#01Oct 29, 2026
cs.CV
RADIOlogy: A Single-Pass Approach to Training-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection
Joaquín Figueira, Giacomo D'Amicantonio, Egor Bondarau
Current zero-shot anomaly detection methods often rely on complex prompt-learning techniques or computationally expensive sliding-window strategies to achieve fine-grained visual alignment to detect small-scale anomalies. This reliance stems from the fundamental limitation of standard CLIP architectures, where [CLS] token attention and spatial patch pooling struggle to capture subtle, localized anomaly features. While prompt-learning approaches aim to bridge this gap, they typically require a large number of ground-truth segmentation masks from auxiliary datasets, which are often unavailable in specialized domains. In this work, we show an emerging property of multi-head attention pooling in vision-language models: remarkable zero-shot anomaly localization and detection right out of the box. We translate this property into a single-pass anomaly detection technique, RADIOlogy, that does not require dense, windowed execution and significantly outperforms other training-free baselines. Instead, the method relies on a simple contrastive scoring approach that compares the average similarity between vision features and a suite of normal and abnormal prompts. Furthermore, we leverage the agglomerative features of RADIO models to enhance pixel-level anomaly segmentation using a dense anomaly refinement pipeline. Finally, we show how the vision-language family of training-free zero-shot anomaly detection techniques can be applied successfully to the medical domain with minimal modifications. Code is available at https://github.com/jacomof/RADIOlogy.
#02Oct 29, 2026
cs.LG
Rethinking Neural Thickets Without Weight Perturbations
Nicolas Dufour, Elouan Gardès, Amil Dravid and 2 more
The Neural Thickets hypothesis posits that pretrained language models lie in dense neighborhoods of task-specific experts in weight space, which random Gaussian perturbations can uncover. We reproduce the reported gains, but show that they do not require this geometric explanation. Perturbing a single decoder block already recovers much of the improvement, while keeping the model entirely frozen and adding a random bias to its output logits matches or exceeds full-weight perturbations on most reasoning tasks. This suggests an alternative explanation based on output diversity, validation-based selection, and voting. We formalize this view as Perturb-Select-Vote (PSV), a general procedure that generates perturbed predictors, selects high-performing members on a small validation set, and aggregates their predictions. This interpretation connects Neural Thickets to established inference-time methods, including sampling, self-consistency, and verifier-guided selection. A first-order analysis further shows that small weight perturbations act primarily through their induced logit shifts. We extend this analysis to vision, where logit PSV substantially improves performance under domain shift, including on Earth observation, while full-weight perturbations provide little additional benefit. Together, these results suggest that the gains attributed to nearby weight-space experts can instead be obtained through output diversity, selection, and voting. Logit PSV realizes these benefits with a fully frozen model, providing a simple, training-free alternative to full-weight perturbation ensembles across language and vision.
#03Oct 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.
#04Oct 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.
#05Oct 29, 2026
cs.CV
InfantNet: A Large Scale Dataset for Infant Body Pose and Shape Estimation
Zhipeng Hui, Jiahao Wang, Xun Dong and 13 more
Infant pose and shape estimation is essential for applications in childcare, developmental monitoring, and medical diagnosis. However, existing methods and datasets are largely designed for adults, and direct transfer to infants fails due to substantial differences in body proportions, articulation limits, and frequent self-occlusion. To address this gap, we introduce InfantNet, the largest real-image infant dataset to date, comprising 108,902 RGB images of infants aged 6-18 months. Each image is annotated with 2D keypoints, and a curated subset of 11,642 images additionally includes 3D pose and shape annotations with full SMIL parameters, verified through multi-view rendering and reprojection-error filtering. We use an iterative annotation pipeline to ensure high fidelity across both 2D and 3D labels. InfantNet establishes a large-scale, comprehensive benchmark for infant 2D keypoint detection and 3D pose-and-shape recovery. Baseline experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art adult pose estimators do not generalize well to infants, whereas fine-tuning on InfantNet yields a consistent improvement. The gains are even more pronounced for 3D pose and shape estimation, where SMIL-based estimation demonstrates robust performance with accuracy comparable to results reported for SMPL-based models. By releasing the InfantNet dataset and benchmark, we provide a vital resource for advancing infant pose analysis and related healthcare applications.