#01Aug 13, 2026
cs.CV
Reconstructing Historical Manuscripts through MSI: The Potential of Contrast in Assessing Image Quality and Legibility
Anna Breger
Digital restoration of historical manuscript images aims to improve readability while preserving the authenticity of cultural heritage documents. However, evaluating quality of restored manuscripts remains challenging, where readability is often subjective and expert annotations are scarce. This study investigates the suitability of contrast-based image quality measures to assess quality and legibility of reconstructed manuscript images from multi-spectral imaging. Two experiments were conducted with publicly-available data sets, facilitating manual quality scores by experts and full-reference image quality measures as reference evaluations. The results show that potential contrast achieves the highest correlation with expert ratings, while contrast-to-noise ratio demonstrates the strongest agreement with full-reference quality measures. Overall, contrast-based measures consistently outperform general image quality measures, demonstrating their potential as objective indicators of manuscript legibility and reconstruction quality.
#02Aug 13, 2026
cs.CV
Alaya-EVOKE: From Linear-Scaling Supervision to Endless World
Yuanyang Yin, Gongxuan Wang, Yifan Zhan and 3 more
Interactive world models must support persistent memory, responsive interaction, and long-horizon generation, yet these requirements place conflicting demands on the model. Maintaining history in the denoiser context or key-value cache incurs growing cost, forcing a trade-off between session length and retained memory, while low-latency interaction relies on few-step generation whose capabilities are bounded by its teacher. Evoke addresses both limitations by externalizing persistent world state and redesigning the teacher for long-horizon interactive generation. Scene geometry is maintained in an external, camera-indexed world state bank, from which only view-relevant information is retrieved, keeping the denoiser context bounded as the session grows. Rather than treating the teacher as a fixed generator, we design it for long-horizon supervision: its sparse attention combines chunk-wise grouping, retrieval of selected distant frames, and a linear-attention global state, yielding linear growth in memory and compute while enabling supervision over long horizons. Such supervision exposes content drift that stays locally plausible within short windows, while per-chunk conditioning enables prompt changes and event control throughout the sequence. A 30-second distribution-matching objective, applied under self-forced rollouts, transfers both capabilities to a three-step student that uses no classifier-free guidance, improving resistance to long-term drift while preserving responsive conditioning. With bounded context and recurrent external memory, Evoke supports open-ended, continuously evolving generation; on a single H200 at $384\times 640$, each $1.5\,\mathrm{s}$ chunk is generated in $2.11\,\mathrm{s}$. As a three-step world model, Evoke achieves state-of-the-art performance on WBench while remaining competitive on VBench-Long and VBench-2.0.
#03Aug 13, 2026
cs.CL
How Do VLMs Behave When Blind or Misled? Behavioral Evaluation of VLMs on Scientific Figures
Paul Osemudiame Oamen, Owusu-Banahene Osei, Ananya Mukherjee and 4 more
Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they behave when visual evidence is missing or misleading). We introduce SciFigBench, a diagnostic VLM benchmark for scientific figure understanding that jointly evaluates perception, reasoning, and behavioral reliability under uncertainty. It contains 250 figures with high-quality human annotations across three evaluation aspects, totaling 600+ hours of annotation effort. We further extend these figures via image transformations, reasoning questions, resistance probes, caption-bias probes, and confirmed selective-blur targets, producing over 34,000 evaluation setups for stress testing. We further propose the Admittance-Resistance-Inductance (A-R-I) framework to evaluate whether models acknowledge insufficient evidence, resist misleading context, and infer cautiously from partial information. Our results reveal substantial behavioral differences among models. GPT-5.2 achieves the highest description quality (MQM 91.6) with strong reasoning accuracy (78.4%), yet hallucinates unreadable content in 96% of cases, whereas Gemini 3.1 Pro, a comparably capable model (MQM 90.2, reasoning 81.0%), admits uncertainty in 71% of such cases and achieves the strongest resistance score (0.91). These findings show that high perception and reasoning accuracy alone do not guarantee behavioral reliability, a dimension critical for deployment in scientific workflows.
#04Aug 13, 2026
cs.CV
SCULPT: Subtractive Composition for 3D Part Generation
Sikuang Li, Chen Yang, Jiemin Fang and 5 more
Part-aware 3D generation aims to create digital assets that are coherent as complete objects while exposing structural parts for editing, material assignment, animation, and reuse. Existing methods impose this structure outside the native generation loop: segmentation-based methods partition an already generated shape, while additive methods synthesize parts from predefined layouts, boxes, or tokens and then reconcile them into a whole. The former preserves the generated geometry but fixes the object before part boundaries are determined; the latter exposes part cardinality but often leaves shared boundaries vulnerable to gaps, interpenetrations, and material discontinuities. In this paper, we propose SCULPT, a framework that addresses these challenges through subtractive composition. Given a complete object represented in a structured 3D latent space, SCULPT iteratively applies a joint split predictor to generate one extracted part together with the remaining object. The predictor performs a coupled denoising process conditioned on both the image and the current 3D state, so the extracted part and updated remainder are generated together rather than reconciled after generation. The joint split predictor processes both outputs on the union of their native sparse 3D supports, allowing neighboring supports to overlap rather than imposing a disjoint voxel partition. The rollout ends when the remainder support becomes empty or reaches a fixed safety cap, allowing the number of generated parts to adapt to each object within that bound. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art geometry on PartObjaverse while preserving strong complete-object reconstruction after part assembly. Results on four dataset images, one text-to-image-generated input, and one real-world photograph further show fine-grained textured part decomposition beyond the benchmark.
#05Aug 13, 2026
cs.RO
HumanTracker: Towards Comprehensive and Human-Aligned Motion Tracking Benchmark
Dairu Liu, Zekun Qi, Jiayu Zeng and 11 more
Humanoid motion tracking is central to teleoperation and whole-body imitation, yet evaluation often disagrees with what people perceive in videos. Kinematic errors average per-frame pose differences but miss the physical artifacts that matter most, particularly unstable support and incorrect contacts such as foot skating and mistimed touch-downs. Meanwhile, widely used test suites are small and lack the diversity needed to stress contact-rich, long-horizon behaviors. We introduce HumanTracker to make humanoid tracking evaluation both perceptually aligned and scalable. The HumanTracker benchmark contains approximately 153 hours of optical motion trajectories from multiple professional performers, organized into four motion families with text labels for fine-grained diagnosis. We further propose HumanScore, a preference-aligned metric trained on 12K motion pairs containing 24K motions. Across representative state-of-the-art trackers, HumanScore better predicts human preferences and reveals contact and stability failures that kinematic metrics often miss.