#01Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
A Lightweight Differentiable Method for Real-Time Skin Rendering and Digitization
Mario Marquez-Balduque, Carlos Rodriguez-Pardo, Jorge Lopez-Moreno
Inverse rendering for skin typically relies on offline path tracing to estimate physical properties, which fail to map directly to the approximate shaders utilized in interactive applications, such as game engines. We bridge this gap by directly estimating subsurface scattering parameters tailored for real-time rendering pipelines. We introduce a differentiable Screen-Space Subsurface Scattering (SSSS) framework that enables the joint optimization of spatially varying base textures and scattering distances. To account for local variations in skin thickness, we estimate these parameters across distinct facial regions, generating a blended profile map ready for production runtime engines. Our pipeline utilizes a low-cost, single-light, single-view capture setup designed for accessible and practical appearance acquisition. Optimization is driven by a masked loss function targeting regions where subsurface scattering effects are dominant. We validate our approach on a real-world dataset of $45$ individuals across the Monk Skin Tone Scale, ensuring demographic generalization. Furthermore, we complement this evaluation with synthetic data, a multi-light setup validating our single-light assumption, and a tilted-view configuration confirming angular consistency. Results demonstrate that our method effectively recovers scattering parameters from lightweight inputs, yielding realistic skin appearance directly compatible with standard real-time shaders.
#02Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
From Video Frames to Robot Meta-Frames: A Unified Latent Interface for World Action Models
Guoqiang Liang, Yiqi Lin, Yanzhe Chen and 2 more
Pretrained video diffusion models (VDMs) offer a powerful foundation for World Action Models (WAMs), which jointly predict robot actions and future observations. Building such models requires injecting low-dimensional robot signals (e.g. proprioception, actions, and values) into a latent space shaped by natural videos, and a key design choice is the interface through which these signals enter: existing schemes treat it as a formatting detail, spending a separate latent frame on each signal or bolting on dedicated encoders and decoders. We argue that signal injection is instead a distribution-alignment problem: how well a representation matches the prior of the pretrained VDMs during denoising. Using the relative reconstruction error of a frozen VDM denoiser as a probe, we find that conventional spatial encodings sit far off this prior, whereas frequency-domain packing yields latents that the denoiser corrects far less. Motivated by this diagnostic result, we propose MetaWAM, which folds all robot signals into a single unified meta-frame: each signal is assigned to a disjoint frequency-domain channel band and lifted to the spatial latent by an inverse DCT, yielding a decodable interface aligned with the pretrained VDM prior without any added module or architectural change. A fixed band layout together with slot-aware routing lets the same meta-frame support policy, world-model, and value prediction over a shared set of robot variables. On RoboCasa, MetaWAM reaches 68.9% success while collapsing the per-signal frames into one and cutting inference latency by 39%, and attains 85.0% success on three real-world Franka tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/showlab/MetaWAM
#03Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
Continuous 3D Spatial Transcriptomics Reconstruction via Histology-Informed Implicit Neural Representations
Kaito Shiku, Ryoma Bise, Ahtisham Fazeel Abbasi and 4 more
Three-dimensional spatial transcriptomics (3D ST) enables the analysis of gene-expression patterns across tissue depths. However, 3D ST measurements are acquired from discrete 2D tissue sections, which are often sparsely sampled due to high acquisition costs. To address this limitation, we propose a histology-informed multi-task implicit neural representation (HIM-INR) for continuous 3D gene-expression reconstruction from sparse ST observations. HIM-INR jointly reconstructs gene-expression profiles and histological representations using an INR with a shared backbone, leveraging densely sampled histological images as auxiliary spatial supervision. Once trained, HIM-INR predicts gene expression at arbitrary 3D coordinates without requiring histological images. Experiments on two 3D ST datasets demonstrate improved reconstruction over existing methods, particularly as the number of missing ST sections increases.
#04Nov 10, 2026
cs.LG
HaiRuo: Forecasting Ocean Eddies as Fields and Objects with a Satellite-Altimetry Foundation Model
Xukun Qin, Haochen Sun, Yuyang Tian and 1 more
Mesoscale eddies carry most of the ocean's kinetic energy and move heat, salt and nutrients across basins, yet where an eddy will be two weeks ahead is still read off ocean models with post-hoc tracking heuristics. We introduce HaiRuo, which forecasts eddies as fields and as objects at once: from 30 days of satellite sea-level maps, one forward pass returns 15 days of sea level and geostrophic velocity, daily eddy masks and the trajectory of every eddy alive today. HaiRuo pairs two components with a clear division of labour: (1) HaiRuo-1B, an open-weight 1.05-billion-parameter foundation model pretrained without labels on 24 years of global satellite-altimetry observations, which supplies the 15-day physical fields and masks (+0.14 field skill and +1.1 mIoU points under the same decoder) and further lowers 15-day centre error by 1.2 km frozen (1.35 km over training from scratch); and (2) XuanJi, a Lagrangian object decoder that samples the evolving forecast in each eddy's co-moving polar frame and refines the 15-day path across three look-ahead rounds, removing 2.5 km on HaiRuo-1B (2.9 km with joint fine-tuning) and 2.5-3.3 km via its object attention across six published backbones. Under one pre-registered global evaluation over the whole ocean, HaiRuo improves on fourteen methods on every endpoint (25.2 vs. 30.6 km 15-day centre error, -18%), holding its margin outside the labelled regions and through both phases of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), while reproducing westward drift, 50-60 deg S eastward reversal and poleward cyclone-anticyclone deflection. Over ten days through one fixed tracker, HaiRuo's forecast field cuts the eddy-centre error of WenHai and XiHe by 37-43% (-2.8 km vs. day 0 while they degrade +4.3-8.7 km), and its object trajectories cut pipeline error by 77-78% globally. Open-weight checkpoints, code and project page: https://github.com/xkqin/HaiRuo
#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.