#01Sep 8, 2026
cs.CV
Prior-free relative 6D pose estimation of multiple object instances
Behdad Khodabandehloo, Andrea Caraffa, Davide Boscaini and 1 more
Object 6D pose estimation formulations have progressively reduced reliance on object-specific priors, evolving from explicit 3D models to multi-view object captures to single reference images. We take this progression to its extreme by introducing prior-free relative 6D pose estimation, which lifts the assumption of knowing which object is to be posed within the scene. This novel setting aims to estimate the relative poses of multiple instances of an unknown object within the same image, without requiring CAD models, templates, or reference images. We solve this by formulating a novel method (PROSE) that finds coarse correspondences between object instances using multimodal foundation features, thus requiring no training. We refine these correspondences by imposing cycle consistency across tuples of instances, and leverage the resulting globally consistent correspondences to estimate the relative 6D pose between any pair of instances. To enable systematic evaluation, we design a novel benchmark (PRENCH) built from three multi-instance BOP datasets and enriched with task-specific metadata. PROSE consistently outperforms baselines obtained by adapting state-of-the-art single-image methods to the proposed setting, while requiring neither task-specific supervision nor additional learned components. Project website: https://tev-fbk.github.io/PROSE/
#02Sep 8, 2026
cs.CV
Leveraging Visual and Geometric Priors for Metric-scale and Complete Vehicle Gaussian Reconstruction from Limited Views
Jinyu Miao, Jiusi Li, Yifei He and 4 more
High-fidelity vehicle assets are essential for controllable traffic scene generation, particularly for synthesizing rare and safety-critical long-tail scenarios. However, reconstructing a reusable vehicle representation from in-the-wild onboard images remains challenging for two reasons. First, image-to-3D generation methods generally produce models without reliable metric scale. Second, onboard cameras usually observe only one side of a target vehicle, making conventional multi-view reconstruction incomplete on unobserved regions. To solve these problems, we propose a feed-forward vehicle asset reconstruction method, which leverages two complementary priors to reconstruct 3D Gaussian representations for vehicles using sparse one-sided observations. To achieve metric-scale reconstruction, a visual foundation model is first utilized to serve as a visual prior for Gaussian initialization. The Gaussian attributes are then estimated by a learnable encoder-decoder module. A symmetry-aware cloning strategy is presented to complete the unobserved side directly in Gaussian space, which exploits the bilateral structure of vehicles as a geometric prior. Experiments on the public dataset demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches in both vehicle asset completeness and geometric accuracy.
#03Sep 8, 2026
cs.CV
Spheriverse: 3D Scene Understanding from Spherical Observations in the Wild
Fei Teng, Sheng Wu, Mengfei Duan and 7 more
Spherical observations provide global visual context for 3D scene understanding. However, visual information is encoded in an angular domain, whereas the physical world is represented in Cartesian coordinates. This cross-space representation gap complicates geometric correspondence and semantic evidence aggregation. To delve into this challenge, we introduce Spheriverse, comprising $64,400$ temporally aligned spherical image-LiDAR pairs organized into 644 sequences. The dataset spans diverse scenes, illumination, and weather conditions, with fine-grained semantic classes. We further establish benchmarks for semantic occupancy prediction, semantic mapping, and 3D object detection, evaluating 30+ methods through overall and scene-wise comparisons. For dense prediction, we propose SphereOcc, an occupancy framework that couples spherical geometry modeling with semantic evidence retrieval. Cartesian-Spherical Representation Remodeling (CSRR) incorporates spherical range-azimuth geometry into Cartesian voxel features through region-wise modulation. Spherical Evidence Re-querying (SER) then conditions queries on voxel content and range-height-azimuth geometry to adaptively retrieve relevant semantic evidence from source spherical image features. SphereOcc achieves 13.91% mIoU and 24.65% GeoIoU, outperforming the respective best-performing methods, TPVFormer and SurroundOcc, by 1.70 and 2.10 percentage points. It also ranks first in both metrics across all five scenes, with consistent advantages across the evaluated spatial partitions and reduced fields of view. The established benchmark and source code will be available at https://feit-feiteng.github.io/Spheriverse.
#04Sep 8, 2026
cs.CV
Medical AI Encodes a "Feeling of Error": Verifying Cancer Segmentation via Internal Concepts
Mengmeng Ma, Yunxiang Peng, Tang Li and 4 more
Cancer segmentation models can fail silently, generating plausible but incorrect masks that risk missed findings or unnecessary biopsies. A critical question arises: Do AI models "know" when they are wrong, and if so, can we use the signal to predict their own failures? Humans do have a "Feeling of Error" (FOE): a spontaneous sense of unease that flags a potential error during thinking. We investigate whether cancer segmentation models exhibit an analogous internal signal. Unlike output-level cues (e.g., prediction confidence or uncertainty), which offer no insight into why a failure occurs and suffer from a sensitivity-quality tradeoff where high detection sensitivity could degrade overall segmentation quality. We instead propose to capture the model's FOE from its inner workings. Using mechanistic interpretability tools, specifically Sparse Autoencoders, we decompose internal neural activations into a dictionary of human-interpretable concepts and show that failure cases exhibit a distinct latent signature: fewer active concepts with lower activation magnitudes compared to successful segmentation. By training a classifier on these concept activations, we achieve accurate failure detection along with explanations for the model's mistakes. Experiments on prostate, pancreatic, and brain cancer segmentation demonstrate that our approach outperforms output-based methods in failure detection while preserving segmentation quality.
#05Sep 8, 2026
cs.CL
Evolution of Multimodal Question Answering: From Modality-Adaptive Extraction to Unified Language Representation
Abdullah Al Shafi
The rapid growth of multimodal data has intensified the need for question answering (QA) systems capable of reasoning across heterogeneous sources such as text, tables, and images. In this paper, we present a comprehensive methodological comparison of three influential frameworks, namely Multimodal Adaptive Extraction (MAE), Solar, and UniMMQA, tracing the evolution of multimodal question answering from modality-adaptive pipelines to fully unified architectures. We examine how each approach models cross-modal interactions, transforms heterogeneous inputs, and performs reasoning, highlighting key design differences in modality representation, reasoning, and answer generation. Our analysis demonstrates a clear shift from explicit modality-specific processing toward unified text-centric formulations enabled by pre-trained language models (PLMs). Empirical comparisons across benchmark datasets show that this transition leads to substantial improvements in both Exact Match (EM) and F1-Scores, with UniMMQA achieving the most consistent and scalable performance. Despite these advances, we identify persistent challenges, including information loss during modality transformation, error propagation in multi-stage pipelines, and limitations in capturing fine-grained cross-modal dependencies. Overall, this study provides a deeper understanding of current design trends and offers insights into the future direction of unified multimodal reasoning systems.