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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

Deformable Contact-Aware 3D Object Placement

Songhe Wang, David Miller, Charles A. Kamhoua

Current language-guided 3D object placement typically predicts a rigid 6-DoF pose, ignoring the physical reality that indoor placements are dictated by contact. Consequently, predicted poses often float, interpenetrate supports, or fail to deform soft surfaces. We propose Deformable Contact-Aware Placement (DCAP), a framework that reframes placement as a drop-to-equilibrium process. Rather than predicting a static pose, DCAP constructs a semantic release state that specifies the drop location, object scale, and deformable components, allowing a coupled rigid-deformable simulator to settle the object under gravity and friction. This explicitly separates semantic intent from physical realization. Evaluated on a benchmark of 2,063 prompt-asset-scene cases, DCAP significantly outperforms static baselines. On standard placements, it improves VLM Physics & Naturalness by 21.2 points and human preference by 26.5 points over the strongest raw rigid baseline, while reducing mean penetration depth by 72.3%. Compared to simulated rollout baselines, DCAP reduces residual speed by 72.1%. Ultimately, our results prove that physically accurate 3D placement requires modeling semantic intent and physical realization as strictly separate processes.

#03Nov 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.

#04Nov 5, 2026

cs.GR

EDGAR: Efficient Diffusion-Driven Gaussian Avatar Refinement via Synthetic Failure

Kwan Yun, Minhyeok Bang, Colette Suhjung Koo and 1 more

Recent advances in Gaussian splatting have enabled efficient and photorealistic head avatar reconstruction, yet monocular video-based or image-based methods still suffer from under-constrained geometry and texture, leading to artifacts such as blurring, stretching, and temporal instability. We present EDGAR (Efficient Diffusion-Driven Gaussian Avatar Refinement), a conditional diffusion framework designed to enhance the quality of Gaussian avatars by correcting artifacts while preserving identity fidelity. To train EDGAR, we construct EDGAR-SET, a hybrid triplet dataset composed of real-captured and synthetic-rendered samples, which simulates realistic Gaussian avatar failure cases by pairing degraded renderings with ground-truth and reference images. EDGAR refines degraded frames through a fusion block that injects identity features extracted by the self-supervised Sapiens model into a one-step diffusion backbone, enabling effective artifact removal without sacrificing efficiency. Our EDGAR model incorporates a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to address diverse degradation types and severity levels. The refined multi-view renderings are subsequently used as pseudo-targets to optimize a single underlying Gaussian avatar, so that the final avatar can be rendered without applying EDGAR to every output frame. Experiments on three different Gaussian avatar reconstruction methods, each evaluated under three different settings, show improvements in both perceptual and reconstruction measures over the raw outputs and an SDEdit-style refinement baseline. In addition, cross-view evaluation demonstrates improved calibrated consistency, while tests under large yaw and open-mouth expressions verify robustness under extreme settings. These results collectively indicate a useful operating regime for recoverable appearance artifacts. The code is available at https://kwanyun.github.io/edgar/

#05Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

StitchEdit: Stitching Depth Priors into Image Editors via Per-Layer Gradient Probing

Qin Guo, Dan Xu

Text-guided image editing with diffusion models struggles with spatial edits (e.g. manipulating objects, changing viewpoints, manipulating occlusions) that depend on the 3D structure understanding of a scene. Marigold and follow-up work demonstrate that a pretrained diffusion backbone already harbors strong geometric priors that can be activated for depth estimation, yet how to redirect these priors toward editing remains unresolved. Through per-layer gradient probing, we discover that the editing and depth objectives are compatible in early transformer layers but actively conflict in late layers, explaining why naive depth-conditioned editing either ignores geometry or degrades visual quality. We present StitchEdit, which first activates the backbone's geometric capability via a lightweight depth-denoising adapter, then selectively fine-tunes this adapter for editing using a probe-guided per-layer learning rate schedule that preserves depth knowledge where it helps and prunes it where it conflicts. On the proposed StitchEditBench, a benchmark of 150 geometry-dependent edits spanning spatial transformation, occlusion manipulation, and viewpoint change, StitchEdit consistently surpasses both instruction-based and depth-conditioned baselines on perceptual quality and geometric fidelity.