#01Nov 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.
#02Nov 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.
#03Nov 12, 2026
cs.CV
MALNISI-Infused Graph Construction and Weighted Contrastive Loss based GAT for Unsupervised Representation Learning in HSI
Soumi Sarkar, Subhadip Boral, Sarbani Palit and 1 more
Hyperspectral images (HSI) possess discriminating spectral characteristics with respect to land utilization due to high-dimensional information. Recently, unsupervised representation learning using graph neural networks has unveiled these utilization-specific complex spectral relations. This article has three main contributions. First, it proposes an index, the Mean Absolute Local Neighborhood Inverse Spectral Index (MALNISI), which measures the similarity between two pixels based on their neighborhood information. The index is used to construct a weighted adjacency matrix, giving the HSI a graph structure. Second, it proposes an upgraded Graph Attention Network that learns compact latent representations of hyperspectral data from the constructed graph. In this network, an enhanced multi-head attention mechanism incorporates the MALNISI weights as an auxiliary feature to emphasize learned attention between neighboring pixels. To alleviate over-smoothing and preserve fine-grained spectral details, the architecture integrates residual connections, skip projections, and feature normalization, which together enhance representation capability, stabilize learning, and accelerate convergence. Third, it proposes a weighted contrastive loss function that incorporates neighborhood-aware MALNISI between connected pixels, encouraging strongly connected pixels in the high-dimensional space to remain close in the latent space, and weakly connected pixels to stay apart. The resulting discriminative low-dimensional embeddings are then clustered using spectral clustering. Experimental analysis on six benchmark HSI datasets demonstrates the efficiency and necessity of the three aforementioned contributions, and the comparative study highlights superior performance over fourteen state-of-the-art approaches.
#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
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.