ML Reads

Personal arXiv list

ML papers to read today.

Pick a topic and keep a small daily list of papers worth opening.

Refresh queueDaily mix

Today's queue

5 papers

#01Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

Scal3R: Learning Efficient Multi-Relative Pose Query for Scalable Online 3D Reconstruction

Chin-Yang Lin, Yang-Che Sun, Cheng Sun and 5 more

Online 3D reconstruction models perform poorly on long videos. This happens because regressing poses relative to a fixed first-frame anchor forces extrapolation far beyond the training distribution. Small drifts accumulate and amplify into significant geometric collapse. However, we observe that per-frame depth remains stable throughout this failure. The backbone's local geometry remains intact; only the global pose head breaks down. Motivated by this decoupling, we introduce Scal3R. This approach reformulates online reconstruction as multi-reference relative pose querying. We use lightweight learnable tokens, which make up about ~1% of the parameters, and inject them into a completely frozen backbone via asymmetric attention. This setup queries poses relative to multiple past keyframes. An online pose-graph optimization system with loop closure suppresses long-range drift. Scal3R reaches convergence in 8 hours on a single GPU. It reduces the average ATE by over 60% on KITTI compared to the online baseline. It also achieves state-of-the-art performance across Virtual KITTI, Sintel, TUM-Dynamic, ScanNet, and 7-Scenes. Project page: https://linjohnss.github.io/scal3r/

#02Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

Editable Visual Design

Junyan Ye, Wei Liu, Dongzhi Jiang and 9 more

While diffusion base models such as GPT-Image-2 and Nano-Banana exhibit remarkable visual expressiveness, their end-to-end generation inherently yields flattened bitmaps with error-prone text, precluding layer-wise post-editing. Conversely, code-based visual generation via Coding Agents provides precise layout control and decoupled layers, yet remains constrained by a lack of global aesthetic intuition and the difficulty of coding complex visual assets. To address this, we propose Editable Visual Design, a new paradigm driven by a Coding Agent. We designate the VLM as the ``creative brain'' for requirement comprehension, task planning, and aesthetic judgment, while utilizing the image generation model as an on-demand ``visual world simulator'' to synthesize standalone visual assets. Operating under an ``imagine first, then act'' closed-loop workflow, the agent generates isolated assets, writes native HTML/CSS, and iteratively refines the design against visual rendering feedback. Furthermore, Agent Design Replay faithfully reproduces the creative and reasoning trajectory akin to that of professional human designers. Ultimately, the system delivers editable artifacts with decoupled layers and real text, enabling users to perform intuitive mouse dragging and layout adjustments on a graphical user interface. Validations on posters, infographics, and other scenarios show that this paradigm successfully achieves both refined aesthetics and production-grade editability.

#03Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

GraFT: A Training-Free Framework for Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models via 3D Scene Graphs

Junqing Du, Fernando Ropero, Erkin Turkoz and 2 more

3D spatial reasoning underpins understanding and acting in the physical world, yet it remains unreliable in current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). These models falter at precise geometric measurement, at transforming between egocentric and allocentric viewpoints, and at grounding fine-grained appearance. The most common remedies fine-tune the model on large-scale curated spatial-reasoning datasets or attach dedicated encoders for 3D geometry, which typically couples the solution to costly supervision and a specific backbone. We instead introduce GraFT, a training-free framework that supplies the missing 3D structure through a compact, easily maintained 3D scene graph (3DSG). From this 3DSG, GraFT provides three spatial reasoning capabilities: (1) deterministic geometry through symbolic tools, (2) allocentric layout through a bird's-eye-view (BEV) rendering, and (3) visual-attribute grounding through task-relevant egocentric frames. On ScanQA, GraFT improves every metric over the same-backbone baseline, raising CIDEr by 27%. On VSI-Bench, GraFT improves frozen MLLMs by up to 65%, surpassing every proprietary and general-purpose open-source baseline, and several prominent fine-tuned spatial models.

#04Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

Principia: Relational Physics Tests for Video Models

Varun Varma Thozhiyoor, Shivam Tripathi, Venkatesh Babu Radhakrishnan and 1 more

Evaluating physical reasoning in video models is difficult because absolute motion measurements depend on frame rate, object scale, and camera calibration, all of which are often ambiguous or unavailable in generated video. We propose a different approach. When two objects in the same scene obey the same physical law, their motions must satisfy predictable relationships, and these relationships hold independent of calibration. We introduce Principia, a benchmark that evaluates Newtonian physics through relational consistency between paired objects. Principia spans eight phenomena - gravity, restitution, friction, rotational inertia, projectile motion, momentum, pendulum, and mass-spring oscillation - across translational, rotational, collisional, and oscillatory dynamics, using real-world scenes recorded under controlled protocols. We also introduce a calibration-independent consistency score that quantifies physical violation directly in image space. Across thousands of generations from six state-of-the-art video generators, no model exceeds 0.42 on Principia despite all scoring around 0.8 on VBench. Vision-language models are evaluated on their ability to detect relational physics violations, with the best model achieving only 67% accuracy and most performing near chance level.

#05Sep 3, 2026

cs.CV

DSAQuant: Denoising-Stage-Aligned Quantization-Aware Training for Video Generation

Shuaiting Li, Zelin Gao, Haibin Shen and 3 more

Video diffusion models (VDMs) have achieved impressive progress in text-to-video generation, but their high memory and computational costs hinder practical deployment. Quantization-aware training (QAT) is an effective solution for compressing and accelerating advanced generative models without runtime overhead at inference. However, existing QAT methods suffer from a distinctive challenge in VDMs: while they often preserve prompt semantics, global layout, and coarse motion, the quantized model severely degrades visual details, texture fidelity, and sharpness. In this paper, we trace this degradation to the timestep-agnostic design of conventional quantization pipelines, which overlooks the stage-wise functionality of video denoising. In VDMs, early denoising steps mainly establish global structure and motion, whereas middle and late steps refine local appearance and high-frequency details. Based on this insight, we propose DSAQuant, a Denoising-Stage-Aligned Quantization-aware training framework for VDMs. During training, Denoising-Stage Oriented Supervision preserves teacher distillation in early steps for stable structure planning, while shifting later steps toward target-driven optimization to enhance detail reconstruction. During inference, Denoising-Stage Gated Guidance disables CFG in the final denoising steps to prevent it from amplifying quantization-induced errors into high-frequency artifacts. Extensive experiments on the Wan and CogVideoX families under W4A4 and W3A3 settings show that DSAQuant consistently outperforms the SOTA QAT baseline, improving the VBench average score by up to 6.60 under aggressive W3A3 quantization while preserving strong text-video alignment. These results demonstrate that effective VDM quantization requires not only reducing quantization error, but also aligning quantization training and inference with the stage-wise nature of video diffusion.