Daily Papers

3D occupancy prediction provides a comprehensive description of the surrounding scenes and has become an essential task for 3D perception. Most existing methods focus on offline perception from one or a few views and cannot be applied to embodied agents that demand to gradually perceive the scene through progressive embodied exploration. In this paper, we formulate an embodied 3D occupancy prediction task to target this practical scenario and propose a Gaussian-based EmbodiedOcc framework to accomplish it. We initialize the global scene with uniform 3D semantic Gaussians and progressively update local regions observed by the embodied agent. For each update, we extract semantic and structural features from the observed image and efficiently incorporate them via deformable cross-attention to refine the regional Gaussians. Finally, we employ Gaussian-to-voxel splatting to obtain the global 3D occupancy from the updated 3D Gaussians. Our EmbodiedOcc assumes an unknown (i.e., uniformly distributed) environment and maintains an explicit global memory of it with 3D Gaussians. It gradually gains knowledge through the local refinement of regional Gaussians, which is consistent with how humans understand new scenes through embodied exploration. We reorganize an EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet benchmark based on local annotations to facilitate the evaluation of the embodied 3D occupancy prediction task. Our EmbodiedOcc outperforms existing methods by a large margin and accomplishes the embodied occupancy prediction with high accuracy and efficiency. Code: https://github.com/YkiWu/EmbodiedOcc.

Current vision-language pre-training (VLP) paradigms excel at global scene understanding but struggle with instance-level reasoning due to global-only supervision. We introduce InstAP, an Instance-Aware Pre-training framework that jointly optimizes global vision-text alignment and fine-grained, instance-level contrastive alignment by grounding textual mentions to specific spatial-temporal regions. To support this, we present InstVL, a large-scale dataset (2 million images, 50,000 videos) with dual-granularity annotations: holistic scene captions and dense, grounded instance descriptions. On the InstVL benchmark, InstAP substantially outperforms existing VLP models on instance-level retrieval, and also surpasses a strong VLP baseline trained on the exact same data corpus, isolating the benefit of our instance-aware objective. Moreover, instance-centric pre-training improves global understanding: InstAP achieves competitive zero-shot performance on multiple video benchmarks, including MSR-VTT and DiDeMo. Qualitative visualizations further show that InstAP localizes textual mentions to the correct instances, while global-only models exhibit more diffuse, scene-level attention.

The rapid progress of navigation, manipulation, and vision models has made mobile manipulators capable in many specialized tasks. However, the open-world mobile manipulation (OWMM) task remains a challenge due to the need for generalization to open-ended instructions and environments, as well as the systematic complexity to integrate high-level decision making with low-level robot control based on both global scene understanding and current agent state. To address this complexity, we propose a novel multi-modal agent architecture that maintains multi-view scene frames and agent states for decision-making and controls the robot by function calling. A second challenge is the hallucination from domain shift. To enhance the agent performance, we further introduce an agentic data synthesis pipeline for the OWMM task to adapt the VLM model to our task domain with instruction fine-tuning. We highlight our fine-tuned OWMM-VLM as the first dedicated foundation model for mobile manipulators with global scene understanding, robot state tracking, and multi-modal action generation in a unified model. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model achieves SOTA performance compared to other foundation models including GPT-4o and strong zero-shot generalization in real world. The project page is at https://github.com/HHYHRHY/OWMM-Agent

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect novel objects beyond a given set of base categories on which the detection model is trained. Recent OVOD methods focus on adapting the image-level pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to a region-level object detection task via, eg., region-level knowledge distillation, regional prompt learning, or region-text pre-training, to expand the detection vocabulary. These methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in recognizing regional visual concepts, but they are weak in exploiting the VLMs' powerful global scene understanding ability learned from the billion-scale image-level text descriptions. This limits their capability in detecting hard objects of small, blurred, or occluded appearance from novel/base categories, whose detection heavily relies on contextual information. To address this, we propose a novel approach, namely Simple Image-level Classification for Context-Aware Detection Scoring (SIC-CADS), to leverage the superior global knowledge yielded from CLIP for complementing the current OVOD models from a global perspective. The core of SIC-CADS is a multi-modal multi-label recognition (MLR) module that learns the object co-occurrence-based contextual information from CLIP to recognize all possible object categories in the scene. These image-level MLR scores can then be utilized to refine the instance-level detection scores of the current OVOD models in detecting those hard objects. This is verified by extensive empirical results on two popular benchmarks, OV-LVIS and OV-COCO, which show that SIC-CADS achieves significant and consistent improvement when combined with different types of OVOD models. Further, SIC-CADS also improves the cross-dataset generalization ability on Objects365 and OpenImages. The code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/SIC-CADS.

We present V-JEPA 2.1, a family of self-supervised models that learn dense, high-quality visual representations for both images and videos while retaining strong global scene understanding. The approach combines four key components. First, a dense predictive loss uses a masking-based objective in which both visible and masked tokens contribute to the training signal, encouraging explicit spatial and temporal grounding. Second, deep self-supervision applies the self-supervised objective hierarchically across multiple intermediate encoder layers to improve representation quality. Third, multi-modal tokenizers enable unified training across images and videos. Finally, the model benefits from effective scaling in both model capacity and training data. Together, these design choices produce representations that are spatially structured, semantically coherent, and temporally consistent. Empirically, V-JEPA 2.1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks, including 7.71 mAP on Ego4D for short-term object-interaction anticipation and 40.8 Recall@5 on EPIC-KITCHENS for high-level action anticipation, as well as a 20-point improvement in real-robot grasping success rate over V-JEPA-2 AC. The model also demonstrates strong performance in robotic navigation (5.687 ATE on TartanDrive), depth estimation (0.307 RMSE on NYUv2 with a linear probe), and global recognition (77.7 on Something-Something-V2). These results show that V-JEPA 2.1 significantly advances the state of the art in dense visual understanding and world modeling.

Fine-grained object detection in challenging visual domains, such as vehicle damage assessment, presents a formidable challenge even for human experts to resolve reliably. While DiffusionDet has advanced the state-of-the-art through conditional denoising diffusion, its performance remains limited by local feature conditioning in context-dependent scenarios. We address this fundamental limitation by introducing Context-Aware Fusion (CAF), which leverages cross-attention mechanisms to integrate global scene context with local proposal features directly. The global context is generated using a separate dedicated encoder that captures comprehensive environmental information, enabling each object proposal to attend to scene-level understanding. Our framework significantly enhances the generative detection paradigm by enabling each object proposal to attend to comprehensive environmental information. Experimental results demonstrate an improvement over state-of-the-art models on the CarDD benchmark, establishing new performance benchmarks for context-aware object detection in fine-grained domains

For robotic agents operating in dynamic environments, learning visual state representations from streaming video observations is essential for sequential decision making. Recent self-supervised learning methods have shown strong transferability across vision tasks, but they do not explicitly address what a good visual state should encode. We argue that effective visual states must capture what-is-where by jointly encoding the semantic identities of scene elements and their spatial locations, enabling reliable detection of subtle dynamics across observations. To this end, we propose CroBo, a visual state representation learning framework based on a global-to-local reconstruction objective. Given a reference observation compressed into a compact bottleneck token, CroBo learns to reconstruct heavily masked patches in a local target crop from sparse visible cues, using the global bottleneck token as context. This learning objective encourages the bottleneck token to encode a fine-grained representation of scene-wide semantic entities, including their identities, spatial locations, and configurations. As a result, the learned visual states reveal how scene elements move and interact over time, supporting sequential decision making. We evaluate CroBo on diverse vision-based robot policy learning benchmarks, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Reconstruction analyses and perceptual straightness experiments further show that the learned representations preserve pixel-level scene composition and encode what-moves-where across observations. Project page available at: https://seokminlee-chris.github.io/CroBo-ProjectPage.

This paper presents the Holistic and Multi-Granular Surgical Scene Understanding of Prostatectomies (GraSP) dataset, a curated benchmark that models surgical scene understanding as a hierarchy of complementary tasks with varying levels of granularity. Our approach encompasses long-term tasks, such as surgical phase and step recognition, and short-term tasks, including surgical instrument segmentation and atomic visual actions detection. To exploit our proposed benchmark, we introduce the Transformers for Actions, Phases, Steps, and Instrument Segmentation (TAPIS) model, a general architecture that combines a global video feature extractor with localized region proposals from an instrument segmentation model to tackle the multi-granularity of our benchmark. Through extensive experimentation in ours and alternative benchmarks, we demonstrate TAPIS's versatility and state-of-the-art performance across different tasks. This work represents a foundational step forward in Endoscopic Vision, offering a novel framework for future research towards holistic surgical scene understanding.

Enabling agents to understand and interact with complex 3D scenes is a fundamental challenge for embodied artificial intelligence systems. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant progress in 2D image understanding, extending such capabilities to 3D scenes remains difficult: 1) 3D environment involves richer concepts such as spatial relationships, affordances, physics, layout, and so on, 2) the absence of large-scale 3D vision-language datasets has posed a significant obstacle. In this paper, we introduce Text-Scene, a framework that automatically parses 3D scenes into textual descriptions for scene understanding. Given a 3D scene, our model identifies object attributes and spatial relationships, and then generates a coherent summary of the whole scene, bridging the gap between 3D observation and language without requiring human-in-the-loop intervention. By leveraging both geometric analysis and MLLMs, Text-Scene produces descriptions that are accurate, detailed, and human-interpretable, capturing object-level details and global-level context. Experimental results on benchmarks demonstrate that our textual parses can faithfully represent 3D scenes and benefit downstream tasks. To evaluate the reasoning capability of MLLMs, we present InPlan3D, a comprehensive benchmark for 3D task planning, consisting of 3174 long-term planning tasks across 636 indoor scenes. We emphasize clarity and accessibility in our approach, aiming to make 3D scene content understandable through language. Code and datasets will be released.

We present a dataset of large-scale indoor spaces that provides a variety of mutually registered modalities from 2D, 2.5D and 3D domains, with instance-level semantic and geometric annotations. The dataset covers over 6,000m2 and contains over 70,000 RGB images, along with the corresponding depths, surface normals, semantic annotations, global XYZ images (all in forms of both regular and 360{\deg} equirectangular images) as well as camera information. It also includes registered raw and semantically annotated 3D meshes and point clouds. The dataset enables development of joint and cross-modal learning models and potentially unsupervised approaches utilizing the regularities present in large-scale indoor spaces. The dataset is available here: http://3Dsemantics.stanford.edu/

Understanding a 3D scene immediately with its exploration is essential for embodied tasks, where an agent must construct and comprehend the 3D scene in an online and nearly real-time manner. In this study, we propose EmbodiedSplat, an online feed-forward 3DGS for open-vocabulary scene understanding that enables simultaneous online 3D reconstruction and 3D semantic understanding from the streaming images. Unlike existing open-vocabulary 3DGS methods which are typically restricted to either offline or per-scene optimization setting, our objectives are two-fold: 1) Reconstructs the semantic-embedded 3DGS of the entire scene from over 300 streaming images in an online manner. 2) Highly generalizable to novel scenes with feed-forward design and supports nearly real-time 3D semantic reconstruction when combined with real-time 2D models. To achieve these objectives, we propose an Online Sparse Coefficients Field with a CLIP Global Codebook where it binds the 2D CLIP embeddings to each 3D Gaussian while minimizing memory consumption and preserving the full semantic generalizability of CLIP. Furthermore, we generate 3D geometric-aware CLIP features by aggregating the partial point cloud of 3DGS through 3D U-Net to compensate the 3D geometric prior to 2D-oriented language embeddings. Extensive experiments on diverse indoor datasets, including ScanNet, ScanNet++, and Replica, demonstrate both the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Check out our project page in https://0nandon.github.io/EmbodiedSplat/.

The advent of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has sparked a surge in research aimed at harnessing their remarkable reasoning abilities. However, for understanding text-rich images, challenges persist in fully leveraging the potential of LMMs, and existing methods struggle with effectively processing high-resolution images. In this work, we propose TextCoT, a novel Chain-of-Thought framework for text-rich image understanding. TextCoT utilizes the captioning ability of LMMs to grasp the global context of the image and the grounding capability to examine local textual regions. This allows for the extraction of both global and local visual information, facilitating more accurate question-answering. Technically, TextCoT consists of three stages, including image overview, coarse localization, and fine-grained observation. The image overview stage provides a comprehensive understanding of the global scene information, and the coarse localization stage approximates the image area containing the answer based on the question asked. Then, integrating the obtained global image descriptions, the final stage further examines specific regions to provide accurate answers. Our method is free of extra training, offering immediate plug-and-play functionality. Extensive experiments are conducted on a series of text-rich image question-answering benchmark datasets based on several advanced LMMs, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and strong generalization ability of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/bzluan/TextCoT.

For human-centric large-scale scenes, fine-grained modeling for 3D human global pose and shape is significant for scene understanding and can benefit many real-world applications. In this paper, we present LiveHPS, a novel single-LiDAR-based approach for scene-level human pose and shape estimation without any limitation of light conditions and wearable devices. In particular, we design a distillation mechanism to mitigate the distribution-varying effect of LiDAR point clouds and exploit the temporal-spatial geometric and dynamic information existing in consecutive frames to solve the occlusion and noise disturbance. LiveHPS, with its efficient configuration and high-quality output, is well-suited for real-world applications. Moreover, we propose a huge human motion dataset, named FreeMotion, which is collected in various scenarios with diverse human poses, shapes and translations. It consists of multi-modal and multi-view acquisition data from calibrated and synchronized LiDARs, cameras, and IMUs. Extensive experiments on our new dataset and other public datasets demonstrate the SOTA performance and robustness of our approach. We will release our code and dataset soon.

Monocular 3D occupancy prediction, aiming to predict the occupancy and semantics within interesting regions of 3D scenes from only 2D images, has garnered increasing attention recently for its vital role in 3D scene understanding. Predicting the 3D occupancy of large-scale outdoor scenes from 2D images is ill-posed and resource-intensive. In this paper, we present DGOcc, a Depth-aware Global query-based network for monocular 3D Occupancy prediction. We first explore prior depth maps to extract depth context features that provide explicit geometric information for the occupancy network. Then, in order to fully exploit the depth context features, we propose a Global Query-based (GQ) Module. The cooperation of attention mechanisms and scale-aware operations facilitates the feature interaction between images and 3D voxels. Moreover, a Hierarchical Supervision Strategy (HSS) is designed to avoid upsampling the high-dimension 3D voxel features to full resolution, which mitigates GPU memory utilization and time cost. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best performance on monocular semantic occupancy prediction while reducing GPU and time overhead.

The rapid development of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for 2D images and videos has spurred efforts to adapt these models for interpreting 3D scenes. However, the absence of large-scale 3D vision-language datasets has posed a significant obstacle. To address this issue, typical approaches focus on injecting 3D awareness into 2D LMMs by designing 3D input-level scene representations. This work provides a new perspective. We introduce reconstructive visual instruction tuning with 3D-awareness (Ross3D), which integrates 3D-aware visual supervision into the training procedure. Specifically, it incorporates cross-view and global-view reconstruction. The former requires reconstructing masked views by aggregating overlapping information from other views. The latter aims to aggregate information from all available views to recover Bird's-Eye-View images, contributing to a comprehensive overview of the entire scene. Empirically, Ross3D achieves state-of-the-art performance across various 3D scene understanding benchmarks. More importantly, our semi-supervised experiments demonstrate significant potential in leveraging large amounts of unlabeled 3D vision-only data.

Reconstructing unbounded outdoor scenes from sparse outward-facing views poses significant challenges due to minimal view overlap. Previous methods often lack cross-scene understanding and their primitive-centric formulations overload local features to compensate for missing global context, resulting in blurriness in unseen parts of the scene. We propose sshELF, a fast, single-shot pipeline for sparse-view 3D scene reconstruction via hierarchal extrapolation of latent features. Our key insights is that disentangling information extrapolation from primitive decoding allows efficient transfer of structural patterns across training scenes. Our method: (1) learns cross-scene priors to generate intermediate virtual views to extrapolate to unobserved regions, (2) offers a two-stage network design separating virtual view generation from 3D primitive decoding for efficient training and modular model design, and (3) integrates a pre-trained foundation model for joint inference of latent features and texture, improving scene understanding and generalization. sshELF can reconstruct 360 degree scenes from six sparse input views and achieves competitive results on synthetic and real-world datasets. We find that sshELF faithfully reconstructs occluded regions, supports real-time rendering, and provides rich latent features for downstream applications. The code will be released.

Navigation and mapping on the lunar surface require robust perception under challenging conditions, including poorly textured environments, high-contrast lighting, and limited computational resources. This paper presents a real-time mapping framework that integrates dense perception models with a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation. We first benchmark several models on synthetic datasets generated with the LuPNT simulator, selecting a stereo dense depth estimation model based on Gated Recurrent Units for its balance of speed and accuracy in depth estimation, and a convolutional neural network for its superior performance in detecting semantic segments. Using ground truth poses to decouple the local scene understanding from the global state estimation, our pipeline reconstructs a 120-meter traverse with a geometric height accuracy of approximately 3 cm, outperforming a traditional point cloud baseline without LiDAR. The resulting 3DGS map enables novel view synthesis and serves as a foundation for a full SLAM system, where its capacity for joint map and pose optimization would offer significant advantages. Our results demonstrate that combining semantic segmentation and dense depth estimation with learned map representations is an effective approach for creating detailed, large-scale maps to support future lunar surface missions.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is an essential skill for embodied agents, allowing them to navigate in 3D environments following natural language instructions. High-performance navigation models require a large amount of training data, the high cost of manually annotating data has seriously hindered this field. Therefore, some previous methods translate trajectory videos into step-by-step instructions for expanding data, but such instructions do not match well with users' communication styles that briefly describe destinations or state specific needs. Moreover, local navigation trajectories overlook global context and high-level task planning. To address these issues, we propose NavRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that generates user demand instructions for VLN. NavRAG leverages LLM to build a hierarchical scene description tree for 3D scene understanding from global layout to local details, then simulates various user roles with specific demands to retrieve from the scene tree, generating diverse instructions with LLM. We annotate over 2 million navigation instructions across 861 scenes and evaluate the data quality and navigation performance of trained models.

Joint estimation of surface normals and depth is essential for holistic 3D scene understanding, yet high-resolution prediction remains difficult due to the trade-off between preserving fine local detail and maintaining global consistency. To address this challenge, we propose the Ultra Resolution Geometry Transformer (URGT), which adapts the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) into a unified multi-patch transformer for monocular high-resolution depth--normal estimation. A single high-resolution image is partitioned into patches that are augmented with coarse depth and normal priors from pre-trained models, and jointly processed in a single forward pass to predict refined geometric outputs. Global coherence is enforced through cross-patch attention, which enables long-range geometric reasoning and seamless propagation of information across patches within a shared backbone. To further enhance spatial robustness, we introduce a GridMix patch sampling strategy that probabilistically samples grid configurations during training, improving inter-patch consistency and generalization. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on UnrealStereo4K, jointly improving depth and normal estimation, reducing AbsRel from 0.0582 to 0.0291, RMSE from 2.17 to 1.31, and lowering mean angular error from 23.36 degrees to 18.51 degrees, while producing sharper and more stable geometry. The proposed multi-patch framework also demonstrates strong zero-shot and cross-domain generalization and scales effectively to very high resolutions, offering an efficient and extensible solution for high-quality geometry refinement.

Modeling spatial-temporal relations is imperative for recognizing human actions, especially when a human is interacting with objects, while multiple objects appear around the human differently over time. Most existing action recognition models focus on learning overall visual cues of a scene but disregard informative fine-grained features, which can be captured by learning human-object relationships and interactions. In this paper, we learn human-object relationships by exploiting the interaction of their local and global contexts. We hence propose the Global-Local Interaction Distillation Network (GLIDN), learning human and object interactions through space and time via knowledge distillation for fine-grained scene understanding. GLIDN encodes humans and objects into graph nodes and learns local and global relations via graph attention network. The local context graphs learn the relation between humans and objects at a frame level by capturing their co-occurrence at a specific time step. The global relation graph is constructed based on the video-level of human and object interactions, identifying their long-term relations throughout a video sequence. More importantly, we investigate how knowledge from these graphs can be distilled to their counterparts for improving human-object interaction (HOI) recognition. We evaluate our model by conducting comprehensive experiments on two datasets including Charades and CAD-120 datasets. We have achieved better results than the baselines and counterpart approaches.

Although robot-to-robot (R2R) communication improves indoor scene understanding beyond what a single robot can achieve, R2R alone cannot overcome partial observability without substantial exploration overhead or scaling team size. In contrast, many indoor environments already include low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) sensors (e.g., cameras) that provide persistent, building-wide context beyond onboard perception. We therefore introduce IndoorR2X, the first benchmark and simulation framework for Large Language Model (LLM)-driven multi-robot task planning with Robot-to-Everything (R2X) perception and communication in indoor environments. IndoorR2X integrates observations from mobile robots and static IoT devices to construct a global semantic state that supports scalable scene understanding, reduces redundant exploration, and enables high-level coordination through LLM-based planning. IndoorR2X provides configurable simulation environments, sensor layouts, robot teams, and task suites to systematically evaluate high-level semantic coordination strategies. Extensive experiments across diverse settings demonstrate that IoT-augmented world modeling improves multi-robot efficiency and reliability, and we highlight key insights and failure modes for advancing LLM-based collaboration between robot teams and indoor IoT sensors. See our project website: https://fandulu.github.io/IndoorR2X_project_page/.

Recently, Transformer-based models have achieved promising results in various vision tasks, due to their ability to model long-range dependencies. However, transformers are computationally expensive, which limits their applications in real-time tasks such as autonomous driving. In addition, an efficient local and global feature selection and fusion are vital for accurate dense prediction, especially driving scene understanding tasks. In this paper, we propose a real-time semantic segmentation architecture named Pyramid Pooling Axial Transformer (P2AT). The proposed P2AT takes a coarse feature from the CNN encoder to produce scale-aware contextual features, which are then combined with the multi-level feature aggregation scheme to produce enhanced contextual features. Specifically, we introduce a pyramid pooling axial transformer to capture intricate spatial and channel dependencies, leading to improved performance on semantic segmentation. Then, we design a Bidirectional Fusion module (BiF) to combine semantic information at different levels. Meanwhile, a Global Context Enhancer is introduced to compensate for the inadequacy of concatenating different semantic levels. Finally, a decoder block is proposed to help maintain a larger receptive field. We evaluate P2AT variants on three challenging scene-understanding datasets. In particular, our P2AT variants achieve state-of-art results on the Camvid dataset 80.5%, 81.0%, 81.1% for P2AT-S, P2ATM, and P2AT-L, respectively. Furthermore, our experiment on Cityscapes and Pascal VOC 2012 have demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed architecture, with results showing that P2AT-M, achieves 78.7% on Cityscapes. The source code will be available at

Affordance prediction serves as a critical bridge between perception and action in embodied AI. However, existing research is confined to pinhole camera models, which suffer from narrow Fields of View (FoV) and fragmented observations, often missing critical holistic environmental context. In this paper, we present the first exploration into Panoramic Affordance Prediction, utilizing 360-degree imagery to capture global spatial relationships and holistic scene understanding. To facilitate this novel task, we first introduce PAP-12K, a large-scale benchmark dataset containing over 1,000 ultra-high-resolution (12k, 11904 x 5952) panoramic images with over 12k carefully annotated QA pairs and affordance masks. Furthermore, we propose PAP, a training-free, coarse-to-fine pipeline inspired by the human foveal visual system to tackle the ultra-high resolution and severe distortion inherent in panoramic images. PAP employs recursive visual routing via grid prompting to progressively locate targets, applies an adaptive gaze mechanism to rectify local geometric distortions, and utilizes a cascaded grounding pipeline to extract precise instance-level masks. Experimental results on PAP-12K reveal that existing affordance prediction methods designed for standard perspective images suffer severe performance degradation and fail due to the unique challenges of panoramic vision. In contrast, PAP framework effectively overcomes these obstacles, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines and highlighting the immense potential of panoramic perception for robust embodied intelligence.

Multilingual document and scene text understanding plays an important role in applications such as search, finance, and public services. However, most existing benchmarks focus on high-resource languages and fail to evaluate models in realistic multilingual environments. In Southeast Asia, the diversity of languages, complex writing systems, and highly varied document types make this challenge even greater. We introduce SEA-Vision, a benchmark that jointly evaluates Document Parsing and Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) across 11 Southeast Asian languages. SEA-Vision contains 15,234 document parsing pages from nine representative document types, annotated with hierarchical page-, block-, and line-level labels. It also provides 7,496 TEC-VQA question-answer pairs that probe text recognition, numerical calculation, comparative analysis, logical reasoning, and spatial understanding. To make such multilingual, multi-task annotation feasible, we design a hybrid pipeline for Document Parsing and TEC-VQA. It combines automated filtering and scoring with MLLM-assisted labeling and lightweight native-speaker verification, greatly reducing manual labeling while maintaining high quality. We evaluate several leading multimodal models and observe pronounced performance degradation on low-resource Southeast Asian languages, highlighting substantial remaining gaps in multilingual document and scene text understanding. We believe SEA-Vision will help drive global progress in document and scene text understanding.

Embodied navigation is a fundamental capability of embodied intelligence, enabling robots to move and interact within physical environments. However, existing navigation tasks primarily focus on predefined object navigation or instruction following, which significantly differs from human needs in real-world scenarios involving complex, open-ended scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a challenging long-horizon navigation task that requires understanding high-level human instructions and performing spatial-aware object navigation in real-world environments. Existing embodied navigation methods struggle with such tasks due to their limitations in comprehending high-level human instructions and localizing objects with an open vocabulary. In this paper, we propose NavA^3, a hierarchical framework divided into two stages: global and local policies. In the global policy, we leverage the reasoning capabilities of Reasoning-VLM to parse high-level human instructions and integrate them with global 3D scene views. This allows us to reason and navigate to regions most likely to contain the goal object. In the local policy, we have collected a dataset of 1.0 million samples of spatial-aware object affordances to train the NaviAfford model (PointingVLM), which provides robust open-vocabulary object localization and spatial awareness for precise goal identification and navigation in complex environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NavA^3 achieves SOTA results in navigation performance and can successfully complete longhorizon navigation tasks across different robot embodiments in real-world settings, paving the way for universal embodied navigation. The dataset and code will be made available. Project website: https://NavigationA3.github.io/.

Recently, there has been growing interest in developing learning-based methods to detect and utilize salient semi-global or global structures, such as junctions, lines, planes, cuboids, smooth surfaces, and all types of symmetries, for 3D scene modeling and understanding. However, the ground truth annotations are often obtained via human labor, which is particularly challenging and inefficient for such tasks due to the large number of 3D structure instances (e.g., line segments) and other factors such as viewpoints and occlusions. In this paper, we present a new synthetic dataset, Structured3D, with the aim of providing large-scale photo-realistic images with rich 3D structure annotations for a wide spectrum of structured 3D modeling tasks. We take advantage of the availability of professional interior designs and automatically extract 3D structures from them. We generate high-quality images with an industry-leading rendering engine. We use our synthetic dataset in combination with real images to train deep networks for room layout estimation and demonstrate improved performance on benchmark datasets.

This paper introduces Scene-LLM, a 3D-visual-language model that enhances embodied agents' abilities in interactive 3D indoor environments by integrating the reasoning strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs). Scene-LLM adopts a hybrid 3D visual feature representation, that incorporates dense spatial information and supports scene state updates. The model employs a projection layer to efficiently project these features in the pre-trained textual embedding space, enabling effective interpretation of 3D visual information. Unique to our approach is the integration of both scene-level and ego-centric 3D information. This combination is pivotal for interactive planning, where scene-level data supports global planning and ego-centric data is important for localization. Notably, we use ego-centric 3D frame features for feature alignment, an efficient technique that enhances the model's ability to align features of small objects within the scene. Our experiments with Scene-LLM demonstrate its strong capabilities in dense captioning, question answering, and interactive planning. We believe Scene-LLM advances the field of 3D visual understanding and reasoning, offering new possibilities for sophisticated agent interactions in indoor settings.

Real-world text can be damaged by corrosion issues caused by environmental or human factors, which hinder the preservation of the complete styles of texts, e.g., texture and structure. These corrosion issues, such as graffiti signs and incomplete signatures, bring difficulties in understanding the texts, thereby posing significant challenges to downstream applications, e.g., scene text recognition and signature identification. Notably, current inpainting techniques often fail to adequately address this problem and have difficulties restoring accurate text images along with reasonable and consistent styles. Formulating this as an open problem of text image inpainting, this paper aims to build a benchmark to facilitate its study. In doing so, we establish two specific text inpainting datasets which contain scene text images and handwritten text images, respectively. Each of them includes images revamped by real-life and synthetic datasets, featuring pairs of original images, corrupted images, and other assistant information. On top of the datasets, we further develop a novel neural framework, Global Structure-guided Diffusion Model (GSDM), as a potential solution. Leveraging the global structure of the text as a prior, the proposed GSDM develops an efficient diffusion model to recover clean texts. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated by thorough empirical study, including a substantial boost in both recognition accuracy and image quality. These findings not only highlight the effectiveness of our method but also underscore its potential to enhance the broader field of text image understanding and processing. Code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/blackprotoss/GSDM.

The remote sensing image intelligence understanding model is undergoing a new profound paradigm shift which has been promoted by multi-modal large language model (MLLM), i.e. from the paradigm learning a domain model (LaDM) shifts to paradigm learning a pre-trained general foundation model followed by an adaptive domain model (LaGD). Under the new LaGD paradigm, the old datasets, which have led to advances in RSI intelligence understanding in the last decade, are no longer suitable for fire-new tasks. We argued that a new dataset must be designed to lighten tasks with the following features: 1) Generalization: training model to learn shared knowledge among tasks and to adapt to different tasks; 2) Understanding complex scenes: training model to understand the fine-grained attribute of the objects of interest, and to be able to describe the scene with natural language; 3) Reasoning: training model to be able to realize high-level visual reasoning. In this paper, we designed a high-quality, diversified, and unified multimodal instruction-following dataset for RSI understanding produced by GPT-4V and existing datasets, which we called RS-GPT4V. To achieve generalization, we used a (Question, Answer) which was deduced from GPT-4V via instruction-following to unify the tasks such as captioning and localization; To achieve complex scene, we proposed a hierarchical instruction description with local strategy in which the fine-grained attributes of the objects and their spatial relationships are described and global strategy in which all the local information are integrated to yield detailed instruction descript; To achieve reasoning, we designed multiple-turn QA pair to provide the reasoning ability for a model. The empirical results show that the fine-tuned MLLMs by RS-GPT4V can describe fine-grained information. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/GeoX-Lab/RS-GPT4V.

This paper addresses the task of large-scale 3D scene reconstruction from long video sequences. Recent feed-forward reconstruction models have shown promising results by directly regressing 3D geometry from RGB images without explicit 3D priors or geometric constraints. However, these methods often struggle to maintain reconstruction accuracy and consistency over long sequences due to limited memory capacity and the inability to effectively capture global contextual cues. In contrast, humans can naturally exploit the global understanding of the scene to inform local perception. Motivated by this, we propose a novel neural global context representation that efficiently compresses and retains long-range scene information, enabling the model to leverage extensive contextual cues for enhanced reconstruction accuracy and consistency. The context representation is realized through a set of lightweight neural sub-networks that are rapidly adapted during test time via self-supervised objectives, which substantially increases memory capacity without incurring significant computational overhead. The experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks, including the KITTI Odometry~Geiger2012CVPR and Oxford Spires~tao2025spires datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in handling ultra-large scenes, achieving leading pose accuracy and state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction accuracy while maintaining efficiency. Code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/scal3r.

Recent approaches to jointly reconstruct 3D humans and objects from a single RGB image represent 3D shapes with template-based or coarse models, which fail to capture details of loose clothing on human bodies. In this paper, we introduce a novel implicit approach for jointly reconstructing realistic 3D clothed humans and objects from a monocular view. For the first time, we model both the human and the object with an implicit representation, allowing to capture more realistic details such as clothing. This task is extremely challenging due to human-object occlusions and the lack of 3D information in 2D images, often leading to poor detail reconstruction and depth ambiguity. To address these problems, we propose a novel attention-based neural implicit model that leverages image pixel alignment from both the input human-object image for a global understanding of the human-object scene and from local separate views of the human and object images to improve realism with, for example, clothing details. Additionally, the network is conditioned on semantic features derived from an estimated human-object pose prior, which provides 3D spatial information about the shared space of humans and objects. To handle human occlusion caused by objects, we use a generative diffusion model that inpaints the occluded regions, recovering otherwise lost details. For training and evaluation, we introduce a synthetic dataset featuring rendered scenes of inter-occluded 3D human scans and diverse objects. Extensive evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates the superior quality of the proposed human-object reconstructions over competitive methods.

Predicting salient regions in natural images requires the detection of objects that are present in a scene. To develop robust representations for this challenging task, high-level visual features at multiple spatial scales must be extracted and augmented with contextual information. However, existing models aimed at explaining human fixation maps do not incorporate such a mechanism explicitly. Here we propose an approach based on a convolutional neural network pre-trained on a large-scale image classification task. The architecture forms an encoder-decoder structure and includes a module with multiple convolutional layers at different dilation rates to capture multi-scale features in parallel. Moreover, we combine the resulting representations with global scene information for accurately predicting visual saliency. Our model achieves competitive and consistent results across multiple evaluation metrics on two public saliency benchmarks and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the suggested approach on five datasets and selected examples. Compared to state of the art approaches, the network is based on a lightweight image classification backbone and hence presents a suitable choice for applications with limited computational resources, such as (virtual) robotic systems, to estimate human fixations across complex natural scenes.

Human vision organizes local cues into coherent global forms using Gestalt principles like closure, proximity, and figure-ground assignment -- functions reliant on global spatial structure. We investigate whether modern vision models show similar behaviors, and under what training conditions these emerge. We find that Vision Transformers (ViTs) trained with Masked Autoencoding (MAE) exhibit activation patterns consistent with Gestalt laws, including illusory contour completion, convexity preference, and dynamic figure-ground segregation. To probe the computational basis, we hypothesize that modeling global dependencies is necessary for Gestalt-like organization. We introduce the Distorted Spatial Relationship Testbench (DiSRT), which evaluates sensitivity to global spatial perturbations while preserving local textures. Using DiSRT, we show that self-supervised models (e.g., MAE, CLIP) outperform supervised baselines and sometimes even exceed human performance. ConvNeXt models trained with MAE also exhibit Gestalt-compatible representations, suggesting such sensitivity can arise without attention architectures. However, classification finetuning degrades this ability. Inspired by biological vision, we show that a Top-K activation sparsity mechanism can restore global sensitivity. Our findings identify training conditions that promote or suppress Gestalt-like perception and establish DiSRT as a diagnostic for global structure sensitivity across models.

Modern computer vision pipelines handle large images in one of two sub-optimal ways: down-sampling or cropping. These two methods incur significant losses in the amount of information and context present in an image. There are many downstream applications in which global context matters as much as high frequency details, such as in real-world satellite imagery; in such cases researchers have to make the uncomfortable choice of which information to discard. We introduce xT, a simple framework for vision transformers which effectively aggregates global context with local details and can model large images end-to-end on contemporary GPUs. We select a set of benchmark datasets across classic vision tasks which accurately reflect a vision model's ability to understand truly large images and incorporate fine details over large scales and assess our method's improvement on them. By introducing a nested tokenization scheme for large images in conjunction with long-sequence length models normally used for natural language processing, we are able to increase accuracy by up to 8.6% on challenging classification tasks and F_1 score by 11.6 on context-dependent segmentation in large images.

The efficient spatial allocation of primitives serves as the foundation of 3D Gaussian Splatting, as it directly dictates the synergy between representation compactness, reconstruction speed, and rendering fidelity. Previous solutions, whether based on iterative optimization or feed-forward inference, suffer from significant trade-offs between these goals, mainly due to the reliance on local, heuristic-driven allocation strategies that lack global scene awareness. Specifically, current feed-forward methods are largely pixel-aligned or voxel-aligned. By unprojecting pixels into dense, view-aligned primitives, they bake redundancy into the 3D asset. As more input views are added, the representation size increases and global consistency becomes fragile. To this end, we introduce GlobalSplat, a framework built on the principle of align first, decode later. Our approach learns a compact, global, latent scene representation that encodes multi-view input and resolves cross-view correspondences before decoding any explicit 3D geometry. Crucially, this formulation enables compact, globally consistent reconstructions without relying on pretrained pixel-prediction backbones or reusing latent features from dense baselines. Utilizing a coarse-to-fine training curriculum that gradually increases decoded capacity, GlobalSplat natively prevents representation bloat. On RealEstate10K and ACID, our model achieves competitive novel-view synthesis performance while utilizing as few as 16K Gaussians, significantly less than required by dense pipelines, obtaining a light 4MB footprint. Further, GlobalSplat enables significantly faster inference than the baselines, operating under 78 milliseconds in a single forward pass. Project page is available at https://r-itk.github.io/globalsplat/

Deep neural networks have reached human-level performance on many computer vision tasks. However, the objectives used to train these networks enforce only that similar images are embedded at similar locations in the representation space, and do not directly constrain the global structure of the resulting space. Here, we explore the impact of supervising this global structure by linearly aligning it with human similarity judgments. We find that a naive approach leads to large changes in local representational structure that harm downstream performance. Thus, we propose a novel method that aligns the global structure of representations while preserving their local structure. This global-local transform considerably improves accuracy across a variety of few-shot learning and anomaly detection tasks. Our results indicate that human visual representations are globally organized in a way that facilitates learning from few examples, and incorporating this global structure into neural network representations improves performance on downstream tasks.

We propose global context vision transformer (GC ViT), a novel architecture that enhances parameter and compute utilization for computer vision tasks. The core of the novel model are global context self-attention modules, joint with standard local self-attention, to effectively yet efficiently model both long and short-range spatial interactions, as an alternative to complex operations such as an attention masks or local windows shifting. While the local self-attention modules are responsible for modeling short-range information, the global query tokens are shared across all global self-attention modules to interact with local key and values. In addition, we address the lack of inductive bias in ViTs and improve the modeling of inter-channel dependencies by proposing a novel downsampler which leverages a parameter-efficient fused inverted residual block. The proposed GC ViT achieves new state-of-the-art performance across image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. On ImageNet-1K dataset for classification, GC ViT models with 51M, 90M and 201M parameters achieve 84.3%, 84.9% and 85.6% Top-1 accuracy, respectively, surpassing comparably-sized prior art such as CNN-based ConvNeXt and ViT-based Swin Transformer. Pre-trained GC ViT backbones in downstream tasks of object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation on MS COCO and ADE20K datasets outperform prior work consistently, sometimes by large margins.

In recent years, 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made significant strides in image-text understanding tasks. However, their performance in 3D spatial comprehension, which is critical for embodied intelligence, remains limited. Recent advances have leveraged 3D point clouds and multi-view images as inputs, yielding promising results. However, we propose exploring a purely vision-based solution inspired by human perception, which merely relies on visual cues for 3D spatial understanding. This paper empirically investigates the limitations of VLMs in 3D spatial knowledge, revealing that their primary shortcoming lies in the lack of global-local correspondence between the scene and individual frames. To address this, we introduce GPT4Scene, a novel visual prompting paradigm in VLM training and inference that helps build the global-local relationship, significantly improving the 3D spatial understanding of indoor scenes. Specifically, GPT4Scene constructs a 3D Bird's Eye View (BEV) image from the video and marks consistent object IDs across both frames and the BEV image. The model then inputs the concatenated BEV image and video frames with markers. In zero-shot evaluations, GPT4Scene improves performance over closed-source VLMs like GPT-4o. Additionally, we prepare a processed video dataset consisting of 165K text annotation to fine-tune open-source VLMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance on all 3D understanding tasks. Surprisingly, after training with the GPT4Scene paradigm, VLMs consistently improve during inference, even without visual prompting and BEV image as explicit correspondence. It demonstrates that the proposed paradigm helps VLMs develop an intrinsic ability to understand 3D scenes, which paves the way for a noninvasive approach to extending pre-trained VLMs for 3D scene understanding.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at holistic understanding, they struggle in capturing the dense world with complex scenes, requiring fine-grained analysis of intricate details and object inter-relationships. Region-level MLLMs have been a promising step. However, previous attempts are generally optimized to understand given regions in isolation, neglecting crucial global contexts. To address this, we introduce Grasp Any Region (GAR) for comprehen- sive region-level visual understanding. Empowered by an effective RoI-aligned feature replay technique, GAR supports (1) precise perception by leveraging necessary global contexts, and (2) modeling interactions between multiple prompts. Together, it then naturally achieves (3) advanced compositional reasoning to answer specific free-form questions about any region, shifting the paradigm from passive description to active dialogue. Moreover, we construct GAR-Bench, which not only provides a more accurate evaluation of single-region comprehension, but also, more importantly, measures interactions and complex reasoning across multiple regions. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that GAR-1B not only maintains the state-of-the-art captioning capabilities, e.g., outperforming DAM-3B +4.5 on DLC-Bench, but also excels at modeling relationships between multiple prompts with advanced comprehension capabilities, even surpassing InternVL3-78B on GAR-Bench-VQA. More importantly, our zero-shot GAR-8B even outperforms in-domain VideoRefer-7B on VideoRefer-BenchQ, indicating its strong capabilities can be easily transferred to videos.

Human perception of the world is shaped by a multitude of viewpoints and modalities. While many existing datasets focus on scene understanding from a certain perspective (e.g. egocentric or third-person views), our dataset offers a panoptic perspective (i.e. multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities). Specifically, we encapsulate third-person panoramic and front views, as well as egocentric monocular/binocular views with rich modalities including video, multi-channel audio, directional binaural delay, location data and textual scene descriptions within each scene captured, presenting comprehensive observation of the world. Figure 1 offers a glimpse of all 28 scene categories of our 360+x dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first database that covers multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities to mimic how daily information is accessed in the real world. Through our benchmark analysis, we presented 5 different scene understanding tasks on the proposed 360+x dataset to evaluate the impact and benefit of each data modality and perspective in panoptic scene understanding. We hope this unique dataset could broaden the scope of comprehensive scene understanding and encourage the community to approach these problems from more diverse perspectives.

Seeing clearly with high resolution is a foundation of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), which has been proven to be vital for visual perception and reasoning. Existing works usually employ a straightforward resolution upscaling method, where the image consists of global and local branches, with the latter being the sliced image patches but resized to the same resolution as the former. This means that higher resolution requires more local patches, resulting in exorbitant computational expenses, and meanwhile, the dominance of local image tokens may diminish the global context. In this paper, we dive into the problems and propose a new framework as well as an elaborate optimization strategy. Specifically, we extract contextual information from the global view using a mixture of adapters, based on the observation that different adapters excel at different tasks. With regard to local patches, learnable query embeddings are introduced to reduce image tokens, the most important tokens accounting for the user question will be further selected by a similarity-based selector. Our empirical results demonstrate a `less is more' pattern, where utilizing fewer but more informative local image tokens leads to improved performance. Besides, a significant challenge lies in the training strategy, as simultaneous end-to-end training of the global mining block and local compression block does not yield optimal results. We thus advocate for an alternating training way, ensuring balanced learning between global and local aspects. Finally, we also introduce a challenging dataset with high requirements for image detail, enhancing the training of the local compression layer. The proposed method, termed LMM with Sophisticated Tasks, Local image compression, and Mixture of global Experts (SliME), achieves leading performance across various benchmarks with only 2 million training data.

Open-world instance-level scene understanding aims to locate and recognize unseen object categories that are not present in the annotated dataset. This task is challenging because the model needs to both localize novel 3D objects and infer their semantic categories. A key factor for the recent progress in 2D open-world perception is the availability of large-scale image-text pairs from the Internet, which cover a wide range of vocabulary concepts. However, this success is hard to replicate in 3D scenarios due to the scarcity of 3D-text pairs. To address this challenge, we propose to harness pre-trained vision-language (VL) foundation models that encode extensive knowledge from image-text pairs to generate captions for multi-view images of 3D scenes. This allows us to establish explicit associations between 3D shapes and semantic-rich captions. Moreover, to enhance the fine-grained visual-semantic representation learning from captions for object-level categorization, we design hierarchical point-caption association methods to learn semantic-aware embeddings that exploit the 3D geometry between 3D points and multi-view images. In addition, to tackle the localization challenge for novel classes in the open-world setting, we develop debiased instance localization, which involves training object grouping modules on unlabeled data using instance-level pseudo supervision. This significantly improves the generalization capabilities of instance grouping and thus the ability to accurately locate novel objects. We conduct extensive experiments on 3D semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation tasks, covering indoor and outdoor scenes across three datasets. Our method outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin in semantic segmentation (e.g. 34.5%sim65.3%), instance segmentation (e.g. 21.8%sim54.0%) and panoptic segmentation (e.g. 14.7%sim43.3%). Code will be available.

Previous methods for image geo-localization have typically treated the task as either classification or retrieval, often relying on black-box decisions that lack interpretability. The rise of large vision-language models (LVLMs) has enabled a rethinking of geo-localization as a reasoning-driven task grounded in visual cues. However, two major challenges persist. On the data side, existing reasoning-focused datasets are primarily based on street-view imagery, offering limited scene diversity and constrained viewpoints. On the modeling side, current approaches predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning, which yields only marginal improvements in reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose a novel pipeline that constructs a reasoning-oriented geo-localization dataset, MP16-Reason, using diverse social media images. We introduce GLOBE, Group-relative policy optimization for Localizability assessment and Optimized visual-cue reasoning, yielding Bi-objective geo-Enhancement for the VLM in recognition and reasoning. GLOBE incorporates task-specific rewards that jointly enhance localizability assessment, visual-cue reasoning, and geolocation accuracy. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that GLOBE outperforms state-of-the-art open-source LVLMs on geo-localization tasks, particularly in diverse visual scenes, while also generating more insightful and interpretable reasoning trajectories. The data and code are available at https://github.com/lingli1996/GLOBE.

Modern vision models have achieved remarkable success in benchmarks where local features provide critical information about the target. There is now a growing interest in solving tasks that require more global reasoning, where local features offer no significant information. These tasks are reminiscent of the connectivity tasks discussed by Minsky and Papert in 1969, which exposed the limitations of the perceptron model and contributed to the first AI winter. In this paper, we revisit such tasks by introducing four global visual benchmarks involving path findings and mazes. We show that: (1) although today's large vision models largely surpass the expressivity limitations of the early models, they still struggle with the learning efficiency; we put forward the "globality degree" notion to understand this limitation; (2) we then demonstrate that the picture changes and global reasoning becomes feasible with the introduction of "visual scratchpads"; similarly to the text scratchpads and chain-of-thoughts used in language models, visual scratchpads help break down global tasks into simpler ones; (3) we finally show that some scratchpads are better than others, in particular, "inductive scratchpads" that take steps relying on less information afford better out-of-distribution generalization and succeed for smaller model sizes.

Recently, self-attention mechanisms have shown impressive performance in various NLP and CV tasks, which can help capture sequential characteristics and derive global information. In this work, we explore how to extend self-attention modules to better learn subtle feature embeddings for recognizing fine-grained objects, e.g., different bird species or person identities. To this end, we propose a dual cross-attention learning (DCAL) algorithm to coordinate with self-attention learning. First, we propose global-local cross-attention (GLCA) to enhance the interactions between global images and local high-response regions, which can help reinforce the spatial-wise discriminative clues for recognition. Second, we propose pair-wise cross-attention (PWCA) to establish the interactions between image pairs. PWCA can regularize the attention learning of an image by treating another image as distractor and will be removed during inference. We observe that DCAL can reduce misleading attentions and diffuse the attention response to discover more complementary parts for recognition. We conduct extensive evaluations on fine-grained visual categorization and object re-identification. Experiments demonstrate that DCAL performs on par with state-of-the-art methods and consistently improves multiple self-attention baselines, e.g., surpassing DeiT-Tiny and ViT-Base by 2.8% and 2.4% mAP on MSMT17, respectively.

Panoramic image enables deeper understanding and more holistic perception of 360^circ surrounding environment, which can naturally encode enriched scene context information compared to standard perspective image. Previous work has made lots of effort to solve the scene understanding task in a bottom-up form, thus each sub-task is processed separately and few correlations are explored in this procedure. In this paper, we propose a novel method using depth prior for holistic indoor scene understanding which recovers the objects' shapes, oriented bounding boxes and the 3D room layout simultaneously from a single panorama. In order to fully utilize the rich context information, we design a transformer-based context module to predict the representation and relationship among each component of the scene. In addition, we introduce a real-world dataset for scene understanding, including photo-realistic panoramas, high-fidelity depth images, accurately annotated room layouts, and oriented object bounding boxes and shapes. Experiments on the synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous panoramic scene understanding methods in terms of both layout estimation and 3D object detection.

Scene recognition is currently one of the top-challenging research fields in computer vision. This may be due to the ambiguity between classes: images of several scene classes may share similar objects, which causes confusion among them. The problem is aggravated when images of a particular scene class are notably different. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have significantly boosted performance in scene recognition, albeit it is still far below from other recognition tasks (e.g., object or image recognition). In this paper, we describe a novel approach for scene recognition based on an end-to-end multi-modal CNN that combines image and context information by means of an attention module. Context information, in the shape of semantic segmentation, is used to gate features extracted from the RGB image by leveraging on information encoded in the semantic representation: the set of scene objects and stuff, and their relative locations. This gating process reinforces the learning of indicative scene content and enhances scene disambiguation by refocusing the receptive fields of the CNN towards them. Experimental results on four publicly available datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms every other state-of-the-art method while significantly reducing the number of network parameters. All the code and data used along this paper is available at https://github.com/vpulab/Semantic-Aware-Scene-Recognition

Trained on internet-scale video data, generative world models are increasingly recognized as powerful world simulators that can generate consistent and plausible dynamics over structure, motion, and physics. This raises a natural question: with the advent of strong video foundational models, might they supplant conventional vision encoder paradigms for general-purpose multimodal understanding? While recent studies have begun to explore the potential of world models on common vision tasks, these explorations typically lack a systematic investigation of generic, multimodal tasks. In this work, we strive to investigate the capabilities when world model priors are transferred into Vision-Language Models: we re-purpose a video diffusion model as a generative encoder to perform a single denoising step and treat the resulting latents as a set of visual embedding. We empirically investigate this class of models, which we refer to as World-Language Models (WorldLMs), and we find that generative encoders can capture latents useful for downstream understanding that show distinctions from conventional encoders. Naming our best-performing variant Dynamic Vision Aligner (DyVA), we further discover that this method significantly enhances spatial reasoning abilities and enables single-image models to perform multi-frame reasoning. Through the curation of a suite of visual reasoning tasks, we find DyVA to surpass both open-source and proprietary baselines, achieving state-of-the-art or comparable performance. We attribute these gains to WorldLM's inherited motion-consistency internalization from video pre-training. Finally, we systematically explore extensive model designs to highlight promising directions for future work. We hope our study can pave the way for a new family of VLMs that leverage priors from world models and are on a promising path towards generalist vision learners.

Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation but encounter challenges when processing lengthy and intricate text prompts describing complex scenes with multiple objects. While excelling in generating images from short, single-object descriptions, these models often struggle to faithfully capture all the nuanced details within longer and more elaborate textual inputs. In response, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract critical components from text prompts, including bounding box coordinates for foreground objects, detailed textual descriptions for individual objects, and a succinct background context. These components form the foundation of our layout-to-image generation model, which operates in two phases. The initial Global Scene Generation utilizes object layouts and background context to create an initial scene but often falls short in faithfully representing object characteristics as specified in the prompts. To address this limitation, we introduce an Iterative Refinement Scheme that iteratively evaluates and refines box-level content to align them with their textual descriptions, recomposing objects as needed to ensure consistency. Our evaluation on complex prompts featuring multiple objects demonstrates a substantial improvement in recall compared to baseline diffusion models. This is further validated by a user study, underscoring the efficacy of our approach in generating coherent and detailed scenes from intricate textual inputs.

Humans naturally perceive the geometric structure and semantic content of a 3D world as intertwined dimensions, enabling coherent and accurate understanding of complex scenes. However, most prior approaches prioritize training large geometry models for low-level 3D reconstruction and treat high-level spatial understanding in isolation, overlooking the crucial interplay between these two fundamental aspects of 3D-scene analysis, thereby limiting generalization and leading to poor performance in downstream 3D understanding tasks. Recent attempts have mitigated this issue by simply aligning 3D models with specific language models, thus restricting perception to the aligned model's capacity and limiting adaptability to downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose InstanceGrounded Geometry Transformer (IGGT), an end-to-end large unified transformer to unify the knowledge for both spatial reconstruction and instance-level contextual understanding. Specifically, we design a 3D-Consistent Contrastive Learning strategy that guides IGGT to encode a unified representation with geometric structures and instance-grounded clustering through only 2D visual inputs. This representation supports consistent lifting of 2D visual inputs into a coherent 3D scene with explicitly distinct object instances. To facilitate this task, we further construct InsScene-15K, a large-scale dataset with high-quality RGB images, poses, depth maps, and 3D-consistent instance-level mask annotations with a novel data curation pipeline.

Determining the exact latitude and longitude that a photo was taken is a useful and widely applicable task, yet it remains exceptionally difficult despite the accelerated progress of other computer vision tasks. Most previous approaches have opted to learn a single representation of query images, which are then classified at different levels of geographic granularity. These approaches fail to exploit the different visual cues that give context to different hierarchies, such as the country, state, and city level. To this end, we introduce an end-to-end transformer-based architecture that exploits the relationship between different geographic levels (which we refer to as hierarchies) and the corresponding visual scene information in an image through hierarchical cross-attention. We achieve this by learning a query for each geographic hierarchy and scene type. Furthermore, we learn a separate representation for different environmental scenes, as different scenes in the same location are often defined by completely different visual features. We achieve state of the art street level accuracy on 4 standard geo-localization datasets : Im2GPS, Im2GPS3k, YFCC4k, and YFCC26k, as well as qualitatively demonstrate how our method learns different representations for different visual hierarchies and scenes, which has not been demonstrated in the previous methods. These previous testing datasets mostly consist of iconic landmarks or images taken from social media, which makes them either a memorization task, or biased towards certain places. To address this issue we introduce a much harder testing dataset, Google-World-Streets-15k, comprised of images taken from Google Streetview covering the whole planet and present state of the art results. Our code will be made available in the camera-ready version.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically align visual features from an encoder with a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM). However, this makes the visual perception module a bottleneck, which constrains the overall capabilities of LVLMs. Conventional evaluation benchmarks, while rich in visual semantics, often contain unavoidable local shortcuts that can lead to an overestimation of models' perceptual abilities. Here, we introduce TopoPerception, a benchmark that leverages topological properties to rigorously evaluate the global visual perception capabilities of LVLMs across various granularities. Since topology depends on the global structure of an image and is invariant to local features, TopoPerception enables a shortcut-free assessment of global perception, fundamentally distinguishing it from semantically rich tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art models on TopoPerception and find that even at the coarsest perceptual granularity, all models perform no better than random chance, indicating a profound inability to perceive global visual features. Notably, a consistent trend emerge within model families: more powerful models with stronger reasoning capabilities exhibit lower accuracy. This suggests that merely scaling up models is insufficient to address this deficit and may even exacerbate it. Progress may require new training paradigms or architectures. TopoPerception not only exposes a critical bottleneck in current LVLMs but also offers a lens and direction for improving their global visual perception. The data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/Wenhao-Zhou/TopoPerception.

Long-horizon video-audio reasoning and fine-grained pixel understanding impose conflicting requirements on omnimodal models: dense temporal coverage demands many low-resolution frames, whereas precise grounding calls for high-resolution inputs. We tackle this trade-off with a two-system architecture: a Global Reasoning System selects informative keyframes and rewrites the task at low spatial cost, while a Detail Understanding System performs pixel-level grounding on the selected high-resolution snippets. Because ``optimal'' keyframe selection and reformulation are ambiguous and hard to supervise, we formulate them as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem and present Omni-R1, an end-to-end RL framework built on Group Relative Policy Optimization. Omni-R1 trains the Global Reasoning System through hierarchical rewards obtained via online collaboration with the Detail Understanding System, requiring only one epoch of RL on small task splits. Experiments on two challenging benchmarks, namely Referring Audio-Visual Segmentation (RefAVS) and Reasoning Video Object Segmentation (REVOS), show that Omni-R1 not only surpasses strong supervised baselines but also outperforms specialized state-of-the-art models, while substantially improving out-of-domain generalization and mitigating multimodal hallucination. Our results demonstrate the first successful application of RL to large-scale omnimodal reasoning and highlight a scalable path toward universally foundation models.

Building extraction from remote sensing images is a challenging task due to the complex structure variations of the buildings. Existing methods employ convolutional or self-attention blocks to capture the multi-scale features in the segmentation models, while the inherent gap of the feature pyramids and insufficient global-local feature integration leads to inaccurate, ambiguous extraction results. To address this issue, in this paper, we present an Uncertainty-Aggregated Global-Local Fusion Network (UAGLNet), which is capable to exploit high-quality global-local visual semantics under the guidance of uncertainty modeling. Specifically, we propose a novel cooperative encoder, which adopts hybrid CNN and transformer layers at different stages to capture the local and global visual semantics, respectively. An intermediate cooperative interaction block (CIB) is designed to narrow the gap between the local and global features when the network becomes deeper. Afterwards, we propose a Global-Local Fusion (GLF) module to complementarily fuse the global and local representations. Moreover, to mitigate the segmentation ambiguity in uncertain regions, we propose an Uncertainty-Aggregated Decoder (UAD) to explicitly estimate the pixel-wise uncertainty to enhance the segmentation accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance to other state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Dstate/UAGLNet

Despite recent advancements in vision-language models, their performance remains suboptimal on images from non-western cultures due to underrepresentation in training datasets. Various benchmarks have been proposed to test models' cultural inclusivity, but they have limited coverage of cultures and do not adequately assess cultural diversity across universal as well as culture-specific local concepts. To address these limitations, we introduce the GlobalRG benchmark, comprising two challenging tasks: retrieval across universals and cultural visual grounding. The former task entails retrieving culturally diverse images for universal concepts from 50 countries, while the latter aims at grounding culture-specific concepts within images from 15 countries. Our evaluation across a wide range of models reveals that the performance varies significantly across cultures -- underscoring the necessity for enhancing multicultural understanding in vision-language models.

Understanding the semantics of individual regions or patches within unconstrained images, such as in open-world object detection, represents a critical yet challenging task in computer vision. Building on the success of powerful image-level vision-language (ViL) foundation models like CLIP, recent efforts have sought to harness their capabilities by either training a contrastive model from scratch with an extensive collection of region-label pairs or aligning the outputs of a detection model with image-level representations of region proposals. Despite notable progress, these approaches are plagued by computationally intensive training requirements, susceptibility to data noise, and deficiency in contextual information. To address these limitations, we explore the synergistic potential of off-the-shelf foundation models, leveraging their respective strengths in localization and semantics. We introduce a novel, generic, and efficient region recognition architecture, named RegionSpot, designed to integrate position-aware localization knowledge from a localization foundation model (e.g., SAM) with semantic information extracted from a ViL model (e.g., CLIP). To fully exploit pretrained knowledge while minimizing training overhead, we keep both foundation models frozen, focusing optimization efforts solely on a lightweight attention-based knowledge integration module. Through extensive experiments in the context of open-world object recognition, our RegionSpot demonstrates significant performance improvements over prior alternatives, while also providing substantial computational savings. For instance, training our model with 3 million data in a single day using 8 V100 GPUs. Our model outperforms GLIP by 6.5 % in mean average precision (mAP), with an even larger margin by 14.8 % for more challenging and rare categories.

Understanding a visual scene goes beyond recognizing individual objects in isolation. Relationships between objects also constitute rich semantic information about the scene. In this work, we explicitly model the objects and their relationships using scene graphs, a visually-grounded graphical structure of an image. We propose a novel end-to-end model that generates such structured scene representation from an input image. The model solves the scene graph inference problem using standard RNNs and learns to iteratively improves its predictions via message passing. Our joint inference model can take advantage of contextual cues to make better predictions on objects and their relationships. The experiments show that our model significantly outperforms previous methods for generating scene graphs using Visual Genome dataset and inferring support relations with NYU Depth v2 dataset.

Visual understanding of the world goes beyond the semantics and flat structure of individual images. In this work, we aim to capture both the 3D structure and dynamics of real-world scenes from monocular real-world videos. Our Dynamic Scene Transformer (DyST) model leverages recent work in neural scene representation to learn a latent decomposition of monocular real-world videos into scene content, per-view scene dynamics, and camera pose. This separation is achieved through a novel co-training scheme on monocular videos and our new synthetic dataset DySO. DyST learns tangible latent representations for dynamic scenes that enable view generation with separate control over the camera and the content of the scene.

Large vision-language models have achieved remarkable progress in visual reasoning, yet most existing systems rely on single-step or text-only reasoning, limiting their ability to iteratively refine understanding across multiple visual contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce a new multi-round visual reasoning benchmark with training and test sets spanning both detection and segmentation tasks, enabling systematic evaluation under iterative reasoning scenarios. We further propose RegionReasoner, a reinforcement learning framework that enforces grounded reasoning by requiring each reasoning trace to explicitly cite the corresponding reference bounding boxes, while maintaining semantic coherence via a global-local consistency reward. This reward extracts key objects and nouns from both global scene captions and region-level captions, aligning them with the reasoning trace to ensure consistency across reasoning steps. RegionReasoner is optimized with structured rewards combining grounding fidelity and global-local semantic alignment. Experiments on detection and segmentation tasks show that RegionReasoner-7B, together with our newly introduced benchmark RegionDial-Bench, considerably improves multi-round reasoning accuracy, spatial grounding precision, and global-local consistency, establishing a strong baseline for this emerging research direction.

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is a classification task that aims to classify both base and novel classes in unlabeled images, using knowledge from a labeled dataset. In GCD, previous research overlooks scene information or treats it as noise, reducing its impact during model training. However, in this paper, we argue that scene information should be viewed as a strong prior for inferring novel classes. We attribute the misinterpretation of scene information to a key factor: the Ambiguity Challenge inherent in GCD. Specifically, novel objects in base scenes might be wrongly classified into base categories, while base objects in novel scenes might be mistakenly recognized as novel categories. Once the ambiguity challenge is addressed, scene information can reach its full potential, significantly enhancing the performance of GCD models. To more effectively leverage scene information, we propose the Modeling Object-Scene Associations (MOS) framework, which utilizes a simple MLP-based scene-awareness module to enhance GCD performance. It achieves an exceptional average accuracy improvement of 4% on the challenging fine-grained datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods, emphasizing its superior performance in fine-grained GCD. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/JethroPeng/MOS.

We present a central-peripheral vision-inspired framework (CVP), a simple yet effective multimodal model for spatial reasoning that draws inspiration from the two types of human visual fields -- central vision and peripheral vision. Existing approaches primarily rely on unstructured representations, such as point clouds, voxels, or patch features, and inject scene context implicitly via coordinate embeddings. However, this often results in limited spatial reasoning capabilities due to the lack of explicit, high-level structural understanding. To address this limitation, we introduce two complementary components into a Large Multimodal Model-based architecture: target-affinity token, analogous to central vision, that guides the model's attention toward query-relevant objects; and allocentric grid, akin to peripheral vision, that captures global scene context and spatial arrangements. These components work in tandem to enable structured, context-aware understanding of complex 3D environments. Experiments show that CVP achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of 3D scene understanding benchmarks.

Despite their great success across various multimodal tasks, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are facing a prevalent problem with object hallucinations, where the generated textual responses are inconsistent with ground-truth objects in the given image. This paper investigates various LVLMs and pinpoints attention deficiency toward discriminative local image features as one root cause of object hallucinations. Specifically, LVLMs predominantly attend to prompt-independent global image features, while failing to capture prompt-relevant local features, consequently undermining the visual grounding capacity of LVLMs and leading to hallucinations. To this end, we propose Assembly of Global and Local Attention (AGLA), a training-free and plug-and-play approach that mitigates object hallucinations by exploring an ensemble of global features for response generation and local features for visual discrimination simultaneously. Our approach exhibits an image-prompt matching scheme that captures prompt-relevant local features from images, leading to an augmented view of the input image where prompt-relevant content is reserved while irrelevant distractions are masked. With the augmented view, a calibrated decoding distribution can be derived by integrating generative global features from the original image and discriminative local features from the augmented image. Extensive experiments show that AGLA consistently mitigates object hallucinations and enhances general perception capability for LVLMs across various discriminative and generative benchmarks. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Lackel/AGLA.

Interactive segmentation of 3D Gaussians opens a great opportunity for real-time manipulation of 3D scenes thanks to the real-time rendering capability of 3D Gaussian Splatting. However, the current methods suffer from time-consuming post-processing to deal with noisy segmentation output. Also, they struggle to provide detailed segmentation, which is important for fine-grained manipulation of 3D scenes. In this study, we propose Click-Gaussian, which learns distinguishable feature fields of two-level granularity, facilitating segmentation without time-consuming post-processing. We delve into challenges stemming from inconsistently learned feature fields resulting from 2D segmentation obtained independently from a 3D scene. 3D segmentation accuracy deteriorates when 2D segmentation results across the views, primary cues for 3D segmentation, are in conflict. To overcome these issues, we propose Global Feature-guided Learning (GFL). GFL constructs the clusters of global feature candidates from noisy 2D segments across the views, which smooths out noises when training the features of 3D Gaussians. Our method runs in 10 ms per click, 15 to 130 times as fast as the previous methods, while also significantly improving segmentation accuracy. Our project page is available at https://seokhunchoi.github.io/Click-Gaussian

Open-vocabulary scene understanding aims to localize and recognize unseen categories beyond the annotated label space. The recent breakthrough of 2D open-vocabulary perception is largely driven by Internet-scale paired image-text data with rich vocabulary concepts. However, this success cannot be directly transferred to 3D scenarios due to the inaccessibility of large-scale 3D-text pairs. To this end, we propose to distill knowledge encoded in pre-trained vision-language (VL) foundation models through captioning multi-view images from 3D, which allows explicitly associating 3D and semantic-rich captions. Further, to foster coarse-to-fine visual-semantic representation learning from captions, we design hierarchical 3D-caption pairs, leveraging geometric constraints between 3D scenes and multi-view images. Finally, by employing contrastive learning, the model learns language-aware embeddings that connect 3D and text for open-vocabulary tasks. Our method not only remarkably outperforms baseline methods by 25.8% sim 44.7% hIoU and 14.5% sim 50.4% hAP_{50} in open-vocabulary semantic and instance segmentation, but also shows robust transferability on challenging zero-shot domain transfer tasks. See the project website at https://dingry.github.io/projects/PLA.

Complex 3D scene understanding has gained increasing attention, with scene encoding strategies playing a crucial role in this success. However, the optimal scene encoding strategies for various scenarios remain unclear, particularly compared to their image-based counterparts. To address this issue, we present a comprehensive study that probes various visual encoding models for 3D scene understanding, identifying the strengths and limitations of each model across different scenarios. Our evaluation spans seven vision foundation encoders, including image-based, video-based, and 3D foundation models. We evaluate these models in four tasks: Vision-Language Scene Reasoning, Visual Grounding, Segmentation, and Registration, each focusing on different aspects of scene understanding. Our evaluations yield key findings: DINOv2 demonstrates superior performance, video models excel in object-level tasks, diffusion models benefit geometric tasks, and language-pretrained models show unexpected limitations in language-related tasks. These insights challenge some conventional understandings, provide novel perspectives on leveraging visual foundation models, and highlight the need for more flexible encoder selection in future vision-language and scene-understanding tasks.

Modern methods mainly regard lane detection as a problem of pixel-wise segmentation, which is struggling to address the problem of challenging scenarios and speed. Inspired by human perception, the recognition of lanes under severe occlusion and extreme lighting conditions is mainly based on contextual and global information. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel, simple, yet effective formulation aiming at extremely fast speed and challenging scenarios. Specifically, we treat the process of lane detection as a row-based selecting problem using global features. With the help of row-based selecting, our formulation could significantly reduce the computational cost. Using a large receptive field on global features, we could also handle the challenging scenarios. Moreover, based on the formulation, we also propose a structural loss to explicitly model the structure of lanes. Extensive experiments on two lane detection benchmark datasets show that our method could achieve the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both speed and accuracy. A light-weight version could even achieve 300+ frames per second with the same resolution, which is at least 4x faster than previous state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be made publicly available.

Humans recognize the visual world at multiple levels: we effortlessly categorize scenes and detect objects inside, while also identifying the textures and surfaces of the objects along with their different compositional parts. In this paper, we study a new task called Unified Perceptual Parsing, which requires the machine vision systems to recognize as many visual concepts as possible from a given image. A multi-task framework called UPerNet and a training strategy are developed to learn from heterogeneous image annotations. We benchmark our framework on Unified Perceptual Parsing and show that it is able to effectively segment a wide range of concepts from images. The trained networks are further applied to discover visual knowledge in natural scenes. Models are available at https://github.com/CSAILVision/unifiedparsing.

Graph Neural Networks operate through bottom-up message-passing, fundamentally differing from human visual perception, which intuitively captures global structures first. We investigate the underappreciated potential of vision models for graph understanding, finding they achieve performance comparable to GNNs on established benchmarks while exhibiting distinctly different learning patterns. These divergent behaviors, combined with limitations of existing benchmarks that conflate domain features with topological understanding, motivate our introduction of GraphAbstract. This benchmark evaluates models' ability to perceive global graph properties as humans do: recognizing organizational archetypes, detecting symmetry, sensing connectivity strength, and identifying critical elements. Our results reveal that vision models significantly outperform GNNs on tasks requiring holistic structural understanding and maintain generalizability across varying graph scales, while GNNs struggle with global pattern abstraction and degrade with increasing graph size. This work demonstrates that vision models possess remarkable yet underutilized capabilities for graph structural understanding, particularly for problems requiring global topological awareness and scale-invariant reasoning. These findings open new avenues to leverage this underappreciated potential for developing more effective graph foundation models for tasks dominated by holistic pattern recognition.

Global operations, such as global average pooling, are widely used in top-performance image restorers. They aggregate global information from input features along entire spatial dimensions but behave differently during training and inference in image restoration tasks: they are based on different regions, namely the cropped patches (from images) and the full-resolution images. This paper revisits global information aggregation and finds that the image-based features during inference have a different distribution than the patch-based features during training. This train-test inconsistency negatively impacts the performance of models, which is severely overlooked by previous works. To reduce the inconsistency and improve test-time performance, we propose a simple method called Test-time Local Converter (TLC). Our TLC converts global operations to local ones only during inference so that they aggregate features within local spatial regions rather than the entire large images. The proposed method can be applied to various global modules (e.g., normalization, channel and spatial attention) with negligible costs. Without the need for any fine-tuning, TLC improves state-of-the-art results on several image restoration tasks, including single-image motion deblurring, video deblurring, defocus deblurring, and image denoising. In particular, with TLC, our Restormer-Local improves the state-of-the-art result in single image deblurring from 32.92 dB to 33.57 dB on GoPro dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/tlc.

Spatial consistency is a fundamental property of the visual world and a key requirement for models that aim to understand physical reality. Despite recent advances, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle to reason about 3D geometry across multiple views. Rather than asking models to describe scene attributes, we introduce a more challenging task: given two views of the same scene, identify the object that violates 3D motion consistency. We propose a simple and scalable method for generating realistic, spatially inconsistent image pairs from multi-view scenes, enabling systematic evaluation of this capability. Our results show that state-of-the-art MLLMs significantly underperform human observers and exhibit substantial variability across different scene attributes, revealing a fragile and incomplete understanding of 3D structure. We hope our findings underscore the need for approaches that develop a more deeply grounded understanding of the physical world.

Three-dimensional (3D) understanding of objects and scenes play a key role in humans' ability to interact with the world and has been an active area of research in computer vision, graphics, and robotics. Large scale synthetic and object-centric 3D datasets have shown to be effective in training models that have 3D understanding of objects. However, applying a similar approach to real-world objects and scenes is difficult due to a lack of large-scale data. Videos are a potential source for real-world 3D data, but finding diverse yet corresponding views of the same content has shown to be difficult at scale. Furthermore, standard videos come with fixed viewpoints, determined at the time of capture. This restricts the ability to access scenes from a variety of more diverse and potentially useful perspectives. We argue that large scale 360 videos can address these limitations to provide: scalable corresponding frames from diverse views. In this paper, we introduce 360-1M, a 360 video dataset, and a process for efficiently finding corresponding frames from diverse viewpoints at scale. We train our diffusion-based model, Odin, on 360-1M. Empowered by the largest real-world, multi-view dataset to date, Odin is able to freely generate novel views of real-world scenes. Unlike previous methods, Odin can move the camera through the environment, enabling the model to infer the geometry and layout of the scene. Additionally, we show improved performance on standard novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction benchmarks.

3D scene understanding is a long-standing challenge in computer vision and a key component in enabling mixed reality, wearable computing, and embodied AI. Providing a solution to these applications requires a multifaceted approach that covers scene-centric, object-centric, as well as interaction-centric capabilities. While there exist numerous datasets approaching the former two problems, the task of understanding interactable and articulated objects is underrepresented and only partly covered by current works. In this work, we address this shortcoming and introduce (1) an expertly curated dataset in the Universal Scene Description (USD) format, featuring high-quality manual annotations, for instance, segmentation and articulation on 280 indoor scenes; (2) a learning-based model together with a novel baseline capable of predicting part segmentation along with a full specification of motion attributes, including motion type, articulated and interactable parts, and motion parameters; (3) a benchmark serving to compare upcoming methods for the task at hand. Overall, our dataset provides 8 types of annotations - object and part segmentations, motion types, movable and interactable parts, motion parameters, connectivity, and object mass annotations. With its broad and high-quality annotations, the data provides the basis for holistic 3D scene understanding models. All data is provided in the USD format, allowing interoperability and easy integration with downstream tasks. We provide open access to our dataset, benchmark, and method's source code.

An in-depth comprehension of global land cover is essential in Earth observation, forming the foundation for a multitude of applications. Although remote sensing technology has advanced rapidly, leading to a proliferation of satellite imagery, the inherent complexity of these images often makes them difficult for non-expert users to understand. Natural language, as a carrier of human knowledge, can be a bridge between common users and complicated satellite imagery. In this context, we introduce a global-scale, high-quality image-text dataset for remote sensing, providing natural language descriptions for Sentinel-2 data to facilitate the understanding of satellite imagery for common users. Specifically, we utilize Sentinel-2 data for its global coverage as the foundational image source, employing semantic segmentation labels from the European Space Agency's (ESA) WorldCover project to enrich the descriptions of land covers. By conducting in-depth semantic analysis, we formulate detailed prompts to elicit rich descriptions from ChatGPT. To enhance the dataset's quality, we introduce the manual verification process. This step involves manual inspection and correction to refine the dataset, thus significantly improving its accuracy and quality. Finally, we offer the community ChatEarthNet, a large-scale image-text dataset characterized by global coverage, high quality, wide-ranging diversity, and detailed descriptions. ChatEarthNet consists of 163,488 image-text pairs with captions generated by ChatGPT-3.5 and an additional 10,000 image-text pairs with captions generated by ChatGPT-4V(ision). This dataset has significant potential for training vision-language geo-foundation models and evaluating large vision-language models for remote sensing. The dataset will be made publicly available.

We focus on grounding (i.e., localizing or linking) referring expressions in images, e.g., "largest elephant standing behind baby elephant". This is a general yet challenging vision-language task since it does not only require the localization of objects, but also the multimodal comprehension of context --- visual attributes (e.g., "largest", "baby") and relationships (e.g., "behind") that help to distinguish the referent from other objects, especially those of the same category. Due to the exponential complexity involved in modeling the context associated with multiple image regions, existing work oversimplifies this task to pairwise region modeling by multiple instance learning. In this paper, we propose a variational Bayesian method, called Variational Context, to solve the problem of complex context modeling in referring expression grounding. Our model exploits the reciprocal relation between the referent and context, i.e., either of them influences the estimation of the posterior distribution of the other, and thereby the search space of context can be greatly reduced, resulting in better localization of referent. We develop a novel cue-specific language-vision embedding network that learns this reciprocity model end-to-end. We also extend the model to the unsupervised setting where no annotation for the referent is available. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks show consistent improvement over state-of-the-art methods in both supervised and unsupervised settings.

To endow machines with the ability to perceive the real-world in a three dimensional representation as we do as humans is a fundamental and long-standing topic in Artificial Intelligence. Given different types of visual inputs such as images or point clouds acquired by 2D/3D sensors, one important goal is to understand the geometric structure and semantics of the 3D environment. Traditional approaches usually leverage hand-crafted features to estimate the shape and semantics of objects or scenes. However, they are difficult to generalize to novel objects and scenarios, and struggle to overcome critical issues caused by visual occlusions. By contrast, we aim to understand scenes and the objects within them by learning general and robust representations using deep neural networks, trained on large-scale real-world 3D data. To achieve these aims, this thesis makes three core contributions from object-level 3D shape estimation from single or multiple views to scene-level semantic understanding.

MonoScene proposes a 3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) framework, where the dense geometry and semantics of a scene are inferred from a single monocular RGB image. Different from the SSC literature, relying on 2.5 or 3D input, we solve the complex problem of 2D to 3D scene reconstruction while jointly inferring its semantics. Our framework relies on successive 2D and 3D UNets bridged by a novel 2D-3D features projection inspiring from optics and introduces a 3D context relation prior to enforce spatio-semantic consistency. Along with architectural contributions, we introduce novel global scene and local frustums losses. Experiments show we outperform the literature on all metrics and datasets while hallucinating plausible scenery even beyond the camera field of view. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/cv-rits/MonoScene.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) has emerged as a promising self-supervised approach that learns by leveraging a world model. While previously limited to predicting missing parts of an input, we explore how to generalize the JEPA prediction task to a broader set of corruptions. We introduce Image World Models, an approach that goes beyond masked image modeling and learns to predict the effect of global photometric transformations in latent space. We study the recipe of learning performant IWMs and show that it relies on three key aspects: conditioning, prediction difficulty, and capacity. Additionally, we show that the predictive world model learned by IWM can be adapted through finetuning to solve diverse tasks; a fine-tuned IWM world model matches or surpasses the performance of previous self-supervised methods. Finally, we show that learning with an IWM allows one to control the abstraction level of the learned representations, learning invariant representations such as contrastive methods, or equivariant representations such as masked image modelling.

Vision transformer has achieved impressive performance for many vision tasks. However, it may suffer from high redundancy in capturing local features for shallow layers. Local self-attention or early-stage convolutions are thus utilized, which sacrifice the capacity to capture long-range dependency. A challenge then arises: can we access efficient and effective global context modeling at the early stages of a neural network? To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the design of superpixels, which reduces the number of image primitives in subsequent processing, and introduce super tokens into vision transformer. Super tokens attempt to provide a semantically meaningful tessellation of visual content, thus reducing the token number in self-attention as well as preserving global modeling. Specifically, we propose a simple yet strong super token attention (STA) mechanism with three steps: the first samples super tokens from visual tokens via sparse association learning, the second performs self-attention on super tokens, and the last maps them back to the original token space. STA decomposes vanilla global attention into multiplications of a sparse association map and a low-dimensional attention, leading to high efficiency in capturing global dependencies. Based on STA, we develop a hierarchical vision transformer. Extensive experiments demonstrate its strong performance on various vision tasks. In particular, without any extra training data or label, it achieves 86.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with less than 100M parameters. It also achieves 53.9 box AP and 46.8 mask AP on the COCO detection task, and 51.9 mIOU on the ADE20K semantic segmentation task. Code will be released at https://github.com/hhb072/SViT.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) serves as a highly performant and efficient encoding of scene geometry, appearance, and semantics. Moreover, grounding language in 3D scenes has proven to be an effective strategy for 3D scene understanding. Current Language Gaussian Splatting line of work fall into three main groups: (i) per-scene optimization-based, (ii) per-scene optimization-free, and (iii) generalizable approach. However, most of them are evaluated only on rendered 2D views of a handful of scenes and viewpoints close to the training views, limiting ability and insight into holistic 3D understanding. To address this gap, we propose the first large-scale benchmark that systematically assesses these three groups of methods directly in 3D space, evaluating on 1060 scenes across three indoor datasets and one outdoor dataset. Benchmark results demonstrate a clear advantage of the generalizable paradigm, particularly in relaxing the scene-specific limitation, enabling fast feed-forward inference on novel scenes, and achieving superior segmentation performance. We further introduce GaussianWorld-49K a carefully curated 3DGS dataset comprising around 49K diverse indoor and outdoor scenes obtained from multiple sources, with which we demonstrate the generalizable approach could harness strong data priors. Our codes, benchmark, and datasets will be made public to accelerate research in generalizable 3DGS scene understanding.

Recent research has made significant progress in localizing and editing image regions based on text. However, most approaches treat these regions in isolation, relying solely on local cues without accounting for how each part contributes to the overall visual and semantic composition. This often results in inconsistent edits, unnatural transitions, or loss of coherence across the image. In this work, we propose Region in Context, a novel framework for text-conditioned image editing that performs multilevel semantic alignment between vision and language, inspired by the human ability to reason about edits in relation to the whole scene. Our method encourages each region to understand its role within the global image context, enabling precise and harmonized changes. At its core, the framework introduces a dual-level guidance mechanism: regions are represented with full-image context and aligned with detailed region-level descriptions, while the entire image is simultaneously matched to a comprehensive scene-level description generated by a large vision-language model. These descriptions serve as explicit verbal references of the intended content, guiding both local modifications and global structure. Experiments show that it produces more coherent and instruction-aligned results. Code is available at: https://github.com/thuyvuphuong/Region-in-Context.git

Scenes are complex, yet structured collections of parts, including objects and surfaces, that exhibit spatial and semantic relations to one another. An effective visual system therefore needs unified scene representations that relate scene parts to their location and their co-occurrence. We hypothesize that this structure can be learned self-supervised from natural experience by exploiting the temporal regularities of active vision: each fixation reveals a locally-detailed glimpse that is statistically related to the previous one via co-occurrence and saccade-conditioned spatial regularities. We instantiate this idea with Glimpse Prediction Networks (GPNs) -- recurrent models trained to predict the feature embedding of the next glimpse along human-like scanpaths over natural scenes. GPNs successfully learn co-occurrence structure and, when given relative saccade location vectors, show sensitivity to spatial arrangement. Furthermore, recurrent variants of GPNs were able to integrate information across glimpses into a unified scene representation. Notably, these scene representations align strongly with human fMRI responses during natural-scene viewing across mid/high-level visual cortex. Critically, GPNs outperform architecture- and dataset-matched controls trained with explicit semantic objectives, and match or exceed strong modern vision baselines, leaving little unique variance for those alternatives. These results establish next-glimpse prediction during active vision as a biologically plausible, self-supervised route to brain-aligned scene representations learned from natural visual experience.

Efficient and accurate feed-forward multi-view reconstruction has long been an important task in computer vision. Recent transformer-based models like VGGT and pi^3 have achieved impressive results with simple architectures, yet they face an inherent runtime bottleneck, due to the quadratic complexity of the global attention layers, that limits the scalability to large image sets. In this paper, we empirically analyze the global attention matrix of these models and observe that probability mass concentrates on a small subset of patch-patch interactions that correspond to cross-view geometric matches. Motivated by the structured attention and inspired by recent advancement in large language models, we propose a replacement for the dense global attention operation based on highly optimized block-sparse kernels, yielding up to 4times faster inference with comparable task performance. Our retrofit requires no retraining of the backbone, extends to both VGGT and pi^3, and supports large image collections. Evaluations on a comprehensive suite of multi-view benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are good at recognizing the global location of a photograph -- their geolocation prediction accuracy rivals the best human experts. But many VLMs are startlingly bad at explaining which image evidence led to their prediction, even when their location prediction is correct. The reasoning chains produced by VLMs frequently hallucinate scene attributes to support their location prediction (e.g. phantom writing, imagined infrastructure, misidentified flora). In this paper, we introduce the first benchmark for geolocation reasoning chains. We focus on the global location prediction task in the popular GeoGuessr game which draws from Google Street View spanning more than 100 countries. We collaborate with expert GeoGuessr players, including the reigning world champion, to produce 800 ground truth reasoning chains for 500 query scenes. These expert reasoning chains address hundreds of different discriminative visual attributes such as license plate shape, architecture, and soil properties to name just a few. We evaluate LLM-as-a-judge and VLM-as-a-judge strategies for scoring VLM-generated reasoning chains against our expert reasoning chains and find that Qwen 3 LLM-as-a-judge correlates best with human scoring. Our benchmark reveals that while large, closed-source VLMs such as Gemini and GPT 5 rival human experts at prediction locations, they still lag behind human experts when it comes to producing auditable reasoning chains. Open weights VLMs such as Llama and Qwen catastrophically fail on our benchmark -- they perform only slightly better than a baseline in which an LLM hallucinates a reasoning chain with oracle knowledge of the photo location but no visual information at all. We believe the gap between human experts and VLMs on this task points to VLM limitations at extracting fine-grained visual attributes from high resolution images.

We present Perceive Anything Model (PAM), a conceptually straightforward and efficient framework for comprehensive region-level visual understanding in images and videos. Our approach extends the powerful segmentation model SAM 2 by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling simultaneous object segmentation with the generation of diverse, region-specific semantic outputs, including categories, label definition, functional explanations, and detailed captions. A key component, Semantic Perceiver, is introduced to efficiently transform SAM 2's rich visual features, which inherently carry general vision, localization, and semantic priors into multi-modal tokens for LLM comprehension. To support robust multi-granularity understanding, we also develop a dedicated data refinement and augmentation pipeline, yielding a high-quality dataset of 1.5M image and 0.6M video region-semantic annotations, including novel region-level streaming video caption data. PAM is designed for lightweightness and efficiency, while also demonstrates strong performance across a diverse range of region understanding tasks. It runs 1.2-2.4x faster and consumes less GPU memory than prior approaches, offering a practical solution for real-world applications. We believe that our effective approach will serve as a strong baseline for future research in region-level visual understanding.

Scene coordinate regression (SCR) methods are a family of visual localization methods that directly regress 2D-3D matches for camera pose estimation. They are effective in small-scale scenes but face significant challenges in large-scale scenes that are further amplified in the absence of ground truth 3D point clouds for supervision. Here, the model can only rely on reprojection constraints and needs to implicitly triangulate the points. The challenges stem from a fundamental dilemma: The network has to be invariant to observations of the same landmark at different viewpoints and lighting conditions, etc., but at the same time discriminate unrelated but similar observations. The latter becomes more relevant and severe in larger scenes. In this work, we tackle this problem by introducing the concept of co-visibility to the network. We propose GLACE, which integrates pre-trained global and local encodings and enables SCR to scale to large scenes with only a single small-sized network. Specifically, we propose a novel feature diffusion technique that implicitly groups the reprojection constraints with co-visibility and avoids overfitting to trivial solutions. Additionally, our position decoder parameterizes the output positions for large-scale scenes more effectively. Without using 3D models or depth maps for supervision, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on large-scale scenes with a low-map-size model. On Cambridge landmarks, with a single model, we achieve 17% lower median position error than Poker, the ensemble variant of the state-of-the-art SCR method ACE. Code is available at: https://github.com/cvg/glace.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive results on vision-language benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether these benchmarks assess genuine global reasoning or allow success via localized visual cues. Existing evaluation methods do not explicitly measure this distinction, hindering effective dataset curation and real-world focused model development. We introduce Region Comprehension Index (RCI), the first model-based score to directly quantify a dataset's reliance on global versus local visual information. RCI systematically compares reference-model performance on image patches versus full images, revealing if tasks require holistic image understanding or can be solved with partial or localized visual cues. When applying RCI to 13 widely used multimodal benchmarks, we observed that most of them favor localized reasoning and exhibit significant spatial biases, indicating potential risks in real-world applications. RCI equips researchers & practitioners with an actionable tool for diagnosing & mitigating these biases, enabling the construction of datasets and benchmarks to foster the development of robust, enterprise-ready multimodal systems.

Learning-based visual localization methods that use scene coordinate regression (SCR) offer the advantage of smaller map sizes. However, on datasets with complex illumination changes or image-level ambiguities, it remains a less robust alternative to feature matching methods. This work aims to close the gap. We introduce a covisibility graph-based global encoding learning and data augmentation strategy, along with a depth-adjusted reprojection loss to facilitate implicit triangulation. Additionally, we revisit the network architecture and local feature extraction module. Our method achieves state-of-the-art on challenging large-scale datasets without relying on network ensembles or 3D supervision. On Aachen Day-Night, we are 10times more accurate than previous SCR methods with similar map sizes and require at least 5times smaller map sizes than any other SCR method while still delivering superior accuracy. Code will be available at: https://github.com/cvg/scrstudio .

Despite encouraging progress in 3D scene understanding, it remains challenging to develop an effective Large Multi-modal Model (LMM) that is capable of understanding and reasoning in complex 3D environments. Most previous methods typically encode 3D point and 2D image features separately, neglecting interactions between 2D semantics and 3D object properties, as well as the spatial relationships within the 3D environment. This limitation not only hinders comprehensive representations of 3D scene, but also compromises training and inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose a unified Instance-aware 3D Large Multi-modal Model (Inst3D-LMM) to deal with multiple 3D scene understanding tasks simultaneously. To obtain the fine-grained instance-level visual tokens, we first introduce a novel Multi-view Cross-Modal Fusion (MCMF) module to inject the multi-view 2D semantics into their corresponding 3D geometric features. For scene-level relation-aware tokens, we further present a 3D Instance Spatial Relation (3D-ISR) module to capture the intricate pairwise spatial relationships among objects. Additionally, we perform end-to-end multi-task instruction tuning simultaneously without the subsequent task-specific fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods across 3D scene understanding, reasoning and grounding tasks. Source code is available at https://github.com/hanxunyu/Inst3D-LMM

Monocular scene understanding is a foundational component of autonomous systems. Within the spectrum of monocular perception topics, one crucial and useful task for holistic 3D scene understanding is semantic scene completion (SSC), which jointly completes semantic information and geometric details from RGB input. However, progress in SSC, particularly in large-scale street views, is hindered by the scarcity of high-quality datasets. To address this issue, we introduce SSCBench, a comprehensive benchmark that integrates scenes from widely used automotive datasets (e.g., KITTI-360, nuScenes, and Waymo). SSCBench follows an established setup and format in the community, facilitating the easy exploration of SSC methods in various street views. We benchmark models using monocular, trinocular, and point cloud input to assess the performance gap resulting from sensor coverage and modality. Moreover, we have unified semantic labels across diverse datasets to simplify cross-domain generalization testing. We commit to including more datasets and SSC models to drive further advancements in this field.

Research on 3D Vision-Language Models (3D-VLMs) is gaining increasing attention, which is crucial for developing embodied AI within 3D scenes, such as visual navigation and embodied question answering. Due to the high density of visual features, especially in large 3D scenes, accurately locating task-relevant visual information is challenging. Existing works attempt to segment all objects and consider their features as scene representations. However, these task-agnostic object features include much redundant information and missing details for the task-relevant area. To tackle these problems, we propose LSceneLLM, an adaptive framework that automatically identifies task-relevant areas by leveraging LLM's visual preference for different tasks, followed by a plug-and-play scene magnifier module to capture fine-grained details in focused areas. Specifically, a dense token selector examines the attention map of LLM to identify visual preferences for the instruction input. It then magnifies fine-grained details of the focusing area. An adaptive self-attention module is leveraged to fuse the coarse-grained and selected fine-grained visual information. To comprehensively evaluate the large scene understanding ability of 3D-VLMs, we further introduce a cross-room understanding benchmark, XR-Scene, which contains a series of large scene understanding tasks including XR-QA, XR-EmbodiedPlanning, and XR-SceneCaption. Experiments show that our method surpasses existing methods on both large scene understanding and existing scene understanding benchmarks. Plunging our scene magnifier module into the existing 3D-VLMs also brings significant improvement.

Global perception is essential for embodied agents in 360° spaces, yet current affordance grounding remains largely object-centric and restricted to perspective views. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task: Holistic Affordance Grounding in 360° Indoor Environments. This task faces unique challenges, including severe geometric distortions from Equirectangular Projection (ERP), semantic dispersion, and cross-scale alignment difficulties. We propose PanoAffordanceNet, an end-to-end framework featuring a Distortion-Aware Spectral Modulator (DASM) for latitude-dependent calibration and an Omni-Spherical Densification Head (OSDH) to restore topological continuity from sparse activations. By integrating multi-level constraints comprising pixel-wise, distributional, and region-text contrastive objectives, our framework effectively suppresses semantic drift under low supervision. Furthermore, we construct 360-AGD, the first high-quality panoramic affordance grounding dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PanoAffordanceNet significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing a solid baseline for scene-level perception in embodied intelligence. The source code and benchmark dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/GL-ZHU925/PanoAffordanceNet.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) still lack robustness in spatial intelligence, demonstrating poor performance on spatial understanding and reasoning tasks. We attribute this gap to the absence of a visual geometry learning process capable of reconstructing 3D space from 2D images. We present G^2VLM, a geometry grounded vision-language model that bridges two fundamental aspects of spatial intelligence: spatial 3D reconstruction and spatial understanding. G^2VLM natively leverages learned 3D visual geometry features to directly predict 3D attributes and enhance spatial reasoning tasks via in-context learning and interleaved reasoning. Our unified design is highly scalable for spatial understanding: it trains on abundant multi-view image and video data, while simultaneously leveraging the benefits of 3D visual priors that are typically only derived from hard-to-collect annotations. Experimental results demonstrate G^2VLM is proficient in both tasks, achieving comparable results to state-of-the-art feed-forward 3D reconstruction models and achieving better or competitive results across spatial understanding and reasoning tasks. By unifying a semantically strong VLM with low-level 3D vision tasks, we hope G^2VLM can serve as a strong baseline for the community and unlock more future applications, such as 3D scene editing.

Current computer vision models, unlike the human visual system, cannot yet achieve general-purpose visual understanding. Existing efforts to create a general vision model are limited in the scope of assessed tasks and offer no overarching framework to perform them holistically. We present a new comprehensive benchmark, General-purpose Visual Understanding Evaluation (G-VUE), covering the full spectrum of visual cognitive abilities with four functional domains x2014 Perceive, Ground, Reason, and Act. The four domains are embodied in 11 carefully curated tasks, from 3D reconstruction to visual reasoning and manipulation. Along with the benchmark, we provide a general encoder-decoder framework to allow for the evaluation of arbitrary visual representation on all 11 tasks. We evaluate various pre-trained visual representations with our framework and observe that (1) Transformer-based visual backbone generally outperforms CNN-based backbone on G-VUE, (2) visual representations from vision-language pre-training are superior to those with vision-only pre-training across visual tasks. With G-VUE, we provide a holistic evaluation standard to motivate research toward building general-purpose visual systems via obtaining more general-purpose visual representations.

A proper scene representation is central to the pursuit of spatial intelligence where agents can robustly reconstruct and efficiently understand 3D scenes. A scene representation is either metric, such as landmark maps in 3D reconstruction, 3D bounding boxes in object detection, or voxel grids in occupancy prediction, or topological, such as pose graphs with loop closures in SLAM or visibility graphs in SfM. In this work, we propose to build Multiview Scene Graphs (MSG) from unposed images, representing a scene topologically with interconnected place and object nodes. The task of building MSG is challenging for existing representation learning methods since it needs to jointly address both visual place recognition, object detection, and object association from images with limited fields of view and potentially large viewpoint changes. To evaluate any method tackling this task, we developed an MSG dataset and annotation based on a public 3D dataset. We also propose an evaluation metric based on the intersection-over-union score of MSG edges. Moreover, we develop a novel baseline method built on mainstream pretrained vision models, combining visual place recognition and object association into one Transformer decoder architecture. Experiments demonstrate our method has superior performance compared to existing relevant baselines.

Image retrieval targets to find images from a database that are visually similar to the query image. Two-stage methods following retrieve-and-rerank paradigm have achieved excellent performance, but their separate local and global modules are inefficient to real-world applications. To better trade-off retrieval efficiency and accuracy, some approaches fuse global and local feature into a joint representation to perform single-stage image retrieval. However, they are still challenging due to various situations to tackle, e.g., background, occlusion and viewpoint. In this work, we design a Coarse-to-Fine framework to learn Compact Discriminative representation (CFCD) for end-to-end single-stage image retrieval-requiring only image-level labels. Specifically, we first design a novel adaptive softmax-based loss which dynamically tunes its scale and margin within each mini-batch and increases them progressively to strengthen supervision during training and intra-class compactness. Furthermore, we propose a mechanism which attentively selects prominent local descriptors and infuse fine-grained semantic relations into the global representation by a hard negative sampling strategy to optimize inter-class distinctiveness at a global scale. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method, which achieves state-of-the-art single-stage image retrieval performance on benchmarks such as Revisited Oxford and Revisited Paris. Code is available at https://github.com/bassyess/CFCD.

The Non-Local Network (NLNet) presents a pioneering approach for capturing long-range dependencies within an image, via aggregating query-specific global context to each query position. However, through a rigorous empirical analysis, we have found that the global contexts modeled by the non-local network are almost the same for different query positions. In this paper, we take advantage of this finding to create a simplified network based on a query-independent formulation, which maintains the accuracy of NLNet but with significantly less computation. We further replace the one-layer transformation function of the non-local block by a two-layer bottleneck, which further reduces the parameter number considerably. The resulting network element, called the global context (GC) block, effectively models global context in a lightweight manner, allowing it to be applied at multiple layers of a backbone network to form a global context network (GCNet). Experiments show that GCNet generally outperforms NLNet on major benchmarks for various recognition tasks. The code and network configurations are available at https://github.com/xvjiarui/GCNet.

We introduce the task of localizing a flexible number of objects in real-world 3D scenes using natural language descriptions. Existing 3D visual grounding tasks focus on localizing a unique object given a text description. However, such a strict setting is unnatural as localizing potentially multiple objects is a common need in real-world scenarios and robotic tasks (e.g., visual navigation and object rearrangement). To address this setting we propose Multi3DRefer, generalizing the ScanRefer dataset and task. Our dataset contains 61926 descriptions of 11609 objects, where zero, single or multiple target objects are referenced by each description. We also introduce a new evaluation metric and benchmark methods from prior work to enable further investigation of multi-modal 3D scene understanding. Furthermore, we develop a better baseline leveraging 2D features from CLIP by rendering object proposals online with contrastive learning, which outperforms the state of the art on the ScanRefer benchmark.

While existing large vision-language multimodal models focus on whole image understanding, there is a prominent gap in achieving region-specific comprehension. Current approaches that use textual coordinates or spatial encodings often fail to provide a user-friendly interface for visual prompting. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multimodal model capable of decoding arbitrary visual prompts. This allows users to intuitively mark images and interact with the model using natural cues like a "red bounding box" or "pointed arrow". Our simple design directly overlays visual markers onto the RGB image, eliminating the need for complex region encodings, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on region-understanding tasks like Visual7W, PointQA, and Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, we present ViP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark to assess the capability of models in understanding visual prompts across multiple dimensions, enabling future research in this domain. Code, data, and model are publicly available.

Contemporary diffusion models show remarkable capability in text-to-image generation, while still being limited to restricted resolutions (e.g., 1,024 X 1,024). Recent advances enable tuning-free higher-resolution image generation by recycling pre-trained diffusion models and extending them via regional denoising or dilated sampling/convolutions. However, these models struggle to simultaneously preserve global semantic structure and produce creative regional details in higher-resolution images. To address this, we present C-Upscale, a new recipe of tuning-free image upscaling that pivots on global-regional priors derived from given global prompt and estimated regional prompts via Multimodal LLM. Technically, the low-frequency component of low-resolution image is recognized as global structure prior to encourage global semantic consistency in high-resolution generation. Next, we perform regional attention control to screen cross-attention between global prompt and each region during regional denoising, leading to regional attention prior that alleviates object repetition issue. The estimated regional prompts containing rich descriptive details further act as regional semantic prior to fuel the creativity of regional detail generation. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our C-Upscale manages to generate ultra-high-resolution images (e.g., 4,096 X 4,096 and 8,192 X 8,192) with higher visual fidelity and more creative regional details.

Recent advances in Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated their remarkable success as general-purpose multi-modal assistants, with particular focuses on holistic image- and video-language understanding. Conversely, less attention has been given to scaling fine-grained pixel-level understanding capabilities, where the models are expected to realize pixel-level alignment between visual signals and language semantics. Some previous studies have applied LMMs to related tasks such as region-level captioning and referring expression segmentation. However, these models are limited to performing either referring or segmentation tasks independently and fail to integrate these fine-grained perception capabilities into visual reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose UniPixel, a large multi-modal model capable of flexibly comprehending visual prompt inputs and generating mask-grounded responses. Our model distinguishes itself by seamlessly integrating pixel-level perception with general visual understanding capabilities. Specifically, UniPixel processes visual prompts and generates relevant masks on demand, and performs subsequent reasoning conditioning on these intermediate pointers during inference, thereby enabling fine-grained pixel-level reasoning. The effectiveness of our approach has been verified on 10 benchmarks across a diverse set of tasks, including pixel-level referring/segmentation and object-centric understanding in images/videos. A novel PixelQA task that jointly requires referring, segmentation, and question answering is also designed to verify the flexibility of our method.

In this paper, we present a novel, scalable approach for constructing open set, instance-level 3D scene representations, advancing open world understanding of 3D environments. Existing methods require pre-constructed 3D scenes and face scalability issues due to per-point feature vector learning, limiting their efficacy with complex queries. Our method overcomes these limitations by incrementally building instance-level 3D scene representations using 2D foundation models, efficiently aggregating instance-level details such as masks, feature vectors, names, and captions. We introduce fusion schemes for feature vectors to enhance their contextual knowledge and performance on complex queries. Additionally, we explore large language models for robust automatic annotation and spatial reasoning tasks. We evaluate our proposed approach on multiple scenes from ScanNet and Replica datasets demonstrating zero-shot generalization capabilities, exceeding current state-of-the-art methods in open world 3D scene understanding.

The Non-Local Network (NLNet) presents a pioneering approach for capturing long-range dependencies, via aggregating query-specific global context to each query position. However, through a rigorous empirical analysis, we have found that the global contexts modeled by non-local network are almost the same for different query positions within an image. In this paper, we take advantage of this finding to create a simplified network based on a query-independent formulation, which maintains the accuracy of NLNet but with significantly less computation. We further observe that this simplified design shares similar structure with Squeeze-Excitation Network (SENet). Hence we unify them into a three-step general framework for global context modeling. Within the general framework, we design a better instantiation, called the global context (GC) block, which is lightweight and can effectively model the global context. The lightweight property allows us to apply it for multiple layers in a backbone network to construct a global context network (GCNet), which generally outperforms both simplified NLNet and SENet on major benchmarks for various recognition tasks. The code and configurations are released at https://github.com/xvjiarui/GCNet.

Visual Text-to-Speech (VTTS) aims to take the environmental image as the prompt to synthesize the reverberant speech for the spoken content. The challenge of this task lies in understanding the spatial environment from the image. Many attempts have been made to extract global spatial visual information from the RGB space of an spatial image. However, local and depth image information are crucial for understanding the spatial environment, which previous works have ignored. To address the issues, we propose a novel multi-modal and multi-scale spatial environment understanding scheme to achieve immersive VTTS, termed M2SE-VTTS. The multi-modal aims to take both the RGB and Depth spaces of the spatial image to learn more comprehensive spatial information, and the multi-scale seeks to model the local and global spatial knowledge simultaneously. Specifically, we first split the RGB and Depth images into patches and adopt the Gemini-generated environment captions to guide the local spatial understanding. After that, the multi-modal and multi-scale features are integrated by the local-aware global spatial understanding. In this way, M2SE-VTTS effectively models the interactions between local and global spatial contexts in the multi-modal spatial environment. Objective and subjective evaluations suggest that our model outperforms the advanced baselines in environmental speech generation. The code and audio samples are available at: https://github.com/AI-S2-Lab/M2SE-VTTS.

The advancement of remote sensing technology has improved the spatial resolution of satellite imagery, facilitating more detailed visual representations for diverse interpretations. However, existing methods exhibit limited generalization capabilities across varied applications. While some contemporary foundation models demonstrate potential, they are hindered by insufficient cross-task adaptability and primarily process low-resolution imagery of restricted sizes, thus failing to fully exploit high-resolution data or leverage comprehensive large-scene semantics. Crucially, remote sensing imagery differs fundamentally from natural images, as key foreground targets (eg., maritime objects, artificial structures) often occupy minimal spatial proportions (~1%) and exhibit sparse distributions. Efficiently modeling cross-task generalizable knowledge from lengthy 2D tokens (~100,000) poses a significant challenge yet remains critical for remote sensing image understanding. Motivated by the selective attention mechanisms inherent to the human visual system, we propose DynamicVis, a dynamic visual perception foundation model for remote sensing imagery. The framework integrates a novel dynamic region perception backbone based on the selective state space model, which strategically balances localized detail extraction with global contextual integration, enabling computationally efficient encoding of large-scale data while maintaining architectural scalability. To enhance cross-task knowledge transferring, we introduce a multi-instance learning paradigm utilizing meta-embedding representations, trained on million-scale region-level annotations. Evaluations across nine downstream tasks demonstrate the model's versatility. DynamicVis achieves multi-level feature modeling with exceptional efficiency, processing (2048x2048) pixels with 97 ms latency (6% of ViT's) and 833 MB GPU memory (3% of ViT's).

Vision systems to see and reason about the compositional nature of visual scenes are fundamental to understanding our world. The complex relations between objects and their locations, ambiguities, and variations in the real-world environment can be better described in human language, naturally governed by grammatical rules and other modalities such as audio and depth. The models learned to bridge the gap between such modalities coupled with large-scale training data facilitate contextual reasoning, generalization, and prompt capabilities at test time. These models are referred to as foundational models. The output of such models can be modified through human-provided prompts without retraining, e.g., segmenting a particular object by providing a bounding box, having interactive dialogues by asking questions about an image or video scene or manipulating the robot's behavior through language instructions. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of such emerging foundational models, including typical architecture designs to combine different modalities (vision, text, audio, etc), training objectives (contrastive, generative), pre-training datasets, fine-tuning mechanisms, and the common prompting patterns; textual, visual, and heterogeneous. We discuss the open challenges and research directions for foundational models in computer vision, including difficulties in their evaluations and benchmarking, gaps in their real-world understanding, limitations of their contextual understanding, biases, vulnerability to adversarial attacks, and interpretability issues. We review recent developments in this field, covering a wide range of applications of foundation models systematically and comprehensively. A comprehensive list of foundational models studied in this work is available at https://github.com/awaisrauf/Awesome-CV-Foundational-Models.

Videos are continuous 2D projections of 3D worlds. After training on large video data, will global 3D understanding naturally emerge? We study this by quantifying the 3D understanding of existing Video Foundation Models (VidFMs) pretrained on vast video data. We propose the first model-agnostic framework that measures the 3D awareness of various VidFMs by estimating multiple 3D properties from their features via shallow read-outs. Our study presents meaningful findings regarding the 3D awareness of VidFMs on multiple axes. In particular, we show that state-of-the-art video generation models exhibit a strong understanding of 3D objects and scenes, despite not being trained on any 3D data. Such understanding can even surpass that of large expert models specifically trained for 3D tasks. Our findings, together with the 3D benchmarking of major VidFMs, provide valuable observations for building scalable 3D models.

Visual understanding goes well beyond object recognition. With one glance at an image, we can effortlessly imagine the world beyond the pixels: for instance, we can infer people's actions, goals, and mental states. While this task is easy for humans, it is tremendously difficult for today's vision systems, requiring higher-order cognition and commonsense reasoning about the world. We formalize this task as Visual Commonsense Reasoning. Given a challenging question about an image, a machine must answer correctly and then provide a rationale justifying its answer. Next, we introduce a new dataset, VCR, consisting of 290k multiple choice QA problems derived from 110k movie scenes. The key recipe for generating non-trivial and high-quality problems at scale is Adversarial Matching, a new approach to transform rich annotations into multiple choice questions with minimal bias. Experimental results show that while humans find VCR easy (over 90% accuracy), state-of-the-art vision models struggle (~45%). To move towards cognition-level understanding, we present a new reasoning engine, Recognition to Cognition Networks (R2C), that models the necessary layered inferences for grounding, contextualization, and reasoning. R2C helps narrow the gap between humans and machines (~65%); still, the challenge is far from solved, and we provide analysis that suggests avenues for future work.

Instruction following vision-language (VL) models offer a flexible interface that supports a broad range of multimodal tasks in a zero-shot fashion. However, interfaces that operate on full images do not directly enable the user to "point to" and access specific regions within images. This capability is important not only to support reference-grounded VL benchmarks, but also, for practical applications that require precise within-image reasoning. We build Localized Visual Commonsense models, which allow users to specify (multiple) regions as input. We train our model by sampling localized commonsense knowledge from a large language model (LLM): specifically, we prompt an LLM to collect commonsense knowledge given a global literal image description and a local literal region description automatically generated by a set of VL models. With a separately trained critic model that selects high-quality examples, we find that training on the localized commonsense corpus can successfully distill existing VL models to support a reference-as-input interface. Empirical results and human evaluations in a zero-shot setup demonstrate that our distillation method results in more precise VL models of reasoning compared to a baseline of passing a generated referring expression to an LLM.

Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have recognized fine-grained grounding as an imperative factor of visual understanding and dialogue. However, the benefits of such representation in LMMs are limited to the natural image domain, and these models perform poorly for remote sensing (RS). The distinct overhead viewpoint, scale variation, and presence of small objects in high-resolution RS imagery present a unique challenge in region-level comprehension. Moreover, the development of the grounding conversation capability of LMMs within RS is hindered by the lack of granular, RS domain-specific grounded data. Addressing these limitations, we propose GeoPixel - the first end-to-end high resolution RS-LMM that supports pixel-level grounding. This capability allows fine-grained visual perception by generating interleaved masks in conversation. GeoPixel supports up to 4K HD resolution in any aspect ratio, ideal for high-precision RS image analysis. To support the grounded conversation generation (GCG) in RS imagery, we curate a visually grounded dataset GeoPixelD through a semi-automated pipeline that utilizes set-of-marks prompting and spatial priors tailored for RS data to methodically control the data generation process. GeoPixel demonstrates superior performance in pixel-level comprehension, surpassing existing LMMs in both single-target and multi-target segmentation tasks. Our methodological ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each component in the overall architecture. Our code and data will be publicly released.

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is a fundamental task in computer vision that has witnessed remarkable progress with deep neural networks. Inspired by the characteristics of the human visual system, existing methods typically use a combination of global and local representations (\ie, multi-scale features) to achieve superior performance. However, most of them adopt simple linear fusion of multi-scale features, and neglect their possibly complex relationship and interaction. In contrast, humans typically first form a global impression to locate important regions and then focus on local details in those regions. We therefore propose a top-down approach that uses high-level semantics to guide the IQA network to focus on semantically important local distortion regions, named as TOPIQ. Our approach to IQA involves the design of a heuristic coarse-to-fine network (CFANet) that leverages multi-scale features and progressively propagates multi-level semantic information to low-level representations in a top-down manner. A key component of our approach is the proposed cross-scale attention mechanism, which calculates attention maps for lower level features guided by higher level features. This mechanism emphasizes active semantic regions for low-level distortions, thereby improving performance. CFANet can be used for both Full-Reference (FR) and No-Reference (NR) IQA. We use ResNet50 as its backbone and demonstrate that CFANet achieves better or competitive performance on most public FR and NR benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art methods based on vision transformers, while being much more efficient (with only {sim}13% FLOPS of the current best FR method). Codes are released at https://github.com/chaofengc/IQA-PyTorch.

We present Mix3D, a data augmentation technique for segmenting large-scale 3D scenes. Since scene context helps reasoning about object semantics, current works focus on models with large capacity and receptive fields that can fully capture the global context of an input 3D scene. However, strong contextual priors can have detrimental implications like mistaking a pedestrian crossing the street for a car. In this work, we focus on the importance of balancing global scene context and local geometry, with the goal of generalizing beyond the contextual priors in the training set. In particular, we propose a "mixing" technique which creates new training samples by combining two augmented scenes. By doing so, object instances are implicitly placed into novel out-of-context environments and therefore making it harder for models to rely on scene context alone, and instead infer semantics from local structure as well. We perform detailed analysis to understand the importance of global context, local structures and the effect of mixing scenes. In experiments, we show that models trained with Mix3D profit from a significant performance boost on indoor (ScanNet, S3DIS) and outdoor datasets (SemanticKITTI). Mix3D can be trivially used with any existing method, e.g., trained with Mix3D, MinkowskiNet outperforms all prior state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on the ScanNet test benchmark 78.1 mIoU. Code is available at: https://nekrasov.dev/mix3d/

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at high-level scene understanding but falter on fine-grained perception tasks requiring precise localization. This failure stems from a fundamental mismatch, as generating exact numerical coordinates is a challenging task for language-centric architectures. In this paper, we introduce VLM-FO1, a novel framework that overcomes this limitation by reframing object-centric perception from a brittle coordinate generation problem into a robust feature retrieval task. Our method operates as a plug-and-play module that integrates with any pre-trained VLM. It leverages a Hybrid Fine-grained Region Encoder (HFRE), featuring a dual vision encoder, to generate powerful region tokens rich in both semantic and spatial detail. A token-based referencing system then enables the LLM to seamlessly reason about and ground language in these specific visual regions. Experiments show that VLM-FO1 achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse suite of benchmarks, demonstrating exceptional capabilities in object grounding, region generational understanding, and visual region reasoning. Crucially, our two-stage training strategy ensures that these perception gains are achieved without compromising the base model's general visual understanding capabilities. VLM-FO1 establishes an effective and flexible paradigm for building perception-aware VLMs, bridging the gap between high-level reasoning and fine-grained visual grounding.

We present an architecture and a training recipe that adapts pre-trained open-world image models to localization in videos. Understanding the open visual world (without being constrained by fixed label spaces) is crucial for many real-world vision tasks. Contrastive pre-training on large image-text datasets has recently led to significant improvements for image-level tasks. For more structured tasks involving object localization applying pre-trained models is more challenging. This is particularly true for video tasks, where task-specific data is limited. We show successful transfer of open-world models by building on the OWL-ViT open-vocabulary detection model and adapting it to video by adding a transformer decoder. The decoder propagates object representations recurrently through time by using the output tokens for one frame as the object queries for the next. Our model is end-to-end trainable on video data and enjoys improved temporal consistency compared to tracking-by-detection baselines, while retaining the open-world capabilities of the backbone detector. We evaluate our model on the challenging TAO-OW benchmark and demonstrate that open-world capabilities, learned from large-scale image-text pre-training, can be transferred successfully to open-world localization across diverse videos.

Vision transformers have demonstrated remarkable success in classification by leveraging global self-attention to capture long-range dependencies. However, this same mechanism can obscure fine-grained spatial details crucial for tasks such as segmentation. In this work, we seek to enhance segmentation performance of vision transformers after standard image-level classification training. More specifically, we present a simple yet effective add-on that improves performance on segmentation tasks while retaining vision transformers' image-level recognition capabilities. In our approach, we modulate the self-attention with a learnable Gaussian kernel that biases the attention toward neighboring patches. We further refine the patch representations to learn better embeddings at patch positions. These modifications encourage tokens to focus on local surroundings and ensure meaningful representations at spatial positions, while still preserving the model's ability to incorporate global information. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our modifications, evidenced by substantial segmentation gains on three benchmarks (e.g., over 6% and 4% on ADE20K for ViT Tiny and Base), without changing the training regime or sacrificing classification performance. The code is available at https://github.com/sinahmr/LocAtViT/.

Earth vision research typically focuses on extracting geospatial object locations and categories but neglects the exploration of relations between objects and comprehensive reasoning. Based on city planning needs, we develop a multi-modal multi-task VQA dataset (EarthVQA) to advance relational reasoning-based judging, counting, and comprehensive analysis. The EarthVQA dataset contains 6000 images, corresponding semantic masks, and 208,593 QA pairs with urban and rural governance requirements embedded. As objects are the basis for complex relational reasoning, we propose a Semantic OBject Awareness framework (SOBA) to advance VQA in an object-centric way. To preserve refined spatial locations and semantics, SOBA leverages a segmentation network for object semantics generation. The object-guided attention aggregates object interior features via pseudo masks, and bidirectional cross-attention further models object external relations hierarchically. To optimize object counting, we propose a numerical difference loss that dynamically adds difference penalties, unifying the classification and regression tasks. Experimental results show that SOBA outperforms both advanced general and remote sensing methods. We believe this dataset and framework provide a strong benchmark for Earth vision's complex analysis. The project page is at https://Junjue-Wang.github.io/homepage/EarthVQA.

Vision-Language Tracking aims to continuously localize objects described by a visual template and a language description. Existing methods, however, are typically limited to local search, making them prone to failures under viewpoint changes, occlusions, and rapid target movements. In this work, we introduce the first global tracking framework based on Multimodal Large Language Models (VPTracker), exploiting their powerful semantic reasoning to locate targets across the entire image space. While global search improves robustness and reduces drift, it also introduces distractions from visually or semantically similar objects. To address this, we propose a location-aware visual prompting mechanism that incorporates spatial priors into the MLLM. Specifically, we construct a region-level prompt based on the target's previous location, enabling the model to prioritize region-level recognition and resort to global inference only when necessary. This design retains the advantages of global tracking while effectively suppressing interference from distracting visual content. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly enhances tracking stability and target disambiguation under challenging scenarios, opening a new avenue for integrating MLLMs into visual tracking. Code is available at https://github.com/jcwang0602/VPTracker.

3D Question Answering (3D QA) requires the model to comprehensively understand its situated 3D scene described by the text, then reason about its surrounding environment and answer a question under that situation. However, existing methods usually rely on global scene perception from pure 3D point clouds and overlook the importance of rich local texture details from multi-view images. Moreover, due to the inherent noise in camera poses and complex occlusions, there exists significant feature degradation and reduced feature robustness problems when aligning 3D point cloud with multi-view images. In this paper, we propose a Dual-vision Scene Perception Network (DSPNet), to comprehensively integrate multi-view and point cloud features to improve robustness in 3D QA. Our Text-guided Multi-view Fusion (TGMF) module prioritizes image views that closely match the semantic content of the text. To adaptively fuse back-projected multi-view images with point cloud features, we design the Adaptive Dual-vision Perception (ADVP) module, enhancing 3D scene comprehension. Additionally, our Multimodal Context-guided Reasoning (MCGR) module facilitates robust reasoning by integrating contextual information across visual and linguistic modalities. Experimental results on SQA3D and ScanQA datasets demonstrate the superiority of our DSPNet. Codes will be available at https://github.com/LZ-CH/DSPNet.

Earth vision has achieved milestones in geospatial object recognition but lacks exploration in object-relational reasoning, limiting comprehensive scene understanding. To address this, a progressive Earth vision-language understanding and generation framework is proposed, including a multi-task dataset (EarthVLSet) and a semantic-guided network (EarthVLNet). Focusing on city planning applications, EarthVLSet includes 10.9k sub-meter resolution remote sensing images, land-cover masks, and 761.5k textual pairs involving both multiple-choice and open-ended visual question answering (VQA) tasks. In an object-centric way, EarthVLNet is proposed to progressively achieve semantic segmentation, relational reasoning, and comprehensive understanding. The first stage involves land-cover segmentation to generate object semantics for VQA guidance. Guided by pixel-wise semantics, the object awareness based large language model (LLM) performs relational reasoning and knowledge summarization to generate the required answers. As for optimization, the numerical difference loss is proposed to dynamically add difference penalties, addressing the various objects' statistics. Three benchmarks, including semantic segmentation, multiple-choice, and open-ended VQA demonstrated the superiorities of EarthVLNet, yielding three future directions: 1) segmentation features consistently enhance VQA performance even in cross-dataset scenarios; 2) multiple-choice tasks show greater sensitivity to the vision encoder than to the language decoder; and 3) open-ended tasks necessitate advanced vision encoders and language decoders for an optimal performance. We believe this dataset and method will provide a beneficial benchmark that connects ''image-mask-text'', advancing geographical applications for Earth vision.

Large-scale Vision-Language Models, such as CLIP, learn powerful image-text representations that have found numerous applications, from zero-shot classification to text-to-image generation. Despite that, their capabilities for solving novel discriminative tasks via prompting fall behind those of large language models, such as GPT-3. Here we explore the idea of visual prompt engineering for solving computer vision tasks beyond classification by editing in image space instead of text. In particular, we discover an emergent ability of CLIP, where, by simply drawing a red circle around an object, we can direct the model's attention to that region, while also maintaining global information. We show the power of this simple approach by achieving state-of-the-art in zero-shot referring expressions comprehension and strong performance in keypoint localization tasks. Finally, we draw attention to some potential ethical concerns of large language-vision models.

We present an Encoder-Decoder Attention Transformer, EDAFormer, which consists of the Embedding-Free Transformer (EFT) encoder and the all-attention decoder leveraging our Embedding-Free Attention (EFA) structure. The proposed EFA is a novel global context modeling mechanism that focuses on functioning the global non-linearity, not the specific roles of the query, key and value. For the decoder, we explore the optimized structure for considering the globality, which can improve the semantic segmentation performance. In addition, we propose a novel Inference Spatial Reduction (ISR) method for the computational efficiency. Different from the previous spatial reduction attention methods, our ISR method further reduces the key-value resolution at the inference phase, which can mitigate the computation-performance trade-off gap for the efficient semantic segmentation. Our EDAFormer shows the state-of-the-art performance with the efficient computation compared to the existing transformer-based semantic segmentation models in three public benchmarks, including ADE20K, Cityscapes and COCO-Stuff. Furthermore, our ISR method reduces the computational cost by up to 61% with minimal mIoU performance degradation on Cityscapes dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/hyunwoo137/EDAFormer.