ML Reads

Personal arXiv list

ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

Back to Pixels: Lifting Latent Video Diffusion into Pixel Space

Yanke Song, Shuo Chen, Chris Rockwell and 9 more

Frontier video generation models work in a VAE latent space that compresses video in both space and time. This compression made training tractable, but now limits high-resolution, controllable, and interactive generation -- doubling resolution quadruples token count, conditions apply to groups of frames rather than individual ones, and each response must wait for the rest of its multi-frame block. We present PixVid, a simple yet effective method that lifts a pretrained latent video model to directly generate every frame in pixel space. PixVid keeps the diffusion transformer and replaces the VAE decoder with a convolutional head that renders its outputs into pixels. We find that predicting clean video rather than velocity, together with a larger noise shift, is key to quality. Finetuned from Wan2.1-14B, PixVid is competitive with the latent baseline within $\sim 1.3$M training clips. Working framewise in pixels, it generates at $2\times$ higher resolution with the same per-frame token count, keeps depth-conditioned video editing aligned under fast motion, and responds to each action at the next frame. Project page: https://chenshuo20.github.io/PixVid/

#02Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

FLEX-LBP: Learning Local Binary Patterns with Exact Binary Inference for Texture Classification

Mohamed Alimoussa, Amal El Kaid

Local Binary Patterns (LBP) remain among the most widely used texture descriptors, from industrial inspection to medical imaging. Yet their radius, sampling angles, color transform and thresholds are fixed by hand for each dataset. We present FLEX-LBP, which learns these parameters by backpropagation while every forward pass computes exact binary codes and hard histogram counts. A straight-through estimator acts only in the backward pass, so the deployed descriptor is an interpretable hard-binary LBP with 90 learnable parameters and unchanged inference cost. In a controlled ablation on six color texture benchmarks, the component worth learning is dataset-dependent. One configuration, applied unchanged everywhere, learns the geometry and thresholds with the color transform frozen. It improves the nearest-neighbor accuracy of the identical fixed descriptor by 3.55 points on average over five seeds, significantly on five of six benchmarks and never significantly worse. With a linear discriminant readout, it gains 0.9 points; the fully learned descriptor gains 2.7 and has the highest mean. FLEX-LBP is more accurate than five classical LBP-family descriptors, PCANet and a neural LBP on five of six benchmarks. Its mean nearest-neighbor accuracy exceeds that of frozen ImageNet ResNet-50 features (23.5 million parameters). On the Kather colorectal cancer histology benchmark, the fully learned descriptor reaches 93.8%, significantly above the best classical descriptor (Completed LBP, 92.8%). The learned radii adapt in directions that recur across seeds. Noise drowns single-pixel comparisons and illuminant change flips inter-channel ones; median sampling or gray-world normalization restores 96-97%. The code is available as a drop-in PyTorch layer at https://github.com/medalimoussa/FLEX-LBP.

#03Nov 12, 2026

cs.AI

LiveGeo: Benchmarking Geographic Agents in Continuously Evolving Worlds

Pengcheng Zhou, Xuanyu Liu, Yanchen Yin and 6 more

We introduce GeoWorld, a controllable and continuously evolving geographic environment platform for LLM agents, and LiveGeo, a benchmark for evaluating reliable decision-making in real-world geographic environments using GeoWorld. Unlike existing evaluations that largely reason and plan over fixed geographic states, GeoWorld is grounded in real-world geographic structure and allows external world states to evolve along their own temporal processes while preserving verifiable state histories. LiveGeo places geographic tasks within this evolving environment, requiring agents to actively acquire task-relevant information, verify whether the evidence supporting prior decisions remains valid, and revise their plans when necessary. Our results reveal that even frontier LLMs struggle with static tasks, with no model consistently excelling across tasks, while strong static performance does not ensure dynamic reliability. Further analysis identifies a key bottleneck: agents struggle to acquire and translate relevant evidence into valid decisions and maintain their correctness as the world evolves. By releasing LiveGeo together with its GeoWorld platform, we aim to provide the community with a flexible and extensible infrastructure for studying the next generation of agents capable of reliable action in evolving geographic worlds.

#04Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

Spatial Foundry: A Multimodal Dataset for Spatial Intelligence

Ethan Lin, Yang Song

Spatial intelligence requires connecting visual observations to the geometry, objects, and persistent state of an environment. Images alone leave these relationships implicit, while disconnected annotations make it difficult to study appearance, camera motion, and scene changes under a common reference. We introduce Spatial Foundry, a collection of 5,280 furnished residential 3D scene configurations with editable assets and aligned visual, geometric, and temporal data. Its modalities include floor plans, perspective and panoramic RGB, metric depth, point clouds, meshes, instance-level 3D bounding boxes, and camera trajectories paired with video. Shared scene coordinates link observations across views and time; editable source scenes enable additional camera paths and controlled object changes. We describe the data representation and construction workflow, and discuss applications in floor-plan-conditioned 3D generation, geometric reconstruction, instance-level perception, camera-conditioned video generation, shared world modeling, and scene editing. Controlled camera and scene variations support spatial perception and world-model research. The public project page provides videos and an interactive colored point-cloud preview.

#05Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

BrickFlow: Connectivity-Guided Brick Reconstruction

Peter Kulits, Cordelia Schmid

Given a set of LEGO parts and an image of an assembled object, our task is to infer the pose of each part to assemble the object. In contrast with traditional 3D reconstruction, doing so requires satisfying discrete physical constraints, which provide structure but render the problem combinatorial and highly sensitive to small pose errors. To learn a prior over how parts fit together, we train a set-conditioned SE(3) flow model on procedurally generated assemblies. We then finetune this model to inject image conditioning, using 1% as much data. However, while the learned flow captures global structure, it does not enforce connectivity. To address this, we introduce an analytic connectivity-field guidance to pull predictions toward connected assemblies at test time. Through this, we demonstrate improved build quality with model size, pretraining, and guidance. We make our models and data available for research purposes at https://kulits.github.io/BrickFlow/