#01Aug 21, 2026
cs.RO
The Coastline as a Structural Constraint: Harnessing Scene Geometry for Autonomous Surface Vessel Localization
Derek R. Benham, Joshua G. Mangelson
Coastal environments contain rich, largely unexploited geometric structure capable of providing globally referenced localization cues. In this work, we present two complementary localization frameworks that exploit shoreline and water-surface geometry for GPS-denied autonomous surface vessel localization. The first framework leverages LiDAR observations of the water surface to estimate roll, pitch, and heave (vertical motion), while recovering global position and heading through direct registration of shoreline observations against a satellite-derived coastline map. The second framework relies solely on passive imagery to detect the shoreline and horizon through semantic segmentation. Using the proposed coastal scene geometry, shoreline distance is inferred from monocular imagery. Shoreline observations are accumulated into short-duration local submaps, registered against the same satellite-derived coastline map, and fused within a hierarchical factor graph. Evaluated across three real-world coastal datasets, the LiDAR pipeline consistently improves trajectory accuracy over standard baselines, while the monocular architecture maintains bounded long-term drift. In addition, we establish that modern zero-shot foundation models can reliably extract shoreline observations across diverse coastal environments. Together, these results demonstrate that coastal geometry provides a powerful and dependable source of globally referenced information for GPS-denied maritime localization.
#02Aug 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.
#03Aug 21, 2026
cs.CV
Re$^3$Cap: Retrieval-Guided Refinement for Image Captioning Enhancement via Reinforcement Learning
Haonan Jia, Shichao Dong, Zenghui Sun and 7 more
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated significant gains in image captioning, yet it is still limited in encouraging Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to explore novel reasoning strategies. This limitation leads to a performance gap between RL and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this paper, we argue that multi-modal retrieval can serve as an effective reasoning signal for caption refinement. Based on this insight, we present the Retrieval-Guided Refinement for Image Captioning (Re$^3$Cap), a retrieval-guided reasoning strategy that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Instantiated by Caption Refinement Suggester (CRS) and Caption Quality Assessor (CQA), this strategy identifies hallucinations and omissions in image captions, leading to more accurate and detailed descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in image captioning, even compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Especially, Re$^3$Cap outperforms GRPO with an average improvement of 8.64% in relation reasoning on the COCO-LN500 benchmark.
#04Aug 21, 2026
cs.AI
Anatomy-Informed Neural Networks: Encoding Anatomic Priors in Loss and Architecture, with an SE(3) Formulation of Guidewire-Induced Aortoiliac Deformation
David P. Stonko
Deep-learning models of anatomy can be numerically plausible yet anatomically impossible, and they generalize poorly when data are scarce. We introduce Anatomy-Informed Neural Networks (AINN), in which soft anatomic priors enter as penalty terms in the loss (e.g., a branching penalty that treats a renal transplant artery off the iliac instead of the aorta as unexpected rather than impossible), in direct analogy to a physics-informed neural network, and hard anatomic priors (e.g., continuity of the vessel) are built into the architecture and state representation, making such invalid predictions impossible by construction wherever the prior admits architectural enforcement. We develop it on a clinical test case with limited data: how the aortoiliac tree deforms when a stiff wire is introduced endoluminally. This is important to contemporary aortic surgery and will matter to autonomous endovascular navigation. We lift the vessel centerline and the wire path from R^3 to curves of frames in the Lie group SE(3), and couple a Cosserat-rod wire to a tortuosity-modulated, anatomically anchored vessel through a unilateral lumen-contact inequality. The prediction is a constrained minimizer of the coupled elastic energy, with contact forces as its Lagrange multipliers. Supervision is a Wasserstein-2 optimal-transport loss between the predicted projection through the C-arm geometry and the observed angiogram, so a 2D angiogram can train a 3D prediction. The kinematics, loss and projection are verified against known ground truth; the mechanics solver only against its own optimality conditions, and predicted displacement is not yet mesh-converged. Here, no network is trained. Future work will transfer this in silico model to real CT scans and test whether it improves predictive accuracy and reduces the training data required.
#05Aug 21, 2026
cs.CV
OmniAssistBench: Assistant-style Interaction Benchmark for Omni-LLMs
Xianyun Sun, Chaoyou Fu, Zhengye Zhang and 6 more
Recent omni-modal large language models (Omni-LLMs) show great potential as real-time video assistants, which continuously perceive environments and guide users to achieve specific goals. Unlike traditional passive video understanding, interactive assistants should actively combine visual states, user goals, and prior knowledge to provide effective help. Evaluating this is rather challenging, as the model's unpredictable response dynamically changes the user's subsequent actions, which static offline datasets cannot accommodate. To address this bottleneck, we introduce OmniAssistBench. To solve the issue of diverging interaction paths where the same user goal can be achieved through various methods, we provide models with predefined priors derived from the source video, requiring them to guide users along the exact same routes. Since real interaction videos are rare, we construct the dataset by reverse-engineering existing Internet videos. We deduce logical user goals and segment the videos into multi-turn clips to simulate continuous interactions. This rigorous pipeline required over 1000 expert person-hours to build the dataset. Results show that the proprietary Gemini-3-Pro reaches 66.4 out of the max point of 100, while the open-source Qwen3-Omni-Instruct achieves 51.2. Although current models generally understand user inputs, they frequently provide incorrect or incomplete answers. Specifically, they struggle with visual prompts (e.g., hand gestures), fail to maintain historical context during multi-turn interactions, and fail to delay response until the target event. Results indicate substantial room for improvement before models can become reliable assistants.