ML Reads

Personal arXiv list

ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

Read, Allocate, Route: Role-Coupled Tokenization for Pixel-Space Generative Transformers

Jiongfan Yang, Weichen Fan, Haiwen Diao and 2 more

Pixel-space generative Transformers typically use one token per image patch, so capturing finer detail requires more tokens and makes global attention increasingly expensive. We observe that finer detail does not necessarily require more global communication: low-frequency structure benefits from global exchange, while high-frequency detail can be modeled locally. Based on this insight, we introduce SpecSlot, a pixel-space rectified-flow Transformer that decouples output detail from the length of the global attention sequence. SpecSlot expands each spatial anchor into multiple slots, each assigned a disjoint band of DCT coefficients; this separates anchor density from spectral subdivision. Only the lowest-frequency slot from each anchor participates in global attention, while all slots interact locally. This allows the model to increase spectral detail without enlarging the global sequence. A spatial head further adds a local correction to the spectral prediction, while the generative state, target, and loss remain in pixel space. On ImageNet-256, SpecSlot achieves a comparable final FID to a FLOPs-matched JiT control while converging faster. On ImageNet-512, it improves FID by 2.84 over the control with 3.9% fewer FLOPs, and comes within only 0.69 FID of JiT-B/16 at 38.2% lower cost. On text-to-image generation, SpecSlot surpasses JiT-B/8 on DPG-Bench by 1.06 at 40.6% lower forward cost.

#02Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

AVPS-360: A Spatial Audio-Visual Benchmark for Instance Segmentation and Tracking of Sound-Producing Persons

Yifu Sun, Parthasaarathy Sudarsanam, Tuomas Virtanen and 1 more

Audio-visual instance segmentation (AVIS) segments and tracks individual sound-producing objects in videos. Existing benchmarks predominantly use monaural audio, which lacks inter-channel cues for spatially distinguishing concurrent sound sources. We introduce AVPS-360 (Audio-Visual Person Segmentation 360), a spatial audio-visual benchmark bridging AVIS and sound event localisation and detection (SELD). Built upon STARSS23, it pairs first-order Ambisonics audio with synchronised 360° video across 230 recordings totalling 10.5 hours. Recordings average 164.0 seconds. The dataset captures intermittent sound production in real-world interactions dominated by speech, alongside laughter, clapping, and footsteps. It provides 31,678 manually reviewed instance masks linked to source identities and sound-event labels. We also present a baseline that integrates spatial audio with visual features for frame-level segmentation and identity association across frames. Experiments on AVPS-360 show that existing AVIS methods struggle with detection and identity association in long recordings with intermittent sound production, while our baseline substantially improves performance in both aspects.

#03Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

PhysCount: Do MLLMs Count Visual Appearances or Physical Entities?

Lidong Lu, Jiaxin Lv, Liangrui Dong and 5 more

Images reveal appearances, but counting often asks about physical objects. A single entity may be visible directly, in several reflections, or through glass, so detecting every visible occurrence does not determine how many entities are present. Existing visual counting benchmarks rarely separate these two operations. We introduce PhysCount, a benchmark for evaluating whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can distinguish what appears in an image from what physically exists in the scene. PhysCount contains 546 real-world images and 4,595 human-written questions organized into 651 target-specific groups. For each group, annotators locate the relevant appearances, label how each is observed, and identify appearances of the same entity. Four complementary question families test the enumeration of appearances, the enumeration of physical entities, image-formation-specific counting, and appearance--entity correspondence. We measure both accuracy on each family and the proportion of groups answered entirely correctly. Across 40 MLLMs, counting visible appearances is substantially easier than recovering the identities that connect them. Even the strongest model answers every question correctly in only 13.36\% of groups. Performance declines when one entity produces many appearances or when its appearances cross observation modes. Higher image resolution improves access to visual evidence but brings limited gains in complete-group accuracy, whereas answering related questions jointly produces a marked improvement. These results expose a gap between recognizing what is visible and correctly recovering the physical entities behind those observations.

#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

L3G-World: Real-Time Infinite World Generation with Latent 3D Gaussian Memory

Jinhyeok Choi, JoungBin Lee, Jongmin Lee and 5 more

Interactive world models generate visual content conditioned on user actions, yet maintaining spatial consistency over long-horizon exploration in real time remains challenging. Existing approaches rely on either temporal context or explicit 3D memory, both of which scale poorly because memory grows with the length of the generated stream. Moreover, explicit 3D memories condition latent video generators by re-encoding RGB renderings, which precludes real-time generation. In this paper, we introduce a Latent 3D Gaussian Memory (L3G) that combines the efficiency of feed-forward reconstruction with a compact, rapidly renderable scene representation. Building on this memory, we propose L3G-World, in which a memory updater and a video diffusion transformer (DiT) alternate autoregressively to generate spatially consistent worlds. The memory updater spawns Gaussians in newly observed regions and refines existing ones, so that the memory grows with scene extent rather than stream length. Each Gaussian further stores a VAE latent feature, allowing the memory to be rendered directly into the DiT's latent space without VAE re-encoding. Experiments show that L3G-World achieves state-of-the-art generation quality and long-horizon spatial consistency, with up to $38.6\times$ fewer 3D primitives, $3.2\times$ faster memory updates, and $359\times$ faster memory rendering relative to the most efficient prior 3D-memory baseline for each metric, enabling real-time world generation at 9 FPS.