#01Aug 21, 2026
cs.RO
VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulation
Congsheng Xu, Qiaochu Yang, Fangyuan Shi and 7 more
We propose VT-MUSE, a Multimodal Unified SEquential representation learning framework for visuotactilemanipulation. Existing approaches often encode visual and tactile observations independently before fusion, limiting their ability to capture fine-grained cross-modal dependencies. Moreover, most methods focus on observations at the current time step and overlook the temporal evolution of contact. VT-MUSE addresses both limitations through a two-stage representation learning framework. In Stage I, modality specific encoders are jointly adapted via cross-modal temporal alignment and masked-view consistency. In Stage II, a conditional variational latent model processes masked visual sequences together with full tactile histories. Auxiliary decoders reconstruct the masked recent visual observations and predict tactile depth changes, encouraging the latent representation to retain both global visual context and local contact dynamics. The learned representation is subsequently integrated into a lightweight Transformer policy through gated cross-attention. On the simulation benchmark, VT-MUSE outperforms the strongest baseline evaluated on all tasks by 11 percentage points and also achieves substantial improvements in real-world experiments.
#02Aug 21, 2026
cs.CV
Llama-Mobile: Efficient 2.7-Bit Quantization of VLMs
Luka Ribar, Jeevan Bhoot, Douglas Orr
Deploying vision-language models (VLMs) on mobile devices is challenging due to their significant memory and compute requirements. We present a framework for quantizing VLMs for efficient inference on resource-constrained hardware. Our approach combines a quantization pipeline that uses the model itself to generate training data and does not require access to the training setup, with a novel 2.7-bit-per-parameter format supporting efficient execution on Arm CPUs. We validate our approach by compressing the Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct model to 3.7 GB with 8-bit activations, preserving strong performance on a set of standard visual question answering tasks.
#03Aug 21, 2026
cs.CV
Robust Validation to Geometric Perturbations for Autonomous Pose Estimation
Gregoire Theau, Melanie Ducoffe
Deploying autonomous systems in safety-critical domains demands guaranteed robustness against physically plausible geometric perturbations rather than abstract pixel-wise noise. In vision-based navigation and autonomous landing, machine learning components require rigorous validation under dynamic operational conditions such as camera rotations and lighting shifts. Extending findings on the failure of first-order spatial attacks in classification, we show that standard gradient-based heuristics (e.g. APGD) similarly fail on for pose estimation, often performing worse than a simple random sampling baseline. To overcome these optimization bottlenecks, we reformulate pose estimation robustness within the framework of Global Lipschitzian Optimization (GLO). We argue that GLO offers a principled approach to robust validation, effectively localizing global optima with strong theoretical convergence guarantees. We evaluate this framework on a YOLOv8-Pose keypoint detector with a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) solver against rotation and contrast. In our evaluations, GLO successfully isolates critical failure modes where position deviations exceed safe operational limits, while rapidly pruning the search space by over 80%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to extend geometric robustness validation to continuous keypoint regression and deep object detection, establishing a practical step toward certifying robust autonomous perception.
#04Aug 21, 2026
cs.CV
A VLM Answer Is Not an Anomaly Score: Rank Compression in Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection
Inpyo Song, Jangwon Lee
Vision-language models enable training-free video anomaly detection by answering questions about video segments. VAD benchmarks, however, require a scalar anomaly score for each segment and evaluate the resulting ranking using the AUROC or AP. A VLM-based detector should therefore define an answer interface: the answer scale specifies the admissible answers, and the readout rule maps the model's output distribution to a score. Because this interface can change the evaluated ranking, it is part of the detector rather than a formatting detail. The generated readout uses only the most likely answer, whereas the probability readout uses the full distribution over admissible answers. Across four 7-8B VLMs, the probability readout outperforms the generated readout for every tested combination of answer scale, benchmark, and metric, with average gains ranging from 5 to 13 points across the four benchmark-metric pairs. The gap arises because the generated readout keeps only one answer value per segment, so segment with different answer distributions can receive the same score and lose their relative order. We call this loss of relative order generated-answer rank compression. Even when the answer scale allows 91 answers, the generated readout produces only 4-18 distinct scores, whereas the probability readout retains substantially finer score resolution. The advantage persists under every decoding strategy, prompt wording, and joint scoring-explanation prompt we test. The answer interface is therefore a consequential component of VLM-based VAD and should be explicitly specified and evaluated.
#05Aug 21, 2026
cs.CV
A2DINOv3: Rethinking Multi-Modal Object Detection via Socialized Collaboration
Jiekang Feng, Zhihe Fan, Yunqi Zhu and 5 more
Multi-modal object detection is essential for robust scene understanding in challenging conditions, including low-light and adverse environments. Recent vision foundation models (e.g., DINOv3) have exhibited strong representation capabilities, yet adapting them to multi-modal scenarios remains challenging. Existing dense cross-modal fusion strategies often force heterogeneous modalities to interact indiscriminately, which may introduce redundant information and disrupt the valuable pre-trained representations. To address this issue, we revisit multi-modal fusion from the perspective of socialized learning and propose adapter to DINOv3 (A2DINOv3), a multi-expert collaboration framework with a Socialized Collaboration Protocol (SCP). Specifically, RGB and infrared branches are modeled as heterogeneous experts that independently preserve their specialized knowledge while exchanging complementary information through selective and constrained interactions. This design mitigates harmful cross-modal interference and prevents degradation of pre-trained priors during adaptation. Furthermore, a zero-initialization strategy is introduced to gradually activate cross-modal collaboration, enabling a smooth transition from modality-specific learning to cooperative representation learning. Extensive experiments on four multi-modal benchmarks, including aerial detection (GAIIC), autonomous driving (FLIR), low-light surveillance (LLVIP), and diverse real-world scenarios (M3FD), demonstrate that A2DINOv3 consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal object detection.