#01Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Towards Scalable Diagnostic-Driven Whole-Slide Image Retrieval for Pathology Archives
Jingsong Liu, Youssef Wally Han Li, Weiwei Zhou and 3 more
The growing adoption of digital pathology has rapidly expanded collections of hematoxylin-and-eosin whole-slide images, yet efficient navigation through these archives remains challenging, as metadata is often inconsistent or unavailable. Content-based image retrieval addresses this challenge by identifying similar cases directly from visual representations instead of manual annotations or metadata. Existing retrieval systems have demonstrated promising performance but largely rely on handcrafted indexing pipelines and predefined sampling strategies, constraining scalability and generalization. Here, we present CLEAR-WSI (Constant-Length Embedding for Automatic Retrieval of Whole-Slide Images) as a scalable, diagnostic-driven slide-retrieval framework, validated on both public and clinical data. Using a fixed-length slide embedding, CLEAR-WSI refines retrieved candidates with either a predicted diagnostic label or the ground-truth label, depending on the retrieval setting. Newly processed cases are subsequently added to the expanding memory bank, allowing the retrieval archive to grow over time. On a comprehensive benchmark consisting of two public and one private clinical datasets representing four retrieval tasks, CLEAR-WSI improves Precision@5 over the strongest evaluated baseline, with gains on CAMELYON16 (3.10), BRACS-1 (2.75), BRACS-2 (1.95), and X-HER2 (3.75). Additional ablation and latency studies further examine the contribution of each component and highlight its potential for scalable deployment.
#02Nov 5, 2026
cs.GR
Seeing Beyond the Next Step: World-Model-Guided Human-Like Navigation in Multi-Agent Scenes
Seong-Eun Hong, JuYeong Hwang, Jinhyun Kim and 2 more
Selecting a next motion in a populated scene is not just a matter of avoiding what is currently in the way: an action can be locally feasible yet drift onto the road instead of the crosswalk, cut into a stream of crossing pedestrians, or bottleneck a narrow passage. These failure modes are invisible from the current state alone, and acting on them requires reasoning about what each candidate action will cause. World models offer exactly this, namely action-conditioned predictions of the future, but rolling them out at every decision step is a cost deployable navigation systems cannot pay, and the field has largely traded foresight for speed. We argue this is a false dichotomy. The natural place for a world model in human-aware navigation is at training time, as a preference oracle that distills foresight into a fast policy, rather than at inference time, as an online planner. We pair a discrete visual action prior with two task-aligned world models, one for nearby social dynamics and one for future scene semantics, that score candidate actions by their predicted consequences and refine the policy through group-relative preference distillation. At deployment, both world models are removed and the policy acts in a single forward pass. Across five held-out evaluation scenarios, this yields navigation that is simultaneously safer, more socially and group-coherent, and more goal-directed than strong reactive and learned baselines, with naive observers rating the resulting motion as more human-like. Taken together, our findings point to a different approach for bringing world-model foresight into deployable agents: not accelerating rollouts, but amortizing them into the policy so that the cost of looking ahead is confined to training. Project page: https://seoneun.github.io/-NeurIPS-2026-Seeing-Beyond-the-Next-Step/
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.LG
Flux as a Codec: Zero-Shot Lossy Compression with Flux
Fuma Kimishima, Jinjia Zhou
We propose FluxC, a zero-shot codec that uses Flux as a compression prior. Although DiffC has shown that pretrained diffusion models can serve as zero-shot codecs, we ask how the choice of coding path and reconstruction method affects rate--distortion--perception behavior. We analyze FluxC along three axes: coding cost and bit allocation, reconstruction method, and low rate distortion. At matched signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), we show that the path choice does not affect the ideal information rate, but changes how bits are allocated across time steps. For reconstruction, we compare ancestral sampling, one-step ODE reconstruction, and many-step ODE reconstruction. Our analysis shows that ODE-based reconstruction can achieve lower distortion than ancestral sampling, especially in the low rate regime. Experiments on Gaussian sources and natural images support this prediction. Moreover, FluxC performs competitively with, and in some cases outperforms, recent neural image compression methods, suggesting that Flux can serve as a principled zero-shot codec.
#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
Reviving the Discarded High-Resolution Feature for Transformer-Based Tiny Object Detection
Zehao Wang, Si Wu, Guiping Cao and 2 more
Tiny object detection remains challenging because tiny instances occupy only a few pixels, and their fine-grained details are easily lost during feature downsampling. Although the highest-resolution feature preserves rich local details for tiny objects, DETR-like detectors often discard it due to its large computational cost, while directly reintroducing this feature also brings dense background noise. To address this problem, we propose ReDHF, a novel framework that Revives the Discarded High-resolution Feature for tiny object detection. ReDHF has three cooperative components. Cross-Scale Deformable Fusion (CSDF) first constructs a semantically enhanced highest-resolution feature and injects its fine-grained details into the shallow feature under a moderate cost. Ellipse-Guided Shallow Supervision (EGSS) then guides the enhanced feature to learn more reliable classification and localization priors by applying geometry-adaptive auxiliary supervision. Full-Scale Query Interaction (FSQI) further enables decoder queries to access both low-level details and high-level semantic information, allowing them to aggregate richer cues for tiny objects. Extensive experiments show that ReDHF consistently improves multiple baselines across different DETR variants and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the evaluated benchmarks. The best ReDHF variants surpass their baselines by +1.4 AP on AI-TOD-v2, +1.6 AP on VisDrone, and +1.5 AP on SODA-D, with especially notable gains on tiny and small objects.