#01Nov 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.
#02Nov 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/
#03Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
Automated PD-L1 Tumor Proportion Scoring with Uncertainty-Guided Triage in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer
Kesi Xu, Ayesha Azam, Tanvier Kaur and 7 more
Programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) tumor proportion score (TPS) informs immunotherapy selection in non-small cell lung cancer. Near the 1% and 50% cutoffs, the score should also indicate when closer review is warranted. We designed a three-stage framework to follow the sequence of TPS assessment. Stage 1 identifies tumor regions and excludes macrophage-rich patches. Stage 2, a dual-branch cell counting network (D2Count-Net), counts PD-L1-positive and PD-L1-negative tumor cells in these regions to calculate TPS. Stage 3, TPS-Guard, an uncertainty-guided triage mechanism, reports model uncertainty as the disagreement among independently trained models, refers the most uncertain slides, and flags scores near the 1% or 50% cutoff when model estimates disagree across that cutoff. Flags state the reason for referral or alert the pathologist to possible scoring errors on auto-reported slides. In a retrospective, single-center study, 154 whole-slide images were scored by three pathologists, and the model and each pathologist were compared in turn with the mean of the other two. On the 114 slides unseen in training, model mean absolute error (MAE) was 6.96 percentage points, within the range of the three pathologists (4.24 to 8.29), and model uncertainty correlated with absolute TPS error (Spearman rho = 0.77) and inter-pathologist disagreement (rho = 0.71). After referral of the 15% most uncertain slides, model and pathologist MAE both decreased. Applied without retraining to an external, publicly available dataset, TPS-Guard still directed review to higher-error cases, and referring more uncertain cases raised sensitivity at the 50% cutoff. TPS-Guard provides reasons for reviewing individual automated scores and identifies slides that also produce greater disagreement among pathologists. Prospective reader studies should assess TPS-Guard's effect on TPS reporting.
#04Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
AURA 2.0: From User-Driven Responses to Model-Initiated Conversations in Streaming Video
Shuhan Li, Huankang Guan, Xintong Guo and 15 more
Most AI assistants respond only when prompted, remaining silent even when events in the video stream offer meaningful opportunities for conversation. To move beyond purely user-driven interaction, we present AURA 2.0, a streaming video large language model that introduces three core upgrades to AURA. The key advance is Model-Initiated Conversation (MIC), which enables the model to identify topics worth discussing in the evolving visual stream and initiate conversations at appropriate moments without a user query. Stream-Aware Tool Calling (SATC) enables the model to invoke external tools using the current visual and conversational context and incorporate returned information into the ongoing interaction. Interactive Visual Grounding (IVG) supports visual grounding in both user inputs and model outputs. The model can identify objects marked by users on video frames and produce frame-aligned bounding boxes to link its responses to specific objects and regions. To develop these capabilities, we construct a dedicated streaming interaction dataset and adopt a three-stage training scheme to integrate the new behaviors with AURA's existing streaming interaction abilities. We further incorporate Long-Horizon Interaction Memory (LHIM) to maintain contextual continuity over extended video streams. Evaluations on public streaming benchmarks show that AURA 2.0 achieves leading performance among open-source streaming models, while targeted evaluations further validate its new interaction capabilities. We open-source the model weights and inference code.
#05Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
FLEX-LBP: Learning Local Binary Patterns with Exact Binary Inference for Texture Classification
Mohamed Alimoussa, Amal El Kaid
Local Binary Patterns (LBP) remain among the most widely used texture descriptors, from industrial inspection to medical imaging. Yet their radius, sampling angles, color transform and thresholds are fixed by hand for each dataset. We present FLEX-LBP, which learns these parameters by backpropagation while every forward pass computes exact binary codes and hard histogram counts. A straight-through estimator acts only in the backward pass, so the deployed descriptor is an interpretable hard-binary LBP with 90 learnable parameters and unchanged inference cost. In a controlled ablation on six color texture benchmarks, the component worth learning is dataset-dependent. One configuration, applied unchanged everywhere, learns the geometry and thresholds with the color transform frozen. It improves the nearest-neighbor accuracy of the identical fixed descriptor by 3.55 points on average over five seeds, significantly on five of six benchmarks and never significantly worse. With a linear discriminant readout, it gains 0.9 points; the fully learned descriptor gains 2.7 and has the highest mean. FLEX-LBP is more accurate than five classical LBP-family descriptors, PCANet and a neural LBP on five of six benchmarks. Its mean nearest-neighbor accuracy exceeds that of frozen ImageNet ResNet-50 features (23.5 million parameters). On the Kather colorectal cancer histology benchmark, the fully learned descriptor reaches 93.8%, significantly above the best classical descriptor (Completed LBP, 92.8%). The learned radii adapt in directions that recur across seeds. Noise drowns single-pixel comparisons and illuminant change flips inter-channel ones; median sampling or gray-world normalization restores 96-97%. The code is available as a drop-in PyTorch layer at https://github.com/medalimoussa/FLEX-LBP.