ML Reads

Personal arXiv list

ML papers to read today.

Pick a topic and keep a small daily list of papers worth opening.

Refresh queueDaily mix

Today's queue

5 papers

#01Nov 4, 2026

cs.CV

Agent-Driven Generative Priors for Pathology Image Synthesis and Segmentation

Sicheng Yang, Rui Tang, Haipeng Zhou and 6 more

Deep learning methods for pathology are constrained by the limited availability and high cost of large-scale pixel-level annotations. Synthetic data can alleviate this limitation, but existing pipelines often lack reliable quality control and remain weakly connected to downstream analysis. To address these issues, we propose a three-stage framework that integrates automated data screening, generative representation learning, and efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. First, we develop a pathology agent system to assess image quality and filter samples, resulting in TCGA-200K, a dataset containing 217,030 pathology patches selected from the public TCGA repository. Second, we train a generative model on the screened data. In addition to image synthesis, its backbone learns structural and semantic representations that can be transferred to downstream tasks. Third, we adapt the pretrained generative backbone to semantic segmentation using a lightweight task-specific head. We further introduce PathSeg-380K, a semantic segmentation dataset with expert annotations for approximately 380,000 cells across 12 cell types. Experiments on multiple pathology datasets show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/script-Yang/Agent-GenPath.

#02Nov 4, 2026

cs.CV

Context-Aware Autoregressive Image Generation for Emerging Reasoning Properties

Jixuan Ying, Haoyu Liu, Timing Yang and 7 more

Autoregressive image generation has recently emerged as a competitive visual generation paradigm, yet its generation order is often predefined or heuristic, such as next-patch prediction, random-order prediction, or one-step generation for specific scales. We observe that these strategies can cause models to overlook important structural dependencies in images, thereby limiting both structural robustness and reasoning capability. In this work, we propose a context-aware autoregressive generation framework, where the model dynamically determines the next token location based on global context and current local information. Rather than following a fixed or random order, our method allows the generation process to adapt to image structure and semantic dependencies. Extensive experiments show that context-aware generation significantly improves structural robustness across different image AR paradigms, including masked autoregressive and scale-wise autoregressive models. Beyond quantitative improvements, we further observe emerging reasoning properties: the model can better understand complex semantic instructions and generate images that more faithfully follow the given guidance. These findings suggest that generation order is a critical yet underexplored factor in image autoregressive modeling, and that context-aware decoding can unlock stronger reasoning-aware visual generation capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/Hpesojyjx/Saccades-AR.

#03Nov 4, 2026

cs.CV

Benchmarking Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning for Remote Sensing in Urban Management

Jiawei Zhang, Rizhao Cai, Dayan Guan

Fine-grained visual reasoning is essential for remote sensing in urban management, yet remains underexplored in the evaluation of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We introduce UMBench, a fine-grained urban remote sensing benchmark built from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images for multiple urban management tasks such as traffic monitoring, urban construction, environmental quality, and disaster warning. Evaluations on UMBench reveal that current MLLMs often rely on scene-level priors and overlook fine-grained visual evidence. To address this issue, we further propose a novel evidence-first chain-of-thought method that directs models to inspect fine-grained visual evidence in a training-free manner. Experiments show that our method can improve the performance of both open-source and commercial MLLMs on UMBench.

#04Nov 4, 2026

cs.CV

TailSteer: Trajectory-Tail Steering for Drift-Resistant Multi-turn Image Editing

Ruikang Li, Zixuan Chen, Jiarui Wu and 6 more

Strong single-turn editing performance does not guarantee reliable multi-turn interaction: as edited outputs are repeatedly reused, small unintended changes can accumulate into severe visual drift. This long-term drift is often mitigated through training on multi-turn data or cross-turn rollouts, potentially altering pretrained priors, or through specialized inference-time mechanisms that are difficult to scale to foundation models. We introduce TailSteer, a final-stage training framework that improves multi-turn robustness while retaining the generative and editing capabilities acquired through earlier training. TailSteer follows a simple principle: keep early denoising dynamics close to those of the base model and concentrate preservation corrections near the trajectory tail, where fine-grained deviations can be suppressed. These corrections are learned from the editor's own on-policy denoising rollouts, using unchanged source content as a preservation reference without requiring curated ground-truth editing pairs. Experiments across the FLUX, SenseNova, and Qwen families show that TailSteer substantially reduces cumulative drift over 15-20 editing turns while largely preserving base-model performance on extensive text-to-image and single-image editing benchmarks. These results demonstrate that long-horizon editing robustness can be unlocked in foundation models after TailSteer, rather than by relearning their existing capabilities.

#05Nov 4, 2026

cs.CV

Same Layout, Different Count: What Number Words Do Past Ten in Text-to-Image Models

Liang Yue, Eric A. Vance

Ask SD3.5-Medium for twelve of an object and then, from the same starting noise, for twenty-five. The picture keeps its layout, but the count changes about as much as it would under a new random seed, and in no consistent direction. We study what number words do once a request passes about ten objects, in five open text-to-image models. Holding the object and the starting noise fixed, we change one thing at a time, and people who never see the request count 3,088 of the images. Every model follows the number for small crowds, but only up to a point, its reach: SD3.5-M and FLUX.1-dev stop following it soon after ten, while FLUX.2 [klein] and Qwen-Image follow it loosely up to twenty-five. Beyond SD3.5-M's reach, the coarse part of the starting noise fixes the composition of the picture but not how many objects it holds: redrawing only the noise finer than an eighth of the image keeps the layout as well as a new number does, and already moves the count two-thirds as far. The number word still reaches the denoiser and acts in its first steps, but nothing we tried gives it a clear direction. Shown instead as a noised grid in the starting latent, the count is drawn: people find it in 59% of images, against 4% when it is only told. Past ten, an exact-match score barely separates a model that follows the number loosely from one that ignores it, and a relative-error score can even prefer a constant guess of sixteen. A same-noise test with a few requests per object tells them apart.