#01Aug 17, 2026
cs.CV
HarnessEval-W: Agentifying the Evaluation of Visual Worlds
Weiliang Chen, Haowen Sun, Jun Gao and 40 more
A benchmark should deliver more than a scalar score: what makes an evaluation trustworthy is the reasoning that justifies the score. This is especially critical for world models, where judging a rollout requires understanding whether physics, causality, and world state evolve correctly. Humans spot such violations naturally, yet no existing benchmark automates this capability: metrics are computed brute-force, leaving no reasoning chain that can be examined or verified. We introduce HarnessEval-W, an agentified evaluation pipeline that brings the harness paradigm from the LLM ecosystem to world model benchmarking. Rather than applying a fixed rubric, HarnessEval-W interprets the context of each evaluation case, decomposes the evaluation question into measurable subproblems, and spawns specialized sub-agents, each equipped with tailored context and diagnostic tools to reason over its own subproblem. The parent agent then validates the gathered evidence and summarizes it into the final verdict. This hierarchical workflow turns every evaluation into a transparent evidence tree whose complete reasoning chain justifies the result. We apply HarnessEval-W to 18 representative world models over 330 evaluation cases. Its judgments closely align with human preferences while providing verifiable, fine-grained diagnoses of every generated rollout. We open-source the full pipeline as a live benchmark and invite the broad community to contribute to grow new skills and evaluation cases as world models evolve.
#02Aug 17, 2026
cs.CV
Unlocking the Potential of Image Editing via Concept Scaling and Dense Supervision
Long Cui, Xiaoqian Liu, Qi Qin and 4 more
Existing image editing frameworks predominantly follow the training paradigm of text-to-image diffusion models. However, extending this paradigm to image editing highlights two inherent discrepancies, specifically, the insufficient attention to edit concept granularity and the training inefficiency caused by sparse supervision signals. To address these issues, we establish a comprehensive hierarchical taxonomy featuring over 1,000 fine-grained edit concepts and build ConceptEdit-12M, a massive dataset of 12 million high-quality editing pairs via an improved synthesis framework. This library-driven approach effectively rectifies the distribution collapse of generated data while ensuring high data fidelity. Furthermore, we propose a dense supervision training strategy that synthesizes multiple non-interfering concepts into single image pairs. By providing richer learning signals, this strategy significantly enhances both training efficiency and overall model performance. Training results validate our strategy, significantly outperforming prior works. Finally, we present ConceptEdit-Bench, a granular evaluation suite designed to diagnose model capabilities across a vast array of real-world scenarios.
#03Aug 17, 2026
cs.RO
Don't Drop the BATON: Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation via Agentic Subtask Exploration and Transition-aware Memory
Bingxin Xu, Yuzhang Shang, Emilio Ferrara
Long-horizon robot manipulation chains many contact-rich skills into one multi-stage task. Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly master the individual skills, yet the chain still fails: errors compound beyond the policy's ability to correct, and one subtask silently constrains the next. A promising recipe freezes the VLA and puts an LLM agent in charge: it plans in language, moves in free space with analytic primitives, invokes the VLA only for contact-rich segments, and writes adaptation into language memory. Applied to long horizons, it breaks twice. (1) Competence comes from whole-task exploration at test time, whose cost is multiplicative in stages: if one stage needs T episodes, a K-stage task needs about T^K, and a failure does not reveal which stage caused it. (2) It has no representation of transitions: the VLA primitive carries an exit but no entry condition, so a subtask can succeed in a form its successor cannot use. We present BATON. Against (1), BATON makes the subtask the unit of exploration: each is explored in the cheap short-horizon regime and its solution stored in memory; a long-horizon trajectory is then composed from these solutions rather than discovered whole. Cost becomes additive (T*K) and every failure is attributed to a single stage. Against (2), BATON equips exploration with a transition-aware memory. Within a subtask, a verifier agent governs the invocation transition: the VLA is called only after the wrist view confirms the scene is ready. Across subtasks, a handoff transition restores an entry state disturbed by the predecessor's residue, and a lookahead transition selects the strategy whose outcome the successor can inherit. No parameters are updated. On the long-horizon benchmark RoboMemArena, BATON improves task success by 11.6% and cumulative success by 14.9% over the SoTA.
#04Aug 17, 2026
cs.CV
PixRestore: Unified Image Restoration via Pixel Diffusion Transformer
Lingchen Sun, Rongyuan Wu, Xiangtao Kong and 6 more
Unified image restoration (UIR) aims to recover high-quality (HQ) content from low-quality (LQ) images with different degradations using a single model. Most recent methods adapt large pretrained text-to-image (T2I) latent diffusion models for their strong capacity and generative priors. However, the variational autoencoder (VAE) in latent T2I models may discard restoration-sensitive details, while the open-ended synthesis prior can introduce content-inconsistent artifacts. We present PixRestore, a VAE-free pixel-space Diffusion Transformer (DiT) for UIR, where the diffusion backbone is trained entirely from scratch, without relying on T2I pretraining. PixRestore performs flow matching directly on patchified pixels, preserving fine-grained details while keeping the token sequence tractable. To adapt to different degradations, PixRestore learns to predict the reliability of layer features using LQ--HQ DINO feature similarity. Features from more reliable layers are fused as dense conditioning, while less reliable layers receive stronger HQ-feature supervision to encourage degradation removal. We train PixRestore on a large-scale corpus of diverse scenes and degradations, and further finetune it into a one-step generator using DINO-based adversarial objectives for efficient inference. Experiments on public benchmarks and real-world test sets show that, with only about 50M parameters and single-step inference, PixRestore achieves the best overall fidelity, perceptual quality, and robustness to degradations among competing UIR models while being far more efficient. Larger PixRestore variants can further boost performance, demonstrating the scalability of our pixel-space design. Code and the curated benchmark can be found at https://github.com/csslc/PixRestore.
#05Aug 17, 2026
cs.CV
Unsupervised Learning of Cell Instances with Generative Routing Pyramids
Ziwen Liu, Martin Weigert
Identifying and representing object instances such as cells or nuclei is a common task in microscopy image analysis. Established machine learning workflows typically use supervised detection or segmentation followed by feature extraction or classification, which requires manual annotations and treats instance segmentation and cell representation as separate stages. We describe a new unsupervised method for cell instance segmentation and phenotypic classification from unlabeled microscopy images. Our method is based on reconstructing each image using a coarse-to-fine routing pyramid that associates pixels with spatially sparse latent sources. The resulting pixel-to-latent associations yield instance masks, while the source latents encode cell morphology. We demonstrate competitive performance in instance segmentation across diverse cell morphologies and imaging modalities, as well as generative modeling of cellular phenotypes under perturbations. Source code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/weigertlab/routing-pyramids.