#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
Trainspotting: Learning Object-Centric 3D Reconstruction from Found Photos
Hanyu Chen, Noah Snavely
State-of-the-art feedforward reconstruction models perform poorly on in-the-wild object-centric photo collections. They are trained largely on single-session object captures whose images vary in viewpoint while the object and its environment remain nearly fixed. Public photo archives contain a different form of multi-view data. They hold found photos of the same object or design: photos taken independently by many people across years, environments, cameras, and sometimes physical units. In this work, we introduce Trainspotting, a dataset of 12,068 objects and 311,886 photos from Wikimedia Commons. We reconstruct each object to recover camera poses, multi-view stereo depth, and object masks. We categorize the objects into three regimes: objects fixed at one site, objects that move between sites, and designs shared by many physical units. Evaluating recent feedforward reconstruction models on Trainspotting shows that they fail most severely in the last two regimes. Fine-tuning VGGT-$Ω$ on Trainspotting significantly improves camera pose, depth, and 3D geometry on held-out objects. We observe similar improvements on the independent NAVI in-the-wild benchmark, which contains photos of each object in different environments. Performance on conventional benchmarks remains largely unchanged.
#03Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Coupled Scene Graph Anticipation: When With-Constraint Recall Hides Structural Inconsistency
Zeno Nongmaithem, Anushttha Srivastava, Anshit Sinha and 4 more
Scene Graph Anticipation (SGA) predicts object relationships in future video frames. Continuous-time SGA models evolve each subject-object pair with an independent Neural ODE, so relationships sharing an entity cannot influence one another during integration, and nothing prevents mutually exclusive predictions, such as "sitting on" and "standing on", for the same pair. We introduce CoupledSGA, which links such relationships through a Relationship Interaction Graph with graph attention inside the ODE vector field, and adds a Structural Consistency Loss ($\mathcal{L}_{SC}$) based on a matrix of mutually exclusive predicates. Developing CoupledSGA revealed a limitation of the evaluation protocol. With-Constraint evaluation keeps one predicate per group for each subject-object pair, so its R@K and mR@K cannot capture the within-group violations targeted by $\mathcal{L}_{SC}$: we prove they are unchanged whenever each group's winning predicate and its score are held fixed. We further show that the gradient of $\mathcal{L}_{SC}$ depends on predicate scores rather than ground-truth labels: for two-predicate rules it amplifies the ordering the model already holds, and when all scores in a group are equal it suppresses predicates in more exclusion rules more strongly, explaining why the penalty can lower recall while improving consistency. On Action Genome, activating $\mathcal{L}_{SC}$ after two warm-up epochs reduces R@20 from 42.21% to 35.18% while lowering the No-Constraint contradiction rate from 45.92% to 4.07% (matched-budget R@20: 40.48% CoupledSGA vs. 44.78% SceneSayerODE). CoupledSGA is a testbed, not a state-of-the-art claim: With-Constraint recall captures the cost of enforcing structural consistency but not the improvement. We recommend reporting No-Constraint results alongside a contradiction rate for methods that constrain predicate co-activation.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
CounterFactual Retrieval for Evidence-Aware Individual Animal Identification
Ankit K. Upadhyay, Aleksandr Algasov, Ekaterina Nepovinnykh and 5 more
Automated identification of individual animals is moving from small curated studies toward shared benchmarks and reusable foundation models. This progress is useful, but current evaluation leaves the evidence behind a match unresolved, i.e., high retrieval accuracy does not show whether a model used animal features or identity-correlated shortcuts. We address this with Counterfactual Foreground Retrieval (CFR), an evidence-aware evaluation protocol. CFR evaluates the same query-gallery task under different views: full image, foreground-only, and shortcut-only. The full-image measures standard retrieval performance; the foreground-only measures foreground-supported retrieval; and shortcut-only view measure how much identity signal is recoverable from background, or silhouette. This turns a retrieval score into an evidence profile: how well the model performs on the original images, how much of that performance remains when only the animal is visible, and how much identity signal remains recoverable when the animal is removed. We release around 0.5M masks for 34 datasets and code for mask generation and CFR evaluation.
#05Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Visual Token Routing: Learning to keep tokens that matter
Pranjal Aggarwal, Sean Welleck
Computer-use agents (CUAs) have recently achieved superhuman performance on several long-horizon benchmarks. However, their computational cost limits their use in long-horizon tasks and real-time domains such as video games. A key bottleneck is representing each screenshot as thousands of visual tokens, which accumulate into long contexts as agents reason over extended interaction histories. We observe that most of these visual tokens are either semantically irrelevant to the agent's next action or temporally redundant across screenshots. Building on this observation, we introduce Visual Token Routing (VTR), a joint training framework for learning sparse visual representations that preserve the information needed for action prediction. In VTR, we train the vision-language model together with a lightweight spatio-temporal router that examines each image region in the current and previous screenshots and decides whether its visual token enters the language model. We optimize the router using an adaptive loss to keep the number of visual tokens as small as possible while minimizing performance degradation. With just 2,000 training steps, VTR matches the performance of the full-resolution model on OSWorld, CUA-World, and video game action prediction, while using 2.5-5.8x fewer visual tokens. These savings reduce inference cost by up to 3.3x and speed up prefill by up to 2.9x. VTR also outperforms lowering the image resolution and other baselines for dropping tokens, by up to 12.8 points on OSWorld. Overall, VTR enables computer-use agents to process only the visual tokens they need, allowing them to be used in long-horizon tasks and real-time domains at a fraction of the computational cost. Code and models are available at https://pranjal2041.github.io/vtr