#01Oct 30, 2026
cs.CV
A Patch is More Than a Token
Zixiong Wang, Haiping Ma
Vision Transformers represent each image patch through a canonical token produced under one observation condition. That token is a powerful interface, but it is still one realized state of the patch. We introduce PMTT, which establishes two foundations: a patch representation object can extend from one canonical state to a canonical-centered Representation State Family, and identity-preserving variation opens Patch-Level Local Feature Space. We develop four parts of this representation program. Patch Information Acquisition and Dense Orbital Views expose lawful same-patch states. Visible-to-Hidden prediction tests whether observed states reveal structure beyond themselves. Intrinsic analysis identifies low-dimensional, energy-concentrated, patch-specific, predictive geometry. Representation Organization separates acquiring more information from organizing that information, with an analytic Manifold as the central structured representation. We realize PMTT on frozen DINOv3 S/B/L/H+ backbones without neural post-training of the representation. Across two independent 4,096-anchor cohorts, Manifold explains 70.8-79.6% of Hidden variation, compared with 55.0-72.3% for directly Observed states, and wins on more than 95% of anchors at every scale. Effective rank falls from about 2.5 to 2.0 while dominant energy concentration rises with backbone scale. Across six visual capabilities and four scales, Observed exceeds the canonical Center in 21 of 24 conditions, Manifold exceeds Center in 23, and Manifold exceeds Observed in 16. The strongest current consequence appears in physical correspondence, where MegaDepth satisfies Center < Observed < Manifold at every scale. These results show that pretrained visual backbones contain richer patch information than the standard single-token interface directly exposes. Code and experimental assets are available at https://github.com/zixiongwang-ai/PMTT.
#02Oct 30, 2026
cs.CV
Latent Reasoning in Continuous Space for Unified Multimodal Models
Byungwoo Jeon, Yoonwoo Jeong, Hyunseok Lee and 2 more
Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) achieve remarkable success on diverse multimodal understanding and generation tasks, yet they still struggle to effectively leverage language-based chain-of-thought reasoning for image generation. As a result, existing reasoning-augmented UMMs often fail to inherit the test-time scaling and fine-grained controllability observed in large language models. We attribute this failure to a fundamental modality mismatch: reasoning is performed in a discrete token space, whereas image generation operates in a continuous space. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Latent Reasoning framework in Continuous space (LARC), which alleviates the token-level bottleneck by reasoning over continuous hidden states. Specifically, the training framework consists of two stages: (i) curriculum supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and (ii) information-gain reinforcement learning (RL). First, the curriculum SFT stage gradually converts token-level reasoning into latent reasoning. Subsequently, the information-gain RL stage self-evolves latent reasoning without ground truth supervision. Experiments across diverse text-to-image generation benchmarks show that LARC consistently improves generation quality, prompt following, and compositional fidelity. Notably, LARC achieves state-of-the-art performance on GenEval with a 7%p gain over BAGEL and demonstrates clear test-time scaling behavior, outperforming token-based generation under both parallel and sequential test-time scaling strategies.
#03Oct 30, 2026
cs.CV
PGGT-Loc: Primitive-Grounded Geometry Transformer for Feed-Forward Camera Localization
Hanqiao Ye, Yuzhou Liu, Mengqi Rong and 3 more
Camera localization methods are mostly multi-stage pipelines relying on dedicated and complex maps that are costly to construct, store, and maintain over time. Alternatively, well-structured maps that organize scenes with compact yet expressive primitives are often readily available, providing rich structural and semantic cues that humans can interpret. However, their potential for direct camera localization remains largely unexplored due to the significant modality gap between map primitives and visual observations. This motivates a new concept for localization, which estimates camera poses by grounding query observations to map primitives. In this paper, we instantiate the concept in the context of planar primitives with PGGT, the Primitive-Grounded Geometry Transformer network. Given a single query image and a set of planar map primitives, the network is trained to predict multiple localization targets for feed-forward 6-DoF camera localization that generalizes to unseen environments. With this straightforward and scalable architecture, our method pushes the state-of-the-art localization performance on both dense surface maps and minimal layout models. The code and models are available at https://github.com/3dv-casia/PGGT-Loc
#04Oct 30, 2026
cs.AI
ReuScope: Auditing Data Reuse and Evaluation Sensitivity in Capsule Vision 2024
Eunseob Choi, Kyeonghun Kim, Hyuk-Jae Lee and 1 more
We develop ReuScope, a protocol for auditing data reuse and evaluation sensitivity, using Capsule Vision 2024 as a case study. It combines measurements of data relationships with two comparisons: changing the evaluation population while holding predictions fixed, and changing training data while holding evaluation fixed. Byte-identical files cross the public training-validation boundary, and all 41 Kvasir-Capsule recordings that contribute frames occur in both partitions. Shared source recordings establish cross-split overlap; missing cross-recording patient identifiers prevent counting unique shared patients. Across ten paired seeds, removing all training rows attributed to Kvasir-Capsule, plus five rows from other sources flagged as near-matches to it, lowers public-validation balanced accuracy from 82.5% to 61.2%. Evaluating the same fitted models on the validation rows of the other sources reverses the comparison: removal improves balanced accuracy by 1.38 percentage points. The public-validation drop measures sensitivity to source removal, not an amount of leakage-induced inflation. Matched controls show that sample size and class counts alone do not explain the observed score differences. An exploratory experiment removes the training neighbors of validation frames that have close training matches, or equally many distant training rows, and yields a difference-in-differences estimate, relative to matched unflagged frames, of -0.355 percentage points in true-class probability; the paired-t interval for accuracy spans zero. The resulting procedure distinguishes observed reuse from conditional performance sensitivity and specifies the population, class support and uncertainty unit for each conclusion.
#05Oct 30, 2026
cs.CV
Open-Weight MLLMs Cannot Compare What They Cannot Name
Wenxin Su, Anna Kreshuk
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly capable of understanding images and performing complex visual reasoning, suggesting the possibility of using them to automate biological image analysis. This need is becoming increasingly urgent as advances in technology continue to generate ever larger and more diverse microscopy datasets, already exceeding the scale at which manual visual analysis is feasible. With the final aim to use MLLMs for visual comparison of complex phenotypes, we investigate a very simple baseline: comparison of the size of body parts in synthetic images of ants. We find that state-of-the-art open-weight MLLMs fail for some body parts, but not for others, even though the comparison itself is visually trivial for all of them. We evaluate different in-context learning strategies and analyze performance on the related object recognition task. Our results suggest a recognition-driven grounding failure: structures that the models cannot recognize are instead associated with a recognizable semantic concept, impairing the grounding and comparison of both. Further analysis of the vision encoder is consistent with the hypothesis that fine-grained visual structure may be less well preserved without semantic support. Together, our results reveal a surprising limitation of current MLLMs: semantic recognition can gate simple visual comparisons that do not intrinsically require semantic understanding. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/kreshuklab/Open-Weight-MLLMs-Cannot-Compare-What-They-Cannot-Name