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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

Probing Spatial State Representations in Visual Foundation Models

Baiqiao Yin, Zhongang Cai, Ruisi Wang and 3 more

An observer sees only part of the surrounding world, yet must keep track of what lies beyond the current view. Spatial perception therefore involves more than recognizing individual images: it calls for a persistent spatial state that is updated under self-motion and used to guide action. Do visual foundation models provide representations that support such a state? We study this question through four levels of spatial capability---spatial structure, object persistence, predictive spatial update, and actionability---using frozen-feature probes on ten representations under streaming egocentric observations of static indoor environments. The resulting capability profiles vary across tasks, network layers, and prefix lengths: strong readout of the visible scene does not ensure accurate object persistence or future-feature retrieval. Matched controls separate readout accuracy from reliance on visual history and motion. Native future prediction retains recoverable spatial structure, but a spatial reader trained on real features does not transfer to predicted features unchanged. Finally, goal-dependent candidate selection does not establish reliable continuous action utility: predicted actions respond to goal changes, yet supplying the correct goal does not reliably improve progress. Across the four levels, object persistence and actionability build on camera-pose readout, whereas feature prediction builds on visible-scene readout. Together, these findings motivate evaluating spatial representations not only by what can be decoded from them, but by whether that information is maintained beyond observation, updated predictively, and used for goal-directed action.

#02Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

Beyond Ground Truth: A Heuristic Unsupervised Quality Assurance Engine for Diagnosing Calibrational Blindness in Dental Segmentation

Fatematuj Johura Mim

In real-world clinical settings, dental X-ray segmentation using deep learning methods suffers from reliability issues. Even when the segmentation quality is bad, deep learning models show high confidence in their predictions (calibrational blindness). Moreover, in real use, doctors do not have ground-truth masks to check their accuracy. To address this problem, we introduce a simple quality-checking engine called HUS-QA with three stages. We train it on the PRAD (Periapical Dental X-ray) dataset to build our SimCLR self-supervised ResNet-18 U-Net model, which generates the segmentation mask and then evaluates its quality. Our HUS-QA checks the segmentation mask quality without a ground-truth mask. Prediction confidence, edge sharpness, shape connectivity, and area-size penalty are the simple indicators considered in this research. Results show that standard confidence methods fail (r = -0.1394, p = 1.7864e-3, ROC AUC = 0.4275). By contrast, our HUS-QA shows a positive correlation with actual Dice scores (r = 0.4647, p = 3.7510e-28) and achieves a strong ROC-AUC of 0.8405. Therefore, HUS-QA serves as a practical tool for clinical quality control.

#03Oct 29, 2026

cs.RO

SymAnt: Grounding Long-Horizon Action Anticipation with Adaptable Symbolic Priors

Fnu Aryan, Yaqi Xie, Joseph Campbell and 6 more

As robots and intelligent systems increasingly interact with humans, they must anticipate long sequences of future actions from only brief observations. While purely neural models typically require extensive observations to predict future actions and remain difficult to interpret and adjust, symbolic priors offer a structured alternative. To this end, we introduce SymAnt, a novel neuro-symbolic approach that unifies the expressiveness of neural networks with the structured reasoning of scene and knowledge graphs. Given a short video, SymAnt performs a joint-search over both graphs to construct a symbolic context, enabling unified reasoning over spatial relationships, object attributes, affordances, and associated actions. This symbolic context serves as a prior for an iterative refinement process that progressively generates and improves the sequence of future actions. By grounding predictions in symbolic context, SymAnt anticipates long-horizon actions from short observation windows in a parameter-efficient manner, while enabling users to directly edit the underlying knowledge to adjust predictions without further training. Through our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SymAnt, particularly when only short observation contexts are available, across five diverse datasets: Breakfast, 50 Salads, EPIC-KITCHENS, EGTEA Gaze+, and Assembly101.

#04Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

PhysInsert: Physically Plausible Object Insertion with Geometric Priors and Bidirectional Object-Scene Interactions

Yue Gong, Le Zhang, Rui Chen and 5 more

We present PhysInsert, a framework for physically plausible reference-based object insertion that jointly adapts objects and their surrounding scenes. Existing methods often rely on masked inputs, generation-based pairs, or training pairs with limited viewpoint variation, leaving pose and illumination adaptation and bidirectional object-scene interactions insufficiently constrained. We construct the Insert World dataset with strictly aligned Blender-rendered counterfactual pairs and object references across viewpoints and lighting conditions. Building on these data, Geometry-Guided Adaptation couples a VGGT geometry stream with image and text streams under target-scene feature supervision to guide spatially consistent insertion. Complementary 2D Object-Scene Spatial Supervision jointly supervises object occupancy and environmental changes while grounding spatial instructions in object regions through image-text attention. We introduce PhysInsert-Bench with dedicated cross-environment and cross-view cases requiring illumination and pose adaptation beyond appearance copying. Experiments on PhysInsert-Bench and DreamBooth demonstrate improved image fidelity; a user study further shows more accurate placement and improved lighting integration, perspective, and pose plausibility.

#05Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

Luggage re-identification: A study of strategies towards a real-world application

Quentin Dhôte, Romaric Audigier

Luggage re-identification (ReID) is a critical task in video surveillance for forensics, security or border management (suspicious or abandoned luggage recognition), as well as luggage management (lost luggage recovery). It enables the association of observations of the same luggage across disjoint camera views in complex environments such as airports, train stations and border crossing. While existing approaches primarily focus on appearance-based cropped image matching under relatively clean conditions, real-world scenarios are characterized by frequent occlusions, cluttered background and crowded scenes which significantly degrade performance. Yet, strategies leveraging the complementarity of multiple shots and views from different video streams is overlooked. In this paper, we study strategies for an end-to-end pipeline that operates from multiple video streams to detect and re-identify luggage. We evaluate different variants on a benchmark dataset acquired in real-world environments to address the questions of selecting and merging different views and shots of the same luggage as well as training on different environment datasets for an overall ReID performance improvement in practical applications.