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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Aug 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.

#02Aug 28, 2026

cs.CV

Abstract4D: A Large-Scale Dataset and Framework for Understanding the Visual Language of Abstract Art

Haowei Zhang, Yuanpei Zhao, Ji-Zhe Zhou and 1 more

Artificial intelligence can classify artistic styles and synthesize images, but it still lacks a model of the visual language that gives art meaning. Abstract painting minimizes object semantics and foregrounds structural cues, making it an ideal testbed for computational perception. We introduce \textbf{Abstract4D}, the largest dataset of abstract paintings to date: more than 120,000 images paired with rich metadata and multi-dimensional prompts that capture each work's perceptual attributes---\textit{form, color, texture, and composition}. Annotations are produced by a hybrid human--VLM pipeline for quality and consistency. Using Abstract4D, we (i) analyze the semantic structure of abstract art through large-scale embedding visualization, uncovering how perceptual relationships organize artistic meaning, and (ii) establish benchmark tasks for classification, cross-modal retrieval, and text-to-image generation to evaluate how AI models perceive and reproduce abstract visual language. Together, these analyses demonstrate how Abstract4D enables both exploration and quantitative assessment of AI's ability to represent and interpret abstract art.

#03Aug 28, 2026

cs.CV

GeoFF3D: Coordinate-Anchored Feed-Forward Reconstruction for Large-Scale UAV Mapping

Xiang Yang, Yongli Wang, Yunsheng Zhang

Existing feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods typically process a bounded number of images and recover cameras and geometry in local or internally normalized frames. Extending them to large-scale UAV mapping requires scalable multi-chunk processing and reliable aggregation, while full Sim(3) alignment can become unstable for near collinear trajectories. We present GeoFF3D, which combines a coordinate-anchored model with a spatial large-scale reconstruction framework (SLRF). The model uses georeferenced camera translations and optional geometric priors to predict camera poses and dense point maps directly in a gravity-aligned Z-up metric frame. SLRF partitions images into spatially overlapping chunks, propagates shared-view priors, and aggregates local reconstructions hierarchically, while remaining applicable to different bounded-view models. Across nine aerial mapping blocks, GeoFF3D achieves the best average reconstruction quality, improving F@5 from 0.829 for Pi3X + SLRF to 0.877. On long UAVScenes sequences, it reaches 0.848, compared with 0.687 for Pi3X + SLRF and 0.451 for the strongest evaluated SLAM/streaming baseline. GeoFF3D reconstructs 2,000 images in approximately five minutes, demonstrating scalable and robust large-scale UAV reconstruction.The code is available at https://github.com/yanxian-ll/GeoFF3D.

#04Aug 28, 2026

cs.CV

GeBDA: Building Damage Assessment as Text-Based Sequence Prediction

Olivier Dietrich, Krishna Sapkota, Konrad Schindler and 1 more

Conventionally, Building Damage Assessment (BDA) is tackled either with dedicated network architectures or by fine-tuning geospatial image foundation models. In this work, we ask whether a general-purpose Vision-Language Model (VLM) can localize buildings and grade their damage through autoregressive sequence generation alone. We cast BDA as predicting a variable-length set of bounding boxes, each specified by its coordinates and a damage label. Our preliminary implementation, based on the open Gemma model, achieves promising damage mapping results from only bi-temporal satellite images and a suitable text prompt.

#05Aug 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.