#01Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
CORE: Improving Compositional Reasoning in MLLM Embedding via Reranker Distillation
Tingyu Song, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang and 5 more
MLLM-based embedding models remain limited in compositional retrieval, often failing to distinguish scenes containing the same concepts but different attribute-object bindings. Yet the same backbone can resolve such distinctions when used as a cross-attentive reranker, motivating us to distill its compositional judgments into the embedding model. We propose CORE, which synthesizes candidate lists spanning five compositional matching levels and introduces a Rank-KL objective that trains the embedding model to reproduce the reranker's fine-grained ranking. We further introduce a graded evaluation protocol and compare contrastive learning, pairwise CoSENT, and listwise Rank-KL under the same data and tuning budget. Our comparison shows that both CoSENT and Rank-KL use the multi-level supervision more effectively than contrastive learning, with Rank-KL achieving the strongest overall performance. Across three compositional reasoning benchmarks (COLA, SUGARCREPE++, NEGBENCH), CORE-RERANKER-8B achieves an 82.7% total average, outperforming Jina-Reranker by 10.7 points, while CORE-EMBED-8B achieves the best total average (0.666) among all evaluated embedding models. The improvements transfer to the MCMR benchmark without sacrificing retrieval performance on COCO and Flickr30K.
#02Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
Beyond Retrieval: Progressive Latent Memory Evolution for Streaming Video Understanding
Hongyu Qu, Guangming Yao, Ling Xing and 7 more
Streaming video understanding requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to process continuous visual inputs and respond to user queries under strict causality and bounded memory. Existing approaches typically compress historical observations into an external memory bank and retrieve query-relevant evidence as additional visual context. Though effective, this store-and-retrieve paradigm keeps historical evidence as external visual context, preventing it from being internalized into a compact, evolving latent memory that can continuously guide streaming reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce LatentStream, a progressive latent working memory framework that shifts streaming memory from store-and-retrieve to retrieve-and-internalize. Specifically, LatentStream comprises three coordinated components. First, Query-agnostic Hierarchical Streaming Memory organizes visual history into short-, mid-, and long-term levels under a fixed memory budget through Jenks-guided adaptive consolidation. Once a query arrives, Hierarchical Latent Memory Evolution equips groups of latent memory tokens with progressively expanding memory receptive fields, enabling them to iteratively retrieve historical evidence from their corresponding scopes and internalize it into a compact, fixed-length latent memory. Finally, Progressive Confidence-guided Latent Memory Optimization constructs a hierarchical progression reward from group-wise predictive entropy and jointly refines the latent memory tokens and retrieved evidence, encouraging increasingly confident streaming reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LatentStream achieves new state-of-the-art results on existing online and offline video benchmarks.
#03Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
One Editor, Many Edits: A Unified Training-Free Framework for Diverse Video Editing
Adheesh Sunil Juvekar, Onkar Kishor Susladkar, Kiet A. Nguyen and 6 more
Video editing spans diverse editing paradigms, yet achieving high-quality instruction-guided and subject-guided editing within a single unified framework remains challenging. We introduce EditVid, a training-free framework combining sparse causal memory for local coherence, correspondence-based post-attention token injection for long-range identity preservation, and soft latent blending for edit locality. The same framework supports instruction-guided and reference-guided edits, including style transfer, attribute modification, object insertion, part-level editing, and subject replacement. On FiVE, EditVid achieves 78.16 FiVE-Acc, compared with 58.95 for the strongest evaluated training-free baseline, while obtaining competitive results on IVEBench. A user study further shows a 51.8\% overall preference for EditVid over 7 competing methods.
#04Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
TokenMatch: 3D Mesh Correspondence Transformer with Curvature-Guided Tokenisation
Adeela Islam, Zorah Lähner, Vittorio Murino and 1 more
While data-driven 3D shape correspondence estimation has recently seen substantial progress, robust matching under partial observations and strong non-isometric deformations remains challenging. Existing learning-based approaches often rely on hand-crafted descriptors or template-based representations, whereas recent generative models over functional maps suffer from high inference cost, limited interpretability, and poor generalisation to partial shapes. In response to these limitations, this paper introduces TokenMatch, a new transformer-based unified model for estimating 3D shape correspondences. Our feed-forward approach trained exclusively on BeCoS, a challenging non-isometric partial-to-partial shape-matching dataset, can generalise to matching full shapes without retraining or fine-tuning. TokenMatch uses self- and cross-attention mechanisms to efficiently learn patch-level and point-level relations as well as dense correspondences between shape pairs. Our core insight is that meshes can be adaptively tokenised into patches using shape curvature guidance, enabling effective learning of shape-specific geometric descriptors for correspondence estimation. We evaluate TokenMatch on standard benchmarks for partial and full shape matching, including CP2P, PSMAL, BeCoS, FAUST, SCAPE, and SHREC'19. Our method achieves consistently high performance, in most cases outperforming existing methods for partial and full shape matching in the mean geodesic error and intersection-over-union metrics, while also running faster at sub-second inference speeds.
#05Sep 3, 2026
cs.CV
The Shape of Time: Video-Token Contrast for Temporal Understanding in VideoLMs
Yumeng Shi, Quanyu Long, Yin Wu and 1 more
Seeing frames in order does not mean representing time. Modern VideoLMs receive ordered video streams, yet their main supervision acts on generated text rather than video-token representations where event dynamics should first emerge. This mismatch allows models to learn temporal answers from shortcuts such as objects, scenes, and language priors, without requiring internal video representations to capture event progression. To address this, we propose VT-Contrast, a representation-level temporal counterfactual objective for VideoLMs. Its design asks where temporal supervision should act and what temporal differences it should expose. VT-Contrast supervises selected late-layer last-frame video tokens, where temporal information is expected to be integrated before language generation, and contrasts order-preserving views with same-video reordered counterfactuals graded by Kendall tau distance. It requires no architectural changes, is compatible with diverse VideoLM training tasks, and improves overall performance across temporal understanding benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/ANDgate99/VT-Contrast.