#01Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
CroCoMAE: Cross-modal self-supervised collaborative representation learning for SAR-optical remote sensing data
Vito Recchia, Giuseppe Guarino, Cássio Fraga Dantas and 3 more
Remote sensing increasingly captures the Earth's surface through complementary sensors such as SAR and optical, yet ground-truth annotations remain scarce, limiting supervised approaches. Self-supervised learning (SSL) addresses the label scarcity, and cross-modal SSL further exploits the complementarity between co-located sensors, but existing cross-modal frameworks align modalities mostly through global image-level representations or treat them as largely redundant, leaving their fine-grained complementary structure underexploited. We propose CroCoMAE, a cross-modal SSL framework for SAR-optical remote sensing that unifies contrastive learning and masked image modeling within a ViT-based architecture, operating at two complementary levels. At the image level, an intra-modality contrastive loss on the class token yields globally discriminative, augmentation-invariant representations. At the patch level, masked image modeling drives fine-grained per-modality representations, while a cross-modal contrastive objective aligns a shared subspace across SAR and optical patch tokens, leaving the complementary subspace unconstrained to retain modality-specific information. On two SAR-optical benchmarks covering scene classification and semantic segmentation, CroCoMAE improves over uni-modal SSL baselines and outperforms state-of-the-art cross-modal frameworks in most configurations, with gains in both single-modality and multi-modal evaluation across varying label regimes and the largest improvements on semantic segmentation.
#02Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
Sim(3)-TurboReg: Robust and Efficient Scale-Aware Registration via Tri-Scale Consistency
Zijun Zhou, Shaocheng Yan, Zhenjun Zhao and 5 more
Feed-forward 3D foundation models recover geometry at high fidelity, yet inference memory constraints keep them from processing long sequences natively. Current streaming systems work around this limit with sliding-window chunking, which introduces severe monocular scale ambiguity. Resolving this ambiguity requires Sim(3) registration that stays accurate and efficient under outlier contamination. We introduce Sim(3)-TurboReg, which reformulates the compatibility graph construction of TurboReg by replacing absolute distance constraints with a strict Tri-Scale Consistency (TSC) criterion. Our analysis shows that TSC suppresses both mismatching and coordinate-distortion outliers. We integrate the resulting solver into existing streaming systems and obtain high-fidelity, kilometer-scale reconstruction for feed-forward models. On controlled unknown-scale registration at 90% outliers, ours matches RANSAC accuracy with 92.5% lower median latency. In DA3-Streaming on KITTI, ours improves mean ATE RMSE by 22.2% and reduces mean end-to-end time by 16.6%. Code: https://github.com/ivan-zzj/Sim3-TurboReg
#03Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
Medical Image Segmentation: Foundation Model Adaptation versus Task-Specific Training
Emre Kutlusan, Yongmin Li
Foundation models pretrained on large natural-image collections are increasingly adapted for medical image segmentation, in the expectation that they will replace models trained for each task. Most comparisons, however, use data from the training distribution and a single task-specific baseline whose configuration is rarely justified, and therefore provide limited evidence of performance at new clinical sites. It also remains unclear how much of a foundation model must be adapted, and what determines this. We adapted a foundation model, DINOv2, with strategies ranging from tuning only its bias terms to full fine-tuning, and compared it with U-Nets and ResU-Nets trained from scratch. Experiments covered colonoscopy, breast ultrasound and dermoscopy, with testing on held-out data from the training source and on independent datasets from other institutions. The adapted foundation model generalised better on every external dataset. Within the training distribution, the task-specific models remained competitive when training data were abundant, and delineated boundaries more precisely, while the foundation model more often missed small lesions. Only a small fraction of the foundation model required adaptation, and the capacity needed was determined by the imaging domain rather than by the adaptation method. A widely used polyp test set was also found to duplicate images from another benchmark. Foundation-model adaptation is therefore warranted where models must work across sites, with capacity selected on the target domain.
#04Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
UniFlow-RS: Unified Generative Prediction for Heterogeneous Remote-Sensing Tasks
Jianlong He, Liang Liao, Jing Xiao and 2 more
Remote-sensing foundation models increasingly unify representations across sensing modalities and downstream tasks, yet their prediction mechanisms remain largely task-specific. Separate decoders, prediction heads, and objectives leave prediction fragmented across tasks. This naturally raises a question: can heterogeneous remote-sensing tasks share the prediction process? UniFlow-RS answers this question with a single latent flow-matching predictor shared across tasks. This requires addressing two key challenges: unifying heterogeneous prediction spaces and harmonizing joint optimization across tasks. First, we cast heterogeneous task outputs into structured visual targets in a common latent space, allowing them to be modeled by the same pretrained flow predictor. Task-dependent conditioning further accommodates differences in input configurations. Second, we optimize all tasks with a common Flow Matching objective, eliminating task-specific prediction losses. To mitigate optimization mismatch across tasks and modalities, we introduce Task-Modality Adaptive Timestep Sampling (TMAS), which dynamically allocates training timesteps according to the online learning state of each task-modality group. Using a single shared model, UniFlow-RS handles six tasks and thirteen datasets, surpassing recent task-specific state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks while remaining competitive on the others. Beyond these benchmarks, the same checkpoint demonstrates strong zero-shot transfer across unseen datasets, task settings, occlusion conditions, and near-infrared false-color imagery, without target-specific adaptation.
#05Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
UGG: Unified Generative Geometry Model
Amani Kiruga, Zhiyi Li, Ruojin Cai and 4 more
Understanding 4D scenes is a core challenge in visual intelligence, requiring models to jointly capture scene geometry, appearance, and dynamics from partial observations. However, existing approaches are subdivided into feedforward models for direct geometric prediction, and generative models for visual synthesis. We introduce UGG, a unified framework for 4D scene understanding that jointly models RGB video and geometric representations such as depth and camera pose. By assigning different noise levels across modalities and time, UGG formulates visual generation and geometric prediction as conditional completion within a single generative model. This flexible formulation enables the model to learn from diverse, heterogeneous datasets with different subsets of geometric and visual annotations. Furthermore, our generative formulation enables inference-time search over multiple plausible scene hypotheses, using geometric evidence extracted from observed RGB frames to improve geometric prediction without ground truth geometry. We demonstrate UGG's effectiveness over non-unified baselines across camera-controlled video generation, depth estimation, and camera pose prediction, including in challenging sparse observation settings. Code and visualizations are available at https://ugg-model.github.io/