Semantic_Segmentation
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Learning Structurally Consistent Representations for Multi-View Radar Semantic Segmentation
2026-06-30 12:57:15Ali Zia, Muhammad Umer Ramzan, Abdelwahed Khamis, Usman Ali, Abdul RehmanAbstract
Radar sensors provide reliable perception under adverse weather and lighting conditions, but their sparse, noisy, and weakly semantic measurements make dense semantic segmentation challenging. Most existing radar segmentation methods rely on grid-based encodings and pairwise interactions, which struggle to capture the higher-order relational structure formed by multiple radar returns from the same physical object. We introduce a unified higher-order structural alignment framework for multi-view radar segmentation. The proposed method refines radar feature representations using learnable hypergraphs to capture higher-order dependencies among spatially related responses. To ensure consistency across heterogeneous radar projections, we further align view-specific features using Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT), enabling correspondence-free alignment under varying measurement densities and partial observations. An adaptive attention mechanism then fuses complementary radar views while emphasising structurally informative responses under sparsity and noise. The resulting architecture learns structurally consistent representations across Range Angle (RA), Range Doppler (RD), and Angle Doppler (AD) views and is trained using supervised segmentation together with cross-view consistency regularisation. Experiments on the CARRADA and RADIal benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over strong radar-specific baselines, achieving 63.8% mIoU on CARRADA and 83.4% mIoU on RADIal, improving the previous best methods by +1.7 and +2.3 mIoU, respectively. These results highlight the importance of higher-order relational modelling for robust radar perception.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31609
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Preserve the Hard, Regenerate the Rest: Uncertainty-Guided Synthetic Training Data Augmentation with Diffusion Models
2026-06-30 12:51:49Nikolai R\"ohrich, Julian Glei{\ss}ner, Ahmed H. A. Ibrahim, Silvan Mertes, Tobias HuberAbstract
Semantic segmentation models struggle with data sparsity and rare or visually diverse regions, e.g., dense regions or small objects in aerial or autonomous mobility data. While synthetic augmentation is an appealing solution, directly generating new labeled data risks misalignment of labels and generated pixels. Existing solutions to this problem often rely on external models, or employ coarse heuristics such as indiscriminately augmenting all foreground objects or entire backgrounds, which wastes capacity on uninformative pixels. To address this, we propose an uncertainty-guided synthetic context augmentation strategy that strictly preserves label validity and efficiently maximizes pixel informativeness per synthetic sample - no external guardrails required. Using a baseline segmenter's predictive entropy, we identify uncertain semantic regions and inpaint only the complementary visual context. When fine-tuning the segmenter on this synthetic data, we compute the loss only over the original pixels, excluding inpainted regions. This focuses learning on the unmodified, uncertain regions while presenting them in novel contexts. We demonstrate substantial mIoU gains on Cityscapes, UAVID, and BDD100K with the largest gains on rare and difficult classes such as buses, trains, or (from the aerial perspective) cars. Our results demonstrate that uncertainty-guided context augmentation is a highly effective lever to improve segmentation performance on complex datasets, with code provided at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31603
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HiRes: A Hierarchical Cascaded Method for Resistor Value Identification
2026-06-29 11:55:06Rama Y. AlHamidi, Aseel A. Mohamed, Mustafa A. Eltayeb, Osama Hasoneh, Mohammad ShaqfehAbstract
Accurate identification of resistor values from unconstrained images remains a challenging computer vision task due to variations in lighting, orientation, scale, and background complexity. This paper presents HiRes, a hierarchical cascaded pipeline for end-to-end resistor value identification directly from full-frame images. The approach combines object detection (YOLOv8n), semantic segmentation (UNet++ with EfficientNet-B2), and structured geometric decoding via projection along the resistor axis. To improve robustness, we incorporate geometric filtering, gap-preserving band separation, and validation against the E24 resistor series. Experiments across diverse real-world images show that HiRes achieves a detection mAP50 of 0.9906, a segmentation mIoU of 0.8444, and an end-to-end identification accuracy of 85.8% (95% CI: 78.0-91.9%), outperforming the publicly available classical baseline, CVResist, which fails to generalize beyond controlled conditions. In addition, our architecture outperforms state-of-the-art MLLMs on our challenging test set, offering a lower cost, high efficiency, and an interpretable alternative method. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating learned visual representations with structured reasoning for robust resistor interpretation. Code and dataset are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30179
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SAD-GS: Learning Reliable 3D Semantic Gaussian Fields via Dynamic Geo-Semantic Anchoring
2026-06-28 12:52:46Yufei Zhang, Chenlu Zhan, Gaoang Wang, Hongwei WangAbstract
Open-vocabulary 3D semantic Gaussian field learning relies on multi-view 2D supervision, whose semantic targets and spatial assignments are often unreliable. Across varying viewpoints, view-dependent features cause semantic identity drift, while propagated tracker masks introduce boundary leakage and identity switches. Directly optimizing against these unreliable 2D targets forces the 3D representation to absorb multi-view contradictions, leading to severe error accumulation. To resolve this limitation, we propose SAD-GS, a framework for learning reliable 3D semantic Gaussian fields via dynamic geo-semantic anchoring. Specifically, Semantic Anchor Distillation (SAD) distills per-view visual embeddings into consensus text anchors to establish a viewpoint-invariant semantic identity. Concurrently, the Geo-Semantic Feedback Loop (GSFL) leverages the evolving 3D field to actively filter tracker anomalies and refine spatial mask assignments via a conservative three-gate update rule. Extensive evaluations on LERF-OVS, 3D-OVS, and Mip-NeRF360 show that SAD-GS consistently achieves the best overall performance in both open-vocabulary localization and semantic segmentation. These comprehensive improvements validate the effectiveness and robustness of dynamic geo-semantic anchoring for reliable 3D semantic Gaussian field learning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29376
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Semantic-Aware, Physics-Informed, Geometry-Grounded Weather Video Synthesis
2026-06-27 17:38:21Chenghao Qian, Nedko Savov, Lingdong Kong, Yeying Jin, Rui Song, Wenjing Li, Zhun Zhong, Jiaqi Ma, Gustav Markkula, Luc Van GoolAbstract
Weather synthesis aims to add weather effects to input videos while preserving scene identity, structure, and motion. The key limitation of existing methods is the lack of diversity in weather appearance and effective control over weather dynamics (e.g., temporal evolution and particle motion). Most approaches rely on text prompts, which are inherently underspecified and often fail to produce detailed weather characteristics. Additionally, general-purpose video editors optimized for clean and aesthetic outputs tend to suppress heavy weather phenomena, making dense particle effects difficult to generate. To address these, we propose a Semantic-Aware, Physics-Informed, and Geometry-Grounded framework that steers an off-the-shelf video editor to synthesize diverse global appearances and detailed particle dynamics. We factorize the synthesis into three conditional signals, so that each provides a distinct and stable source of guidance: semantics specifies what the weather should look like, dynamics governs how it evolves over time, and geometry determines where it should appear in the scene. Specifically, we introduce (1) semantic-aware appearance anchoring to establish the target appearance from scene semantics and user input; (2) physics-informed dynamic simulation to generate particle effects by simulating a Gaussian-represented particle field under gravity, wind, and turbulence; and (3) geometry-grounded video synthesis to align the simulated particles with target scene geometry and synthesize the final video. Experiments demonstrate that our method produces diverse, physically and visually realistic weather effects. Furthermore, we show that our synthesized data significantly improves the robustness of autonomous driving semantic segmentation under adverse weather conditions. Project page: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29020
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Panoramic Scene Analysis: A Survey from Distortion-Aware Engineering to Sphere-Native Foundation Modeling
2026-06-26 05:54:38Qinfeng Zhu, Lei FanAbstract
Panoramic images capture the complete visual sphere in a single frame, providing spatial context unattainable by conventional cameras. Yet this completeness comes at a geometric cost: the 2-sphere cannot be faithfully mapped to the plane, and every planar representation introduces distortions that violate the assumptions underlying standard vision architectures. This survey traces the evolution of panoramic scene analysis along a methodological trajectory, from projection-based adaptation, through distortion-aware engineering, to sphere-native modeling and geometry-aware tokenization for foundation models, and argues that this evolution reflects a progressive deepening of geometric commitment rather than a simple accumulation of techniques. We organize the literature along two orthogonal dimensions: architectural design (how operators interact with spherical geometry) and training paradigm (how knowledge is transferred across domains). Covering dense prediction (semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and room layout estimation), unified multi-task understanding, open-world perception, vision-language reasoning, and dynamic video analysis, we identify a central unresolved tension: among the methods surveyed, none simultaneously delivers strict spherical equivariance and full reuse of perspective-pretrained foundation-model weights, and we argue that this is a structural rather than incidental gap. We further expose five systematic gaps in current evaluation protocols, namely the absence of spherical-area-weighted metrics, seam-consistency testing, polar-robustness stratification, cross-projection generalization, and open-world protocol standardization, and propose a six-point research roadmap toward general-purpose panoramic intelligence. The corresponding repository is publicly available at: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27745
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OctoSense: Self-Supervised Learning for Multimodal Robot Perception
2026-06-25 17:30:49Anthony Bisulco, Jeremy Wang, Kostas Daniilidis, Randall Balestriero, Pratik ChaudhariAbstract
We present OctoSense, an open-source sensor platform with stereo RGB and event cameras, LiDAR, a thermal camera, an inertial measurement unit, RTK-corrected global positioning system, and proprioception (CAN bus data from a car, and joint angles for a quadruped robot). The eponymous OctoSense dataset contains 59 hours of time-synchronized driving data across different types of environments at different times of the day, including situations with highly degraded sensors. We demonstrate multi-modal self-supervised learning using such real-world robotics data, where sensors have different representations, frequencies, latencies and noise. Our approach, a "late-fusion" masked autoencoder, (i) uses modality-specific tokenizers to account for different spatiotemporal characteristics of these sensors, and (ii) caches modality-specific tokens at inference time to process new measurements as they come. This architecture (i) is fast (6.68 ms and 112 ms on NVIDIA 5090 and Orin NX respectively, to compute the representation), (ii) performs better than existing image-only foundation models on tasks such as estimation of optical flow, depth, semantic segmentation, and ego-motion (translation, rotation, and steering angle), and (iii) predicts robustly at nighttime or in situations where sensory data is degraded. See our project page for links to the dataset, code, and supplementary videos: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27317
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TaskTok: Delving into Task Tokens for Task-driven Image Restoration
2026-06-25 05:20:01Hongjae Lee, Sojung Kang, Jaeseong Yu, Seung-Won JungAbstract
While traditional image restoration focuses on perceptual quality, Task-Driven Image Restoration (TDIR) aims to maximize the performance of downstream high-level vision tasks. Recent approaches leveraging generative priors have shown promise for TDIR; however, they typically suffer from computational inefficiency and potential semantic alteration by indiscriminately updating all latent tokens. In this paper, we posit that not all visual information is equally important for machine perception. Through an analysis of the latent token space, we observe that task-relevant cues are unevenly distributed across the token sequence, exhibiting index-wise specialization. This suggests that selectively refining a subset of tokens can be sufficient for task-driven objectives. Leveraging this insight, we propose TaskTok, a novel framework that selectively restores only task-relevant tokens via a learnable token switch and a lightweight token refinement module. Extensive experiments across image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection demonstrate that TaskTok significantly enhances task performance with high computational efficiency. The source code is available at this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26615
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RSGPNet: Geometric Prompting for Remote Sensing Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation
2026-06-25 03:52:43Shanwen Wang, Xin Sun, Sirui Wang, Xiao Xiang ZhuAbstract
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) enables text-guided segmentation of unseen objects, breaking fixed-class limitations to achieve open-world understanding. However, existing OVSS methods primarily focus on modifying the CLIP attention mechanism, which still suffers from unstable local segmentation for remote sensing (RS) domain. To address these limitations, we propose RSGPNet, a training-free geometric prompting framework for RS OVSS that refines segmentation by leveraging object geometric areas and consistency constraints. Specifically, RSGPNet comprises three core modules: a Text-guided Coarse Mask module (TCM), a Geometric Re-prompting Module (GRP), and a Coarse-to-fine Consistency Verification Mechanism (CVM). TCM utilizes text prompts and the input image to construct initial coarse segmentation masks. GRP then converts these coarse masks into geometric box prompts, feeding them back into the segmentation model to generate refined masks. Finally, CVM employs consistency computation to prevent prompting from reinforcing erroneous regions. They allow the model to improve segmentation accuracy in complex areas, such as category boundaries. Extensive experiments on RS datasets demonstrate that RSGPNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across both quantitative and qualitative metrics while exhibiting excellent interpretability. The code is released at \href{this https URL}{this https URL}.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28410
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Learning Stable Canonical Worlds for Novel View Synthesis and Beyond
2026-06-25 03:36:03Xiaoyu Xu, Jian Zou, Sheyang Tang, Zhihua Wang, Jing Liao, Kede MaAbstract
Feed-forward Gaussian splatting (FFGS) facilitates real-time novel view synthesis, yet current methods often remain tied to view-dependent predictions. As more input views are added, they may accumulate noisy or redundant evidence instead of converging to a stable scene representation. In this paper, we introduce CanonicalGS, a feed-forward pipeline that maps cluttered multi-view observations into a stable, scene-centric representation. CanonicalGS first extracts view-centric evidence from depth, semantic features, and uncertainty estimates, and then aggregates this evidence in a canonical latent world using uncertainty-aware fusion. By emphasizing reliable observations while suppressing uncertain or redundant ones, CanonicalGS produces representations that scale more effectively for novel view synthesis and transfer to downstream visual perception tasks. Experiments show up to a $2.5$ dB improvement in peak signal-to-noise ratio for synthesizing novel views and an $11\%$ gain in semantic segmentation accuracy.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23027
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Vision-driven Preference Synthesis for Mitigating Hallucinations in VLMs
2026-06-24 11:06:22Yunhun Nam, Jongheon JeongAbstract
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in visual understanding, yet they still suffer from hallucinations, generating content that is not grounded in the image. Preference alignment is a promising approach to improve visual faithfulness, but its success depends heavily on how preference pairs are constructed. Existing methods exhibit two key limitations; (a) intervention-based methods often introduce significant deviation from the policy distribution, and (b) sampling-based methods often underuse visual information during the construction. In this paper, we propose ViPSy (Vision-driven Preference Synthesis), a framework for constructing preference data that are both policy-aligned and visually grounded. Our framework consists of two stages; in the first stage, ViPSy derives a visual cue from recurring object-level content across semantically aligned image variants, so preference construction can rely on visual information rather than language priors. In the second stage, ViPSy conditions the policy's own rollouts on this cue, allowing candidates to be guided by visually grounded content while staying close to the policy's response distribution. The resulting candidates remain close to the policy's response distribution while better leveraging visual information from the image. Experiments show that the resulting VLM, preference-aligned with ViPSy-constructed preference pairs, achieves a new state-of-the-art in hallucination mitigation. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art method, it reduces hallucination rates on AMBER and Object HalBench by 35.7% and 24.5%, respectively. The resulting model further improves on general visual grounding benchmarks, e.g., MMStar, MMVP, and CV-Bench, while also yielding gains in semantic segmentation and ImageNet linear probing, underscoring the effectiveness of our framework in enhancing the model's visual capabilities.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28401
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Heterogeneous and Adept Snapshot Distillation for 3D Semantic Segmentation
2026-06-24 01:31:22Xiaopei Wu, Yuenan Hou, Junkai Xu, Wenxiao Wang, Binbin Lin, Yu Li, Ping Li, Haifeng Liu, Deng Cai, Wanli OuyangAbstract
Multi-modal fusion and multi-model ensembling are prevalent in enhancing the performance of 3D semantic segmentation. Despite the impressive performance, these methods either rely on auxiliary input signals or suffer from costly computational expense. To efficaciously enhance the segmentation performance without introducing intolerable costs, we propose to transfer the rich knowledge from the multi-modal model (i.e., point clouds and images) and multiple model experts to the point-cloudbased network through knowledge distillation. Specifically, we present Information-oriented Heterogeneous Distillation (IHD) to help the uni-modal model absorb the complementary knowledge from the multi-modal teacher. We design the Information-Oriented Filtering (IOF) strategy to select informative images from the continuous image sequence for multi-modal fusion. This practice can boost the performance of the multi-modal teacher, thus benefiting the learning of the student. Besides, as opposed to vanilla model ensembling that requires the separate training of each expert, we propose Adept Snapshot Distillation (ASD). ASD treats the freely available model snapshots generated during the training phase as multiple experts, which significantly reduces the training cost for model ensembling. For each expert teacher, it only provides supervision to the student in the class where it is adept. The resulting Heterogeneous and Adept Snapshot Knowledge Distillation, dubbed HAS-KD, attains state-of-the-art results on ScanNetV2 and S3DIS datasets. HAS-KD can be seamlessly integrated into contemporary 3D segmentation algorithms and bring considerable gains without introducing extra inference burdens. The code will be made publicly available upon publication.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25278
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Benchmarking the Alignment of Data-Quality Metrics, Human Judgment and Land-Cover Segmentation Performance for Earth Observation
2026-06-23 20:02:57\"Umit Mert \c{C}a\u{g}lar, Alptekin TemizelAbstract
Volume and quality of datasets are crucial for deep learning model training, yet they are often constrained by availability and data acquisition costs. Synthetic data augmentation can extend existing datasets with realistic images, and the quality of these images is generally assessed through fidelity metrics such as FID, KID, IS, LPIPS and SSIM that measure structural or distributional similarity. However, such metrics, including the widely used FID, focus on visual fidelity without reflecting downstream utility, and can diverge from human perception under perturbations that are imperceptible to human observers. In this work, we systematically evaluate Earth observation datasets alongside synthetic counterparts generated by deep generative models, comparing automatic metrics against human perception and downstream tasks. Our results reveal a stark misalignment: semantics-preserving perturbations such as rotation drastically alter metric scores while leaving human recognition unaffected, and synthetic samples that score poorly on automatic metrics achieve comparable or higher perceived realism, and can improve downstream performance when combined with real data. By benchmarking semantic segmentation models trained on mixed real-synthetic datasets, we demonstrate that quality metrics rooted in ImageNet-pretrained feature spaces are unreliable indicators for geospatial data. Our findings underscore that automatic quality evaluation of synthetic datasets should be grounded in downstream task performance and human evaluation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25128
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Tri-Efficient Transfer Learning for Point Cloud Videos
2026-06-23 05:55:02Yiding Sun, Dongxu Zhang, Jihua Zhu, Haozhe Cheng, Zhengqiao Li, Pengcheng Li, Chaowei Fang, Yonghao Dong, Lin ChenAbstract
While point cloud foundation models have significantly advanced point cloud video understanding, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods still suffer from two critical limitations: prohibitive annotation costs for large-scale point cloud datasets and severe memory bottlenecks. In this paper, we aim to mine richer supervision signals from existing data rather than blindly scaling datasets. A further key principle is that the memory footprint of fine-tuning must be drastically reduced compared to full fine-tuning, which remains elusive for current PEFT techniques. Driven by these challenges, we identify three core desiderata: data-, parameter-, and memory efficiency, and present PoinTriE, a unified framework that excels along all three dimensions. For pre-training, pseudo-motion trajectories are synthesized via rigid transformations, paired with text corpora and 2D projections derived from raw point clouds. We then propose a Geometric-Motion Duality Network optimized via multimodal contrastive learning, rigid rotation prediction, and motion distribution divergence to produce dense self-supervision. During fine-tuning, we freeze the pretrained backbone and only update a lightweight Spatio-temporal Side Network built with LoRA units. Equipped with a gradient flow masking strategy, PoinTriE simultaneously reduces memory consumption and parameter overhead. Extensive experiments confirm that PoinTriE establishes new state-of-the-art results on action recognition and semantic segmentation tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24175
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Ingredient-Level Food Image Segmentation for Nutrition Awareness
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Food images often contain several visible ingredients, so assigning one dish label to an entire image hides important visual structure. This work studies ingredient-level semantic segmentation on FoodSeg103, where the model predicts an ingredient class for each pixel. Two SegFormer variants were fine-tuned and evaluated under a controlled setup: SegFormer-B0 as the smaller baseline model and SegFormer-B1 as the larger final model. Both models use ImageNet-pretrained MiT backbones with newly initialized 104-class output layers. On the held-out FoodSeg103 test split of 2,135 images, B0 achieved 0.7709 pixel accuracy and 0.2521 mean IoU, while B1 achieved 0.7929 pixel accuracy and 0.3204 mean IoU. B1 improved every saved test metric, including a +0.0683 absolute gain in mean IoU. The system also converts predicted masks into visible ingredient-area percentages, giving a simple visual composition summary of the predicted meal. This summary can serve as a first-pass nutrition-awareness cue by providing a visual alternative to detailed food tracking similar to plate-based meal guidance, but it is not a direct estimate of calories, macronutrients, food mass, volume, density, or true portion size.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24059
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Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation
2026-06-18 14:01:58Duc T. Nguyen, Hoang-Long Nguyen, Thanh-Ha DO, Huy-Hieu PhamAbstract
Existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods in computational pathology rely on a multi-stage paradigm: class activation map (CAM) generation, offline pseudo-mask refinement, and fully supervised retraining. While established, this decoupled approach presents fundamental limitations. The multi-stage process not only incurs high computational training costs but also suffers from error propagation: local texture biases in shallow CNN layers generate false-positive artifacts that subsequent refinement steps often fail to correct. To address these persistent challenges through a simple yet highly effective approach, we propose the Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification (SSHR) framework. Rather than passively refining CAMs post-hoc, our method proactively purifies intermediate feature representations during the forward pass. We introduce a Hierarchical Feature Rectification Module (HFRM) that utilizes deep global semantic context to filter out local anomalies in shallow layers. This mechanism generates high-fidelity activation maps directly within a single training loop. Experiments on the LUAD-HistoSeg and BCSS datasets demonstrate that SSHR outperforms state-of-the-art multi-stage methods. Furthermore, SSHR reduces training duration by 2 to 5 times. This efficiency minimizes computational overhead and accelerates clinical translation for large-scale histopathology workflows. The code is available at: this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20250
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SAM3 Self-Distillation for Fine-Grained GOOSE 2D Semantic Segmentation
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We describe our 4th-place entry to the ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge, which reached a composite mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 69.73% on the official 1,815-image test set. Our model adapts the image encoder of a recent visual foundation model, Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3), with a lightweight decoder. Beyond this, we contribute two techniques and one empirical finding: (i) a self-distillation scheme that re-uses SAM3 itself, prompted with ground-truth boxes, as a teacher on the classes where it outperforms our own model; (ii) an image-level multi-scale test-time augmentation scheme that restores multi-scale inference for a fixed-input-size model by rescaling the image rather than the model input; and (iii) the finding that an aggressive photometric distortion from a winning 2025 GOOSE 2D entry, transplanted onto our pipeline, is its single largest source of improvement.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20130
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Speeding up the annotation process in semantic segmentation industrial applications
2026-06-18 08:31:50Marta Fernandez-Moreno, Margarita Guerrero, Rosalia Rementeria, Pablo Mesejo, Raul MorenoAbstract
Current machine learning models commonly require large and well-annotated datasets. However, the annotation process often becomes a bottleneck, with increased complexity leading to higher chances of human errors. Within this context, our goal in this paper is to leverage unsupervised algorithms to improve data annotation efficiency for complex semantic segmentation problems in industrial materials science. Previous research has quantified labeling time and others explored unsupervised methods. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to quantify how much unsupervised algorithms accelerate the labeling process. We aim to validate the extent to which this laborious process can be accelerated, focusing on semantic segmentation tasks that involve annotating each pixel of high-resolution images, such as the microstructure characterization challenge in materials science. Specifically, we demonstrate that by using unsupervised computer vision algorithms, the time required for the labeling process can be reduced from 170 hours to 37 hours, achieving an approximate reduction of 78\%. The dataset we work with includes large images of dimensions 1280x959 and 960x703, which further increases the complexity of the annotation task. Despite these challenges, we create and share the largest public steel microstructure segmentation dataset to date, available under MIT License with permanent DOI, contributing a fully annotated, high-resolution dataset to the field. Additionally, this is the first work to compare the labeling time from scratch (a common approach in previous studies) to the labeling time when using these unsupervised algorithms as a pre-annotation step. Furthermore, we provide a Deep Learning model trained on this dataset, validated by field experts, and deployed in an industrial setting, serving as an initial benchmark for this public dataset.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19934
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LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation
2026-06-17 18:14:51Jiaqi Zhang, Ashton Lee, Anthony Wong, John Zou, Sami BuGhanem, Randall BalestrieroAbstract
Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19483
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Viking Hill Dataset: A Lidar-Radar-Camera Dataset for Detection and Segmentation in Forest Scenes
2026-06-17 14:58:00Vladim\'ir Kubelka, Oleksandr Kotlyar, Unal Artan, Martin MagnussonAbstract
Autonomous robots operating under forest canopies need robust perception of trees and surrounding vegetation across varying seasonal conditions. Existing forestry datasets provide lidar or camera data with per-tree annotations, but none include co-registered 4D imaging radar -- a modality of growing interest for its resilience to visual degradation, surface contamination, and vegetation occlusion. We introduce a multi-sensor forest dataset collected by a mobile robot equipped with a high-resolution FMCW imaging radar, lidar, RGB camera, IMU, and RTK-GNSS. The site was recorded in two sessions under contrasting vegetation states, and 3D cuboid annotations -- including per-tree diameter estimates -- provide shared semantic labels across all three perception modalities. Furthermore, we provide baseline results for semantic segmentation of the radar and lidar point clouds using MinkowskiUNet. Radar achieves IoU scores competitive with lidar for dominant classes (ground 91%, canopy 86%) while lagging on geometrically fine structures such as tree trunks (56% vs. 74%). A cross-modality analysis further compares lidar and radar trunk segmentation against an RGB detection model, and a diameter-stratified evaluation reveals how trunk segmentation quality varies with tree size. Beyond segmentation, the co-registered multi-modal data and RTK-GNSS-aided reference positioning support research in mapping, localization, and sensor fusion under canopy. The dataset and annotation tools are publicly available.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19154
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