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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Jul 28, 2026

cs.CV

Explicit Layer Modeling for Video Object Insertion and Layer Decomposition

Kyujin Han, Seungjoo Shin, Sunghyun Cho

Most video editing systems still lack explicit layered video representations, limiting their ability to perform realistic compositing, object reuse, and consistent manipulation. This limitation is especially pronounced in video object insertion and video layer decomposition, where existing methods rely on implicit inference or per-scene optimization due to the absence of explicit foreground-layer supervision. We introduce TriLayer, a large-scale triplet video dataset containing aligned composite, background, and foreground videos, where the foreground layers include both object appearance and associated visual effects. This explicit supervision enables models to learn layered video representations directly rather than inferring them implicitly. Building on this dataset, we propose DBL-Diffusion, a dual-branch diffusion framework that jointly models RGB composites and RGBA foreground layers through shared denoising and cross-branch interaction. We instantiate the framework in two tasks: DBL-Insert for layered object insertion, which generates explicit RGBA layers for realistic compositing and flexible post-editing, and DBL-Decompose for video layer decomposition, which recovers foreground and background layers using triplet supervision. Experiments demonstrate that explicit layer modeling substantially improves both insertion fidelity and decomposition quality.

#02Jul 28, 2026

cs.AI

Desktop-Delta Bench: Do Computer-Use Models Understand Desktop GUI Transitions?

Abhishek Pillai, Samir Kumar Nayak, Yuan Chen

Computer-use agents (CUAs) increasingly act through desktop GUIs to complete long-horizon tasks. Current benchmarks primarily measure end-task success or single-frame grounding. Neither isolates whether a model can reconstruct the causal, task-relevant transition produced by an action- crucial for rejecting stale observations, verifying progress, and recovering from failure. This is difficult because inference, remote input, app rendering, and screenshot capture are asynchronous: the next observation may be delayed, occluded, transient, or unrelated, then misread as progress and carried into subsequent planning. We introduce Desktop-Delta Bench (DDB), an offline step-level benchmark with 2,013 human-verified instances from novel, multi-app Linux trajectories across ~15 applications and 50 task domains. DDB trajectories targets 3 failure dimensions- state verification, source tracking, and context-aware control- through 2 complementary tasks: 463 3-frame temporal-ordering instances, including 105 with a cross-trajectory decoy, and 1,550 before-after pairs labeled from 5 actions + its payload. We evaluate 8 closed and open-source model families across 32 ordering and 16 single-action settings, observing consistent gaps. Ordering remains unsaturated: best non-decoy and decoy exact-match rates are 65.1% and 65.7%. Task context improves decoy identification by 6.9 percentage points but reduces non-decoy exact match by 2.2 points; error analysis reveals systematic copying of the presented A-B-C order. Single-action results show that inferring the action family is harder than locating it: click F1 is 0.96 vs, 0.76 for drag, while recognized drags are generally localized well. DDB, thus, complements end-to-end benchmarks by filling the missing diagnostic layer between GUI grounding and final task success, enabling targeted improvements to desktop CUA verification, reliability, and recovery.

#03Jul 28, 2026

cs.CV

VetClaw: An Edge-Cloud Multimodal Agentic System for Veterinary Disease Screening

Syed Mhamudul Hasan, Anas AlSobeh, Hussein Zangoti and 1 more

We present VetClaw, an edge-cloud multimodal agentic system for early veterinary disease screening. VetClaw uses a camera module as an edge sensing device and sends captured images, together with optional symptom descriptions, to a server-hosted vision-language model for zero-shot disease classification. The system separates agent interaction from workflow orchestration: OpenClaw provides scheduling, tool access, user interaction, and notification services on the edge device, while LangGraph manages the stateful screening workflow, including input validation, image transmission, model invocation, safety checks, conditional routing, failure handling, and structured logging. This design moves beyond static image classification by enabling the system to collect visual evidence, invoke external models, apply deterministic safety rules, and generate diagnostic-support alerts. Results show that image-only VLM prediction remains limited, whereas symptom-guided and multimodal inputs improve zero-shot classification performance. Thus, VetClaw transforms a static prediction model into a coordinated, safety-aware system that can use tools, manage workflows, handle failures, and escalate uncertain cases.

#04Jul 28, 2026

cs.CV

Knowledge-Guided Multimodal Reasoning over Interacting Streams for Video-Level Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition

Podakanti Satyajith Chary, Barath Parthiban, Pranesh Velmurugan and 2 more

Ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) are conflicting affective states that precede the delay or abandonment of health behaviour change. Recognition of A/H at the video level is difficult, since the signal arises from disagreement across and within facial, vocal, linguistic, and bodily modalities, and manifests differently across individuals. The proposed PRISM-AH (Predictive Reasoning over Interacting Streams for Multimodal Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition), is a framework that treats A/H as a multimodal conflict that unfolds over time. Frozen vision, audio, and text encoders are aligned into short time windows and passed to a lightweight streaming model that scores cross-modal dissonance, predicts each next window to expose a hesitation surprise signal, discovers behaviour prototypes, and is conditioned on participant metadata. Dense window-level annotations supervise the model as an auxiliary objective, and the decision threshold is calibrated for macro F1. A knowledge-guided large language model then reasons over structured evidence using the expert cue taxonomy of the dataset, and its verdict is fused late only when validation performance improves. On the labelled public test partition of 525 videos, PRISM-AH attains a macro F1 of 0.6133, compared to the reported zero-shot baseline of 0.2827. The reasoning gain is validated to transfer from validation to the larger test partition.

#05Jul 28, 2026

cs.CV

Pictura: Perspective-View Self-Play at Scale for Driving

Yuan Yin, Elias Ramzi, Marc Lafon and 8 more

Self-play in simulation produces robust driving policies at scale. Demonstrations of such behavior have been made using privileged vectorized observations such as exact poses and velocities, even for occluded agents. This assumes that perception is solved and introduces a representation gap with the partial observation of a deployed agent driving from the perspective view of egocentric cameras. A common fix, distilling the privileged policy into a camera-input student, leaves the student imitating decisions its own view cannot justify. Instead, we establish perspective-view self-play as a practical training regime. We introduce Pictura, a GPU-accelerated multi-agent driving simulator that renders each agent's egocentric view at every step, mitigating the representation gap at its source. Pictura sustains up to 500K agent-steps/s (2M images/s) on a single H100. Using Pictura, we train Alberti by self-play with plain PPO. It is the first large-scale driving self-play policy trained directly from perspective images, without privileged observations. Training spans 50B agent steps for ~35M km of driving. It approaches the driving performance of its privileged vectorized counterpart, and transfers zero-shot to Waymo Open Motion Dataset layouts re-rendered in Pictura, where it outperforms privileged vectorized agents. Project page: https://valeoai.github.io/Pictura/