#01Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Turns Matter: Advancing Streaming Video RL via Turn-Level Credit
Shuai Dong, Kanghui Tian, Linghan Chen and 20 more
Streaming video understanding requires models to repeatedly decide whether to respond or continue observing. Recently, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has been applied to this setting, with existing approaches emphasizing reward design while retaining a single trajectory-level advantage across turns. Such shared credit can reinforce redundant replies after earlier successes and discourage useful follow-ups after earlier failures. We propose TurnWise, a turn-level GRPO framework that aligns learning with individual streaming decisions. TurnWise addresses the mismatch between trajectory-level feedback and turn-level interaction, promoting informative responses and reducing redundancy. Specifically, turn-level credit assignment uses silence-completed prefix scoring to construct group-relative advantages from each decision's remaining return, separating its learning signal from earlier rewards. Turn-mean policy optimization averages token losses within each turn and then across turns, giving response and waiting decisions equal weight regardless of output length. These complementary designs improve streaming policy learning without a learned critic or additional rollouts. Extensive experiments show our method outperforms prior RL approaches for streaming video understanding.
#02Nov 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.
#03Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Route First, See Later: Enabling Vision Agents to Reason Scientifically by Separating Routing Policy from Action Spaces
Shubhabrata Mukherjee, Jeffrey Donatelli, Daniela Ushizima
Scientific image-analysis workflows require agents to select among diverse capabilities like description, detection, counting, and segmentation. Current multi-tool architectures conflate intent interpretation with visual execution, masking whether a failure arises from flawed reasoning (misrouting) or failed perception (invalid tool execution). This lack of auditability renders agents unreliable for high-stakes scientific automation. We introduce ZETA, an extensible architecture that operationalizes the decoupling of routing policy from action execution. ZETA resolves scientific intent before invoking specialized visual tools, treating measurement as a deterministic operation grounded in explicit geometry rather than generative output. This architecture exposes the "black box" of agent decision-making, allowing routing correctness and downstream execution to be evaluated as independent failure modes. To our knowledge, we provide the first controlled study in scientific vision-agent routing that isolates explicit routing-policy specification while holding the legal action interface fixed. Evaluation on a zero-shot benchmark of 51 scientific-intent queries shows that explicit routing semantics can substantially improve routing accuracy, particularly at semantically adjacent action boundaries, although improvements vary across models. For Qwen 3.8, explicit routing-policy specification improves segmentation routing accuracy from 6.2% to 75.0% and detection routing accuracy from 60.0% to 100%. ZETA's execution traces make routing decisions and downstream artifacts separately observable, providing a basis for distinguishing intent-selection errors from visual execution failures. ZETA establishes the necessary infrastructure to isolate execution errors from interpretive ones, a critical requirement for deploying reliable scientific vision agents.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Occlusion for Free: Detecting Occlusion from the Disagreement Between Two Monocular Distance Cues
Chibueze Praise Onyenweaku, Toyibat Adele, Sikirulahi Opeyemi Abdulkareem and 1 more
Knowing that a pedestrian is occluded is useful to a robot even when the detector cannot recover the hidden pixels, but occlusion estimators are normally trained on occlusion annotations that deployment settings rarely have. We show that occlusion can be read off two distance estimates a camera-only pipeline already computes. Apparent height is largely unchanged by occlusion, because the detected box still spans the whole person; monocular metric depth is pulled toward the occluder, because the nearest surface inside the box is what a depth map reports. Only their ordering matters, so no focal length, stature, or depth scale is needed, provided the depth model's error is close to a pure gain, a condition that can be checked without labels. The score detects heavy occlusion on KITTI with AUC 0.909 (0.888 over all annotated pedestrians, including those the detector misses), requires no training and no occlusion labels, and is not a proxy for range: within fixed distance bands it holds AUC 0.894-0.925 while true distance alone sits near chance. On synthetic CARLA scenes with measured visibility it reaches 0.819, against 0.644 for distance alone. We arrived here after measuring three standard architectural responses to occlusion, depth fusion, occlusion-simulating augmentation, and attention, none of which improved detection outside its training distribution in the configurations we tested, and after finding that a detector trained on German roads loses half its accuracy on self-annotated street scenes in Lagos, Nigeria. Signals that need no local annotation are worth more in settings that benchmarks do not represent.
#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.