#01Nov 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.
#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
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.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.RO
ForeseeDrive: Future-Token Conditioning for Anticipatory Generative Driving
Shaokai Wu, Xunchu Zhou, Pinzhi Wang and 8 more
Generative driving planners can represent diverse ego futures, but a downstream scorer can choose only among sampled candidates; it cannot recover an absent maneuver. We present ForeseeDrive, which turns future scene evolution into a deployable interface for shaping candidate generation. Rather than reconstructing dense future states or scoring a fixed menu, ForeseeDrive derives query-indexed tokens from logged actor motion, occupancy evolution, route interactions, and TTC margins, and predicts the same token space from present context at deployment. The tokens condition trajectory geometry before candidates materialize. A zero-token-gated residual path and candidate-preservation loss limit unnecessary drift, while a TTC-margin guard targets brittle safe-to-unsafe boundary crossings. Under their respective benchmark protocols, ForeseeDrive reaches 89.2 PDMS on NAVSIM navtest, 0.41\,m average L2 and 0.05\% collision rate on nuScenes validation, and a 76.50 driving score on Bench2Drive. Controlled DiffusionDrive/NAVSIM diagnostics show an exact zero-token no-op, a small aligned-over-shuffled selected-PDM advantage under preservation, mixed oracle-best quality, and localized TTC-boundary failures. Together, the benchmark results and bounded mechanism tests support future-conditioned generation as a practical interface for anticipation. Code is included in the supplementary materials.