#01Nov 5, 2026
cs.RO
Learning Robotic World Models with Semantic and Visual Feedback
Hao Wu, Yuqi Li, Yizhou Zhao and 7 more
Robot world models predict action-conditioned future visual states to support robotic planning and decision making. However, visual reconstruction does not fully capture task progress, semantic evaluation alone provides limited constraints on fine-grained visual errors, and homogeneous predictions limit comparative feedback. We present RoboImagine, a framework for post-training autoregressive robotic world models through candidate-future comparisons with semantic and visual feedback. Diverse search promotes diversity among candidate trajectories under shared visual observations, action sequences, and task instructions. A frozen multimodal evaluator provides task-relevant semantic preferences through pairwise video comparisons in both presentation orders, complemented by pixel- and perceptual-level visual consistency feedback that constrains local structural and appearance errors. These signals drive policy optimization through group-relative advantages. Fixed initial context and branch-specific rolling histories support long-sequence generation with bounded context and consistent conditioning between candidate generation and policy optimization. Experiments with separately trained models on RT-1, BridgeV2, and RoboCasa cover real-world and simulated manipulation. On RT-1, under matched initialization, update counts, and evaluation protocols, RoboImagine improves PSNR by 1.26 dB and reduces LPIPS by 11.93% relative to continued supervised fine-tuning. Ablations show that diverse search improves prediction quality and that combined semantic and visual feedback yields higher external multimodal evaluation scores than visual feedback alone while maintaining comparable visual fidelity. Rolling histories further improve long-horizon prediction. These results support improving visual fidelity, task relevance, and long-horizon prediction through candidate comparison and complementary feedback.
#02Nov 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.
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Rain Beyond Streaks: Cascaded Realistic Rain and Wet Surface Synthesis via Scene Priors
Melissa Tijink, Kirill Tolstobrov, Shunxin Wang and 5 more
Realistic rain synthesis is a persistent challenge for vision systems operating in adverse weather. Existing methods primarily focus on generating rain streaks, often neglecting consequent surface effects such as reflections and puddles, which are critical for perceptual realism and robustness of downstream vision tasks. We introduce CascadeRS, a rain synthesis framework that leverages depth and segmentation priors to render scene-consistent rain and surface effects. In addition to rain streaks, CascadeRS produces reflections and puddles aligned with scene semantics through a physics-inspired zero-shot, controllable generative pipeline. It produces photorealistic rainy urban scenes, with high perceptual realism, which we validate qualitatively with an extensive user study and quantitatively. We produce the Cityscapes-CascadeRS dataset, to study downstream task performance under real rainy conditions. Our results establish CascadeRS as a scalable and realistic rain-generation framework for evaluating and enhancing the robustness of vision in adverse rainy weather. Code and dataset are available via https://github.com/nis-research/CascadeRainSynthesis
#04Nov 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/.
#05Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Bri3D: Bridging the Object-Scene Gap in Single-Image 3D Generation via Scene-Anchor
Hongye Hou, Shuai Zhang, Hongjie Li and 4 more
Generating compositional 3D scenes from a single image requires recovering detailed object geometry and coherent spatial arrangements. Existing object-to-scene methods, including SAM3D and MIDI, extend object generation through image-context reasoning or inter-instance modeling. Coordinating objects remains challenging with limited scene-level supervision. Directly extending object-centric generators to entire scenes can degrade geometry and fail to preserve instance scale, orientation, and pose. We propose Bri3D, a framework bridging scene-level structural reasoning and object-level generative priors through instance-aware voxel scene anchors. Bri3D predicts a color-coded scene scaffold encoding coarse object geometry and spatial arrangements. Each instance is extracted as a scene anchor and refined into a pose-preserving, prior-compatible voxel support, enabling a frozen object generator to synthesize detailed textured geometry in the anchor-defined spatial reference. This coarse-to-fine design separates scene organization from object-scale detail synthesis, focusing scene-level training on spatial organization and anchor refinement while reusing pretrained object priors. Experiments demonstrate improvements in scene layout, object geometry, visual quality, and generalization. Bri3D predicts scene layouts efficiently; full scene generation is faster than SceneGen and SAM3D.