#01Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Occlusion for Free: Detecting Occlusion from the Disagreement Between Two Monocular Distance Cues
Chibueze Praise Onyenweaku, Toyibat Adele, Sikirulahi Opeyemi Abdulkareem and 1 more
Knowing that a pedestrian is occluded is useful to a robot even when the detector cannot recover the hidden pixels, but occlusion estimators are normally trained on occlusion annotations that deployment settings rarely have. We show that occlusion can be read off two distance estimates a camera-only pipeline already computes. Apparent height is largely unchanged by occlusion, because the detected box still spans the whole person; monocular metric depth is pulled toward the occluder, because the nearest surface inside the box is what a depth map reports. Only their ordering matters, so no focal length, stature, or depth scale is needed, provided the depth model's error is close to a pure gain, a condition that can be checked without labels. The score detects heavy occlusion on KITTI with AUC 0.909 (0.888 over all annotated pedestrians, including those the detector misses), requires no training and no occlusion labels, and is not a proxy for range: within fixed distance bands it holds AUC 0.894-0.925 while true distance alone sits near chance. On synthetic CARLA scenes with measured visibility it reaches 0.819, against 0.644 for distance alone. We arrived here after measuring three standard architectural responses to occlusion, depth fusion, occlusion-simulating augmentation, and attention, none of which improved detection outside its training distribution in the configurations we tested, and after finding that a detector trained on German roads loses half its accuracy on self-annotated street scenes in Lagos, Nigeria. Signals that need no local annotation are worth more in settings that benchmarks do not represent.
#02Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Context-Aware Autoregressive Image Generation for Emerging Reasoning Properties
Jixuan Ying, Haoyu Liu, Timing Yang and 7 more
Autoregressive image generation has recently emerged as a competitive visual generation paradigm, yet its generation order is often predefined or heuristic, such as next-patch prediction, random-order prediction, or one-step generation for specific scales. We observe that these strategies can cause models to overlook important structural dependencies in images, thereby limiting both structural robustness and reasoning capability. In this work, we propose a context-aware autoregressive generation framework, where the model dynamically determines the next token location based on global context and current local information. Rather than following a fixed or random order, our method allows the generation process to adapt to image structure and semantic dependencies. Extensive experiments show that context-aware generation significantly improves structural robustness across different image AR paradigms, including masked autoregressive and scale-wise autoregressive models. Beyond quantitative improvements, we further observe emerging reasoning properties: the model can better understand complex semantic instructions and generate images that more faithfully follow the given guidance. These findings suggest that generation order is a critical yet underexplored factor in image autoregressive modeling, and that context-aware decoding can unlock stronger reasoning-aware visual generation capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/Hpesojyjx/Saccades-AR.
#03Nov 4, 2026
cs.RO
Dexterous Robotic Hands in the Foundation-Model Era: A Full-Stack Survey of Hardware, Data, Cross-Embodiment Transfer, Learning, and Evaluation
Ji Pei
Dexterous robotic hands are increasingly coupled to large-scale human data and foundation models, yet progress in hardware, representation learning and evaluation is often assessed separately. This survey reviews work from January 2024 to early November 2026, with earlier studies included to establish technical lineages. We organize the literature into five interdependent layers: hardware; data collection and curation; cross-embodiment transfer; learning and foundation models; and evaluation and applications. Human hand-object understanding and tactile sensing provide two cross-cutting perspectives. A system-level architecture, comparative tables and five case analyses connect design choices across these layers. We distinguish within-study experimental comparisons from heterogeneous corpus statistics, vendor specifications and company-reported results. Three conclusions emerge. First, the value of human data depends on kinematic, visual and contact alignment, not recording volume alone. Second, shared action representations and foundation policies do not remove embodiment-specific constraints on force, latency and contact. Third, task completion is insufficient to establish physical correctness or deployment readiness. Evidence remains limited for zero-shot transfer of contact-rich skills between morphologically different hands, long-duration reliability, and cross-sensor tactile generalization. We identify eleven open problems and propose reporting interfaces and controlled comparisons that can make full-stack progress more measurable. The review is a structured narrative synthesis rather than a pooled performance ranking or an exhaustive systematic review.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Dynamical State-Space Diffusion for Spatiotemporal Prediction
Woojun Lee, Hankyeol Kim, Pilsung Kang
Diffusion models for temporal prediction typically corrupt each future frame with independent noise, leaving temporal dependence entirely to the denoiser. We propose Dynamical State-Space Diffusion (DSSD), which learns the temporal structure of the corruption process itself. DSSD builds a temporal kernel from the damped oscillatory modes of a stable diagonal state-space model, whose learned decay rates and frequencies let the corruption capture multiple timescales and oscillatory correlations, while the denoiser architecture remains unchanged. Running this model on a finite clip, however, requires the state before the first frame, which is unobserved; starting from a zero state leaves the early frames with less noise than the diffusion schedule prescribes. We avoid this by using the Cholesky factor of the model's stationary covariance as the temporal operator. We prove that this operator is causal, exactly invertible, keeps each frame's noise variance equal to that of standard diffusion, and reduces to the identity at the clean end of the process, and that it is exactly the Kalman innovations form of the state-space model. The denoiser is trained to predict the temporally correlated noise, and sampling removes and reapplies the temporal mixing at each step. On scientific-field and robot-video datasets, DSSD outperforms diffusion baselines that share its denoiser, and the evolution of its learned modes during training shows that the temporal operator adapts to each dataset.
#05Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Uncertainty-Driven Efficient Communication for UAV-Based Collaborative Perception
Jiuwu Hao, Yuting Wan, Liguo Sun and 3 more
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based collaborative perception enables multiple agents to share complementary perceptual information, overcoming limitations such as occlusion and limited sensing range. Communication efficiency is a critical bottleneck, as UAVs operate under stringent bandwidth and computational constraints. However, existing spatial selection methods focus predominantly on foreground regions to reduce missed detections, neglecting perceptually ambiguous regions and leaving false detections unresolved. We propose UCP, an uncertainty-driven framework that characterizes collaborative value through observational uncertainty, identifying sensor-limited regions, and discriminative uncertainty, capturing model-level ambiguity near the decision boundary. These estimates drive spatial request and supply maps for efficient inter-agent communication, and the received messages are aggregated via U-Fusion, an uncertainty-guided cross-attention module. Experiments on three benchmarks across 3D object detection and trajectory prediction demonstrate a superior performance-bandwidth trade-off with high interpretability and strong generalizability.