#01Nov 2, 2026
cs.CV
ASCoR: Asymmetric Semantic-Spatial Learning for Remote Sensing Domain Generalization
Zitong Wang, Shuchang Lyu, Meng Li and 3 more
Source-only domain generalization (DG) for remote sensing semantic segmentation seeks reliable predictions in unseen domains without target-domain data during training. Although vision foundation models offer transferable knowledge, category recognition remains sensitive to source-specific visual cues, while task-specific adaptation may weaken pretrained transferability. We propose ASCoR, an asymmetric semantic-spatial framework built on SAM3. Its text-conditioned semantic branch uses class-name prompts to provide explicit category guidance. Probe-Once Dynamic Adaptive LoRA distributes a fixed adaptation budget across encoder blocks to limit source-specific specialization. A complementary task-specific dense branch learns multi-scale spatial representations using a separate frozen SAM3 image encoder. A lightweight reliability router integrates the two branches through bounded spatial correction based on local prediction reliability. All components are trained using source-domain supervision only. Experiments on the ISPRS, LoveDA, and OpenEarthMap benchmarks cover nine cross-domain transfers. ASCoR achieves a state-of-the-art mean IoU of 68.61% across six ISPRS transfers, outperforming the previous best method by 2.69 percentage points. It also achieves the best results on all three LoveDA/OpenEarthMap transfers, with 59.07%, 47.95%, and 49.38% mIoU on Rural-to-Urban, Urban-to-Rural, and Urban-to-OpenEarthMap, respectively. Ablation studies, feature visualizations, and spatial reliability analyses support the effectiveness and complementarity of the proposed components. Code: https://github.com/WangZitong42/ASCoR.
#02Nov 2, 2026
cs.CV
EO-Jev: Decision Model for Earth Observation
Mohamed Atef Abouelhadid, Diaa Addeen Abuhani, Muhammad Akhtar Munir and 2 more
Earth observation (EO) workflows require selecting among known outcomes, estimating confidence, and processing large volumes of imagery. Generative vision-language models can address these tasks, but autoregressive decoding is computationally costly and their confidence estimates are unreliable. Decision models offer an alternative, returning probabilities over candidate answers in a single forward pass. However, their accuracy, calibration, and transfer across EO tasks remain insufficiently understood. We investigate these properties through a diagnostic study of d3-flash (8.4B parameters) across 30 settings from 23 public EO benchmarks. We find that compositional reasoning transfers well and calibration improves over its Qwen3.5-9B backbone on 24 settings, while counting, change quantification, damage grading, and absent-object recognition remain challenging. To address these limitations, we adapt d3-flash through low-rank fine-tuning on public EO training splits, producing EO-Jev. EO-Jev improves significantly over d3-flash on 26 of 30 settings and matches or exceeds specialist references on 20 of 28. It also achieves an average gain of 8.0 points across 12 held-out settings and lower expected calibration error than specialists on 21 of 28 settings. These improvements come at a modest cost of 1.8 points in general decision performance. Our results demonstrate the potential of adapting general decision models into competitive EO generalists while highlighting persistent challenges in quantitative perception, option-order consistency, and calibration under distribution shift.
#03Nov 2, 2026
cs.CV
Every Pixel Is an Option: A System One Model for Medical Ultrasound Biometry
Moein Heidari, Junbo Rao, Yudan Chen and 6 more
**Purpose:** Ultrasound biometry is widely used across various clinical applications, including prenatal and cardiac examinations, to obtain quantitative measurements by placing calipers at anatomical landmarks. However, these measurements remain subject to interoperator variability as they rely largely on manual caliper placement. Conventional methods often use specialized prediction heads for different ultrasound tasks, whereas vision-language models offer flexibility through text instructions. However, direct coordinate prediction does not explicitly model spatial likelihood distributions, limiting the representation of localization ambiguity. **Methods:** We propose Kev-Bio, a vision-language model that uses clinical measurement questions to guide ultrasound landmark detection. Inspired by System One decision models, Kev-Bio uses decision representations of the language model to generate queries for each caliper endpoint. These queries are matched against shared dense ultrasound features to produce spatial probability maps, from which landmark coordinates and clinical measurements are derived. The model is trained end-to-end using both landmark localization and clinical measurement losses. **Results:** On the nine-view FU/GU Biometry 2026 dataset, Kev-Bio achieves a mean radial error (MRE) of 22.50 pixels and a clinical measurement mean absolute error (MAE) of 15.38, outperforming the compared baselines in overall performance. **Conclusion:** These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Kev-Bio for ultrasound landmark detection and clinical measurement across different anatomical views. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/moeinheidari7829/Kev-Bio.
#04Nov 2, 2026
cs.CV
ArabGeoText: Tool-Augmented Vision-Language Models for Arabic Geospatial Text Spotting
Yakoub Bazi, Sarah Alsaleh, Mohamad M. Al Rahhal and 2 more
Geospatial text spotting involves locating and transcribing geographic labels, such as road names, district names, and landmarks, in raster maps. These labels are often small, densely arranged, and arbitrarily oriented. Although Arabic text recognition has been studied extensively in documents and natural scenes, Arabic geospatial text spotting remains underexplored. We introduce ARABGEOTEXT, an Arabic-centric benchmark covering 970 geographic locations in Riyadh and Jeddah, with 17,875 manually annotated text instances per view type. For each location, we pair an OpenStreetMap (OSM) rendering with a composite created by overlaying that rendering on the corresponding remote sensing (RS) imagery. The paired views preserve label content and pixel geometry, allowing evaluation across different backgrounds. Geographic partitions support in-city and city-disjoint evaluation of detection, recognition, and end-to-end spotting. Experiments with direct Qwen3.5-4B spotting show difficulties in recovering all labels within a tile. We therefore propose a tool-augmented vision-language framework that combines YOLO26 localization and crop rectification with Qwen3.5-4B recognition adapted through low-rank adaptation (LoRA). The framework outperforms direct LoRA-adapted Qwen3.5-4B spotting across both image views and test cities. With localization held fixed, reader adaptation further improves recognition over the pretrained zero-shot reader. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yakoubbazi/ArabGeoText.
#05Nov 2, 2026
cs.CV
Contrastive Adapter Training and Consensus Knowledge Distillation for Multi-Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Skin Cancer Diagnosis
Ali Abedi, Q. M. Jonathan Wu, Ning Zhang and 1 more
Skin cancer diagnosis, particularly differentiating melanoma from benign nevi, is challenging due to the visual similarity between lesions. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) have shown promising performance, their effectiveness often deteriorates on data from heterogeneous clinical sources. Conventional domain adaptation methods address domain shift but require access to source data during adaptation, which is often infeasible due to privacy regulations. Multi-source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (MSFDA) addresses this limitation by leveraging multiple labeled source domains to generalize to an unlabeled target domain without requiring access to source data. However, existing MSFDA methods rely on full backbone fine-tuning, leading to catastrophic forgetting and overfitting on small clinical datasets, and address domain shift at the aggregation stage without establishing a shared domain-invariant feature space. Furthermore, their reliance on hard pseudo-labels or confidence-weighted aggregation introduces noisy supervision signals under domain shift. To address these limitations, we propose CAT-CKD, consisting of two components: (1) contrastive adapter training (CAT), which trains lightweight ConvPass adapters within a frozen ViT backbone using supervised contrastive learning (SCL) to establish a shared domain-invariant feature space before source-specific model training, and (2) consensus knowledge distillation (CKD), which aggregates logits from multiple source models into a consensus supervisory signal and adapts a student model on unlabeled target data using KL divergence. Experiments on five publicly available skin lesion datasets show that CAT-CKD achieves an average AUROC of 86.1%, outperforming existing MSFDA methods while requiring only 4.3M trainable parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/A-Abedi/CAT_CKD.