#01Sep 4, 2026
cs.CV
UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletons
Linzhan Mou, Jiahui Lei, Zhiyang Dou and 4 more
Recent advances in automatic rigging now deliver animation-ready 3D assets at scale, yet generating the motion to drive them remains a bottleneck. Existing learned animators are topology-constrained: they rely on category-specific templates or require per-skeleton fine-tuning and reference motions at inference. We present UniMate, a unified foundation model that synthesizes articulated motion for arbitrary skeletons from a rigged 3D asset and a text prompt, with no test-time optimization or per-skeleton retraining. UniMate introduces a topology-aware diffusion transformer, which integrates skeletal topology into attention via three mechanisms: (1) a graph-aware attention bias from pairwise joint relations and geodesic distances; (2) a spectral rotary position embedding generalizing RoPE to arbitrary kinematic trees via the graph Laplacian; and (3) a global topological conditioner attention-pooled from the rest-pose skeleton. We also curate UniML3D, 13,006 motion sequences spanning bipedal, quadrupedal, avian, marine, insectoid, serpentine, and articulated rigid objects with unified canonicalization and text pairing. Trained on this dataset, UniMate outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in quality, generalization, and efficiency, and supports zero-shot cross-topology transfer, in-betweening, expansion, and text-guided editing. Our project page is available at https://linzhanmou.com/unimate/.
#02Sep 4, 2026
cs.CV
SMILE: Self-Explainable Multimodal Information Bottleneck for Medical Diagnosis
Yuqing Yang, Alexander Schmatz, Zhaozhao Ma and 3 more
Explainability is increasingly seen as a crucial requirement in AI-based medical diagnosis, particularly in safety-critical clinical decision-making. Most existing explainability methods in healthcare operate in a post-hoc manner and are predominantly designed for unimodal data, which limits their applicability in increasingly prevalent multimodal diagnostic settings. This paper addresses the problem of self-explainable multimodal diagnosis by formulating it within the information bottleneck (IB) framework. We propose a unified learning paradigm that jointly optimizes predictive performance and modality-specific explainability by identifying the most informative elements inside each modality that contribute to diagnostic decisions. To enable tractable and stable optimization, we employ a matrix-based Renyi's $α$-order entropy functional under the assumption of sufficiently expressive encoders. Extensive experiments on representative medical datasets spanning heterogeneous modalities demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves strong diagnostic performance, including an absolute accuracy improvement of 9.1 percentage points on the iCTCF dataset. Moreover, the learned explanations provide transparent and modality-aware insights into feature relevance, thereby improving both the explainability and generalization.
#03Sep 4, 2026
cs.CV
Learning Spatial-Spectral Refinement and Calibrating Complementary Observations for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution
Liqian Yang, Xingchi Chen, Xinfeng Gui and 2 more
Hyperspectral and multispectral image fusion (HMIF) aims to reconstruct a high-resolution hyperspectral image (HR-HSI) by combining the fine spatial details of a high-resolution multispectral image (HR-MSI) with the rich spectral information of a low-resolution hyperspectral image (LR-HSI). Recent advances in implicit neural representations (INRs) have enabled flexible coordinate-based modeling for HMIF; however, existing INR-based approaches may not fully capture fine-grained spatial structures and rich spectral dependencies. Moreover, the LR-HSI and HR-MSI are primarily incorporated through degradation-consistency constraints, leaving their complementary information underexploited. To address these limitations, we propose Two-Stage Reconstruction with Implicit Tensor Neural Representation (TSR-ITNR), a unified self-supervised framework integrating representation refinement and observation-guided calibration. In Stage 1, TSR-ITNR learns an implicit Tucker representation and refines its low-rank spatial coefficient tensor and spectral basis to better capture fine spatial structures and interband correlations. A fixed pretrained denoiser further provides a deep prior for the preliminary reconstruction. In Stage 2, parameter-free calibration derives complementary and noninterfering corrections from both observations to recover information insufficiently captured in Stage 1. Theoretical analysis establishes the geometry-preserving property of spectral refinement and the orthogonal complementarity of calibration. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate strong quantitative, visual, and spectral reconstruction performance without ground-truth HR-HSI supervision. Beyond conventional reconstruction metrics, we further assess the effectiveness of TSR-ITNR using downstream semantic segmentation accuracy.
#04Sep 4, 2026
cs.CV
Think-Verify-Revise: Neuro-Symbolic Visual Reasoning with Vision-Language Models and Dynamic Logic Tensor Networks
Homayoun Afshari, Pietro Basci, Alessandro Russo and 1 more
Visual reasoning tasks require a system to jointly perceive visual content and apply formal relational constraints---a combination that neither pure neural nor purely symbolic approaches handle well in isolation. This paper proposes a Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) framework that closes this gap by tightly coupling a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for automatic First-Order Logic (FOL) rule induction with a Dynamic Logic Tensor Network (D-LTN) for differentiable rule verification, in a closed iterative feedback loop. The VLM receives a small set of labelled visual examples and proposes candidate FOL rules conforming to a strict grammar (Think); the D-LTN is automatically assembled from these rules at runtime and evaluates them grounding on CNN-produced visual embeddings (Verify); and verification failures are fed back to guide the VLM's next hypothesis (Revise). Evaluated on the ViSudo-PC benchmark across four visual domains (MNIST, EMNIST, KMNIST, FMNIST), the system induces valid Sudoku constraint rules using only three training examples as visual context. The proposed method achieves AUC scores matching or outperforming previous methods (NeuPSL, LTN), showing the potential for automatic rule discovery through VLM. Code is available at https://github.com/homayoun-afshari/nesy.
#05Sep 4, 2026
cs.CV
From Interpretability Methods to Interpretable Models
Julien Colin, Nuria Oliver, Thomas Serre
More than a decade in, explainable AI (XAI) for computer vision has assembled a mature toolbox: attribution, feature visualization, concept-based, and circuit-based methods. Yet almost all of the field's effort has gone into building and comparing these methods, and little into the question they were meant to answer---how interpretable are our models, and are we making progress as they evolve? We argue for shifting the field's focus from methods to models, along two complementary lines. One is already within reach: existing tools let us characterize and compare what different models represent and compute. The other is harder, and largely neglected: whether a model can actually be understood by the humans who rely on it---the independent evaluators on whom trust and certification depend, not the experts confirming what they already expect. It can only be measured, not inferred. We review why the toolbox is mature enough to support both, survey the thin body of work comparing models, draw a parallel to systems neuroscience, and close with a model-centric XAI agenda.