#01Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Motion-guided Contrastive Regularization For Latent World Models
Yiwen Chen, Qiqi Hou, Jisoo Jeong and 3 more
JEPA-style world models learn action-conditioned latent dynamics without reconstructing observations, but distributional regularization alone does not ensure that their representations preserve information needed for control. We identify static collapse, a failure mode in which the encoder preserves episode-specific static content while suppressing manipulation-relevant state changes. Because static content is temporally predictable yet diverse across episodes, this failure can persist despite regularizers such as SIGReg. A controlled study on OGBench-Cube shows that introducing randomized backgrounds substantially degrades planning performance while leaving the underlying manipulation task unchanged. To address this problem, we propose motion-guided contrastive regularization. Our approach compares predicted latent transitions with transitions to candidate observations from the same episode, reducing the usefulness of static background identity for distinguishing action outcomes. Optical-flow similarities provide soft contrastive targets, allowing candidates with similar motion to receive similar supervision. Combined with latent prediction and SIGReg, our objective encourages representations to preserve within-episode state distinctions and similarities between related transitions. Our method improves planning success over LeWorldModel (LeWM) from 52% to 78% on OGBench-Cube with randomized backgrounds and from 14% to 54% on LIBERO-Object, while maintaining comparable performance on four other visual-control benchmarks.
#02Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Trick-or-Treat: Adversarial Evaluation of Multimodal Medical Reasoning with Synthetic Images
Oishi Banerjee, Eujin Lee, Sung Eun Kim and 4 more
We used medical image synthesis to create a challenging multimodal evaluation framework that exposes hallucination behaviors in frontier models. Evaluating multimodal reasoning has historically been difficult because existing medical datasets rarely pair different image modalities, such as radiographs and external clinical photographs. To address this gap, we introduce Trick-or-Treat, an adversarial multimodal medical benchmark that pairs real chest radiographs with synthetic clinical photographs to challenge models' cross-modal reasoning. For each of a wide range of conditions, we created two pairs of images, where the pairs share a single chest radiograph but contain different external photographs. In matched pairs, the chest radiograph and photograph both contain findings suggesting the same disease (e.g., varicella pneumonia suggested by lung opacities and crusted skin lesions seen in chickenpox). In mismatched pairs, the photograph depicts an alternative clinical finding that would not lead to the same unifying diagnosis (e.g. replacing crusted skin lesions with ordinary acne). Synthetic photograph generation allows clinical findings to be varied while the person's features and photographic setting stay consistent, reducing confounding. In an investigation of three frontier models, we found that models hallucinated clinically significant photograph findings in 45-57.5% of mismatched pairs, up from 25-37.5% for the same photographs shown alone. When faced with mismatched pairs, models tended to ignore mismatches and instead hallucinated findings that better matched the radiograph (e.g. misreading acne as crusted skin lesions to justify diagnosing chickenpox). Trick-or-Treat both demonstrates concerning error pattern in frontier models' medical reasoning and provides a proof of concept for the use of synthetic images in adversarial multimodal evaluation.
#03Nov 4, 2026
cs.RO
Perceptive Humanoid Motion from Simulation
Siyuan Hu, Abulikemu Abuduweili, Yue Meng and 5 more
Humanoid robots have the potential to automate a wide range of physical tasks. Progress toward generalist humanoid autonomy, however, remains constrained by a data bottleneck: mapping pixels and free-form language to low-level joint commands requires paired supervision, and no corpus of such data exists at sufficiently large scale. Some approaches rely on human teleoperation and wearable capture devices, which require at least an hour of human time to produce an hour of data. We present HALO, a humanoid autonomy system powered by a pipeline that synthesizes vision-language-motion data across a thousand procedurally generated homes. The corpus scales with compute rather than human labor. HALO acquires a repertoire of physical skills, including sitting on chairs, navigating to named objects, stepping sideways through half-open doors, crouching and crawling beneath tables, and pushing boxes. It orchestrates these skills to solve composite, long-horizon tasks. Without ever seeing a real home during training, HALO transfers zero-shot to the physical world, achieving a 91% success rate across 360 trials in six unmapped real-world environments. See https://apple-aiml-research.github.io/ml-halo/ for code and videos.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Route First, See Later: Enabling Vision Agents to Reason Scientifically by Separating Routing Policy from Action Spaces
Shubhabrata Mukherjee, Jeffrey Donatelli, Daniela Ushizima
Scientific image-analysis workflows require agents to select among diverse capabilities like description, detection, counting, and segmentation. Current multi-tool architectures conflate intent interpretation with visual execution, masking whether a failure arises from flawed reasoning (misrouting) or failed perception (invalid tool execution). This lack of auditability renders agents unreliable for high-stakes scientific automation. We introduce ZETA, an extensible architecture that operationalizes the decoupling of routing policy from action execution. ZETA resolves scientific intent before invoking specialized visual tools, treating measurement as a deterministic operation grounded in explicit geometry rather than generative output. This architecture exposes the "black box" of agent decision-making, allowing routing correctness and downstream execution to be evaluated as independent failure modes. To our knowledge, we provide the first controlled study in scientific vision-agent routing that isolates explicit routing-policy specification while holding the legal action interface fixed. Evaluation on a zero-shot benchmark of 51 scientific-intent queries shows that explicit routing semantics can substantially improve routing accuracy, particularly at semantically adjacent action boundaries, although improvements vary across models. For Qwen 3.8, explicit routing-policy specification improves segmentation routing accuracy from 6.2% to 75.0% and detection routing accuracy from 60.0% to 100%. ZETA's execution traces make routing decisions and downstream artifacts separately observable, providing a basis for distinguishing intent-selection errors from visual execution failures. ZETA establishes the necessary infrastructure to isolate execution errors from interpretive ones, a critical requirement for deploying reliable scientific vision agents.
#05Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
PixelSpline: Continuous Space-Time Video Super-Resolution via Endpoint-Anchored Shared Pixel Trajectories
Wanqi Yuan, Nianyi Li
Existing continuous space-time video super-resolution methods often infer motion from only two endpoint frames and model the two motion directions independently, making them vulnerable to ambiguous correspondence and inconsistent trajectories. We introduce a continuous STVSR framework that combines long-context encoding, continuous HR feature lifting, and an endpoint-anchored PixelSpline. Long-range observations provide more reliable endpoint representations, while continuous upsampling constructs detailed appearance features directly on the requested HR grid. PixelSpline explicitly models each pixel's motion as a single continuous trajectory shared by both endpoints. Using this trajectory, our method warps endpoint colors into a coarse intermediate frame and aligns the HR features for residual reconstruction. Experiments across spatial and temporal upsampling settings demonstrate that the proposed framework offers a favorable quality--efficiency trade-off.