#01Jul 23, 2026
cs.CV
Scene Parameter Saliency via Differentiable Light Transport
Linas Beresna, Eugene Fiume
Gradient-based saliency methods reveal which input features most influence a neural network's output, and are a standard tool for model interpretability. We observe that differentiable renderers, which are conventionally used for parameter optimisation, produce an analogous form of saliency: given any scalar metric evaluated on a rendered image, a single reverse-mode differentiation pass yields per-parameter gradients that identify which scene elements most influence the metric. We call these gradient fields metric saliency maps. Unlike neural saliency, which propagates attribution through learned weights, metric saliency propagates through the image formation process itself, including multi-bounce light transport, capturing parameter dependencies that are semi-opaque to manual inspection. We compute metric saliency maps for qualitatively different objectives: psychovisual glare indices, mean scene luminance, and neural perceptual scores. The saliency rankings differ substantially across metrics for the same scene, with parameters that dominate one objective being negligible for another. The saliency map is specific to the metric, not an intrinsic property of the scene. Our results suggest that differentiable renderers produce derivative images that are as informative for scene understanding as the primal images they were designed to generate.
#02Jul 23, 2026
cs.CV
SANA-Video 2.0: Hybrid Linear Attention with Attention Residuals for Efficient Video Generation
Junsong Chen, Jincheng Yu, Yitong Li and 11 more
We introduce SANA-Video 2.0, a hybrid video diffusion transformer instantiated at 5B and 14B scales under a unified architecture. Designed to generate high-quality video up to 720p on a single GPU, SANA-Video 2.0 matches full-softmax video DiTs in quality while retaining the favorable long-sequence scaling of linear attention. To avoid quadratic attention throughout, Hybrid Linear-Softmax Attention combines gated linear attention for O(N)-dominated mixing with periodic gated-softmax anchors at a 3:1 ratio, restoring the full-rank token interactions that pure linear attention lacks. To propagate these refreshed representations across depth, Block Attention Residuals (AttnRes) route completed block summaries into later linear layers, enabling anchor-feature reuse and boosting deep-layer effective rank by ~12%. Through from-scratch training, SANA-Video 2.0 learns the complete hybrid directly rather than linearizing pretrained models, with reduced-resolution proxy studies establishing 25% softmax as the optimal quality-efficiency trade-off. With 40-step sampling, SANA-Video 2.0 achieves a VBench score of 84.30 in 13.2s at 480p on a single H100, remaining competitive with far larger softmax video DiTs at a fraction of the latency. Its compiled DiT forward pass is 3.2x faster than a matched full-softmax baseline at 720p/60s, a gap that expands with video duration. Furthermore, full-stack Sol-Engine optimization (kernel fusion, caching, and sparse attention) accelerates this hardware-friendly backbone by a further 3.58x, bringing the 5B pipeline to 13.06s at 720p/5s and making it 120x faster than Wan 2.2-A14B on one H100. Overall, our hybrid design recovers softmax-level expressiveness at substantially reduced cost, unlocking scalable long, high resolution video generation.
#03Jul 23, 2026
cs.CV
Towards Privacy-Preserving Federated Prompt Tuning under Data Heterogeneity: A Subspace-Decomposed Expert Approach
Yuhua Wang, Xiaodong Li, Yihao Guo and 6 more
Federated prompt tuning (FPT) enables collaborative adaptation of vision--language models (VLMs) using lightweight prompts. Existing methods often address heterogeneity and privacy through a split-prompt design under local differential privacy (DP), combining a shared prompt for global transfer with private prompts for local adaptation. However, a single shared prompt may over-smooth diverse transferable knowledge, weakening the balance between personalization and generalization. Multi-expert prompts (MEPs) can better capture this diversity, but enlarge the communicated space, increasing DP noise and communication cost while making robust expert composition more difficult. We propose FedSEPT, a privacy-preserving Fed}erated Subspace-decomposed Expert Prompt Tuning. Specifically, we employ Subspace-decomposed Expert Modeling (SEM) to parameterize multiple prompt experts with shared low-rank factors, a fixed public basis, and private residuals, thereby confining communication and DP perturbation to a compact factor space while enabling direct server aggregation in a common coordinate system. We further design Instance-aware Expert Fusion (IEF), which adaptively combines semantically complementary experts via on-device routing and performs efficient logit-level fusion using cached expert-specific text features. Extensive experiments on 11 heterogeneous benchmarks show that, under the same privacy constraints, FedSEPT achieves a better trade-off between local adaptation and global generalization than strong baselines.
#04Jul 23, 2026
cs.CV
DAPM: UAV Monocular Depth Estimation from Any Height, Pitch, Roll and FOV
Tong Ling, Wenhui Diao, Yingchao Feng and 3 more
Monocular depth estimation is a fundamental prerequisite for 3D reconstruction and autonomous navigation in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In practical deployments, UAVs operate under highly dynamic camera poses characterized by continuous variations in height, pitch, roll, and field of view (FOV). Existing monocular depth estimation methods frequently fail to generalize across such diverse perspectives and the expansive scale of depth distributions inherent in aerial scenes. To address these challenges, we establish a quantitative representation of UAV viewing angles through rigorous theoretical analysis, deriving the geometric correspondence between viewing angles and view distances using the ground plane as a reference for observation. Building upon this, we propose Depth Estimation for Any Perspectives Model (DAPM), representing the first monocular framework specifically designed for UAV aerial imagery to jointly estimate camera pose and depth under continuously varying viewpoints. Specifically, we introduce an Ideal Ground Depth (IGD) module that leverages the derived geometric relationships between UAV perspectives and view distances to implement dense camera-pose supervision and enhance depth features. And we further develop a coarse-to-fine Progressive Quantization Bins (PQB) module. By incorporating progressive supervision and hierarchical quantization bins, the PQB module enables robust estimation in complex UAV aerial imagery. To evaluate the proposed framework, we present the UAV Any Perspectives Depth (UAPD) dataset, featuring comprehensive and continuous distributions of pose parameters. Experimental results on UAPD demonstrate that DAPM achieves state-of-the-art performance across both depth and camera-pose estimation metrics. The source code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ThisIsLT/DAPM.
#05Jul 23, 2026
cs.CV
SPDCN: Strip-based Deformable Convolutional Network for Steel Surface Defect Segmentation
Zhongming Liu, Bingbing Jiang, Guangxin Wan and 1 more
Steel surface defect segmentation is critical for industrial quality inspection, yet existing methods struggle with elongated, anisotropic defects such as cracks and scratches due to the isotropic receptive fields of standard convolutions and rigid sampling grids that cannot adapt to irregular defect boundaries. To address these limitations, we propose Strip-based Predictor for Deformable Convolutional Networks (SPDCN) with two key innovations. The \textbf{Fuzzy-enhanced Multi-scale Context Module (FMCM)} employs group-wise multi-branch convolutions with an intuitionistic fuzzy channel attention mechanism to adaptively capture multi-scale contextual information across varying defect sizes. The \textbf{Adaptive Direction-Aware Deformable Convolution (ADADC)} replaces the conventional offset predictor with decoupled horizontal and vertical strip convolutions, enabling the deformable sampling grid to anisotropically align with the principal orientation of elongated defects. Extensive experiments on public steel surface defect benchmarks demonstrate that SPDCN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 89.60\% mIoU on NEU-Seg with only 3.54M parameters. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/DWlzm .