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5 papers

#01Sep 1, 2026

cs.CV

Reliability Challenges in Diffusion Vision-Language Models

Md. Atabuzzaman, Chris Thomas

Diffusion-based Large Vision-Language Models (dLVLMs) have recently emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) LVLMs, offering advantages in parallel decoding, bidirectional context, and controllable generation. Despite rapid progress, their reliability properties remain largely uncharacterized. We present the first systematic reliability evaluation of hallucination and bias in dLVLMs, benchmarking six diffusion models against competitive AR baselines across four dimensions. Our key findings are: (1) dLVLMs reverse the yes-bias of AR models in binary visual queries; (2) they achieve competitive hallucination rates yet exhibit degraded linguistic quality; (3) they collapse to near-zero accuracy on underrepresented racial groups with opposite-polarity gender bias; and (4) they exhibit accuracy collapse in multiple-choice settings when the correct option is shorter than its distractors, associated with a length prior that emerges at the first denoising step. Tokens committed at late denoising steps with low confidence further correlate with hallucinated content, pointing to a mechanistic signal unique to diffusion generation. These patterns vary across model families, suggesting reliability is shaped by the generative paradigm together with training data.

#02Sep 1, 2026

cs.CV

Benchmarking Spatial, Spectral, and Self-Supervised Cues for Face Forgery Detection under Realistic Degradation

Lucas Cunha, Lucas Sotomaior, Lucas Gasperin and 3 more

Face forgery detectors often achieve strong results on controlled benchmarks, but their reliability under realistic image degradations remains limited. This paper presents a standardized benchmark for face forgery detection using the Multi-Dimensional Face Forgery Image (MFFI) dataset and evaluates performance on both clean and degraded test partitions. We compare six model families, including convolutional networks, transformer-based models, and a frozen self-supervised DINOv3 backbone, across spatial, spectral, and hybrid input representations. The results show that clean-set performance is not a reliable indicator of robustness under compression, resizing, and blurring. Xception with RGB obtains the best clean performance, reaching 0.884 mean ROC-AUC, but degrades substantially on the harder partition. In contrast, frozen DINOv3 achieves the strongest degraded-set result, with 0.726 mean ROC-AUC, while training only a linear classification head. The representation analysis indicates that Fourier-domain cues are most useful when combined with RGB information, whereas purely spectral inputs consistently underperform spatial representations. Qualitative attribution maps further suggest that convolutional detectors focus on localized artifacts, while DINOv3 relies on broader facial structure. These findings reinforce the need for degraded evaluation protocols and highlight self-supervised visual representations as a promising direction for robust face forgery detection. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/lucasdocunha/FaceForgery-Benchmark/.

#03Sep 1, 2026

cs.CV

ExBind: A Controlled Diagnostic Benchmark for Visual-to-Executable Correspondence

Ziqian Wang, Yuxiao Cheng, Tingxiong Xiao and 1 more

Multimodal coding and editing systems must map a visible or semantic referent to the exact executable object that can be edited. A wrong reference may select a valid but incorrect DOM node, SVG element, graph endpoint, hierarchy member, or table cell, while final execution success alone does not reveal the source of the failure. ExBind isolates this visual-to-executable correspondence layer as a controlled diagnostic benchmark between semantic localization and action execution. It samples representation-independent latent binding instances and compiles them into SVG, DOM, canvas, tree, graph, and table cases with deterministic mappings to executable references. Models output only a strict reference; the evaluator maps predictions back to latent structure and scores structural constraints without requiring reasoning traces. The release contains a 250-case broad suite, a disjoint 240-case targeted suite, and 50 paired latent groups. Qwen2.5-VL-3B achieves 98.4% candidate validity but 76.4% exact accuracy, while Qwen3-VL-4B achieves 100.0% validity and 98.8% exact accuracy. In the targeted table suite, all Qwen2.5-VL-3B residual errors are valid correct-row/wrong-column selections. Candidate-order perturbations change case-level outcomes while preserving this error pattern. ExBind is designed for controlled diagnosis rather than population-scale ranking or end-to-end editing evaluation. Code and benchmark records are available at https://github.com/Daerwang2020/Exbind and https://huggingface.co/datasets/Ziqianwwww/ExBind.

#04Sep 1, 2026

cs.CV

BS: Take the Hint - Interactive Multitracer PET/CT Lesion Segmentation with a Scribble-Conditioned ResEnc U-Net

Marven Sherif, Amgad Elmasry, Youssef Ghazal and 1 more

Automated lesion segmentation in whole-body PET/CT is complicated by the variety of physiological tracer uptake patterns and by the differing appearance of lesions across tracers. The autoPET/CT V challenge addresses this by making segmentation interactive: user scribbles marking foreground and background are supplied alongside the image, and the algorithm is expected to exploit them. We present our submission, a scribble-conditioned residual encoder U-Net operating on four input channels: CT, PET, and a sparse scribble map for each of foreground and background. The network is initialised from the autoPET-III winning weights and extended from two to four input channels, with the two scribble channels zero-initialised so that the pretrained representation is preserved exactly at initialisation. Every model is fine-tuned per fold from the corresponding autoPET-III fold checkpoint, so that no validation case is seen during pretraining. PET intensities are normalised against a per-scan aorta blood-pool reference derived from a CT segmentation, which removes tracer- and centre-specific scaling without requiring lesion labels. At inference the five fold models are ensembled by averaging their softmax outputs per sliding-window patch, before Gaussian-weighted stitching. On the challenge's five-fold split, with each fold evaluated on its own validation cases, mean Dice is 0.554 and mean lesion-level F1 is 0.528 without scribbles, rising to 0.751 and 0.733 after five correction rounds. About 85% of that gain follows the first scribble, and the spread between fold models narrows five-fold over the same rounds, so interaction largely compensates for how well or badly a given model segments unaided.

#05Sep 1, 2026

cs.CV

TempCloze: Can Video-LLMs Identify the Missing Middle?

Wenqi Pei, Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Yilai Liu and 4 more

Temporal reasoning benchmarks for Video-LLMs are often mediated by language, leaving room for linguistic shortcuts from option wording, answer correlations, or language priors. To reduce such shortcuts, we introduce TempCloze, a video cloze benchmark for evaluating visual temporal reasoning in Video-LLMs. Given the beginning and ending clips of a video, models must identify the true missing middle from four candidates. TempCloze contains 1,521 carefully filtered videos from seven sources, mainly long-take and egocentric videos. We construct same-source distractors along three dimensions: Semantic asks what event should happen, Alignment probes when it should occur, and Progression tests how it should unfold, while shared scenes and objects reduce appearance cues. Our evaluation of 10 proprietary and 21 open-source Video-LLMs reveals Alignment as the primary bottleneck: models often recognize plausible semantic content and local event progression but struggle with temporal alignment. We further conduct error pattern and behavioral sensitivity analyses on TempCloze-Mixed and TempCloze-Hard with four representative models to examine where errors arise and how candidate order, context direction, visible span, frame density, and test-time scaling influence model choices.