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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

Puffin-World: Scaling a Unified Multimodal Model with Native 3D World States

Kang Liao, Yihang Luo, Xiao-Ming Wu and 7 more

We propose Puffin-World, a unified multimodal architecture that integrates physical understanding, spatial simulation, and 3D world generation and reconstruction without relying on external offline modules. To reliably construct and interact with 3D worlds, our framework jointly models three native world states: physics (gravity field and latitude), geometry (depth), and appearance (image), together with a unified Omni-Camera representation that supports diverse tasks and flexible motions. Beyond modeling these states, we introduce a strategy for propagating physical dynamics across future frames. By grounding absolute camera properties in the real world, Puffin-World enables physically consistent and visually stable world generation. We further couple appearance and geometry within a single generative process, jointly synthesizing each future view and reconstructing its underlying geometry. This unified paradigm enables interleaved closed-loop applications requiring synergy across multiple tasks, including mimic and self-calibrated world exploration. To scale Puffin-World to complex scenarios, we construct Puffin-16M, comprising 15 million vision-language-camera triplets and 1 million trajectories featuring various and challenging motions. To foster further research in this area, we released the code, models, and datasets.

#02Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

RARF: Region-Aware Rectified Flows for 3D Brain MRI Inpainting

Tomas Guija-Valiente, Blanca Rodriguez-Gonzalez, Norberto Malpica and 1 more

Medical image inpainting has the potential to improve automated brain MRI analysis by reconstructing healthy tissue within pathological regions. We introduce RARF, a task-agnostic region-aware rectified flow framework for masked data generation. We instantiate the framework for 3D brain MRI inpainting as our submission to the BraTS Inpainting Challenge 2026. RARF restricts the stochastic interpolation process to the inpainting region, while the observed voxels remain fixed and provide patient-specific anatomical context. A three-dimensional neural network receives the partially voided image, with Gaussian noise filling the missing region, together with the inpainting mask and the corresponding timestep. The model is trained using masked flow-matching and reconstruction-consistency objectives, combined with mask-aware preprocessing and data augmentation. During inference, the learned velocity field transports the initial noise toward a plausible reconstruction of the missing tissue, which is then combined with the unchanged observed anatomy. Experiments under the BraTS evaluation protocol show that the proposed approach produces competitive reconstructions while maintaining anatomical consistency. Source code is available at: https://github.com/TomasGuija/rarf.

#03Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

Scal3R: Learning Efficient Multi-Relative Pose Query for Scalable Online 3D Reconstruction

Chin-Yang Lin, Yang-Che Sun, Cheng Sun and 5 more

Online 3D reconstruction models perform poorly on long videos. This happens because regressing poses relative to a fixed first-frame anchor forces extrapolation far beyond the training distribution. Small drifts accumulate and amplify into significant geometric collapse. However, we observe that per-frame depth remains stable throughout this failure. The backbone's local geometry remains intact; only the global pose head breaks down. Motivated by this decoupling, we introduce Scal3R. This approach reformulates online reconstruction as multi-reference relative pose querying. We use lightweight learnable tokens, which make up about ~1% of the parameters, and inject them into a completely frozen backbone via asymmetric attention. This setup queries poses relative to multiple past keyframes. An online pose-graph optimization system with loop closure suppresses long-range drift. Scal3R reaches convergence in 8 hours on a single GPU. It reduces the average ATE by over 60% on KITTI compared to the online baseline. It also achieves state-of-the-art performance across Virtual KITTI, Sintel, TUM-Dynamic, ScanNet, and 7-Scenes. Project page: https://linjohnss.github.io/scal3r/

#04Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

Sparse auto-regressive modeling for scene generation from multi-view images

Thomas Lucas, Maxime Pietrantoni, Philippe Weinzaepfel and 4 more

Generating complete 3D scenes from sparse, unconstrained views is a fundamental challenge in 3D vision which requires reasoning beyond observed content while remaining computationally tractable. Existing feed-forward reconstruction methods are inherently limited to content visible in the input images, while 3D generative modeling is hindered by the high computational cost of dense volumetric representations and the scarcity of large-scale 3D supervision. We introduce SPAR3S, a sparse voxel-aligned 3D latent generative model for conditional scene completion without requiring ground-truth 3D data for supervision. Our key insight is to formulate 3D scene generation in a structured, compact, voxel-aligned 3D latent space where only occupied voxels are represented. We learn this sparse latent space directly from multi-view images using photometric supervision via differentiable 3D Gaussian Splatting. Given a partial set of observed voxels encoded from sparse input views, scene completion reduces to predicting the missing latent tokens and their spatial support within the voxel grid. To this end, we train a masked autoregressive transformer that jointly models voxel occupancy and latent token values, enabling efficient and spatially consistent generation of unseen regions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on synthetic indoor scenes, achieving higher novel-view quality than prior work. We further validate its generalization on RealEstate10k, highlighting its applicability to real-world data.

#05Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

Editable Visual Design

Junyan Ye, Wei Liu, Dongzhi Jiang and 9 more

While diffusion base models such as GPT-Image-2 and Nano-Banana exhibit remarkable visual expressiveness, their end-to-end generation inherently yields flattened bitmaps with error-prone text, precluding layer-wise post-editing. Conversely, code-based visual generation via Coding Agents provides precise layout control and decoupled layers, yet remains constrained by a lack of global aesthetic intuition and the difficulty of coding complex visual assets. To address this, we propose Editable Visual Design, a new paradigm driven by a Coding Agent. We designate the VLM as the ``creative brain'' for requirement comprehension, task planning, and aesthetic judgment, while utilizing the image generation model as an on-demand ``visual world simulator'' to synthesize standalone visual assets. Operating under an ``imagine first, then act'' closed-loop workflow, the agent generates isolated assets, writes native HTML/CSS, and iteratively refines the design against visual rendering feedback. Furthermore, Agent Design Replay faithfully reproduces the creative and reasoning trajectory akin to that of professional human designers. Ultimately, the system delivers editable artifacts with decoupled layers and real text, enabling users to perform intuitive mouse dragging and layout adjustments on a graphical user interface. Validations on posters, infographics, and other scenarios show that this paradigm successfully achieves both refined aesthetics and production-grade editability.