#01Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
Teach with Blinks: Breaking Linguistic Momentum in On-Policy Distillation for Fine-Grained Multimodal Perception
Tangzheng Lian, Hang Zhang, Guanyu Hu and 4 more
On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an effective post-training approach to improving fine-grained perception in multimodal large language models by amortizing costly inference-time zooming operations into a single-pass recipe. However, vanilla OPD is inherently susceptible to linguistic momentum: the teacher can follow the student's erroneous prefixes, thus weakening corrective supervision. To address this, we propose Blink On-Policy Distillation (BlinkOPD), in which the teacher "blinks" at every token: it reads the same prefix once with its eyes open and once with its eyes closed. A first-glance gain further strengthens the correction on rollouts that conflict with the teacher. By extracting more effective supervision from each on-policy trajectory, BlinkOPD achieves state-of-the-art average performance across six fine-grained benchmarks using only 500 training images (12x less data) than existing OPD methods. Beyond fine-grained perception, BlinkOPD also demonstrates strong zero-shot improvements across ten held-out benchmarks spanning general visual perception, visual hallucination, and multimodal reasoning abilities. Code: https://github.com/Supltz/BlinkOPD
#02Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
ActWorld-JEPA: Action-Conditioned JEPA World Models Meet Latent Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Ziying Song, Shengkai Zhang, Caiyan Jia and 10 more
Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) enable future prediction in latent space without pixel reconstruction. However, latent predictive consistency alone does not establish the relative driving quality of candidate plans. We present ActWorld-JEPA, a joint-embedding formulation for candidate-based driving. Where Plan-Conditioned JEPA (PC-JEPA) uses global and step-wise trajectory intentions to guide recurrent latent prediction, then combines the predicted future with the current scene through gated cross-attention; Relational Residual Reranking ($R^3$) models agreement and discrepancy between plan and future representations under planning supervision, yielding bounded, gated residual corrections to the base planning scores. This formulation connects latent prediction to candidate selection using only observed context and proposed trajectories at inference. Benchmark-specific implementations report 94.1 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 navtest, with the final selector calibrated using aggregate NAVTEST feedback, and 91.6 and 42.7 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2 navtest and navhard, respectively. The nuScenes evaluation reports a mean $L_2$ error of 1.20 m and a predicted collision rate of 0.76% over 1--6 s. This work provides an effective path from JEPA's predictive representations to driving decisions informed by anticipated consequences.
#03Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
Do the Details Help the Whole? One-Way Transfer from Person Actions to Group Intent in VLMs on JRDB-Social
Chengguang Gan, Zhixi Cai, Yunhao Liang and 3 more
Social scene datasets label people at two levels: what each person is doing and what the group is there for. Training on both levels at once is often assumed to help each of them. We test this assumption for vision-language models (VLMs) on JRDB-Social, treating person actions as the details and group intent as the whole. We fine-tune Qwen3.5 4B under eight training arms with three seeds, repeat the core arms on Qwen3.5 9B and Qwen3-VL 4B, and judge every arm with a verdict rule fixed before testing. Writing each member's actions before the intent raises intent macro-F1 from 30.1 to 31.0, and writing the intent first reaches 31.2, while action F1 stays within 0.2 points of an action-only model. Under the selected recipe, no arm trained with intent improves actions. The gain requires correct, image-grounded actions: empty action lists or actions borrowed from another group with the same intent lower intent F1. Forced-prefix tests, occlusion, member masking, linear probes and component grafting show that the intent follows the written actions, relies more on people and partly resides in the vision tower. Supplying actions as input instead of as targets hurts both levels.
#04Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
UniSpark: Exploring Hybrid Attention for Multimodal Understanding and Generation
Jiancheng Pan, Yuzheng Liu, Hengyuan Cao and 7 more
We present UniSpark-9B, a unified multimodal model that investigates hybrid attention for visual understanding and generation. Built on a Mixture-of-Transformer-Experts backbone with approximately 9B parameters in each branch, UniSpark combines full attention for explicit token interactions with GatedDeltaNet linear attention for compact context propagation. Autoregressive text prediction and visual flow matching jointly support visual question answering, text-to-image generation, instruction-guided editing, and interleaved text-image prediction. In interleaved generation, noisy visual targets are isolated from subsequent predictions, while clean visual representations provide context for later outputs. A blockwise protocol enforces this distinction through attention masks in full-attention layers and recurrent-state retention rules in linear-attention layers. The selected training sources contain 159.7M generation samples, 213.4M understanding samples, and 624.8K interleaved sequences. A four-stage curriculum jointly trains multimodal understanding and visual generation, refining answer accuracy and instruction following while extending image synthesis to 2K. UniSpark scores 2470.3 on MME-S and 0.83 on GenEval. Qualitative examples further illustrate its capabilities in interleaved image generation, video synthesis, and video editing. Together, these results demonstrate that hybrid attention provides an effective backbone for unified multimodal understanding and generation.
#05Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
Improved CNN-Transformer Network for Neutron Image Super-Resolution
Yuheng Chu, Hongli Li, Tian Zhang
The spatial resolution of neutron images is of great importance for material defect diagnosis, structural characterization, and nondestructive testing. However, owing to limitations in neutron beam quality, scintillator conversion efficiency and light scattering, detector pixel size, and noise levels, conventional neutron images often suffer from speckle noise, blurred edges, and missing details, making them inadequate for high-precision analysis. To address these issues, an improved super-resolution model combining convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers is proposed. First, to overcome the difficulty of obtaining high-quality and clear training images for neutron imaging, a pretrained image restoration model is fine-tuned using real neutron images and then employed to enhance existing neutron images, thereby providing high-quality reference images for subsequent super-resolution model training. Second, an improved CRAFT-based super-resolution network is developed by incorporating a hybrid prior-guided channel fusion module (HPCF), a mean-standard deviation dual-statistics squeeze-and-excitation block (MS-SEBlock), and a partial convolution feed-forward network (PCFN), with the aim of improving the reconstruction of important information, such as textures and fine details, in neutron images. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with bicubic interpolation, SRCNN, SRGAN-VGG, and other methods, the proposed network achieves superior performance in both full-reference metrics, including PSNR and SSIM, and no-reference metrics, including AGM and SMD. The visual quality and structural fidelity of the reconstructed images are also significantly improved. This study provides a new approach to improving neutron image quality.