#01Nov 10, 2026
cs.AI
Multimodal Abstention That Preserves Acquired Correct Answers
Jinyuan Zhang
Adding abstention to a task-adapted multimodal model can discard correct answers, including capabilities acquired during adaptation. We formulate abstention repair as maximizing correct abstention on unanswerable questions under a budget on newly lost correct answers. We propose ReFrain (Regression-Free Abstention), which combines a linear probe on first-token logits, threshold calibration on held-out image clusters, and a deterministic veto that replaces rejected outputs with the displayed "none of the above" option while preserving all other responses. "Regression-free" denotes zero loss on the calibration set at the zero-budget target. All abstention methods in our main comparison start from the same answering-SFT checkpoint; we separately track lost correct answers, repaired errors, and retained SFT gains. On Qwen2.5-VL-3B, ReFrain at zero budget retains all 57 SFT-gained answers with no losses and improves correct abstention by 7.30 percentage points. At a 0.5% calibration budget, it reaches 74.05% correct abstention with 8 losses and retains 55 gains; CLIP-UP EmbLoRA reaches 64.65% with 62 losses, 41 repairs, and 40 retained gains. The same probe at its default threshold loses 298 correct answers. With models and thresholds frozen, confirmation on 228 independent question clusters yields 66.05% correct abstention and no losses at the 0.5% point, exceeding EmbLoRA by 32.72 percentage points. Ordinary refusal SFT achieves higher correct abstention at greater regression cost. Code and reproduction materials: https://github.com/ModeLiberaL/ReFrain.
#02Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
BoviShift: A Six-Year Multi-Attribute Audit of Visual Cattle Phenotyping Across Animals and Time
Mobasshir Bhuiya Shagor, Nilambar Halder Tonmoy, Md Saef Ullah Miah
Computer vision offers a scalable, non-contact means of estimating livestock traits, but correlated images and video frames make reliable evaluation difficult. Image-random splitting can place views of the same animal in both training and test sets, while deployment further requires transfer to animals captured in future years. We introduce BoviShift, a corpus reconstructed from six consecutive annual cohorts of an operational cattle marketplace collected from 2021 to 2026. It contains 2{,}657 cattle, 10{,}610 still images, and 2{,}566 walk-around videos across nine recorded breed categories. We evaluate three splitting strategies through four configurations: image-random and pooled cattle-disjoint splits over the same development cohorts, followed by separate future-2025 and locked future-2026 evaluations. Using a fixed ResNet-50 multi-task baseline, we assess weight, age, height, breed, and coat color. Differences between image-random and cattle-disjoint splitting are task-dependent rather than a universal leakage penalty. Future-cohort behavior is also attribute- and cohort-specific: breed declines relative to pooled evaluation; mean weight and age performance fails to beat constant baselines in 2025; height remains above baseline; and color transfers well to 2025 but degrades in 2026. Multi-task training improves all five point estimates in a single-seed ablation, still-view aggregation helps selectively, and zero-shot video-frame aggregation exposes a still-to-video domain gap. To our knowledge, BoviShift is the longest-spanning cattle-vision resource combining consecutive annual cohorts with physical and visual attributes.
#03Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
ViGA-FLAME: Aligning Latent Visual and Geometric Representations for Robust 3D Head Expression Estimation
Wen Hao He, Jiacheng Wu, Jie Chen
Estimating 3D head expression from a single image requires mapping visual appearance to underlying facial geometry. We propose ViGA-FLAME, a two-stage framework that aligns semantic visual features with a structured geometric latent space. First, a Parametric-Geometric Variational Autoencoder (PG-VAE) learns a unified representation of canonical head surfaces and FLAME parameters, supporting both detailed surface reconstruction and interpretable parameter recovery. Supervision on geometry and parameters, together with consistency between the two decoding branches, connects surface detail with parametric structure. Second, a trainable Visual-Geometric Adapter (ViGA) maps features from a pretrained semantic visual encoder into this latent space. Asymmetric attention enables ViGA to align semantic image features from the visual encoder with the structured geometric information represented in the PG-VAE latent space, without altering the original visual stream. By grounding image evidence in this latent prior, ViGA-FLAME enables robust 3D head expression estimation across severe facial deformations and large viewing angles, efficiently improving robustness over competing feed-forward methods.
#04Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
C$^2$-Routing: Complementary Cropping and Compression for Efficient Vision-Language Inference
Guorui Lu, Qinyu Chen
Visual Question Answering (VQA) imposes substantial computational overhead on vision-language models (VLMs), motivating model-agnostic input reduction methods that can be readily applied across diverse VLMs, including in black-box settings. Simply enforcing a visual-token cap reduces computation, but it can discard information needed to answer the question. A single reduction strategy also struggles to accommodate different scenarios. Our key observation is that cropping and compression are complementary: cropping highlights small targets and local details, whereas whole-image compression better preserves context for large targets or distributed evidence. Based on this observation, we propose C$^2$-Routing, which adaptively selects cropping or compression according to the input image and question. Since both strategies may still discard key information, we further design a safety gate that uses the predicted joint correctness distribution under original and reduced inputs to guide fallback and protect accuracy. To accommodate consumer GPU resource constraints, all training and evaluation experiments run on RTX 3090 GPUs. To measure gains beyond token capping, we use full-image baselines with the same cap of 1,024 visual tokens. We conduct extensive evaluation on three VLMs and 18 datasets spanning local details, global scenes, scene text, and documents. With the visual budget already capped, C$^2$-Routing further reduces end-to-end FLOPs by 36.53% and visual tokens by 42.36% on average, with a mean relative task-score decrease of only 0.77%.
#05Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
DailyWildfireCAN: A Dataset and Benchmark for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction in Canada
Mahacine Ettahri, Hager Radi Abdelwahed, Toluwaleke Olutayo and 2 more
Wildfires represent a critical ecological and socio-economic challenge in Canada, where vast boreal forests and a warming climate have amplified the frequency and severity of extreme fire seasons. Predicting next-day wildfire spread can support fire management, but requires capturing complex interactions among weather, fuels, and terrain. Deep learning has emerged as a promising approach to learning these relationships from heterogeneous environmental data, yet its development and evaluation depend on representative datasets. Existing deep learning research on wildfire spread relies predominantly on US-focused datasets, leaving Canadian fire environments underrepresented. To address this gap, we present DailyWildfireCAN, a multi-modal, multi-temporal dataset and benchmark for predicting next-day wildfire spread across Canada. The dataset tracks continuous fire progression over multi-day events at a high spatial and temporal resolution of 90-m and 24-hour, respectively. This resolution preserves fine-scale information relevant to fire-edge geometry, local fuel variations, and terrain effects, supporting research toward improved daily wildfire spread forecasting. DailyWildfireCAN covers 2,440 wildfire events across eight fire seasons 2017-2024 and integrates 33 features across diverse modalities, including topography, meteorology, land cover, vegetation and forest structure, human influence indices, and satellite imagery. We establish a comprehensive benchmark comparing mono-temporal and multi-temporal prediction models, accompanied by a multi-dimensional evaluation framework assessing robustness across wildfire characteristics, geographic regions, and temporal conditions, spatial prediction quality, and sensitivity to reference label variations.