#01Aug 3, 2026
cs.CV
Action-grounded tissue affordance enables anticipatory auto-framing that lowers surgeon cognitive workload during laparoscopic surgery
Jiayu Gu, Yiwei Wang, Jie Zhang and 14 more
Computational attention models could help surgeons manage the visual demands of laparoscopy, but they require dense spatial labels that are difficult to obtain because surgical intent is highly specialized and tacit. Here, we introduce DiffeoAfford, an action-grounded tissue affordance framework that retrospectively derives visual attention supervision from completed surgical procedures. By combining diffeomorphism-constrained tissue tracking with instrument trajectory analysis, DiffeoAfford generates affordance hotspot labels without manual per-frame annotation. A real-time prediction model trained on these labels anticipates relevant surgical regions and enables AffordView, an assistive auto-framing system for laparoscopic visualization. The proposed framework aligns with expert annotations and intraoperative surgeon gaze, and reduces surgeon cognitive workload during real-world evaluations using subjective, physiological, and behavioral measures.
#02Aug 3, 2026
cs.CV
Calibrated Similarity and Graph Clustering for Open-Set Animal Re-Identification
Mohamed ElBassat, Seifeldin Elkerdany, Mohamed ElBialy and 5 more
AnimalCLEF26 addresses discovery-oriented animal re-identification, where systems must both attach query images to known individuals and discover unseen individuals by clustering them correctly. We present a similarity-to-clustering pipeline for this setting across Eurasian lynx, fire salamander, loggerhead sea turtle, and Texas horned lizard images. The method first isolates the target specimen using segmentation and then applies lightweight species-specific preprocessing for lynx, sea turtle, and salamander images to enhance identity-relevant visual cues, while Texas horned lizard images are used after segmentation only. Pairwise similarities are then estimated with WildFusion by calibrating and combining a MiewID global descriptor with two local matching branches, ALIKED + LightGlue and DISK + LightGlue. The resulting query-query similarities are refined and converted into identity clusters using graph-based clustering, while query-database similarities are used to attach confident samples to known identities. We evaluate training-free and fine-tuned MiewID variants, including Dynamic ArcFace and SphereFace2-Focal adaptations, and combine them in the final ensemble. Our selected ensemble substantially improves on the WildFusion baseline, achieving the best public ARI of 0.72124 and a private ARI of 0.70393, while a simpler preprocessing-before-calibration variant achieves the best private ARI of 0.71087. These results indicate that calibrated global-local fusion with species-aware preprocessing choices is effective for open-set wildlife re-identification under challenging field conditions and visual variation. The implementation code is available on GitHub.
#03Aug 3, 2026
cs.CV
MoRAL: Sensor-Grounded BEV Reasoning for Compact VLMs toward Edge-Oriented Autonomous Driving
Ambarish Govindarajulu Kaliamurthi, Kaikai Liu
Deploying vision-language models (VLMs) for safety-critical spatial reasoning on resource-constrained autonomous driving platforms requires both compact model size and reliable metric grounding. We present MoRAL (Multimodal Reasoning for Autonomous Language Models), a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline that teaches Cosmos-Reason2-2B to first read a physics-encoded Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation and then reason over it for driving decisions. The BEV image encodes LiDAR metric distance as color bands, object class as cluster morphology, and radar Doppler velocity as directional wedge overlays, externalizing spatial perception into the input image so that no learned 3D backbone is required at inference. Stage 1 fine-tunes the vision encoder on 60,000 grounding records; zero-shot baselines produce no parseable BEV outputs, confirming the vocabulary requires explicit training. Stage 2 fine-tunes the full model (52M parameters, 2.4% of total) on 57,696 chain-of-thought records generated by Cosmos-Reason2-8B as teacher, spanning eight driving question types. On 2,304 held-out nuScenes frames evaluated by Gemma 4 (31B) calibrated against human review, MoRAL wins seven of eight question types over a zero-shot 8B baseline despite using four times fewer parameters, with the largest margins on question types requiring structured multi-step physics reasoning. Emergency braking recall improves from 10.8% to 47.8%, output degeneration falls from 94.1% to 20.8%, and the full pipeline fits a consumer 8 GB GPU at 42 tok/s without quantization. These results establish a reproducible foundation for compact, physics-grounded VLM reasoning on mobile edge platforms.
#04Aug 3, 2026
cs.CV
GROVE: Growing and Reasoning over Temporally Stratified Memory from Streaming Video Experience
Sitong Gong, Caixin Kang, Tianyu Yan and 7 more
A wearable assistant should both answer questions about its visual history and recognize when that history is useful to the present situation. Existing video-memory systems primarily support question-conditioned recall, whereas proactive assistants typically use separate memory and control mechanisms. We introduce GROVE, a training-free framework that supports both behaviors with one memory grown causally from a continuous video stream. GROVE retains fine-grained perceptual evidence and incrementally consolidates it into time-stamped moments, coherent episodes, and recurring cross-day patterns. Each stratum is paired with a scale-native retrieval skill for locating an observation, replaying an activity, or traversing long-range regularities. Reactive QA and proactive assistance share this memory and access interface, differing in whether retrieval is initiated by a user query or the current situation. Across multiple benchmarks including the challenging MM-lifelong and EgoServe, GROVE achieves the best results among the compared methods. Controlled ablations show that the temporal strata and their access skills are complementary, with patterns providing the largest benefit when evidence spans multiple days. Code will be available at https://github.com/SitongGong/GROVE.
#05Aug 3, 2026
cs.CV
USP-Mamba: Unmixing-Derived Spectral and Structural Prompting for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution
Shi Chen, Jie Zhang, Yicong Zhou
Hyperspectral image super-resolution aims to reconstruct high-resolution imagery while preserving dense spectral information. Recently, Mamba-based models have shown promising potential for this task by capturing long-range dependencies with linear computational complexity. Nevertheless, their causal sequence modeling requires two-dimensional hyperspectral features to be unfolded along predefined scanning orders, which disrupts spatial adjacency and restricts the effective propagation of contextual information. Moreover, state-space parameterization of existing models is predominantly derived from generic learned representations, without explicit alignment with the intrinsic characteristics of the hyperspectral image. To address this issue, we propose an Unmixing-derived Spectral and Structural Prompting Mamba framework, termed USP-Mamba, which adapts Mamba state evolution through composition-aware spectral priors and image-dependent structural prompts. Specifically, an unmixing-informed spectral prompt captures the global material composition of the input image and provides persistent conditioning throughout reconstruction. Injected into the Mamba sequence and progressively adapted across layers, it steers state evolution toward composition-consistent reconstruction. We introduce feature-level structural prompts comprising spatial and frequency components to provide image-dependent local guidance. The spatial prompt promotes structure-sensitive state encoding for local detail preservation, while the frequency prompt enables region-adaptive transitions between homogeneous regions and high-frequency details. Finally, complementary Hilbert and Semantic-Guided Neighboring scans preserve spatial continuity and strengthen non-local semantic dependency modeling. Extensive experiments on different datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms representative approaches.