#01Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Where Do Reported Long-Video QA Gains Come From? A Controlled Audit of Frame Selection, Evidence Injection, and Expert Routing
Shih-Yao Lin
Long-video question answering is usually studied as frame selection: which few frames should a vision-language model see? We introduce VideoRouteAudit, a controlled audit that separates this choice from two alternatives, injecting non-visual evidence and routing to another answering model. It holds the backbone, frame budget, decoding, prompt and grader fixed while varying one decision at a time. On the full Video-MME long bucket (n=900, K=8), no tested selector significantly improves over uniform sampling. The largest selection-only estimate is +1.9 pt (95% CI [-1.2,+5.0]) and our cascade is +1.2 pt [-1.7,+4.1]; all are equivalent to uniform within +/-5 pt. The same contrasts are unstable at the n=200 subset scale commonly used: three of four are up to 3.8x larger, one reverses sign, and resampled 200-item subsets reverse the full-bucket effect's sign in 35.8% of draws. The audit also corrects our own first results. The anomaly-domain "+ASR" arms injected no text, so the pooled +4.7 pt gain was selection plus a development prefix. With transcripts, ASR lowers XD-Violence accuracy by 10.0 pt when appended after the question and not at all when placed before it, and lowers UCF-Crime by 13.0 pt either way; on Video-MME, placing it first adds about 4 pt (7 on Qwen2-VL) to uniform sampling and to the cascade alike (post hoc, unadjusted). Swapping the answering model gives the largest contrast (+15.1 pt on MUSIC-AVQA, +33.3 pt on its worst type), but the same audio-visual expert with its soundtrack silenced keeps 92% of the gain (69% with a mismatched soundtrack), so the contrast is mostly a model swap. Code, per-item predictions and scripts that recompute every statistic are available at https://github.com/mikeslin-ir/long-video-qa-audit.
#02Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Occlusion for Free: Detecting Occlusion from the Disagreement Between Two Monocular Distance Cues
Chibueze Praise Onyenweaku, Toyibat Adele, Sikirulahi Opeyemi Abdulkareem and 1 more
Knowing that a pedestrian is occluded is useful to a robot even when the detector cannot recover the hidden pixels, but occlusion estimators are normally trained on occlusion annotations that deployment settings rarely have. We show that occlusion can be read off two distance estimates a camera-only pipeline already computes. Apparent height is largely unchanged by occlusion, because the detected box still spans the whole person; monocular metric depth is pulled toward the occluder, because the nearest surface inside the box is what a depth map reports. Only their ordering matters, so no focal length, stature, or depth scale is needed, provided the depth model's error is close to a pure gain, a condition that can be checked without labels. The score detects heavy occlusion on KITTI with AUC 0.909 (0.888 over all annotated pedestrians, including those the detector misses), requires no training and no occlusion labels, and is not a proxy for range: within fixed distance bands it holds AUC 0.894-0.925 while true distance alone sits near chance. On synthetic CARLA scenes with measured visibility it reaches 0.819, against 0.644 for distance alone. We arrived here after measuring three standard architectural responses to occlusion, depth fusion, occlusion-simulating augmentation, and attention, none of which improved detection outside its training distribution in the configurations we tested, and after finding that a detector trained on German roads loses half its accuracy on self-annotated street scenes in Lagos, Nigeria. Signals that need no local annotation are worth more in settings that benchmarks do not represent.
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Vis2State: Visual Reasoning through Executable State Abstractions
Sheng Jin, Wentao Liu, Chen Qian
Solving visual puzzles requires both accurate interpretation of visual evidence and reliable computation under task-specific rules. Embedding visual assumptions and task constraints directly in solving code makes the represented problem difficult to inspect and revise independently. We introduce Vis2State, a training-free agentic framework that abstracts visual puzzles into explicit, revisable problem states linking visual inspection and execution. Visual inspection guides state construction and refinement, while generated programs solve the represented problem. The model constructs both the state and the program without predefined puzzle schemas or solving procedures. Inspection and execution feedback allow it to revise the problem representation and solving procedure independently. Vis2State achieves the state-of-the-art performance on four benchmarks. Cross-model evaluation further demonstrates consistent gains. Ablations, error analyses, and fixed-program state interventions further support the effectiveness of the state-centered design. The code will be made publicly available to facilitate future research.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
From Pixels to Actions - Towards Native Vision-Language-Action Policies
Weichen Fan, Haiwen Diao, Penghao Wu and 14 more
Vision-language-action models are typically built on a simple premise: perception is first compressed by visual encoders, and action reasoning begins only afterwards. Yet manipulation often hinges on precisely the visual signals most vulnerable to this abstraction, e.g., local geometry, boundaries, depth, and subtle state changes. This raises a fundamental question: should action policies inherit a fixed visual endpoint, or directly access evolving visual computation? We introduce NEO-VLA, a structurally encoder-free vision-language-action framework. Images are tokenized by lightweight patch convolutional layers and evolve jointly with language throughout the backbone, allowing a flow-matching action expert to draw from instruction-conditioned visual representations at different depths. This simple change reveals a consistent pattern. Native architectures outperform encoder-based counterparts under controlled comparisons; full fine-tuning reduces but does not erase the gap, and additional scale alone cannot recover it. More strikingly, layer-wise probing shows that the action-critical signals often peak well before the final visual representation. Across diverse manipulation settings and distribution shifts, NEO-VLA consequently achieves stronger and more robust control. Together, these results suggest that embodied control benefits from access to visual representations across the computational hierarchy, rather than a fixed encoder output.
#05Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
VIPA: View-Invariant Projector-Based Adversarial Attack
Jiyu Han, Qingyue Deng, Bingyao Huang
Projector-based adversarial attack aims to physically manipulate real-world scenes by projecting adversarial patterns, thereby causing deep image classifiers to produce incorrect predictions. However, existing stealthy projector-based adversarial attack methods model the project-and-capture process in a single and static view, limiting their view-invariant capability and practical applicability in dynamic environments. In this paper, we introduce View-Invariant Projector-Based Adversarial Attack (VIPA), a novel method designed to overcome these limitations by achieving both view-invariant and classifier-agnostic adversarial attacks in the physical world. We first leverage a view-invariant projector-camera system simulation method to model the physical interactions between projected patterns and real-world surfaces. To ensure robustness and stealthiness of the attack across different views, VIPA optimizes adversarial projections by aggregating simulated attack losses from multiple views. This joint optimization across diverse views helps maintain robustness regardless of the viewpoints. Finally, the optimized patterns are physically projected into real-world scenes, where they successfully fool various classifiers from different viewpoints, thereby enabling robust and practical view-invariant adversarial attacks. Our experiments in both targeted and untargeted attacks demonstrate that VIPA consistently achieves higher attack success rates than existing methods, while also enhancing stealthiness and ensuring minimal perceptual degradation across all tested views.