#01Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
Zero-Shot Novel Depth Synthesis Using 3D Foundation Models Scene Representations
Denis M. Akola, David F. Fouhey
3D Foundation Models (3DFMs) such as VGGT have recently pushed the boundaries of 3D vision by predicting rich unified representations with feed-foward transformers. The scene representations learned by these models enable strong performance on multiple 3D vision tasks. In this paper, we investigate using their internal representations to infer 3D in the scene from new views. Our hypothesis is that in order to solve the task of 3D reconstruction, these models need to learn a representation that includes a large amount of general knowledge about 3D scenes. After showing that it is possible to decode hidden surfaces from internal 3DFM representations, we propose a method, Z3D, that estimates pointmaps in unseen views by doing latent diffusion on 3DFM representation. We show that Z3D can predict realistic depth maps for new views across multiple datasets.
#02Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
Principia: Relational Physics Tests for Video Models
Varun Varma Thozhiyoor, Shivam Tripathi, Venkatesh Babu Radhakrishnan and 1 more
Evaluating physical reasoning in video models is difficult because absolute motion measurements depend on frame rate, object scale, and camera calibration, all of which are often ambiguous or unavailable in generated video. We propose a different approach. When two objects in the same scene obey the same physical law, their motions must satisfy predictable relationships, and these relationships hold independent of calibration. We introduce Principia, a benchmark that evaluates Newtonian physics through relational consistency between paired objects. Principia spans eight phenomena - gravity, restitution, friction, rotational inertia, projectile motion, momentum, pendulum, and mass-spring oscillation - across translational, rotational, collisional, and oscillatory dynamics, using real-world scenes recorded under controlled protocols. We also introduce a calibration-independent consistency score that quantifies physical violation directly in image space. Across thousands of generations from six state-of-the-art video generators, no model exceeds 0.42 on Principia despite all scoring around 0.8 on VBench. Vision-language models are evaluated on their ability to detect relational physics violations, with the best model achieving only 67% accuracy and most performing near chance level.
#03Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
Beyond Retrieval: Progressive Latent Memory Evolution for Streaming Video Understanding
Hongyu Qu, Guangming Yao, Ling Xing and 7 more
Streaming video understanding requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to process continuous visual inputs and respond to user queries under strict causality and bounded memory. Existing approaches typically compress historical observations into an external memory bank and retrieve query-relevant evidence as additional visual context. Though effective, this store-and-retrieve paradigm keeps historical evidence as external visual context, preventing it from being internalized into a compact, evolving latent memory that can continuously guide streaming reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce LatentStream, a progressive latent working memory framework that shifts streaming memory from store-and-retrieve to retrieve-and-internalize. Specifically, LatentStream comprises three coordinated components. First, Query-agnostic Hierarchical Streaming Memory organizes visual history into short-, mid-, and long-term levels under a fixed memory budget through Jenks-guided adaptive consolidation. Once a query arrives, Hierarchical Latent Memory Evolution equips groups of latent memory tokens with progressively expanding memory receptive fields, enabling them to iteratively retrieve historical evidence from their corresponding scopes and internalize it into a compact, fixed-length latent memory. Finally, Progressive Confidence-guided Latent Memory Optimization constructs a hierarchical progression reward from group-wise predictive entropy and jointly refines the latent memory tokens and retrieved evidence, encouraging increasingly confident streaming reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LatentStream achieves new state-of-the-art results on existing online and offline video benchmarks.
#04Sep 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.
#05Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
TAP-Path: Task-Adaptive Structural and Token Pruning for Efficient and Trustworthy Pathology Foundation Models
Mehedi Hasan, Ashfak Yeafi, Md Khairul Islam
Pathology foundation models improve transferable representation learning for histopathology, but recent gains often rely on encoders with hundreds of millions of parameters and high inference cost. We propose TAP-Path, a task-adaptive compression framework that directly restructures a pretrained Virchow2 encoder rather than distilling it into a separate student. TAP-Path combines validation-driven transformer-block selection, physical removal of redundant blocks, input-adaptive patch-token pruning, multi-depth feature recovery, and a lightweight gated task head. The final model retains 24 of 32 transformer blocks and 70% of patch tokens after pruning, reducing encoder parameters by 24.96% (631.24M to 473.70M) and analytical encoder compute by 35.20% (340.13G to 220.40G FLOPs). Across three task-head optimization seeds, TAP-Path achieved $87.98 \pm 0.067%$ test accuracy, $81.26 \pm 0.49%$ balanced accuracy, and $82.38 \pm 0.48%$ macro-F1 on a 32-class histopathology benchmark, compared with 86.89% for full Virchow2 and 87.67% for UNI2-h. TAP-Path achieved a Brier score of $0.1800 \pm 0.0005$ and failure-detection AUROC of $0.9047 \pm 0.0060$. A validation-only rare-aware objective improved rare-class balanced accuracy in a secondary operating analysis. Frozen external evaluation on 433 CPTAC samples yielded $91.22 \pm 0.83%$ accuracy and $91.10 \pm 0.81%$ balanced accuracy. These results show that task-adaptive structural and token sparsification can improve the accuracy-efficiency trade-off of large pathology foundation models while preserving reliability under internal and external evaluation.