#01Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
LongBanana: An Expert-Verified Benchmark for Long-Context Multi-Reference Image Synthesis
Haoxiang Cao, Yuxuan Zhang, Penghui Du and 16 more
We introduce LongBanana, to our knowledge the first expert-designed and expert-verified benchmark for long-context multi-reference image synthesis in the age of agent-driven image generation. The task requires retrieving dispersed visual evidence, rejecting distractors, binding entities and relations, and composing one coherent final image from multiple references. LongBanana contains 90 carefully designed tasks organized by a 3-by-3 taxonomy; each task includes about 32 reference images, 20 constraints, and 50 evaluation items, yielding 4,670 expert-specified atomic evaluation items in total. Its graph-grounded evaluation design instantiates each task with reference images and an entity-relation graph, then converts node, edge, and whole-graph obligations into checklist items for Content Fidelity, Relational Binding, and Global Constraint Satisfaction. Reviewed expert labels include a 15% double-labeled subset with 89.4% exact agreement and 0.83 quadratic weighted kappa. We further introduce LongBanana-Gen, an agent-harness framework for long-horizon image generation; experiments show that minimal agent harnesses improve over direct generation, while a ReAct-Plan-Exec-Reflect (RPR) workflow yields harness-dependent gains by strengthening evidence grounding and repair. Together, LongBanana provides an auditable testbed for measuring dense visual evidence use and a shared target for developing stronger agent-driven image-generation systems. Code and data are available at the project page: https://long-banana.com/.
#02Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Occlusion for Free: Detecting Occlusion from the Disagreement Between Two Monocular Distance Cues
Chibueze Praise Onyenweaku, Toyibat Adele, Sikirulahi Opeyemi Abdulkareem and 1 more
Knowing that a pedestrian is occluded is useful to a robot even when the detector cannot recover the hidden pixels, but occlusion estimators are normally trained on occlusion annotations that deployment settings rarely have. We show that occlusion can be read off two distance estimates a camera-only pipeline already computes. Apparent height is largely unchanged by occlusion, because the detected box still spans the whole person; monocular metric depth is pulled toward the occluder, because the nearest surface inside the box is what a depth map reports. Only their ordering matters, so no focal length, stature, or depth scale is needed, provided the depth model's error is close to a pure gain, a condition that can be checked without labels. The score detects heavy occlusion on KITTI with AUC 0.909 (0.888 over all annotated pedestrians, including those the detector misses), requires no training and no occlusion labels, and is not a proxy for range: within fixed distance bands it holds AUC 0.894-0.925 while true distance alone sits near chance. On synthetic CARLA scenes with measured visibility it reaches 0.819, against 0.644 for distance alone. We arrived here after measuring three standard architectural responses to occlusion, depth fusion, occlusion-simulating augmentation, and attention, none of which improved detection outside its training distribution in the configurations we tested, and after finding that a detector trained on German roads loses half its accuracy on self-annotated street scenes in Lagos, Nigeria. Signals that need no local annotation are worth more in settings that benchmarks do not represent.
#03Nov 4, 2026
cs.RO
Dexterous Robotic Hands in the Foundation-Model Era: A Full-Stack Survey of Hardware, Data, Cross-Embodiment Transfer, Learning, and Evaluation
Ji Pei
Dexterous robotic hands are increasingly coupled to large-scale human data and foundation models, yet progress in hardware, representation learning and evaluation is often assessed separately. This survey reviews work from January 2024 to early November 2026, with earlier studies included to establish technical lineages. We organize the literature into five interdependent layers: hardware; data collection and curation; cross-embodiment transfer; learning and foundation models; and evaluation and applications. Human hand-object understanding and tactile sensing provide two cross-cutting perspectives. A system-level architecture, comparative tables and five case analyses connect design choices across these layers. We distinguish within-study experimental comparisons from heterogeneous corpus statistics, vendor specifications and company-reported results. Three conclusions emerge. First, the value of human data depends on kinematic, visual and contact alignment, not recording volume alone. Second, shared action representations and foundation policies do not remove embodiment-specific constraints on force, latency and contact. Third, task completion is insufficient to establish physical correctness or deployment readiness. Evidence remains limited for zero-shot transfer of contact-rich skills between morphologically different hands, long-duration reliability, and cross-sensor tactile generalization. We identify eleven open problems and propose reporting interfaces and controlled comparisons that can make full-stack progress more measurable. The review is a structured narrative synthesis rather than a pooled performance ranking or an exhaustive systematic review.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Human Motion Prediction via Continual Prior Compensation
Jianwei Tang, Jian-Fang Hu, Tianming Liang and 4 more
Human Motion Prediction (HMP) aims to predict future human poses at different moments according to observed past motion sequences. Previous approaches mainly treated the prediction of different temporal moments as a single prediction task and learned the predictions of varied moments simultaneously, which would encounter a main limitation: the learning of short-term predictions (referring to ``near-future'' prediction) could be hindered by the predictions of long-term (referring to ``far-future'' prediction) motions. In this paper, we develop a novel temporal continual learning framework called Continual Prior Compensation (CPC) to progressively train HMP models, in which we divide the prediction task of motions corresponding to varied temporal moments into several subtasks and train the model in a multi-stage manner. To mitigate the prior information forgetting in the progressive training, we further introduce a learnable random variable Prior Compensation Factor (PCF) to explicitly measure the prior knowledge loss. We theoretically show that the PCF can be efficiently learned together with the model parameters by minimizing a reasonable upper bound of the objective function. The proposed CPC is further enhanced to estimate the prior information loss for each subtask and a new framework called Continual Prior Compensation++ (CPC++) with Fine-Grained Prior Compensation Factor (FGPCF) is finally developed. Our CPC and CPC++ frameworks are quite flexible and can be easily integrated with different HMP backbone models and adapted to various datasets and applications. Extensive experiments on three HMP benchmark datasets using multiple SOTA HMP backbones (PGBIG, siMLPe, MotionMixer, and LTD) demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our frameworks.
#05Nov 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.