#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.CV
InnerLogic-Surg: An Open Surgical Foundation Model via Continual Pretraining
Kun Yuan, Hao Ding, Yiqing Shen and 5 more
Vision foundation models are the backbone of modern surgical image analysis, yet most surgical systems still rely on encoders pretrained on natural images or on specialist models trained from scratch on comparatively small datasets. Pretraining encoders on large amounts of surgery-specific data has the potential to generally enhance the performance of surgical image analysis methods simply by providing stronger backbones. Here we present InnerLogic-Surg, an open family of surgical vision encoders (21M--300M parameters) obtained by continually pretraining a transformer-based image encoder on millions of surgical images curated from 11,965 internet-sourced surgical videos spanning ~2,900 hours and more than fifteen procedure types. Our training recipe inherits DINOv3's pretraining stage to preserve representation ability after surgical adaptation, and additionally applies a learned feature-upsampling module for high-resolution dense prediction at low token cost. Across a benchmark covering workflow, instrument and anatomy recognition, segmentation, detection, and monocular depth, under the same architecture, the largest InnerLogic-Surg model achieves the best linear-probe performance in all 20 surgical tasks. We demonstrate that surgical continual pretraining yields transferable representations that generalize across procedures, anatomical regions, and task types, showing our surgical image encoders as a promising and scalable alternative to the procedure-specific representation learning approaches that have traditionally dominated surgical computer vision.
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
PlayGen2: Learning Real-Time Playable Worlds with Explicit 3D State
Jihai Zhang, Yuhan Zhou, Junyou Li and 3 more
Building a playable world requires more than generating plausible video: it demands responsive control, persistent spatial structure, and coherent interactions with dynamic entities. Using generated frames as the sole recurrent world representation ties these requirements to view-dependent appearance synthesis, making it difficult to maintain long-term spatial and temporal consistency in generation and interaction. We present PlayGen2, a real-time interactive world model that separates learned 3D state evolution from neural rendering. PlayGen2 maintains a persistent world memory comprising static geometry represented by a volumetric occupancy grid and identity-indexed 3D states for the player and other entities. Within a fixed-size local region, its world-state model jointly learns action-conditioned entity dynamics, geometry completion, and entity discovery, committing updates to a persistent world memory. A separate neural renderer synthesizes first-person observations from depth and semantic projections of the world state, without feeding generated images back into state prediction. Using Doom as a testbed, we demonstrate that the model successfully learns world dynamics including geometry-aware player motion and player--NPC interactions. The framework is computationally efficient, enabling the complete simulation and rendering pipeline to achieve approximately 160ms backend latency on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip. Beyond single-player interaction, we demonstrate zero-shot deployment on unseen Doom maps, multiplayer interaction through the composition of single-player models, and programmable gameplay through rule-based state interventions. These capabilities demonstrate the transferability and extensibility of the learned game-world model. Code and pretrained model weights are publicly available.
#04Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
WAM-Sim0.1: World Anchored Memory Meets Online RL for Consistent and Realistic Driving Simulation
Jiahao Cui, Jiaye Li, Wenhao Zhang and 7 more
Autoregressive driving world models systematically suffer from structural drift, identity drift, and quality decay over long rollout horizons due to transient conditioning signals that lack persistent state. We present WAM-Sim, a driving world model anchored by a persistent hierarchical memory and optimized via online flow-matching RL. WAM-Sim structures persistent context across three temporal and semantic scales: pose-aligned structural tokens encoding persistent road topology, read-only scene tokens supplying geolocated background appearance, and write-once instance tokens preserving individual traffic participant identities across occlusions and chunk boundaries. To restore visual sharpness and physical plausibility degraded by multi-scale conditioning, we introduce an online post-training framework that optimizes self-generated rollouts via flow-matching RL guided by hierarchy-aligned visual rewards and a vision-language model physical judge. The invariant memory empirically confines policy optimization within the anchored context, helping suppress semantic collapse and reward hacking, while online RL systematically enforces physical commonsense and fine-grained visual fidelity. On the nuScenes benchmark, WAM-Sim achieves a superior generation fidelity (FID=3.47, FVD=25.72) and strong downstream perception performance (24.16 mAP, 71.23 road mIoU). On minute-scale rollouts of self-collected data, WAM-Sim substantially mitigates structural and identity drift, preserving high scene similarity and subject identity coherence across extended horizons. Project page: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/WAM-Sim.
#05Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
CMDiff: Left Atrial Scar Segmentation from 3D LGE MRI Using Conditional Mask Diffusion Model: A Feasibility Study
Jing Zhang, Bastien Bergere, Jonas Leite and 4 more
Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac MRI enables non-invasive assessment of left atrial (LA) scar, an imaging marker associated with atrial fibrillation ablation outcome. However, automatic scar segmentation is hindered by low contrast, the thin atrial wall, scarce labels, and extreme class imbalance. Conditional diffusion offers iterative mask generation, but its suitability for sparse 3D LA scar segmentation remains unclear. To address this gap, we propose Conditional Mask Diffusion (CMDiff), which predicts clean masks using a dynamic-encoder-conditioned 3D sinusoidal UNet. We compared CMDiff with a deterministic baseline on identical cases in five-fold cross-validation of 60 scar-labelled public LASCARQS subjects, with 48 training and 12 held-out cases per fold. CMDiff achieved a scar DSC of 0.47 $\pm$ 0.08, HD95 of 12.89 $\pm$ 6.39 mm, and ASD of 1.91 $\pm$ 0.96 mm, compared with deterministic baseline values of 0.51 $\pm$ 0.08, 10.86 $\pm$ 5.39 mm, and 1.58 $\pm$ 1.03 mm, respectively. Under the same implementation, clean-mask prediction performed substantially better than the noise-prediction configuration evaluated in this study. Thus, CMDiff was technically feasible but did not improve segmentation performance: DSC was lower, and both HD95 and ASD were higher. Direct mask diffusion therefore provides an analytical alternative, but not a competitive performance advance for this task. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/jizhang02/CMDiff.