#01Sep 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.
#02Sep 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.
#03Sep 4, 2026
cs.CV
Cross-Domain Tracker Adaptation Without Target-Domain Labels via Vision-Language Agents
Daniel Davila, Ravikumar Balakrishnan, Mike Cochran
We present a system that uses a Vision-Language Model (VLM) as a diagnostic agent for adapting a detect-to-track pipeline to a new target domain without access to target-domain labels. Rather than optimizing against annotated metrics, the VLM directly inspects rendered tracking outputs, identifies visual failure modes, and recommends parameter updates through an iterative tuning loop. We first demonstrate that ground-truth-supervised hyperparameter transfer can be brittle. On MOT17->MOT20, applying a source-derived oracle configuration reduces mean HOTA by 0.090, from a target-domain ceiling of 0.357, to 0.267. Without using any target-domain labels, our VLM-based tuner recovers 67.8% of this lost headroom, finishing within 0.029 HOTA of the target ceiling; on the highest-density target sequence, it recovers up to 86.7%. We further show that label-free Bayesian optimization with handcrafted proxy objectives struggles under large domain shifts and can degrade configurations that are already strong. In contrast, the VLM tuner acts selectively: when its visual diagnosis reveals no clear failure mode, it declines to modify the configuration, preserving performance on easy transfers while improving hard ones. Finally, we characterize the conditions under which this approach succeeds, namely, when domain shift manifests through exposed detection-level parameters, versus where it is less effective, such as MOT17->DanceTrack, where the source oracle is already near-optimal.
#04Sep 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/.
#05Sep 4, 2026
cs.CV
Training-Free Logical and Structural Anomaly Detection via Calibrated Fusion
Changyi Li, Miao Yu, Kai Dong and 1 more
Industrial anomaly detection must handle two distinct defect families: structural anomalies, which manifest as local texture corruptions, and logical anomalies, which violate global rules on object count, composition, or arrangement. Existing detectors typically favor one family at the expense of the other. In particular, training-free methods effectively exploit frozen representations but lack an explicit notion of object count, while methods that reason about counts usually rely on category-specific component modeling. We show that counting ability can be introduced into training-free anomaly detection without additional training or part-level supervision. Our key idea is a normal-set calibration that aligns heterogeneous anomaly cues using statistics from normal images, enabling their direct fusion within a unified training-free framework. Built upon this calibration, our detector combines complementary frozen cues to address both logical and structural anomalies. On MVTec-LOCO, our method achieves image-level AUROCs of 89.0 and 95.9 on logical and structural anomalies, respectively, yielding a 92.5 average---the best among training-free detectors in our comparison. It remains competitive with methods requiring network training or part annotations, while its structural variant matches PatchCore on MVTec-AD (99.1 image-AUROC), suggesting that the proposed calibration generalizes beyond logical anomaly detection.