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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#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

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.

#03Aug 28, 2026

cs.CV

GraspHOI: Full-Body 3D Human-Object Reconstruction with Finger-Level Grasps from a Single In-the-Wild Image

Semin Kim, Haechan Shin, Jongyoo Kim

Existing monocular full-body 3D human-object interaction (HOI) methods do not combine explicit finger-level grasp optimization with category-agnostic object reconstruction. Despite plausible body-object configurations, their fingers may float from or penetrate objects instead of forming a grasp. We present GraspHOI, the first framework that reconstructs a full-body 3D HOI from a single image while explicitly optimizing finger articulation against the reconstructed object. GraspHOI recovers object geometry directly, without predefined meshes or a fixed category vocabulary. It reconstructs the body, hands, and object separately, aligning them in metric camera space via depth-based registration and image-space alignment. Occlusion-aware palmar correspondences seat the object against the grasping hand, and contact-aware optimization refines arm and finger articulation to form surface contact without excessive penetration. Across four benchmarks and six baselines, GraspHOI improves relative human-object placement, hand accuracy, and contact plausibility. Full pipeline code will be released.

#04Aug 28, 2026

cs.CV

Conditional Visual Evidence Utility: State-Dependent Rank Reversals in Frozen Vision-Language Encoders

Yunxuan Fang, Xinhe Wang

Static importance scores compress visual evidence into a single ranking, but the value of remaining evidence can change after one cue has been observed. We study this possibility in controlled compositional visual search, where color, shape, and texture evidence can be independently exposed and their conditional marginal utility measured across acquisition states. In a held-out confirmation on 800 scenes, frozen OpenCLIP and SigLIP exhibit robust state-dependent rank reversals that concentrate in candidate-overlap regimes designed to induce ordering changes. The structure persists across two evidence-accumulation constructions and ten equivalent query wordings, but disappears under query-scene derangement. We also ask whether these reversals matter for decisions. In a post-confirmation exploratory matched-first-action analysis, reranking only after the first acquisition yields positive step-2 utility when decisions are selected under one evidence mode, wording, or backbone and evaluated under another. Together, these results show that evidence importance is state-dependent in this controlled setup and that updating an evidence ordering can retain decision-relevant value across evaluator changes. They motivate evaluating vision-language evidence use conditionally rather than through a single static ranking, while providing a measurable target for future adaptive evidence-selection methods.

#05Aug 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.