#01Nov 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/.
#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
Procedural Adversarial Learning
Jack Nugent, Jia Deng
For many computer vision tasks, neural networks can be trained to produce a low average error, yet they still fail on seemingly simple scenes. Reducing these failures requires first finding them, but they may not be in a fixed dataset. We study procedural adversarial learning (PAL), a framework of minimax training and adversarial evaluation which searches the input space of a procedural generator for difficult instances. The procedural generator is an interpretable program mapping a low-dimensional vector of control parameters (e.g. layout, lighting, pose) to a rendered image and its label. We introduce the Simple-PAT algorithm, which uses zeroth-order optimization in the procedural generator's parameter space to propose adversarial training samples that are generated on demand. We also create PAL-Dojo, a collection of efficient procedural generators for surface normal estimation, image segmentation, and human pose estimation. Against a cross-model black-box adversary with 50M aggregate queries, Simple-PAT reduces worst-case error by a geometric mean of 3.15x compared to standard training and 2.63x compared to the strongest robust training baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/procedural-adversarial-learning.
#04Nov 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.
#05Nov 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.