#01Aug 28, 2026
cs.CV
Focus Where It Counts: A Salience-Driven Vision-Language Model for Low Vision Assistance
Jiazhao Liang, Hao Huang, Shuaihang Yuan and 8 more
Vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly progressing and offer promising capabilities for assistive technologies supporting persons with blindness or low vision. However, existing VLMs are primarily designed for general-purpose captioning and do not explicitly model human perceptual priorities, thereby limiting their ability to emphasize the most relevant information in a scene. To address this gap, we propose a salience-driven captioning framework that prioritizes scene elements according to their importance for human-centered assistance. We curate three salience-aware datasets, namely, Salience COCO, Salience Flickr, and Salience VizWiz, with object-level salience annotations designed to reflect the visual information most relevant to low vision users across different environments. Building on these datasets, we introduce Salience-LLaVA, a salience-aware VLM that incorporates salience cues to generate captions in which important elements are mentioned in the order of importance. Our work makes four main contributions. We build salience-aware datasets verified by low vision participants, propose Salience-LLaVA to describe objects in the order of importance, introduce SCMI to evaluate ordering accuracy, and deploy the system on assistive glasses to demonstrate real-world practicality. Code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/topo-focus/Topofocus
#02Aug 28, 2026
cs.CV
WilLaGS: Latent-Conditional 3D Appearance Fields for Robust Gaussian Splatting In-the-Wild
Yuhao Bai, Qianqiu Tan, Lilong Chen and 2 more
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) delivers real-time and high-fidelity rendering but remains challenged by unconstrained in-the-wild scenes, where drastic appearance variations and transient objects violate multi-view consistency. Existing methods are fundamentally limited by independent and discrete embeddings that struggle to capture continuous environmental changes or model spatially-varying local illumination. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{WilLaGS}, a unified framework for robust 3D scene reconstruction and generative appearance synthesis under unconstrained settings. Specifically, we introduce a generative appearance model where a $β$-VAE learns a structured and continuous manifold of global appearance. Conditioned on the latent code, we construct a 3D neural appearance field that generates dynamic Tri-Plane features to encode spatially-varying local illumination effects. Furthermore, to suppress transient artifacts, we present a self-supervised perceptual masking mechanism that leverages a Teacher-Student (EMA) architecture to derive a stable scene consensus, robustly identifying inconsistent regions via perceptual discrepancies. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that \textbf{WilLaGS} achieves state-of-the-art performance in reconstruction quality and novel view appearance synthesis, while maintaining real-time rendering efficiency.
#03Aug 28, 2026
cs.CV
Prompt-Guided Interactive Segmentation of Interstitial Lung Disease in Thoracic CT
Vasilis Dedousis, Lubnaa Abdur Rahman, Lorenzo Brigatο and 8 more
Accurate segmentation of interstitial lung disease (ILD) patterns is essential for quantitative disease assessment and longitudinal monitoring. However, existing approaches remain limited by relying on dense annotations and producing static predictions that cannot be refined, motivating interactive approaches. While promptable models show promise in interactive segmentation, their adaptation to ILDs remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we investigate prompt-guided foundation models for ILD refinement and present, to the best of our knowledge, the first adaptation of MedSAM2 for interactive 3D ILD segmentation on thoracic CT. We investigate three fine-tuning strategies and multiple clinically motivated prompts: bounding-boxes (BBox), point, lasso, and scribble. On a dataset spanning seven ILD patterns and healthy lung tissue, full model fine-tuning performed best, improving the average Dice score by 4.7 percentage points over MedSAM2.While BBox prompts achieve the strongest performance, non-native MedSAM2 interactions such as lasso and scribble prompts also prove effective. Finally, we present and evaluate a proof-of-concept end-to-end workflow in which MedSAM2 is initialized from an automatic segmentation prior and subsequently refined using radiologist prompts. Model weights and plug-ins made available at: https://github.com/AIHNlab/ILD-SemiSegTool.
#04Aug 28, 2026
cs.CV
SignRR: Retrieve and Refine Real Motion for Sign Language Production
Fidel Omar Tito Cruz, Angie Sanchez Marquina, Summy Farfan and 1 more
Sign language production (SLP) aims to generate continuous signing motion from spoken language, often through gloss-to-pose generation. Prior work mainly follows two paradigms. Generative models synthesize motion from a learned prior or from noise, without reference to an observed signing instance, making rare hand configurations and signer-specific articulation difficult to preserve. Retrieval-based methods reuse real, well-articulated motion segments, but concatenating segments from different signers and co-articulation contexts can introduce rhythm and style inconsistencies across the full sequence, not only at segment boundaries. These limitations suggest a complementary solution: use retrieval to provide realistic articulation, and use learned refinement to impose the global coherence that retrieval alone lacks. We therefore propose retrieve-and-refine, a paradigm that starts from real retrieved motion and refines it into a globally coherent signing sequence rather than generating motion from scratch. Our framework, SignRR, initializes motion from a dictionary of real sign segments and refines the full sequence with a part-aware Residual VQ-VAE, where residual quantization preserves fine hand articulation and temporal length differences are handled in the latent space. Experiments on PHOENIX14T and CSL-Daily show that SignRR achieves state-of-the-art back-translation performance while maintaining competitive pose quality.
#05Aug 28, 2026
cs.CV
Lossy Event Compression: From Event Stream Distortion to Task Performance
Zahra Rezaee, Catarina Brites, João Ascenso
Event cameras generate asynchronous, sparse data streams with microsecond temporal resolution, but in moderate-to-high motion scenes they can produce as many as hundreds of millions of events per second, creating significant bandwidth and storage challenges. Lossy compression is therefore essential for practical deployment, yet existing event stream distortion metrics fail to reliably predict compression-induced degradation at the task level, forcing codec optimization to rely on expensive task-specific evaluations. To address this gap, this paper introduces two fundamentally different event compression pipelines: i) an aggregation-based pipeline that converts the event stream into polarity-based histogram frames for compression with the conventional image codec JPEG 2000, and ii) a frame-free point cloud-based pipeline that codes events natively as 3D points using the octree-based codec G-PCC. Both pipelines are then assessed within a unified task-driven evaluation framework that relates event stream distortion to downstream application performance across four representative tasks: i) video reconstruction, ii) object detection, iii) optical flow estimation, and a delay-sensitive task iv) asynchronous feature tracking under a reference-relative protocol. Building on this framework, five classification-based distortion metrics are applied to event compression for the first time, to the best of the authors' knowledge, and benchmarked against existing event stream metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metrics reliably predict compression-induced task degradation across different coding frameworks. This demonstrates that event stream distortion assessment can be an efficient alternative to repeated task-specific evaluation, providing direct guidance for the development and optimization of future event data coding solutions.