#01Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
VA-TDM: A Unified View for Improving Few-Step Diffusion Models by Velocity Adversarial Distillation
Yihong Luo, Tianyu Pang, Tianyang Hu
Few-step distillation offers efficient generation with diffusion and flow models, but preserving quality with only a few sampling steps remains challenging. Distribution-matching methods via score distillation provide a strong foundation, yet they rely on accurately tracking the student's changing distribution. At intermediate generation steps in few-step sampling, student-score estimation can be difficult, and commonly used estimators may describe a different distribution from the one used to update the student. Flow matching allows a more flexible approach to supervision through velocity fields constructed from the student's sampling process. Building on this perspective, we introduce Velocity Adversarial Distillation (VAD), which uses a learned critic to compare student and teacher fields and turn their disagreement into feedback for learning. VAD unifies score distillation, Fisher-based matching, and moment matching, also explaining existing heuristic MMD updates and delivering new training objectives. We further develop VA-TDM, which follows trajectory distribution matching: providing supervision for partial denoising along the student trajectory. Beyond this, VA-TDM combines transition-aware online velocity learning and dual-form VAD supervision across intermediate student transitions. Extensive results show that VA-TDM is powerful for learning few-step generators, achieving state-of-the-art four-step performance in both text-to-image and text-to-video generation across various backbones and scaling effectively to 33B MiniMax-H3. In particular, our VA-TDM-H3 notably outperforms the few-step Fast-H3 and is closer to the original many-step H3 according to human preference.
#02Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
CardioDrift: Automatic Cardiac Motion Tracking on a 3D Atlas Mesh via Shape-aware Coherent Point Drift with Slice Shift Correction
Reza Akbari Movahed, Abuzar Rezaee, Shatha Alamri and 3 more
Automatic cardiac motion tracking from cine cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is essential for quantifying myocardial motion abnormalities associated with cardiovascular disease. Existing methods fall into two groups: those that represent motion without anatomical correspondence across subjects and therefore limit inter-subject motion assessment; and those that represent motion with globally corresponding points, which typically require a time-consuming and error-prone semi-automatic step to fit a cardiac atlas to the subject space. To address these limitations, this study proposes CardioDrift, a fully automatic, atlas-based probabilistic framework that represents subject-specific cardiac motion on a 3D atlas mesh with globally corresponding points. The Coherent Point Drift (CPD) formulation is generalised to jointly register the atlas surfaces of multiple cardiac regions to the anatomically corresponding contours extracted from cine CMR segmentation maps throughout the cardiac cycle. Slice-shift correction is embedded in the same probabilistic model, estimating slice-wise translations that suppress the misalignment artefact limiting atlas-fitting accuracy. Evaluation on 1301 randomly selected UK Biobank subjects and the M&M dataset, CardioDrift attains Dice similarity coefficients (DSCs) of $92.23\pm8.70\%$, $82.11\pm7.56\%$, and $88.69\pm4.13\%$ for the left ventricle (LV), myocardium (Myo), and right ventricle (RV), exceeding the strongest baseline on every distance and overlap metric of both datasets.
#03Nov 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.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
TailSteer: Trajectory-Tail Steering for Drift-Resistant Multi-turn Image Editing
Ruikang Li, Zixuan Chen, Jiarui Wu and 6 more
Strong single-turn editing performance does not guarantee reliable multi-turn interaction: as edited outputs are repeatedly reused, small unintended changes can accumulate into severe visual drift. This long-term drift is often mitigated through training on multi-turn data or cross-turn rollouts, potentially altering pretrained priors, or through specialized inference-time mechanisms that are difficult to scale to foundation models. We introduce TailSteer, a final-stage training framework that improves multi-turn robustness while retaining the generative and editing capabilities acquired through earlier training. TailSteer follows a simple principle: keep early denoising dynamics close to those of the base model and concentrate preservation corrections near the trajectory tail, where fine-grained deviations can be suppressed. These corrections are learned from the editor's own on-policy denoising rollouts, using unchanged source content as a preservation reference without requiring curated ground-truth editing pairs. Experiments across the FLUX, SenseNova, and Qwen families show that TailSteer substantially reduces cumulative drift over 15-20 editing turns while largely preserving base-model performance on extensive text-to-image and single-image editing benchmarks. These results demonstrate that long-horizon editing robustness can be unlocked in foundation models after TailSteer, rather than by relearning their existing capabilities.
#05Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Benchmarking Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning for Remote Sensing in Urban Management
Jiawei Zhang, Rizhao Cai, Dayan Guan
Fine-grained visual reasoning is essential for remote sensing in urban management, yet remains underexplored in the evaluation of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We introduce UMBench, a fine-grained urban remote sensing benchmark built from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images for multiple urban management tasks such as traffic monitoring, urban construction, environmental quality, and disaster warning. Evaluations on UMBench reveal that current MLLMs often rely on scene-level priors and overlook fine-grained visual evidence. To address this issue, we further propose a novel evidence-first chain-of-thought method that directs models to inspect fine-grained visual evidence in a training-free manner. Experiments show that our method can improve the performance of both open-source and commercial MLLMs on UMBench.