#01Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
One Editor, Many Edits: A Unified Training-Free Framework for Diverse Video Editing
Adheesh Sunil Juvekar, Onkar Kishor Susladkar, Kiet A. Nguyen and 6 more
Video editing spans diverse editing paradigms, yet achieving high-quality instruction-guided and subject-guided editing within a single unified framework remains challenging. We introduce EditVid, a training-free framework combining sparse causal memory for local coherence, correspondence-based post-attention token injection for long-range identity preservation, and soft latent blending for edit locality. The same framework supports instruction-guided and reference-guided edits, including style transfer, attribute modification, object insertion, part-level editing, and subject replacement. On FiVE, EditVid achieves 78.16 FiVE-Acc, compared with 58.95 for the strongest evaluated training-free baseline, while obtaining competitive results on IVEBench. A user study further shows a 51.8\% overall preference for EditVid over 7 competing methods.
#02Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
GraFT: A Training-Free Framework for Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models via 3D Scene Graphs
Junqing Du, Fernando Ropero, Erkin Turkoz and 2 more
3D spatial reasoning underpins understanding and acting in the physical world, yet it remains unreliable in current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). These models falter at precise geometric measurement, at transforming between egocentric and allocentric viewpoints, and at grounding fine-grained appearance. The most common remedies fine-tune the model on large-scale curated spatial-reasoning datasets or attach dedicated encoders for 3D geometry, which typically couples the solution to costly supervision and a specific backbone. We instead introduce GraFT, a training-free framework that supplies the missing 3D structure through a compact, easily maintained 3D scene graph (3DSG). From this 3DSG, GraFT provides three spatial reasoning capabilities: (1) deterministic geometry through symbolic tools, (2) allocentric layout through a bird's-eye-view (BEV) rendering, and (3) visual-attribute grounding through task-relevant egocentric frames. On ScanQA, GraFT improves every metric over the same-backbone baseline, raising CIDEr by 27%. On VSI-Bench, GraFT improves frozen MLLMs by up to 65%, surpassing every proprietary and general-purpose open-source baseline, and several prominent fine-tuned spatial models.
#03Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
Temporal Self-Distillation: Learning Visual State Tracking in Videos Without Supervision
Shravan Venkatraman, Wenshuai Zhao, Mohammad Hassan Vali and 1 more
We introduce S$^3$T (Self-Supervised Self-Distillation over Time), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first fully self-contained framework for continuous video state tracking. Our method treats temporal sampling density as privileged information, based on the hypothesis that a denser view of the same clip recovers the running state more accurately. This view serves as the teacher, while a sparse-view student with the same weights learns to match its next-token distribution. The model generates its own target, so training requires no labels, separate teacher, or reward signal, and adds no inference cost. On LLaVA-OneVision-2-8B, S$^3$T improves VSTAT accuracy by $+1.74$ as a single model, $+2.38$ with souping, and $+2.70$ with additional vision-encoder adaptation, while prior self-evolving methods leave state tracking largely unchanged. The capability learned from unlabeled synthetic clips transfers to real videos, improving performance by $+7.95$ on VSTAT-YouTube state-tracking questions and $+4.50$ on MVBench Action Count.
#04Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
CORE: Improving Compositional Reasoning in MLLM Embedding via Reranker Distillation
Tingyu Song, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang and 5 more
MLLM-based embedding models remain limited in compositional retrieval, often failing to distinguish scenes containing the same concepts but different attribute-object bindings. Yet the same backbone can resolve such distinctions when used as a cross-attentive reranker, motivating us to distill its compositional judgments into the embedding model. We propose CORE, which synthesizes candidate lists spanning five compositional matching levels and introduces a Rank-KL objective that trains the embedding model to reproduce the reranker's fine-grained ranking. We further introduce a graded evaluation protocol and compare contrastive learning, pairwise CoSENT, and listwise Rank-KL under the same data and tuning budget. Our comparison shows that both CoSENT and Rank-KL use the multi-level supervision more effectively than contrastive learning, with Rank-KL achieving the strongest overall performance. Across three compositional reasoning benchmarks (COLA, SUGARCREPE++, NEGBENCH), CORE-RERANKER-8B achieves an 82.7% total average, outperforming Jina-Reranker by 10.7 points, while CORE-EMBED-8B achieves the best total average (0.666) among all evaluated embedding models. The improvements transfer to the MCMR benchmark without sacrificing retrieval performance on COCO and Flickr30K.
#05Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
Persistent Identity Preservation in Generative Image Models: A Benchmark and Evaluation System
Mengwei Ren, Xuaner Zhang, Zhihao Xia
Generative image models can now produce high-quality images, follow complex instructions, and support precise edits, but they still struggle to preserve who or what is being depicted. When generating or editing images of a specific subject, identity may drift as the pose, expression, appearance, viewpoint, or surrounding scene changes. Existing subject-driven methods make fundamentally different choices about where identity is represented: through the input context (GPT-Image-2, NB2), as trainable subject-specific model parameters (LoRA), or as a persistent identity layer (PHOTA IDENTITY) reusable across generations and edits. We systematically benchmark these paradigms across subject-driven generation, editing, restoration, and multi-subject settings, with tasks designed to increasingly stress identity preservation. Our results show that identity preservation remains a distinct limitation of current generative foundation models: strong image quality and instruction following do not necessarily imply strong identity fidelity, and identity degradation becomes more pronounced under iterative edits, small subject scales, severe image degradation, and multi-subject composition. Persistent identity substantially reduces this degradation across generation, editing, and restoration, consistently improving identity preservation when applied to different foundation models while maintaining comparable instruction adherence and perceptual image quality. These results suggest that identity does not simply emerge from increasingly capable generative models, but can instead be represented as persistent subject knowledge that is composed independently with the underlying generative model.