#01Jul 22, 2026
cs.CV
RIM: A Retrieval-In-Matching Framework for Cross-Domain Global Visual Localization of UAVs
Xin Li, Siyuan Duan, Shang Wang and 3 more
Global visual localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using remote-sensing reference maps has attracted increasing attention. However, acquisition-time and imaging-platform differences between UAV and reference imagery induce substantial cross-domain appearance and viewpoint shifts, challenging robust six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation. We address these shifts by sampling UAV-viewpoint reference views from Google 3D Tiles across locations, altitudes, and orientations. A two-stage cross-domain fine-tuning recipe adapts SALAD using pose-near positives and geographically distant hard negatives, while local geometric consistency re-ranks the Top-K candidates. We further propose Retrieval-In-Matching (RIM), which freezes the adapted DINOv2-B retriever and distils a local-descriptor decoder that reuses its token field alongside a shallow VGG19 detail stream. One query-side DINOv2-B forward thus serves both SALAD retrieval and local description, eliminating a second foundation-model backbone while preserving retrieval descriptors by construction. We evaluate RIM zero-shot on the reconstructed EPFL Urbanscape and self-collected Chang'an Park datasets, both geographically disjoint from the training data. RIM outperforms ten recent retrieval baseline families. At 25/50 m under the full 3D distance metric, it improves Recall@1 over SALAD by 8.55/13.77 percentage points on EPFL and 4.45/8.94 points on Park. At Top-K=5, the complete measured localization query, including retrieval, candidate matching, and robust geometric verification, takes 67.9 ms end-to-end: 1.8 times faster than the strongest separate sparse-matching baseline and over 40 times faster than RoMa, while achieving comparable re-ranking accuracy. These results establish an efficient and deployable pipeline for UAV global visual localization in GNSS-challenged environments.
#02Jul 22, 2026
cs.CV
Toward Reliable RGB-D Semantic Segmentation: Handling Missing Modalities via Condition Dropout
Xuchen Zhu, Yajuan Wei, Shuang Hao and 3 more
RGB-D semantic segmentation has achieved remarkable progress, yet most models assume that RGB and depth are always available. In practice, failures or occlusions of surveillance sensors often remove one modality. Although RGB or depth alone can contain sufficient cues, models trained only on full-modality inputs fail to exploit the remaining modality once one is missing, causing severe degradation. We tackle this issue with a simple continued-training paradigm, \emph{Condition Dropout (ConD)}, which mitigates degradation while preserving full-modality accuracy. Starting from a pretrained RGB-D model, ConD adds a second stage that randomly simulates complete, RGB-missing, and depth-missing inputs, freezes the original encoders, and trains copied encoders with zero-initialized feature injection. Experiments on NYU-Depth V2 and SUN RGB-D show that ConD improves robustness under missing modalities and even yields slight gains when modalities are complete. Our code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
#03Jul 22, 2026
cs.CV
Self-supervision drives representational convergence in medical foundation models more than clinical supervision
Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh, Sebastian Ziegelmayer, Mahshad Lotfinia and 4 more
Medical image encoders from different groups are increasingly treated as interchangeable, on the assumption that scale and clinical supervision concentrate their representations onto a shared structure. Whether this convergence is real, what produces it, and whether it is clinically usable are untested, and the similarity measures behind such claims are fragile. We present a controlled dissection across 18 image and 7 text encoders, all open-weight and run locally, spanning 7M to 27B parameters and five imaging modalities, including 650,982 chest radiographs from six datasets. To isolate cause, we train encoders that vary only the objective under fixed data, architecture, and scale, and reproduce the effect in a synthetic model. Convergence is modest but above a random floor, driven by the self-supervised objective, not clinical supervision: matched self-supervised encoders aligned most (40.4% on chest radiography), with label-supervised (21.1%) and image-text (3.3%) far lower, and did not grow with size (Spearman 0.302, p=0.223) or capability. It is within-modality, does not reach clinical language, and does not reproduce how radiologists judge case similarity. Yet a linear classifier transfers across encoders and to five held-out hospitals, retaining about 85% of within-encoder performance. Convergence in medical imaging is therefore set by the pretraining objective, not inherited from scale or clinical supervision. Interoperability is accordingly something to design for through that objective, and to validate where the shared geometry is weakest, across patient subgroups and against clinical judgment.
#04Jul 22, 2026
cs.CV
HeadCast: Casting Attention Heads for Efficient Autoregressive Video Generation
Jinliang Shen, Lianghao Su, Zheming Li and 4 more
Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models have become a promising paradigm for long and streaming video synthesis, but the continuously growing Key-Value (KV) cache makes attention the dominant inference cost, especially at high resolution where each frame contributes many tokens. Existing remedies either evict the cache with coarse heuristics that cause inter-frame flickering, or require model re-training. We propose HeadCast, a training-free, plug-and-play acceleration framework built on the observation that a pre-trained AR model's attention heads exhibit stable, heterogeneous behaviors. After a short warm-up, HeadCast performs a one-time classification at the maximum-noise step that sorts every head into one of four archetypes: Sink, Dummy, Spatial, and Global, and restructures the monolithic KV cache into head-specific pathways. Crucially, it retains the Global heads that preserve the long-range temporal consistency aggressive eviction destroys. Because the Spatial pathway operates on a fixed-size grid, its savings grow with resolution: across state-of-the-art AR models, HeadCast accelerates inference by up to 1.62x at 720P and 1.95x at 1080P, while keeping VBench quality on par with full attention and largely flicker-free. Code is available at https://github.com/sjlgaga/HeadCast .
#05Jul 22, 2026
cs.CV
StreamHOI: Interaction-aware Temporal Memory Adaptation for Streaming HOI Video Generation
Zejing Rao, Haoxian Zhang, Xiaoqiang Liu and 5 more
Existing human--object interaction (HOI) video generation methods are largely limited to offline short-video generation with complex driving conditions, making them unsuitable for real-time interactive applications. We present \emph{StreamHOI}, a low-latency streaming framework for long-duration HOI video generation. Instead of converting heavily conditioned HOI pipelines into streaming systems, we study how an image-to-video streaming generator should organize historical memory to preserve interactions under bounded latency. We find that the standard sink-local memory design faces a trade-off in streaming HOI generation, and different transformer blocks show different historical-memory preferences for HOI regions and surrounding regions. To match memory composition with block behavior, StreamHOI performs offline HOI-aware block profiling and applies bias-guided memory-specialized training to adapt the generator to block-specific memory layouts. We further introduce a memory distance scaling module to strengthen long-range access to early interaction states. Extensive comparisons with both long-video baselines and recent HOI generation methods demonstrate that StreamHOI achieves strong interaction plausibility, object fidelity, human quality and efficiency, reaching 17.6 FPS with 0.75s first-chunk latency.