#01Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Do You Miss the Nights We Spent Crafting Figures? Rethinking Teaser and Framework Figures in the Age of Generative AI
Xiaoqi Zhao, Youwei Pang, Kailai Zhou
Scientific figures give research ideas a visual form through choices of abstraction, composition, and emphasis. Generative AI offers new ways to realize these choices, raising questions about explanatory clarity and purposeful visual expression. We examine these questions through a visual retrospective of 371 motivation and framework figures from 200 papers. The corpus comprises a quota-based main sample of 160 papers spanning four temporal periods and a separate purposive style-contrast sample of 40 papers. A single multimodal judge evaluates six dimensions of communication and design, with three repeated judgments per figure. We attempt source-constrained revisions of all 371 figures, of which 369 pass the recorded fidelity checks. Original-figure ratings show no uniform decline across periods. Revisions increase mean clarity ratings by 0.428 points and decrease aesthetic coherence ratings by 0.111 points on a five-point scale. Gains in the six-dimension average are larger for main-sample motivation figures than for frameworks. Case analyses show that added explanation can clarify comparisons while leaving typographic hierarchy and visual economy unresolved. These model-based findings support researcher-led design, with AI assisting exploration and authors retaining responsibility for explanatory purpose, composition, and scientific relationships. The accompanying atlas and evaluation records are available at https://ntu-ai4x.github.io/Rethinking_Figures/index_en.html.
#02Nov 5, 2026
cs.AI
The Geometry of Simulated Perspectives: Dissociating Representation and Behaviour in a Multimodal Language Model
Mathis Immertreu, Fitim Abdullahu, Thomas Kinfe and 4 more
Multimodal language models can simulate different observers, yet it remains unclear how assigned perspectives reshape their internal representations and whether these changes govern their judgements. Here, we investigate the representational geometry of persona-conditioned visual interestingness in Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct. Across 100 images and 53 prompting conditions, we systematically vary persona content and the linguistic framing used to introduce it, while recording behavioural ratings and layer-wise hidden states. We observe a systematic reorganisation of representational geometry across processing depth: early layers primarily encode image identity, whereas persona-specific structures emerge in later layers. Strikingly, prompt framing reshapes internal representations more strongly than persona identity, whereas persona content has a greater impact on behavioural judgements. This dissociation is further illustrated by minimal identity statements that alter representations even without changing responses. These findings demonstrate that representational distance does not necessarily reflect behavioural relevance. More broadly, they reveal how simulated perspectives emerge as distinct structures within the representational space of artificial cognitive systems, highlighting a fundamental distinction between the geometry of internal representations and their functional consequences.
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.RO
VisionSIM: Beyond Idealized Sensors - A Multi-Modal Simulator for Robot Perception
Sacha Jungerman, Kaustubh Sadekar, Avery Gump and 6 more
Robotic perception increasingly relies on heterogeneous sensor suites combining cameras with emerging modalities (event, SPAD, iToF/dToF, and thermal). Yet existing simulators idealize these sensors, hiding critical modality-specific failure modes that limit real-world deployment. We present VisionSIM, a unified, physically grounded simulation platform that elevates sensor realism to a first-class concern by modeling the raw physical measurement process for diverse conventional and emerging modalities. We expose fine-grained control over physical sensor parameters, reproducing failure modes overlooked by general-purpose simulators: pileup and glare for LiDAR; phase wrapping, saturation, and motion artifacts for iToF; refractory drops for event cameras; and history-dependent emission for thermal cameras. This enables principled cross-modality comparison on identical scenes and trajectories. We release the platform and a large indoor dataset with synchronized raw measurements and rich ground-truth annotations.
#04Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Adaptive Low-Light Enhancement for Road Anomaly Detection: A Multi-Architecture Benchmark and Edge Deployment Study
Obed Honour Eje, Oluwatosin Kolade, Glory Bagai and 1 more
Road anomaly detection systems on autonomous vehicles must function reliably under degraded visual conditions including darkness, rain, and Harmattan dust haze. This paper benchmarks four object detection architectures, YOLOv8n, YOLOv12n, RT-DETR, and Faster R-CNN, under physically grounded lighting and weather degradation, and shows that uniform application of the SCI low-light enhancement network is actively harmful at dusk-level lighting (-16.1% to -30.7% mAP@50). We propose a lightweight, training-free luminance-adaptive router that selects between no enhancement, moderate SCI, and denoising plus strong SCI based on per-frame Rec. 601 luminance, recovering most of the dusk penalty while preserving low-light gains, and we validate the full pipeline on NVIDIA Jetson Nano edge hardware.
#05Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
DART: Domain-Agnostic Residual Transfer for Generalist Anomaly Detection
Muhammad Aqeel, Maham Nazir, Marco Cristani and 1 more
Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to detect anomalies in unseen domains using only a few reference samples. Recent normal-abnormal guided methods improve this setting by exploiting abnormal references, but their residuals often mix transferable anomaly cues with domain-specific appearance factors such as texture, geometry, and acquisition conditions. This residual domain entanglement limits cross-domain transfer and may produce spurious activations on novel domains. We propose DART, a plug-in framework for normal-abnormal guided GAD that learns to separate residuals into anomaly-relevant and domain-specific components. DART combines a Residual Disentanglement Module, which preserves anomaly-discriminative information while suppressing domain information, with Cross-Domain Meta-Training, which forms episodes across source domains to make the separation effective. The method is architecture-agnostic and can be inserted between residual computation and the detection head of existing GAD pipelines. Experiments on MVTec AD, VisA, and BraTS show consistent improvements over multiple base methods, with the largest gains under stronger domain shifts. https://github.com/aqeeelmirza/DART