#01Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
Back to Pixels: Lifting Latent Video Diffusion into Pixel Space
Yanke Song, Shuo Chen, Chris Rockwell and 9 more
Frontier video generation models work in a VAE latent space that compresses video in both space and time. This compression made training tractable, but now limits high-resolution, controllable, and interactive generation -- doubling resolution quadruples token count, conditions apply to groups of frames rather than individual ones, and each response must wait for the rest of its multi-frame block. We present PixVid, a simple yet effective method that lifts a pretrained latent video model to directly generate every frame in pixel space. PixVid keeps the diffusion transformer and replaces the VAE decoder with a convolutional head that renders its outputs into pixels. We find that predicting clean video rather than velocity, together with a larger noise shift, is key to quality. Finetuned from Wan2.1-14B, PixVid is competitive with the latent baseline within $\sim 1.3$M training clips. Working framewise in pixels, it generates at $2\times$ higher resolution with the same per-frame token count, keeps depth-conditioned video editing aligned under fast motion, and responds to each action at the next frame. Project page: https://chenshuo20.github.io/PixVid/
#02Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
TuMAP: A Dual-View, Morphotype-Aware Pathomics Pipeline for Quantifying Renal Tubular Remodeling
Ruijie Wu, Yuechen Yang, Yanfan Zhu and 8 more
Quantifying disease-associated renal tubular remodeling is challenging because tubular appearances are heterogeneous. We introduce TuMAP (Tubular Morphotype-Aware Pathomics), a pipeline combining (1) dual-view foundation-model representations and provisional morphotype annotation, (2) compositional and within-morphotype pathomics, and (3) patient-level statistical inference. From 456,158 tubules in 358 PAS-stained kidney biopsy slides, TuMAP identified eight image-based morphotypes, seven of which showed stable subsampling assignments. Across 219 patients in six diagnostic groups, diabetic nephropathy (DN) and tubulointerstitial nephritis/acute tubular injury (TIN/ATI) each differed from minimal change disease in seven morphotype proportions, while IgA nephropathy differed in six. DN showed reduced nuclear solidity and increased eccentricity across all eight morphotypes. Area-normalized nuclear density exposed additional within-morphotype differences. TuMAP provides a framework for separating changes in tubular morphotype composition from phenotypic differences within morphotypes.
#03Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
Joint Null-Space Projection for Data-Free Model Merging
Tian Xia
Merging independently fine-tuned checkpoints into a single multi-task model requires no data, no labels, and no gradient steps. In practice the task vectors of different tasks interfere, and the standard remedies--averaging, magnitude pruning, sign election--operate entry by entry, ignoring that each delta induces a low-dimensional update on the hidden features it acts upon. We recast merging as a subspace interference problem. For every two-dimensional weight tensor we take the top-r right-singular subspace of each task's delta--the input directions along which that task moves the representation most--and remove from each task vector the component lying in the union of the other tasks' subspaces. The resulting Joint Null-Space Projection (JNSP) is closed-form and order-independent, needs no forward pass, and is defined entirely by the checkpoint set. On eight CLIP image-classification tasks JNSP merges ViT-B/16 experts to 89.45% average accuracy without using a single image, 11.88 points above the strongest parameter-wise training-free baseline (TIES-Merging, 77.57%), 14.22 above Task Arithmetic, and 0.98 above WUDI's data-free consensus merge (88.47%). The gain holds across three backbones on the independently trained TALL release (+10.8, +12.6, +9.1 over TIES for ViT-B/16, ViT-B/32, ViT-L/14) and replicates there at 89.20%; controls confirm the source--a single shared subspace instead of per-task ones loses 2.9 points, and a sequential variant collapses to 69.6%. On RoBERTa-large the same projection underperforms plain task arithmetic, which we report rather than hide. Code is available at https://github.com.
#04Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
Objects as Addresses: Instance Binding in Vision Transformer Attention
Khalil Sabri, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Nicolas Saunier and 1 more
Humans naturally parse visual scenes into coherent individual objects rather than scattered features, a capability cognitive science calls object binding. While recent work shows that pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs) intrinsically acquire this ability, how native self-attention computations mechanistically keep object instances separate remains unresolved. By studying this across eight pretrained ViTs, we found that instance separation is expressed more strongly in attention routing than in token content: selected query-key relations distinguish individual objects more reliably than value similarity or residual representations. Inside heads, patches belonging to one individual tend to read from a common image region, which we term their attention address. Visually distinct parts of one person share an address, whereas identical duplicated instances receive separate, movable addresses. These shared destinations arise in part because query interactions with the spatial structure of keys direct attention toward consistent regions for one object and elsewhere for another. In DINOv2 and most other backbones we tested, editing this query component at the selected head redirects its attention address toward another individual. Grouping patches by this query component separates same-category instances, reaching .615 FG-ARI versus .289 for the same clustering of final-layer features, which tend to merge them.
#05Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
A Disease-specific Retinal Aging Biomarker for Predicting Progression to Late Age-related Macular Degeneration
Hexin Dong, Benjamin Hou, Puzhen Wu and 4 more
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of irreversible vision loss in older adults. While chronological age is a primary risk factor, it inadequately reflects individual variations in retinal aging, limiting effective AMD risk stratification and timely intervention. Here, we propose and validate fundus-based AMD age (FAA), which quantifies disease-specific retinal aging in AMD and captures accelerated AMD-related retinal aging, thereby improving prognostic precision over chronological age. Trained on 36,782 images from 2,192 participants in the Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS) dataset and validated across AREDS and AREDS2 cohorts, our model demonstrates significant improvements over traditional chronological age-based approaches. Specifically, integrating the proposed FAA into Cox proportional-hazards models significantly enhances prediction performance. FAA improved the C-index from 0.836 to 0.888 and reduced the 5-year Brier score from 0.050 to 0.046 in AREDS, with consistent gains observed in AREDS2 (C-index 0.715 to 0.756; 2-year Brier 0.078 to 0.076). FAA showed improved prognostic performance across the two datasets and under different phenotype definitions (reading center-defined vs. specialist-defined grading), supporting its potential utility for AMD risk stratification. These findings highlight the advantage of incorporating FAA into AMD risk prediction frameworks, supporting further evaluation of FAA for AMD risk stratification.