#01Aug 20, 2026
cs.CV
Prompt-Conditioned Channel Attention for Hierarchical Feature Modulation toward Anatomy-Agnostic Segmentation
Mosharof Hossain, Md Rabiul Islam, Limon Halder and 2 more
Anatomically plausible segmentation remains challenging because of low contrast, ambiguous boundaries, and modality-specific artifacts. Interactive segmentation has emerged as a promising strategy to guide feature extraction and improve localization, particularly in structurally ambiguous regions. However, existing methods integrate prompts through late-stage fusion and lack explicit mechanisms for prompt-driven channel-wise modulation across hierarchical feature representations, limiting their ability to capture deeper contextual and modality-specific variations. To address these limitations, we introduce Prompt-Conditioned Channel Attention (PCCA), a novel modulation mechanism that enables deep, hierarchical integration of semantic prompts within encoder-decoder networks. PCCA extracts compact channel descriptors via pooling, projects them into a shared space, and fuses them through a gated excitation mechanism to compute prompt-aware channel attention weights. These weights adaptively recalibrate feature responses across multiple network stages, enabling prompt-conditioned, semantically enriched hierarchical representations. Building on this, we propose PROMISE-Net, instantiated in two network variants: a convolutional model (PROMISE-CNN) and a transformer-based model (PROMISE-Txformer). Across the ISIC-Lesion, Kvasir-Polyp, CAMUS-Cardiac, and Kvasir-Instrument benchmarks, integrating PCCA into PROMISE-CNN yielded relative IoU gains of 10.4%, 8.7%, 0.8%, and 3.4%, respectively, over the baseline U-Net, while PROMISE-Txformer achieved corresponding gains of 7.6%, 23.0%, 2.1%, and 1.1%, respectively, over the baseline UNETR. These results show consistent improvements across architectures, imaging modalities, and anatomical targets, establishing PCCA and PROMISE-Net as a scalable, generalizable framework for prompt-aware hierarchical feature modulation in medical image segmentation.
#02Aug 20, 2026
cs.CV
V-REX: Efficient Specialist VLM Training for Veterinary X-Rays
Tim Elsner, Nicole McNally, Andre Dourson and 1 more
While generalist VLMs are expensive to train, creating domain experts is widely assumed to require fine-tuning increasingly large foundation models. We show that, in veterinary radiology, this assumption is misguided. By rethinking the entire VLM pipeline - from text tokenisation and pre-training to grounding and inference - we demonstrate that careful engineering can yield models that outperform much larger foundation models from scratch, without relying on any other data. Our approach introduces new strategies for generative pre-training and grounding that improve training efficiency, increasing data utilisation and downstream performance. Using only a fraction of the parameters, data, and compute of contemporary generalist models, we develop the first VLM capable of generating diagnostic reports for veterinary radiographs, surpassing open foundation models on this task by significant margin.
#03Aug 20, 2026
cs.MA
Multi-Agent Orchestration with the Common-Sense Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs for Autonomous Driving
Mehdi Azarafza, Faezeh Pasandideh, Ali Ehteshami Bejnordi and 2 more
Autonomous vehicles require robust perception and decision-making capabilities to operate in diverse and unseen scenarios. While reinforcement learning and rule-based methods can provide effective control and safety mechanisms, their performance may degrade in situations requiring contextual reasoning. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in understanding multimodal information and generating contextual reasoning, however, their use for direct vehicle control can introduce latency and hallucination risks. To address these limitations, a hybrid framework is proposed. This system uses an orchestrator to coordinate PPO-trained reinforcement learning and PID control, with LLM common-sense reasoning applied throughout the framework. LLM reasoning is further employed iteratively to refine the RL reward function for dynamic driving environments. The proposed framework is evaluated in highly randomized CARLA scenarios under diverse environmental and traffic conditions. The results demonstrate the potential of integrating LLM-based reasoning with conventional autonomous driving methods while retaining structured control and safety mechanism.
#04Aug 20, 2026
cs.CL
G-CARL: Grounded Checklist-Aligned Reward Learning for Patient-Oriented Medical Report Interpretation
Shiao Xie, Siyu Chen, Jianwei Lv and 3 more
Personalized interpretation of medical reports has emerged as an increasingly important need among patients. Addressing this need requires both evidence-grounded medical factuality and context-dependent patient communication, yet existing medical vision-language tasks do not adequately capture these dual requirements. To bridge this gap, we introduce Patient-oriented Medical Report Interpretation (PMRI), a novel open-ended multimodal generation task that requires models to explain medical reports in accurate and accessible language based on a user's query and dialogue history. These two objectives differ fundamentally in their verifiability, yet remain tightly coupled, making them difficult to optimize jointly under conventional supervised fine-tuning and holistic reinforcement learning paradigms. To address this challenge, we propose G-CARL, a grounded, checklist-aligned reinforcement learning framework that combines multi-source retrieval for atomic claim verification with context-aware, instance-specific weighted checklists for response coverage, providing structured supervision for factuality, user-demand satisfaction, and expression quality without constraining response diversity. We further construct MMedReport, a real-world PMRI benchmark, along with a clinician-designed three-dimensional evaluation protocol. Extensive experiments demonstrate that G-CARL consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in overall quality, claim-level precision, and checklist recall. Pairwise preference evaluation by clinicians further confirms that G-CARL produces interpretations that are more accurate and better aligned with patient needs.
#05Aug 20, 2026
cs.CV
Gravity-aware partially calibrated absolute pose estimation from affine- or rotation-covariant features
Marcus Valtonen Örnhag, Alberto Jaenal, Stefan Adalbjörnsson
Inertial measurement units (IMUs) are now standard in most consumer devices, such as smartphones, drones, and extended reality (XR) headsets. By fusing visual and inertial data, localization systems gain significantly in speed and robustness compared to vision-only or IMU-only approaches. However, traditional pose estimation methods fail to utilize the local geometric information embedded in feature descriptors like SIFT. Recent work has proved the advantages of leveraging this information for relative and absolute pose estimation, but its application to partially calibrated absolute pose estimation remains unexplored. In this paper, we derive novel constraints for joint estimation of absolute pose and focal length, making use of a gravity vector obtained from IMU data and the feature-induced local geometry, which we use to construct two efficient solvers: UP1PfAC, that operates given a single affine correspondence and UP2PfORI, which requires two orientation-covariant features. Unlike traditional, semi-calibrated absolute pose methods requiring four point correspondences, our solvers benefit from fewer samples and lower computational cost, simplifying robust estimation in modern RANSAC-like frameworks. We evaluate the proposed solvers against the state-of-the-art on large-scale public datasets and demonstrate that our method achieves fast and accurate localization and focal length estimation.