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

#01Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

When GeoFMs Meet VHR: Benchmarking Foundation Models on Very High Resolution Earth Observation Imagery

Kshitij Raj Sharma, Pierre Adorni, Minh-Tan Pham and 2 more

Geospatial foundation models are a widely adopted starting point for remote sensing tasks. Most are pretrained on Sentinel-1/2 and Landsat imagery at a ground sampling distance (GSD) of 10m or coarser. Many applications instead rely on very high resolution (VHR) imagery, where individual buildings, roads, and amenities are resolved. We study which pretraining regimes transfer well to this scale. We introduce VHR-Bench, a benchmark suite of ten datasets at 1.5m GSD or finer spanning five task families, eight application domains, and both satellite and aerial platforms. We evaluate twelve encoders in three pretraining tiers with frozen backbones at two training-data fractions. We find that both pretraining on large natural-image collections and VHR-specific pretraining transfer effectively to VHR tasks, with complementary strengths. SkySense leads when labels are scarce; at the full label fraction the web-pretrained DINOv3 ViT-L edges ahead, with the two close together there. Encoders pretrained only on Sentinel-scale imagery transfer least well under RGB input. Guided by these complementary results, we continue the self-supervised pretraining of DINOv3 ViT-L on 1.02 million held-out VHR tiles and evaluate the resulting encoder without changing the downstream protocol. The continued model gives a clear improvement over the released backbone when labels are scarce and a modest one at the full fraction, at no increase in inference parameters or compute. These findings support a generalize-then-specialize strategy: already strong, broad natural-image pretraining can be further improved by a short VHR continuation stage while preserving its general visual features.

#02Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

OcTreeMamba: Topology-Aware Mamba for 3D Medical Segmentation via Octree Sparsification

Kaixiang Mai, Jiaqi Yu, Yuzhu Ji and 4 more

Accurate segmentation of 3D anatomical structures is crucial to medical image analysis. Recently, Mamba-based approaches have achieved promising segmentation performance in capturing long-range dependencies with linear-time computational complexity. However, heuristic selective scanning strategies inherently disrupt the intrinsic spatial hierarchy and increase computational redundancy, ignoring the inherent sparsity of 3D anatomical structures. To this end, we propose OcTreeMamba, a hierarchical framework that incorporates Octree structures into SSM, achieving 3D topology-aware long-range context feature propagation and integration. Specifically, a Structure Learner performs anatomy-adaptive structured sparsification through hierarchical gating and Gumbel-Softmax sampling, enabling differentiable selection of anatomical regions. The selected regions are subsequently organized by a Dynamic Octree Builder into a multi-level topology that preserves their hierarchical connectivity. Based on the constructed Octree, a bidirectional Tree-SSM propagates and integrates contextual features along connectivity-aware leaf--parent--root and root--parent--leaf trajectories. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our proposed OcTreeMamba achieves competitive performance \wrt topological continuity and computational efficiency, particularly for recovering the complex structure on vascular datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/MikeMak123/OcTreeMamba.

#03Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

MV-Sign: Multi-View 3D Motion Integration and Enhanced Text-to-Motion Conditioning for Sign Language Production

Singyu Muk, Kaustubh Kundu, Kunyuan Xie and 2 more

Sign language production (SLP) aims to generate appropriate sign language motion from spoken language text. However, current 3D SLP methods suffer from noisy supervision and weak text conditioning. Specifically, these methods typically rely on pseudo-3D motion data fitted from single-view frontal videos, which introduces severe self-occlusion and loses fine-grained hand details, ultimately degrading downstream production. To overcome these limitations, we propose a comprehensive framework that jointly integrates multi-view 3D motion data and optimizes the text-conditioning pathway. First, we introduce How2Sign-MV3D, a high-fidelity dataset constructed via a novel cross-view curation pipeline that fuses multi-view estimates to resolve occlusions and filter non-signing segments. Second, we design a robust SLP model incorporating a sign-aware spatio-temporal VQ-VAE (ST-VQVAE) for joint body-hand tokenization, a pseudo-gloss adapter, and keyframe-aware retrieval to enhance text-to-motion alignment. Evaluated on the How2Sign benchmark, our framework reduces body and hand DTW-PA-JPE by 32.8% and 20.9% respectively compared to the state-of-the-art. Finally, we release two new high-quality 3D datasets, ASLCitizen-3D and MM-WAuslan-MV3D, alongside SGNify-MV as a multi-view video benchmark to support broader community research.

#04Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

BiGrounder: Bidirectional Training Unlocks the Potential of GUI Grounding

Dengyao Shi, Tianyu Fu, Fei Hu and 6 more

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding aims to map natural language instructions to precise operational coordinates, serving as a critical task for autonomous agent interaction. Current approaches formalize GUI grounding as predicting action-coordinate pairs from instructions, with end-to-end training supervised solely by final coordinates. Training datasets typically provide only a small number of descriptions per target coordinate, whereas real-world scenarios involve a much larger set of varied descriptions for the same target, which limits robustness to linguistic variation. While recent GUI grounding paradigms have begun employing reinforcement learning to enhance localization accuracy, models with limited exploratory capability before reinforcement yield constrained improvements even with identical training data during the reinforcement phase. To overcome these limitations, we propose a bidirectional reward paradigm that enables model self-reinforcement. During SFT, bidirectional training equips the model to generate action descriptions from target coordinates. During RL, the model samples semantically consistent instruction variations on-policy and grounds each variation back to its target. A cycle-consistency gate couples semantic quality to grounding success, turning the model's own instruction policy into a source of continually refreshed reinforcement trajectories. Our 4B-parameter model achieves competitive accuracy across five grounding benchmarks in our evaluation, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed training paradigm. https://github.com/Spell-shi/BiGrounder

#05Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

Structure from Collision via Hypothesis-Space Reasoning

Takuhiro Kaneko

Knowledge of the hidden interior structure of an object, including the presence and location of cavities, is essential for predictive simulation, robotic manipulation, and nondestructive inspection. However, such cavities leave no direct signature on the static visible surface, making collision-induced deformation one of the few cues used to infer their presence. Structure from Collision (SfC) addresses this problem by recovering the hidden interior structure of an object from multiview observations of a collision event. SfC is challenging for two reasons: hidden cavities are only indirectly observable through surface motion, and voids correspond to the absence of material, making direct optimization using standard density representations difficult. The density-based SfC baseline inherits both difficulties. Surface-matching gradients do not directly indicate the cavity location, while density gradients can be weak or uninformative inside or near void regions. Therefore, we reformulate SfC as hypothesis-space reasoning, representing hidden cavities as explicit structural hypotheses whose variables encode available structural assumptions rather than relying on implicit density updates. A global stage performs gradient-free optimization over this hypothesis space using forward-only material point method (MPM) simulation. A local stage then refines the selected hypothesis as a Lagrangian particle system through gradient-based optimization using differentiable MPM simulation. On the SfC benchmark, our method improves hidden-structure reconstruction and future prediction over the density-based SfC baseline. Interior-topology stress tests and robustness analyses characterize its scope and limitations. The project page is available at https://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/people/kaneko.takuhiro/projects/sfc-hypothesis/.