#01Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
HiVE-VQA: Hierarchical Interaction via Volumetric Embedding for Video Quality Assessment
Robbie Hamilton, Fan Zhang, David Bull
The proliferation of user-generated video content has made accurate and robust no-reference video quality assessment (NR-VQA) a highly important challenge. Existing research increasingly relies on architecturally complex multi-branch pipelines or computationally intensive fine-tuning of single-branch backbones. In this paper, we investigate whether a single frozen video foundation model can serve as an effective NR-VQA backbone, and propose HiVE-VQA, the first framework (to our knowledge) to apply a JEPA-based video encoder to this task. HiVE-VQA extracts token grids from multiple depths of a pre-trained V-JEPA 2.1 encoder and stacks them into a hierarchical spatio-temporal volume, which a compact 3D convolutional head fuses across its layer, spatial, and temporal axes, combining low-level distortion cues from shallow layers with the semantic and temporal context captured at greater depths. The encoder remains frozen throughout, so only the head is trained: 5.2M parameters (5.7\% of the total), with no auxiliary multi-modal models and an inference cost that is invariant to video resolution. Trained solely on LSVQ and evaluated without any fine-tuning, HiVE-VQA outperforms 17 state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in SROCC and PLCC on both intra-dataset (LSVQ-test, LSVQ-1080p) and cross-dataset (KoNViD-1k, LIVE-VQC) benchmarks. These results indicate that hierarchical, depth-wise fusion of features from a single frozen video foundation model provides a more effective and efficient basis for NR-VQA than task-specific multi-network fusion. Code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/RobHam99/HiVE-VQA.
#02Nov 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.
#03Nov 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.
#04Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
Unbundling Multimodal Vision Encoding
Ellis Brown, Chris Hoang, Shengyi Qian and 9 more
How multimodal language models should encode visual input remains up for debate. Most models use a pretrained vision encoder, while some recent recipes train the encoder from scratch with the language model or remove it entirely. Vision encoders bundle together three design choices: a visual prior from upstream pretraining, dedicated vision capacity, and pre-fusion placement of that capacity (i.e., before the multimodal backbone). Because published models also differ in data, architecture, and compute, comparing them cannot isolate the effect of each choice. We disentangle these choices via a controlled framework where we pretrain all models from scratch on common data and compare them on visual question answering and language benchmarks at matched lifetime compute. We find that the visual prior is not necessary; an encoder trained jointly from scratch is on par with a pretrained one, without a separate training stage. What matters instead is dedicated vision capacity: an encoder-free model trails on visual understanding even when its backbone is enlarged by the encoder's parameter count. Yet that capacity need not precede multimodal fusion, as vision-only modules added in-fusion to early backbone layers perform comparably to a pre-fusion encoder and can lower time to first token. These results also hold across backbone sizes, when encoder pretraining is treated as free, and when starting from a pretrained language model. Overall, our findings favor dedicated vision capacity trained jointly with the backbone and placed early within it.
#05Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
Report of the 8th LSVOS Challenge: Mobile Unified Multimodal Understanding
Chang Liu, Henghui Ding, Tong Yang and 10 more
This report summarizes the Mobile Unified Multimodal Understanding (MUMU) track of the 8th Large-scale Video Object Segmentation (LSVOS) Challenge, held in conjunction with ECCV 2026. MUMU asks for a single unified model that jointly performs multi-concept image tagging over quality, scene, and event vocabularies, open-vocabulary object detection, and concise image captioning, within a budget of 0.5B parameters and 8 GB of peak inference memory. Submissions are ranked by a weighted task score scaled by an efficiency factor. We describe the tasks, rules, and evaluation protocol, report the final results, and review the methods of the top three teams. All three leading solutions build on the compact Florence-2-base model, but extend it in different ways: lightweight tagging heads with cross-task inference refinement, a shared low-rank adapter trained on coverage-aware multi-source data with task-dependent decoding, and a training-free pipeline that maps captions to tags and applies detection test-time augmentation. The results show that a compact prompt-based vision-language model can serve all three outputs when supervision, decoding, and cross-task cues are designed for each task, while open-vocabulary detection on novel categories remains the main bottleneck.