ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Oct 19, 2026

cs.CV

Real-Time Radar Semantic and Panoptic Scene Understanding

Santosh Parit, Julia Hindel, Rohit Mohan and 4 more

Robust scene understanding under varying environmental conditions is essential for safe autonomous driving. While cameras and LiDAR degrade in adverse weather and poor lighting, Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) spinning radar provides dependable 360° perception at extended ranges with minimal compute cost. However, real-time FMCW radar scene understanding is challenging due to complex signal returns, limited temporal resolution, and scarce annotated datasets. We introduce StreamRPS, a novel framework for streaming FMCW radar panoptic segmentation, comprising an automated label-generation pipeline via LiDAR scene completion and a real-time streaming network for semantic and panoptic segmentation. Our encoder-decoder streaming architecture comprises a radar-specific hierarchical Transformer encoder and task-specific decoders for semantic or panoptic prediction. Our encoder introduces a stem to capture range-dependent signatures, anisotropic patch embeddings to preserve angular resolution, and axial polar attention to separately model the periodic azimuth and bounded range axes. We further introduce azimuth roll rotation augmentation to simulate ego-vehicle rotation during training. Comprehensive experiments on the SAX and BOREAS datasets validate both our auto-labeling methodology and streaming segmentation network against established baselines. We outperform the strongest baseline by at least 1.4pp while processing sectors at over 400 FPS in a 4-sector streaming setting. We additionally provide manual annotations for 100 SAX radar scans, enabling independent evaluation of the entire framework.

#02Oct 19, 2026

cs.CV

InfiniDream: Open-Ended Photorealistic 3D Worlds Through Procedural Generation

Yi-Chuan Huang, Hao-Jen Chien, Zheng-Hui Huang and 3 more

Procedural generation plays a key role in synthetic data creation and game development, offering greater controllability, editability, and diversity than static mesh representations. However, VLM-based code generation often produces relatively simple 3D assets, while sophisticated photorealistic procedural systems require extensive manual development. Existing VLM-guided procedural methods remain largely constrained by predefined factories and APIs, limiting their ability to create novel asset types. We introduce InfiniDream, a VLM-driven framework for open-ended procedural 3D world generation. First, we propose Symbolically Constrained Asset Generation, which leverages existing procedural algorithms to create novel, photorealistic assets while preserving editability and seed-based diversity. Second, we develop an end-to-end text-to-world pipeline that combines semantic scene planning with Deterministic Frustum-Guided Grid Placement to construct large-scale 3D worlds with precise object placement, procedural population, and animation. Extensive evaluations on 100 object and 20 scene generation tasks demonstrate improvements across four perceptual metrics. Diversity analysis, ablation studies, and human preference evaluations further validate the effectiveness of our framework. Project page: https://yichuanh.github.io/infinidream-page/

#03Oct 19, 2026

cs.CV

VideoMaMa++: Temporally Consistent Video Matting via Preserve-and-Refine Token

Sangbeom Lim, Seoung Wug Oh, Heeji Yoon and 2 more

Diffusion-based video matting has recently emerged as a leading approach, leveraging video diffusion priors from internet-scale pretraining to achieve strong zero-shot generalization from limited synthetic data. However, the heavy compute of these diffusion backbones limits inference to a short chunk of just 6 to 24 frames, so even ordinary videos span multiple chunks. Because each chunk is matted independently from coarse mask guidance, existing methods fail to maintain consistency across chunk boundaries, producing flickering edges and discontinuous transparency. We address this with a mask-guided diffusion-matting framework built on two ideas. The RGB and mask conditioning are represented as separate token streams that interact through full spatio-temporal self-attention, letting the model adaptively combine fine RGB texture with coarse mask layout rather than committing to a fixed channel-wise fusion. On top of this, we propose a novel pair of learnable embeddings, the preserve token and the refine token, that act as a per-frame conditioning interface and enable a sliding-window inference scheme in which already-generated mattes are propagated across chunk boundaries for local temporal consistency, complemented by a globally shared reference anchor at every chunk to prevent error accumulation in long sequences without any additional training. Across standard video matting benchmarks and in-the-wild long footage, our framework outperforms prior diffusion-based methods in both fine-detail accuracy and temporal consistency, and uniquely maintains consistency across chunk boundaries on long videos.

#04Oct 19, 2026

cs.CL

OpenVLHarness: Real World Visual Agentic Tool-Use with Multimodal Memory

Yu Zhou, Cheng-Fu Yang, Rui Sun and 8 more

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress on visual reasoning, yet many tasks require evidence that is difficult to obtain through internal reasoning alone: our controlled study on 22 benchmarks shows that simply increasing the inference budget of the base model yields only modest gains. Such tasks demand grounded perception, external knowledge, and numerical measurements obtained through heterogeneous tools, whose outputs must be made interpretable to the model and retained across reasoning steps. We introduce OpenVLHarness, a multimodal reasoning harness organized around a capability layer and persistent multimodal memory. The capability layer combines task-level tool interfaces with evidence rendering, providing consistent access to heterogeneous backends and converting their outputs into model-readable observations. Persistent multimodal memory retains the corresponding images, structured data, and web references as addressable artifacts throughout each query. A coding interface executes generated programs over stored data, enabling computations that combine results from multiple tools. Together, these mechanisms support an iterative process of acquiring, inspecting, and composing multimodal evidence. Evaluated on 22 benchmarks with eight open and proprietary backbones, OpenVLHarness improves average scores by 9.7-12.6 points over matched no-tool baselines, including +11.2 with Qwen3-VL-8B, +9.7 with Kimi K3, and +9.9 with GPT-6 Astra. With GPT-6 Luna at medium reasoning effort, OpenVLHarness outperforms the base model, Codex, and Visual Sketchpad at maximum effort by 7.7-8.5 points while incurring at most 37% of their model-token cost.

#05Oct 19, 2026

cs.CV

GenOlympiad: Benchmarking Frontier Image Models at Their Capability Boundaries

Xi Hu, Martin Bell, Liang Zheng

Text-to-image models have made tremendous progress and can produce high-quality images. However, a question which would be asked in any other discipline is where the frontier models fall short. We introduce GenOlympiad, a benchmark which provides the most challenging text prompts from nine capability axes for stress-testing frontier text-to-image models. The assessed capabilities include generating large quantities, performing deep reasoning, ensuring hard physical consistency, following complex rules and so on. The prompts are designed such that prompt alignment is visually verifiable (e.g., counting) instead of relying on subjectiveness (e.g., style). Based on this, we develop an automated evaluation framework which decomposes the prompt into easy and hard questions, and for most hard questions, draws help lines to ground evidence for accurate grading. We evaluate 20+ strong text-to-image models, including Nano Banana Pro, GPT-Image-2.5, Seedream-5.0 and so on. We report that even the best-performing T2I model (Nano Banana Pro) only achieves a strict score of 23.9 out of 100 and that coding models such as GPT-6 Astra have higher prompt alignment scores (but not as visually pleasing). We also derive insights in model evolution, alignment with Elo scores, and effectiveness of our grounding-based evaluation protocol. Code is available at https://github.com/GenOlympiad/GenOlympiad and the project page is at https://genolympiad.github.io/