#01Nov 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.
#02Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
Predicting Ethanol Drinking Status from Nonhuman Primate Liver Histology: A Proof of Concept for Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning in Few-Shot Vision-Language Modeling
Amirmohammad Mohammadi, Rupak Khadka, Kathleen A. Grant and 2 more
Combining vision-language models (VLMs) with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) offers a promising approach to few-shot whole-slide image (WSI) classification in computational pathology. This study evaluates this approach for predicting ethanol drinking status from nonhuman primate liver histology. Adapters are evaluated against non-PEFT configurations on a subset of the Monkey Alcohol Tissue Research Resource (MATRR). All evaluated PEFT configurations achieve higher mean balanced accuracy than the non-PEFT baselines. For example, in the four-shot setting, attention-based multiple instance learning (ABMIL) alone achieves 43.5% mean balanced accuracy, compared with 78.1% after adding an adapter. Qualitative attention analysis shows that textual pathway adaptations produce localized attention heatmaps, while visual pathway adaptations produce more diffuse ones. A pathologist's review identified similar histological features across adaptations.
#03Nov 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.
#04Nov 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.
#05Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
eDMD: Endpoint Distribution Matching for Few-Step Diffusion Distillation
Tong Zhao, Xianfang Zeng, Yucheng Han and 4 more
Distribution matching distillation (DMD) has emerged as a leading paradigm for distilling diffusion models into few-step students, where an auxiliary fake score model tracks the student's distribution and the discrepancy between the teacher and fake predictions drives the student toward the teacher. In multi-step distillation, although only the student's final output is delivered, existing methods train the fake model on intermediate states or across all denoising steps. Consequently, the student's update signal becomes entangled with intermediate distributions, which can distort the matching direction and remain nonzero even after the student's final outputs already match the teacher distribution. To resolve this mismatch, we propose Endpoint Distribution Matching Distillation (eDMD), which trains a single shared fake model exclusively on the student's final outputs and uses it to correct every denoising step. Our theoretical analysis proves that this endpoint reference guarantees that the distribution matching term vanishes if and only if the student's final output distribution matches the teacher's, regardless of intermediate distributions. Beyond the fake reference, we further strengthen teacher supervision through a precise teacher (PT) that replaces single-step guided predictions with short multi-step trajectories on the final noise interval, paired with a calibrated query density for intermediate steps. Experiments on SD3-Medium, FLUX.2-klein (4B and 9B), and Qwen-Image-2.1 demonstrate that eDMD consistently outperforms existing distribution matching methods for 4-step generation.