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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

BrickFlow: Connectivity-Guided Brick Reconstruction

Peter Kulits, Cordelia Schmid

Given a set of LEGO parts and an image of an assembled object, our task is to infer the pose of each part to assemble the object. In contrast with traditional 3D reconstruction, doing so requires satisfying discrete physical constraints, which provide structure but render the problem combinatorial and highly sensitive to small pose errors. To learn a prior over how parts fit together, we train a set-conditioned SE(3) flow model on procedurally generated assemblies. We then finetune this model to inject image conditioning, using 1% as much data. However, while the learned flow captures global structure, it does not enforce connectivity. To address this, we introduce an analytic connectivity-field guidance to pull predictions toward connected assemblies at test time. Through this, we demonstrate improved build quality with model size, pretraining, and guidance. We make our models and data available for research purposes at https://kulits.github.io/BrickFlow/

#02Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

Ropedia Xperience 2: A Gold Standard for Scaling Physical AI Environments and Behaviors

Hao Li, Fangzhou Hong, Zhaoxi Chen and 18 more

Large foundation models such as GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 have recently been shown to control robots directly from visual observations. They nevertheless remain brittle on long-horizon, contact-rich tasks in real-world environments. Further progress depends on two complementary resources: demonstrations of human behavior that supervise how tasks are performed, and interactive environments in which policies can be rolled out, evaluated, and improved in closed loop. Language models have advanced along well-characterized scaling laws; the corresponding question for physical AI is how capability scales with environments and behaviors, which first requires identifying which data to scale and how to produce and reuse such data continuously. To address this question, we introduce Ropedia Xperience 2, comprising 1,589 released metric-scale 3D scans and a collection of 4,230 egocentric recordings of 74 tasks (131 hours). We further show that each capture can be repurposed for robot learning: scenes are converted into physically interactive simulation environments, human motion is retargeted to whole-body robot trajectories, and additional robot behaviors are obtained through virtual teleoperation and automated long-horizon trajectory generation. We propose this joint capture of environments and behaviors as a gold standard for physical AI data collection, laying a data foundation for establishing scaling laws over environments and behaviors.

#03Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

Consensus Capture in Reference-Based UAV Video Stabilization: A Benchmark on Dynamic Urban Scenes

Robert Fonod, Nikolas Geroliminis

Reference-frame stabilization registers every frame of a hovering-drone video onto one reference frame, keeping object positions comparable. The registration pipelines it relies on are selected on feature-matching benchmarks in which only the camera moves. Over a busy intersection, vehicles moving together supply mutually consistent correspondences that can draw the robust homography estimate toward their motion: consensus capture, which inlier statistics cannot flag. A two-part benchmark measures it and the object masking meant to prevent it. A static protocol scores ten pipelines under exactly known homographies on 4K aerial frames, tuned on a site-disjoint split at a matched resolution and feature budget. A dynamic protocol scores them at an offline and a real-time budget on hovers selected from the video alone to span the amount and coherence of moving foreground, plus a stationary control. It measures background alignment, object position error and the share of a moving group's displacement an estimate follows, against a pseudo-ground-truth reference audited with manually annotated ground control points, which also score every candidate. On static scenes, tuned AKAZE, RootSIFT, SIFT and BRISK lead, retuning the matcher thresholds raises the mean average accuracy (mAA) by at most 0.0062, and masking costs less than 0.005. Unmasked ORB is captured on 28 of 304 real-time dynamic pairs and on 6 offline; its real-time captured estimates have a median corner error of 18.8 px yet typical inlier counts and ratios. Masking removes capture for every pipeline and leaves the leading pipelines unchanged. Code, data and results are released.

#04Nov 12, 2026

cs.GR

Neural Render Proxies for Interactive and Differentiable Lighting

Sergio Sancho, Alexander Rath, Marco Manzi and 5 more

Within the CG animation production pipeline, the challenges artists tackle in Lighting can be immense. Even minor adjustments require re-rendering massive scenes with slow offline renderers; global illumination has to be sampled and complex shaders have to be evaluated, leading to iteration times of minutes to hours per frame. To accelerate this process, we introduce a novel neural render proxy (NRP) that enables differentiable relighting of static scenes with fixed camera and materials at interactive rates. Our main insight is the decoupling of traditional rendering into path sampling and emission computation. From a single, light-agnostic render pass, we collect light transport data in the form of path samples. This enables rapidly sampling lighting conditions on the fly, and training a scene-specific lightweight neural network that learns how light is transported from any scene location to any image pixel. This approach is compatible with non-differentiable production renderers, induces minimal memory requirements during inference, and scales only with resolution and the number of light sources and parameters, but independently of scene and appearance complexity. Our evaluation demonstrates interactive frame rates for relighting (~30-60 Hz) while closely approximating the visual fidelity of ground-truth path tracing. In addition, the differentiable NRP enables fast, gradient-based inverse workflows, allowing artists to efficiently solve for lighting parameters from intuitive image-space edits or generative targets.

#05Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

ElasticDino: Dense Semantic Features Using Elastic Deformations

Ulysse Mizrahi, Sean Zaretzky, Dov Danon and 1 more

Vision transformers (ViTs) serve as the backbone for countless vision tasks, including dense prediction tasks, such as segmentation and depth estimation, even though the quadratic complexity of self-attention severely limits feature resolution and induces spatial artifacts. In this work, we introduce ElasticDino, a lightweight adapter which produces high-resolution feature maps, adhering to the fine details of the input image. As a key insight, we observe the consistency of artifacts across channels, and simultaneously resolve them to match the input image structure. Using a slim architecture based on spatial deformations, ElasticDino produces pixel-aligned, high-resolution feature maps efficiently. Leveraging deformations allows strictly preserving sharp semantics, and thereby avoiding the smoothness biases inherent to alternative approaches. Due to the absence of ground truth, we employ pixel-level semantic segmentation and depth estimation with linear heads to predict a set of downstream dense tasks, guiding the deformation process without leaking task-specific semantics into the model. We demonstrate superior accuracy over current methods on a range of popular dense task benchmarks, with better computational performance.