#01Sep 4, 2026
cs.RO
What Matters, When? Diagnosing and Improving Conditional Visual Grounding in Visuomotor Imitation Policies
Vivek Chavan, Pengtao Xie, Yahuan Shi and 3 more
Visuomotor imitation policies can achieve high performance under in-distribution visual conditions yet fail when visually similar objects or receptacles are introduced. We study this behavior as a problem of conditional visual grounding: the visual target required for successful control changes with the manipulation phase and, in more complex tasks, with the observed task state. Using Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT), we systematically introduce distractor objects and receptacles with controlled color and shape similarity and localize failures to picking and placement. We find that distractor sensitivity is specific to both the type of visual similarity and the manipulation stage. Guided by this diagnosis, we evaluate distractor augmentation, phase-dependent attention regularization, and appearance-based visual prompting as complementary interventions for improving target selection while preserving spatial information required for control. These interventions substantially improve robustness in simulation and on a physical UR3e. We further examine the same failure pattern in a pretrained vision-language-action policy on a state-conditioned instrument-handling task, where the observed state of a medical instrument determines the correct destination. Together, the results show that visual distractors can cause incorrect object or destination selection even when the underlying manipulation skill remains intact, and that explicitly improving target selection can substantially recover performance across distinct visuomotor policy-learning regimes.
#02Sep 4, 2026
cs.CV
CrossDepth: Geometry-Constrained Attention for Generalizable Multi-View Surround Depth Estimation
Samer Abualhanud, Max Mehltretter
Reliable 3D understanding of the surrounding environment is a core requirement for autonomous driving. Multi-view surround camera rigs provide broad scene coverage, but the spatially adjacent images typically overlap only minimally. Consequently, the depth of most pixels must be inferred from monocular appearance cues. These cues can appear differently across images and may therefore be interpreted differently by the depth estimation model. We target two main sources of cross-image inconsistency: differences in camera intrinsics and the limited receptive field of each image. We address the former by conditioning the features on per-pixel camera-aware ray embeddings, enabling the network to account for camera-dependent variations in monocular cues. We address the latter by extending each pixel's context beyond its own image through cross-image attention constrained to geometrically plausible regions, derived from the calibrated rig setup. The model is trained in a fully self-supervised manner based on photometric consistency. Evaluations on DDAD and nuScenes show improved overall depth accuracy and cross-image depth consistency over state-of-the-art self-supervised methods under in-domain and cross-domain evaluation. Code is available at https://abualhanud.github.io/CrossDepthPage/.
#03Sep 4, 2026
cs.CV
Conserved Immune Topology Improves Pathology Foundation Model Generalization for Cross-Cancer MSI-H Prediction
Dasari Naga Raju
Pathology foundation models integrated with multiple instance learning achieve competitive accuracy within single-cancer cohorts, yet cross-cancer generalization remains unresolved due to organ-specific histological and architectural differences. In this paper, we propose Conserved Immune Topology (CIT), a lightweight spatial representation for cross-cancer MSI-H prediction that augments foundation-model embeddings with biologically motivated immune descriptors. CIT uses unsupervised clustering to identify immune-associated tiles, then encodes tertiary lymphoid structures, peritumoral immune reactions, multi-scale tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte density, and immune-tumor mixing from frozen foundation-model embeddings and tile coordinates without requiring annotations or target-domain data. The proposed method was evaluated under cross-site and cross-cancer settings using CPTAC-COAD and TCGA-STAD cohorts, which introduce scanner variability, distribution shifts, and organ-specific architectural variations. Zero-shot cross-cancer transfer with CIT increased TransMIL AUC from 0.6627 to 0.7161, an absolute gain of 0.0534 (p=0.003), with consistent improvements across all three MIL aggregators. These results suggest that spatial immune topology provides potentially an organ-invariant representation for MSI-H prediction, supporting cross-cancer generalization of pathology foundation models.
#04Sep 4, 2026
cs.CV
Adaptive Gated Deepfake Detection for Low-Resolution and Resource-Constrained Environments
Vaishnavi Sen, Cody Laurie, Rashida Hasan
Deepfake detection models often rely on high-quality inputs, fixed inference paths, and computationally expensive architectures, limiting their use in low-resolution and resource-constrained settings. This paper proposes AdaGate-DF, an adaptive gated deepfake detection framework that uses image-quality cues to route samples through a dual multi-exit system so high-quality images can exit earlier and save compute. We evaluated AdaGate-DF against MaD-CoRN, DefakeHop++, and ShuffleNetV2 on two benchmark datasets (Celeb-DF and FaceForensics++) under multiple configurations to test image resolution dependence and training and inference efficiency. On Celeb-DF, AdaGate-DF achieves an AUC of 0.9370, outperforming MaD-CoRN and DefakeHop++ while maintaining a low inference latency. Resolution-based testing shows consistent improvement as input resolution increases, reaching an AUC of 0.9708 at 384 by 384. The FaceForensics++ results highlight that AdaGate-DF remains effective under class imbalance, following competitive results with evaluated models. Overall, AdaGate-DF demonstrated a practical balance between detection performance, uncertainty-aware prediction, and computational efficiency for variable-quality deepfake detection.
#05Sep 4, 2026
cs.CV
Compact Neural Appearance Models for Efficient Gaussian Splatting
Florian Hahlbohm, Jorge Condor, Linus Franke and 2 more
Explicit primitive-based radiance fields such as 3D Gaussian Splatting typically model view-dependent appearance using low-order spherical harmonics (SH). Although efficient to evaluate, SH coefficients dominate per-primitive storage and memory traffic, while their band-limited basis restricts angular detail. We present a thorough, end-to-end comparison of SH and recent spherical appearance models and introduce an implicit alternative that decodes compact per-primitive latent codes using a tiny shared MLP. We integrate all models into the same optimized pipeline, fusing their forward and backward passes into a differentiable CUDA rasterizer and provide a portable WebGL viewer for laptop and mobile GPUs. Our evaluation across reconstruction quality, memory use, and optimization and rendering performance shows that recent spherical models offer the strongest overall quality-efficiency trade-off. Our neural representation is the most compact model evaluated and, compared to third-degree SH, reduces the per-primitive appearance footprint from 192 to 28 bytes, accelerates optimization by 1.3$\times$, while improving reconstruction quality. We further analyze how appearance parametrization shapes optimization, identifying differences in recovered geometry and the tendency of expressive models to absorb non-static scene content. Together, our framework and analysis provide practical guidance for replacing SH beyond what image metrics alone can capture.