#01Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
From Pixels to Actions - Towards Native Vision-Language-Action Policies
Weichen Fan, Haiwen Diao, Penghao Wu and 14 more
Vision-language-action models are typically built on a simple premise: perception is first compressed by visual encoders, and action reasoning begins only afterwards. Yet manipulation often hinges on precisely the visual signals most vulnerable to this abstraction, e.g., local geometry, boundaries, depth, and subtle state changes. This raises a fundamental question: should action policies inherit a fixed visual endpoint, or directly access evolving visual computation? We introduce NEO-VLA, a structurally encoder-free vision-language-action framework. Images are tokenized by lightweight patch convolutional layers and evolve jointly with language throughout the backbone, allowing a flow-matching action expert to draw from instruction-conditioned visual representations at different depths. This simple change reveals a consistent pattern. Native architectures outperform encoder-based counterparts under controlled comparisons; full fine-tuning reduces but does not erase the gap, and additional scale alone cannot recover it. More strikingly, layer-wise probing shows that the action-critical signals often peak well before the final visual representation. Across diverse manipulation settings and distribution shifts, NEO-VLA consequently achieves stronger and more robust control. Together, these results suggest that embodied control benefits from access to visual representations across the computational hierarchy, rather than a fixed encoder output.
#02Nov 4, 2026
cs.RO
Dexterous Robotic Hands in the Foundation-Model Era: A Full-Stack Survey of Hardware, Data, Cross-Embodiment Transfer, Learning, and Evaluation
Ji Pei
Dexterous robotic hands are increasingly coupled to large-scale human data and foundation models, yet progress in hardware, representation learning and evaluation is often assessed separately. This survey reviews work from January 2024 to early November 2026, with earlier studies included to establish technical lineages. We organize the literature into five interdependent layers: hardware; data collection and curation; cross-embodiment transfer; learning and foundation models; and evaluation and applications. Human hand-object understanding and tactile sensing provide two cross-cutting perspectives. A system-level architecture, comparative tables and five case analyses connect design choices across these layers. We distinguish within-study experimental comparisons from heterogeneous corpus statistics, vendor specifications and company-reported results. Three conclusions emerge. First, the value of human data depends on kinematic, visual and contact alignment, not recording volume alone. Second, shared action representations and foundation policies do not remove embodiment-specific constraints on force, latency and contact. Third, task completion is insufficient to establish physical correctness or deployment readiness. Evidence remains limited for zero-shot transfer of contact-rich skills between morphologically different hands, long-duration reliability, and cross-sensor tactile generalization. We identify eleven open problems and propose reporting interfaces and controlled comparisons that can make full-stack progress more measurable. The review is a structured narrative synthesis rather than a pooled performance ranking or an exhaustive systematic review.
#03Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
CounterFactual Retrieval for Evidence-Aware Individual Animal Identification
Ankit K. Upadhyay, Aleksandr Algasov, Ekaterina Nepovinnykh and 5 more
Automated identification of individual animals is moving from small curated studies toward shared benchmarks and reusable foundation models. This progress is useful, but current evaluation leaves the evidence behind a match unresolved, i.e., high retrieval accuracy does not show whether a model used animal features or identity-correlated shortcuts. We address this with Counterfactual Foreground Retrieval (CFR), an evidence-aware evaluation protocol. CFR evaluates the same query-gallery task under different views: full image, foreground-only, and shortcut-only. The full-image measures standard retrieval performance; the foreground-only measures foreground-supported retrieval; and shortcut-only view measure how much identity signal is recoverable from background, or silhouette. This turns a retrieval score into an evidence profile: how well the model performs on the original images, how much of that performance remains when only the animal is visible, and how much identity signal remains recoverable when the animal is removed. We release around 0.5M masks for 34 datasets and code for mask generation and CFR evaluation.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
LongBanana: An Expert-Verified Benchmark for Long-Context Multi-Reference Image Synthesis
Haoxiang Cao, Yuxuan Zhang, Penghui Du and 16 more
We introduce LongBanana, to our knowledge the first expert-designed and expert-verified benchmark for long-context multi-reference image synthesis in the age of agent-driven image generation. The task requires retrieving dispersed visual evidence, rejecting distractors, binding entities and relations, and composing one coherent final image from multiple references. LongBanana contains 90 carefully designed tasks organized by a 3-by-3 taxonomy; each task includes about 32 reference images, 20 constraints, and 50 evaluation items, yielding 4,670 expert-specified atomic evaluation items in total. Its graph-grounded evaluation design instantiates each task with reference images and an entity-relation graph, then converts node, edge, and whole-graph obligations into checklist items for Content Fidelity, Relational Binding, and Global Constraint Satisfaction. Reviewed expert labels include a 15% double-labeled subset with 89.4% exact agreement and 0.83 quadratic weighted kappa. We further introduce LongBanana-Gen, an agent-harness framework for long-horizon image generation; experiments show that minimal agent harnesses improve over direct generation, while a ReAct-Plan-Exec-Reflect (RPR) workflow yields harness-dependent gains by strengthening evidence grounding and repair. Together, LongBanana provides an auditable testbed for measuring dense visual evidence use and a shared target for developing stronger agent-driven image-generation systems. Code and data are available at the project page: https://long-banana.com/.
#05Nov 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.