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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Aug 7, 2026

cs.CV

Geometry-Aware Camera Localization for Bronchoscopy

Lumin Chen, Qingyao Tian, Jinpeng Li and 5 more

Camera localization in bronchoscopy remains a challenging problem due to stringent accuracy requirements, real-time constraints, and limited training data. Compared to natural scenes, the confined anatomical structures demand millimeter-level precision, while intraoperative guidance necessitates low-latency inference. However, existing methods often fail to effectively exploit preoperative geometric priors, limiting their robustness and accuracy. To address these limitations, we propose a unified geometry-aware bronchoscope localization framework (GABL) that effectively fuses preoperative structural priors with paired intraoperative video to estimate 6-DoF camera poses. Specifically, to address visual ambiguity in complex airways, we propose a graph-guided coarse-to-fine localization scheme that effectively leverages structural priors for precise pose estimation. Furthermore, to mitigate pose jitter and bridge the visual-structural gap, we integrate a Transformer-based tracking model with a novel RGB-depth matching objective, jointly enforcing spatio-temporal and geometric consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields remarkable reductions of 8.37% and 31.76% in translation and rotation errors over the prior state-of-the-art, alongside 4 times inference speedup (33.6 FPS) for robust real-time bronchoscope localization. Project website: https://paulili08.github.io/GABL/.

#02Aug 7, 2026

cs.CV

GeoDistill-Refine: Silhouette-First Geometry Distillation for Annotation-Free Spacecraft Segmentation

Yonglong Zhang, Zongwu Xie, Yang Liu

Foundation segmentation models can provide supervision for spacecraft imagery without manual training masks, but their predictions vary with textual prompts and may contain geometric errors that are amplified during distillation. This paper presents GeoDistill-Refine, a two-stage framework that transfers offline SAM 3 pseudo-masks to a compact segmentation network. Six fixed prompts are fused by an unweighted 50% vote to stabilize the teacher output. The student first learns the foreground silhouette and is then refined with signed-distance-field, skeleton, and area objectives derived from the pseudo-mask. A sample-level gate, computed from prompt agreement, the valid-prompt ratio, and pseudo-mask area plausibility, reduces the influence of unreliable pseudo-geometry. On the SpaceSense-Bench HJM lockbox set, GeoDistill-Refine improves Image IoU and Boundary F1 by 0.0456 and 0.1380, respectively, over a plain pseudo-label student. External evaluations on the SPEED+ Lightbox and Sunlamp domains and on TANGO show competitive regional overlap together with gains in boundary quality or foreground precision. The deployed TinyUNet contains 0.263 M parameters and requires approximately 1.1 ms per image on an RTX 4090; SAM 3 pseudo-mask construction and the auxiliary geometry branches are used only during training.

#03Aug 7, 2026

cs.CV

I Seek You in Videos: Identity-Conditioned Queries for Person-Centric Video Reasoning

Shibo Gao, Chongxiao Wang, Chenglong Huang and 10 more

Real-world video reasoning often involves multimodal, multi-source inputs, whereas existing video reasoning tasks typically assume a simplified video-text setting, limiting identity matching and person-centric reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Identity-conditioned Queries (ICQ) task, in which models are required to jointly associate and interpret an input video and a reference image of a person, and leverage this conditioning to address identity grounding, behavior understanding, and temporal reasoning, among other challenges. Building on ICQ, we present ISYV (I Seek You in Videos), a systematic solution comprising three components: (1) ISYV-Bench, a challenging evaluation benchmark with 1,377 real-world complex videos and 1,377 question-answer pairs, organized into six difficulty levels spanning capabilities from identity recognition to causal reasoning; (2) ISYV-75K, a large-scale training set of 75K high-quality samples constructed via automated annotation, multi-stage verification, and manual review; and (3) ISYV-Framework, containing an ICQ-oriented model and training strategy for learning to exploit informative video shots without additional shot-level annotations. Extensive experiments show that both mainstream closed-source and open-source MLLMs struggle on ISYV-Bench, especially in cross-domain identity matching and long-horizon tracking. ISYV-Model outperforms strong baselines and in some aspects approaches closed-source performance. Overall, ISYV provides a unified task definition, scalable datasets/benchmarks, and modeling insights for person-centric video reasoning.

#04Aug 7, 2026

cs.CV

Flow-Corrected Shape Optimization: Taming Manifold Drift in High-Dimensional 3D Models

Emilien Seiler, Nicolas Talabot, Yingxuan You and 2 more

Optimizing 3D shapes within the latent spaces of deep generative models is fundamental to computer assisted engineering, yet remains prone to a critical failure mode we term manifold drift: the tendency of gradient-based optimization to move latent vectors away from the manifold of valid shapes. This problem is exacerbated in state-of-the-art 3D shape generative models that operate in increasingly high-dimensional latent spaces where valid shapes occupy a vanishingly small fraction of the full space. Existing mitigation strategies, including latent regularization and flow-matching approaches, either sacrifice expressiveness, demand a difficult trade-off between objective guidance and generative fidelity that remains prone to manifold drift, or are computationally infeasible to scale to modern, large-capacity 3D shape models. We introduce a novel optimizer-corrector framework that alternates between gradient steps for objective minimization and guided flow matching to drive the latent state back to the valid shape manifold. By decoupling objective minimization from flow-based correction, optimizing freely and correcting strictly, this alternating design avoids inherent trade-offs, preserving geometric validity without sacrificing expressiveness while remaining computationally feasible on modern 3D shape models. We demonstrate its effectiveness across generative priors of varying complexity, from simple vector latent spaces to large-scale architectures across a variety of downstream optimization tasks, including aerodynamic drag reduction and object compliance optimization.

#05Aug 7, 2026

cs.CV

MirrorWorld: Taming Video Diffusion Models for Mirror Reflection Generation

Youjun Zhao, Alex Warren, Gary K. L. Tam and 1 more

Recent advances in video diffusion models (VDMs) have enabled high-fidelity video synthesis. However, generating mirror reflections remains challenging because the content within a mirror must remain consistent with the surrounding scene. Existing VDMs are not specifically designed to model scene-to-mirror relationships, which can lead to reflections with incorrect content or inconsistent spatial arrangements. We observe that mirror reflection generation involves two complementary challenges: determining what scene content should be reflected and how the reflected content should be spatially arranged within the mirror region. Motivated by this observation, we propose MirrorWorld, a reflection-aware video inpainting framework that models scene-to-mirror relationships during generation. Specifically, we introduce Semantic Relation Distillation (SRD), which transfers relational information from a frozen visual foundation model to encourage semantic associations between visible scene content and mirror regions. We further propose Geometric Transformation Alignment (GTA), which learns a transformation that guides the spatial arrangement of reflected content. The two components play complementary roles, with SRD modeling what should be reflected and GTA modeling how it should be arranged. To facilitate research on this problem, we construct a benchmark for video mirror reflection generation by repurposing four existing video mirror datasets into a unified reflection reconstruction task. Experimental results show that MirrorWorld achieves improved reflection reconstruction quality over representative image-based reflection generation methods and strong video inpainting baselines.