Biological visual systems compute reliably under tight metabolic and wiring constraints, whereas artificial vision systems consume far more energy and can be sensitive to adversarial perturbations. Whether networks with brain-like wiring are more robust at lower computational cost is unclear. We address this by benchmarking a task-optimized, continuous-time recurrent neural network of the fly visual system constrained by its synaptic connectome (FlyNet) against artificial neural networks. We compare it against CNNs, RAFT, and continuous-time recurrent neural networks without detailed connectome constraints (sCTRNN, CTRNN) on a collision-detection task within a differentiable 3D rendering pipeline. FlyNet is adversarially vulnerable but, relative to its compute, more robust to common video corruptions than RAFT, while using up to five orders of magnitude fewer FLOPs. The CTRNNs remain more robust than FlyNet across almost all tested perturbations, suggesting that connectome constraints benefit efficiency, through their low edge count, over robustness. Recurrence improves robustness to white-box attacks in RAFT and temporal context improves robustness to common corruptions. FlyNet's position and velocity representations degrade under adversarial textures but recover under counterfactual textures that restore correct classification while staying equally far from training, ruling out unfamiliar textures as the cause of failure. The reverse-phi illusion similarly disrupts these representations and inverts the same low-level motion statistic as the adversarial textures. Optimizing this input statistic alone, without access to the network, suffices to induce classification failure, attributing both perturbations to the same circuit vulnerability. Connectome-constrained models can thus surface adversarial failure mechanisms as testable hypotheses about biological perceptual vulnerabilities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14498
Cross-sensor remote sensing image retrieval aims to find scenes with the same content across heterogeneous sensors, such as SAR and optical or panchromatic (PAN) and multispectral (MS) imagery, without manual labels. Existing self-supervised methods either reconstruct sensor-specific pixel detail, align each image only with its co-registered twin, or rely on large transformers with 118-173M parameters (and up to 398M). We introduce RS-JEPA, a compact joint-embedding predictive framework built on a Vision Mamba encoder shared by both sensors. Since a state-space encoder reads an image as an ordered sequence of patches, we propose scan-path views, which treat two reading orders of the same image as two views with identical pixels and predict the hidden patches in one order from the visible patches in the this http URL keep this prediction challenging, we propose Adversarial View Coupling (AVC), which learns the hardest split of the visible patches, and a neighbourhood consensus loss that aligns the scene similarities of both sensors. Extensive experiments on SAR-optical (BEN-14K, CBRSIR-VS) and PAN-MS (DSRSID) benchmarks demonstrate that RS-JEPA achieves the highest F1@5 among twelve re-implemented methods (72.92, 80.35 and 94.43) with a retrieval network of only 3.88M parameters (14.57M in training, 8-16times fewer than prior JEPA retrievers). Like prior methods, RS-JEPA trains on co-registered pairs. Our results highlight reading order as a source of self-supervised views. code: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14496
Neural networks are increasingly studied not merely as predictive systems, but as complex systems whose internal computations are themselves objects of scientific inquiry. Recent progress in mechanistic interpretability (MI) has made it possible to identify neurons, features, circuits, population structures, and dynamical patterns associated with model behavior. As these tools improve, attention is shifting from what can be observed inside a model to how those observations support mechanistic explanations. We examine the parallel efforts of neuroscience and MI to address this question and identify recurring inferential bottlenecks when inferring mechanisms from complex neural systems. We propose five principles and organize them into a recursive logic for a more rigorous procedure of mechanistic inference. These principles provide a framework that supports scientific discovery in two senses: it helps turn local interpretability findings into cumulative knowledge of mechanisms within models, and it makes those mechanisms sufficiently precise to generate testable hypotheses about domains beyond the models. Evidence beyond MI is ultimately required to establish what model mechanisms reveal about the world.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14483
Computer vision offers a scalable, non-contact means of estimating livestock traits, but correlated images and video frames make reliable evaluation difficult. Image-random splitting can place views of the same animal in both training and test sets, while deployment further requires transfer to animals captured in future years. We introduce BoviShift, a corpus reconstructed from six consecutive annual cohorts of an operational cattle marketplace collected from 2021 to 2026. It contains 2{,}657 cattle, 10{,}610 still images, and 2{,}566 walk-around videos across nine recorded breed categories. We evaluate three splitting strategies through four configurations: image-random and pooled cattle-disjoint splits over the same development cohorts, followed by separate future-2025 and locked future-2026 evaluations. Using a fixed ResNet-50 multi-task baseline, we assess weight, age, height, breed, and coat color. Differences between image-random and cattle-disjoint splitting are task-dependent rather than a universal leakage penalty. Future-cohort behavior is also attribute- and cohort-specific: breed declines relative to pooled evaluation; mean weight and age performance fails to beat constant baselines in 2025; height remains above baseline; and color transfers well to 2025 but degrades in 2026. Multi-task training improves all five point estimates in a single-seed ablation, still-view aggregation helps selectively, and zero-shot video-frame aggregation exposes a still-to-video domain gap. To our knowledge, BoviShift is the longest-spanning cattle-vision resource combining consecutive annual cohorts with physical and visual attributes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14476
Preventing human error in physical assembly tasks requires assistance systems that can intervene before mistakes are made. This is especially challenging in settings where users are free to choose the construction order and correctness depends on the evolving assembly rather than a fixed next step. We present TanCRAFT, a four-stage real-time predictive assistance system that tracks the scene state, reasons about the current partial assembly, forecasts the near-future motion of manipulated pieces, and intervenes when the predicted placement is incompatible with the target. We instantiate our framework and confirm its effectiveness in a controlled tangram assembly task through offline benchmarks and a within-subject user study. Our findings show that the predictive feedback significantly reduces mistakes relative to unguided and reactive sessions, while yielding the lowest mean perceived workload and shortest mean completion time. Overall, these results demonstrate the value of predictive feedback for error prevention and provide a step toward cost-aware assistance for automation and human-robot workcells.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14470
Visual Question Answering (VQA) imposes substantial computational overhead on vision-language models (VLMs), motivating model-agnostic input reduction methods that can be readily applied across diverse VLMs, including in black-box settings. Simply enforcing a visual-token cap reduces computation, but it can discard information needed to answer the question. A single reduction strategy also struggles to accommodate different scenarios. Our key observation is that cropping and compression are complementary: cropping highlights small targets and local details, whereas whole-image compression better preserves context for large targets or distributed evidence. Based on this observation, we propose C$^2$-Routing, which adaptively selects cropping or compression according to the input image and question. Since both strategies may still discard key information, we further design a safety gate that uses the predicted joint correctness distribution under original and reduced inputs to guide fallback and protect accuracy. To accommodate consumer GPU resource constraints, all training and evaluation experiments run on RTX 3090 GPUs. To measure gains beyond token capping, we use full-image baselines with the same cap of 1,024 visual tokens. We conduct extensive evaluation on three VLMs and 18 datasets spanning local details, global scenes, scene text, and documents. With the visual budget already capped, C$^2$-Routing further reduces end-to-end FLOPs by 36.53% and visual tokens by 42.36% on average, with a mean relative task-score decrease of only 0.77%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14469
Inverse rendering for skin typically relies on offline path tracing to estimate physical properties, which fail to map directly to the approximate shaders utilized in interactive applications, such as game engines. We bridge this gap by directly estimating subsurface scattering parameters tailored for real-time rendering pipelines. We introduce a differentiable Screen-Space Subsurface Scattering (SSSS) framework that enables the joint optimization of spatially varying base textures and scattering distances. To account for local variations in skin thickness, we estimate these parameters across distinct facial regions, generating a blended profile map ready for production runtime engines. Our pipeline utilizes a low-cost, single-light, single-view capture setup designed for accessible and practical appearance acquisition. Optimization is driven by a masked loss function targeting regions where subsurface scattering effects are dominant. We validate our approach on a real-world dataset of $45$ individuals across the Monk Skin Tone Scale, ensuring demographic generalization. Furthermore, we complement this evaluation with synthetic data, a multi-light setup validating our single-light assumption, and a tilted-view configuration confirming angular consistency. Results demonstrate that our method effectively recovers scattering parameters from lightweight inputs, yielding realistic skin appearance directly compatible with standard real-time shaders.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14451
Understanding 4D scenes is a core challenge in visual intelligence, requiring models to jointly capture scene geometry, appearance, and dynamics from partial observations. However, existing approaches are subdivided into feedforward models for direct geometric prediction, and generative models for visual synthesis. We introduce UGG, a unified framework for 4D scene understanding that jointly models RGB video and geometric representations such as depth and camera pose. By assigning different noise levels across modalities and time, UGG formulates visual generation and geometric prediction as conditional completion within a single generative model. This flexible formulation enables the model to learn from diverse, heterogeneous datasets with different subsets of geometric and visual annotations. Furthermore, our generative formulation enables inference-time search over multiple plausible scene hypotheses, using geometric evidence extracted from observed RGB frames to improve geometric prediction without ground truth geometry. We demonstrate UGG's effectiveness over non-unified baselines across camera-controlled video generation, depth estimation, and camera pose prediction, including in challenging sparse observation settings. Code and visualizations are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14440
Deepfake detectors are commonly evaluated on real/fake classification alone, but real-world applications require explanations of the visual evidence behind each prediction. Joint vision-language models struggle with authenticity assessment, producing "real" narratives for manipulated images. To address this, we propose a decoupled predict-then-explain pipeline as our submission to the ACM Multimedia 2026 Explainable Deepfake Detection Challenge, with methods trained and evaluated on the XPlainVerse benchmark. A vision-foundation-model ensemble first classifies the image, then a Qwen3-VL-8B model generates a decision-conditioned explanation of the visual evidence. For fake images, a second Qwen3-VL-8B compresses that text into a short non-expert summary without using the image. We further apply metric-aligned Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to optimize both explainers against the challenge criteria. Under matched conditions, GRPO raises complex BERTScore-F1 from 0.686 to 0.712 and also improves grounding (entity and evidence F1); our submission ranked first on complex BERTScore-F1 and seventh overall.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14436
Video world models promise general-purpose interactive simulators, but their training is limited by action supervision: action labels are scarce, fragmented across incompatible specifications, and do not scale with the unlabeled video pretraining corpus. A common workaround jointly trains an action encoder to compress consecutive frames into a latent action and a decoder to reconstruct the next frame from the previous frame and that latent, forcing the latent to capture only new information. This has two limitations: learning the action space from scratch can limit generalization to unseen domains, and the bottleneck trades expressiveness for separation, with tighter settings losing nuance and looser ones risking scene leakage under domain shifts. We argue for a different starting point: rather than learning actions from scratch, we start from a pretrained foundation model (V-JEPA 2), whose embeddings of a frame pair already carry substantial action information after large-scale, diverse video pretraining. The remaining challenge is to extract the action while discarding the scene. We propose a label-free contrastive adaptation framework that pulls together frame pairs sharing the same motion under a different scene and pushes apart pairs from the same scene with different motion, reshaping the geometry of the pretrained space without imposing a reconstruction bottleneck. We introduce a unified evaluation protocol along three axes (action expressiveness, scene invariance, and action-conditioned video generation quality) across robot manipulation, camera navigation, game, and driving benchmarks, most of which are unseen during adaptation. Compared with annotation-free latent-action methods, our representations are substantially more expressive while matching their scene invariance, and they yield world models that transfer demonstrated actions to new scenes more faithfully.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14420
Fetal brain biometry provides a quantitative basis for assessing prenatal growth and identifying congenital brain abnormalities. However, comprehensive assessment remains limited by labor-intensive manual measurements and automated models that lose accuracy across imaging sequences and institutions. We introduce BioTTA, an anatomically guided test-time adaptation framework that measures 11 fetal brain biometrics from reconstructed three-dimensional magnetic resonance images. BioTTA adapts pretrained models to individual unlabeled volumes using geometric consistency and atlas priors, without access to source images. In a retrospective study across five centers in China and Switzerland, BioTTA improved measurement accuracy across three out-of-distribution datasets and two network architectures. It reduced mean absolute measurement errors by 46-82% relative to the corresponding models without adaptation, achieving errors similar to those of supervised fine-tuning. Its measurements were mapped onto normative growth trajectories derived from expert annotations, enabling gestational-age-specific assessment through a web-based reporting platform. Across four disease cohorts, the platform achieved 82.1-95.0% accuracy in binary detection of ventriculomegaly or cerebellar abnormalities, with performance similar to that of a senior radiologist. BioTTA provides a practical foundation for standardized fetal brain biometry across heterogeneous imaging settings, supporting scalable prenatal growth assessment and quantitative evaluation of brain abnormalities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23966
Many scientific and policy decisions require estimating the total number of target objects across a large image collection. Exhaustive human labeling is often infeasible, while raw model predictions can be biased, especially under domain shift. Recent human-AI estimation methods combine imperfect model predictions with limited human verification to obtain reliable collection-level estimates. However, existing work provides little guidance on how practitioners should choose among models, estimators, and adaptation strategies for a new deployment. We study these choices within a common human-in-the-loop counting framework across 12 tasks spanning biomedical microscopy, ground-level and aerial wildlife surveys, and overhead imagery of urban structures. Our results show that modern multimodal models provide a strong, training-free starting point for many tasks, while fine-tuned detectors become more advantageous at larger labeling budgets and across repeated deployments. Estimation efficiency improves further when model predictions are used to prioritize which units humans label, rather than sampling uniformly. We also find that each model's ranking quality can be estimated with a small pilot set, yielding practical guidance for selecting strategies on new counting tasks. In a field deployment on aerial pronghorn surveys, a task-specific adaptation of these methods meets the survey's $\pm 5\%$ tolerance after reviewing a median of only $3.2\%$ of collected images.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14380
Pretrained video diffusion models (VDMs) offer a powerful foundation for World Action Models (WAMs), which jointly predict robot actions and future observations. Building such models requires injecting low-dimensional robot signals (e.g. proprioception, actions, and values) into a latent space shaped by natural videos, and a key design choice is the interface through which these signals enter: existing schemes treat it as a formatting detail, spending a separate latent frame on each signal or bolting on dedicated encoders and decoders. We argue that signal injection is instead a distribution-alignment problem: how well a representation matches the prior of the pretrained VDMs during denoising. Using the relative reconstruction error of a frozen VDM denoiser as a probe, we find that conventional spatial encodings sit far off this prior, whereas frequency-domain packing yields latents that the denoiser corrects far less. Motivated by this diagnostic result, we propose MetaWAM, which folds all robot signals into a single unified meta-frame: each signal is assigned to a disjoint frequency-domain channel band and lifted to the spatial latent by an inverse DCT, yielding a decodable interface aligned with the pretrained VDM prior without any added module or architectural change. A fixed band layout together with slot-aware routing lets the same meta-frame support policy, world-model, and value prediction over a shared set of robot variables. On RoboCasa, MetaWAM reaches 68.9% success while collapsing the per-signal frames into one and cutting inference latency by 39%, and attains 85.0% success on three real-world Franka tasks. Code and models are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14365
Streaming multi-reference video generation establishes a scene from specified people and objects, then continues it under changing instructions. We introduce TaoMate-R1, a streaming multi-reference generator that organizes adaptation parameters through temporal role specialization. It assigns separate low-rank adapters to scene establishment and continuation on a frozen backbone. Each adapter performs both denoising and context writing for its role; Self Gradient Forcing jointly trains the roles through the history they construct. This allocation contrasts with operation-based specialization, which separates denoising from context writing across all chunks. A fixed-replay gradient analysis characterizes the update directions admitted by the two sharing schemes. On 32 multi-reference cases, we compare the schemes at the same two-adapter budget. Across ten approximately two-minute streams with changing instructions and shared teacher-audio conditioning, TaoMate-R1 reduces the mean boundary luminance jump from 1.96 to 0.613, with higher boundary feature similarity. It also achieves higher mean CLIP and DINO temporal similarity across short interactions, long streams, and public reference compositions. These results support grouping adaptation parameters by scene establishment and continuation for streaming multi-reference generation. Our code and model are released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14307
Generative driving planners can represent diverse ego futures, but a downstream scorer can choose only among sampled candidates; it cannot recover an absent maneuver. We present ForeseeDrive, which turns future scene evolution into a deployable interface for shaping candidate generation. Rather than reconstructing dense future states or scoring a fixed menu, ForeseeDrive derives query-indexed tokens from logged actor motion, occupancy evolution, route interactions, and TTC margins, and predicts the same token space from present context at deployment. The tokens condition trajectory geometry before candidates materialize. A zero-token-gated residual path and candidate-preservation loss limit unnecessary drift, while a TTC-margin guard targets brittle safe-to-unsafe boundary crossings. Under their respective benchmark protocols, ForeseeDrive reaches 89.2 PDMS on NAVSIM navtest, 0.41\,m average L2 and 0.05\% collision rate on nuScenes validation, and a 76.50 driving score on Bench2Drive. Controlled DiffusionDrive/NAVSIM diagnostics show an exact zero-token no-op, a small aligned-over-shuffled selected-PDM advantage under preservation, mixed oracle-best quality, and localized TTC-boundary failures. Together, the benchmark results and bounded mechanism tests support future-conditioned generation as a practical interface for anticipation. Code is included in the supplementary materials.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14286
Remote-sensing foundation models increasingly unify representations across sensing modalities and downstream tasks, yet their prediction mechanisms remain largely task-specific. Separate decoders, prediction heads, and objectives leave prediction fragmented across tasks. This naturally raises a question: can heterogeneous remote-sensing tasks share the prediction process? UniFlow-RS answers this question with a single latent flow-matching predictor shared across tasks. This requires addressing two key challenges: unifying heterogeneous prediction spaces and harmonizing joint optimization across tasks. First, we cast heterogeneous task outputs into structured visual targets in a common latent space, allowing them to be modeled by the same pretrained flow predictor. Task-dependent conditioning further accommodates differences in input configurations. Second, we optimize all tasks with a common Flow Matching objective, eliminating task-specific prediction losses. To mitigate optimization mismatch across tasks and modalities, we introduce Task-Modality Adaptive Timestep Sampling (TMAS), which dynamically allocates training timesteps according to the online learning state of each task-modality group. Using a single shared model, UniFlow-RS handles six tasks and thirteen datasets, surpassing recent task-specific state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks while remaining competitive on the others. Beyond these benchmarks, the same checkpoint demonstrates strong zero-shot transfer across unseen datasets, task settings, occlusion conditions, and near-infrared false-color imagery, without target-specific adaptation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14281
A single validation-tuned threshold can become brittle when dense-score distributions shift. We introduce AutoThreshold, a post-hoc policy that predicts the joint mass of positive and negative pixels over score bins. This target directly parameterizes threshold-indexed confusion counts, avoiding products of independently estimated prevalence and class-conditional rates. Softmax normalization and cumulative decoding yield coherent, monotone confusion profiles; a plug-in decoder then selects a threshold for any $F_\beta$ objective without retraining the head. Across three independently trained Kvasir pipelines transferred to four polyp datasets, Joint exceeds continuous Otsu by $0.0080 \pm 0.0046$ external macro Dice, with positive gains in 3/3 runs. On the reference pipeline, three head seeds achieve $0.6324 \pm 0.0027$, 0.0085 above Otsu; direct-utility Ridge achieves 0.6342, with the paired difference interval spanning zero. The same Joint checkpoints outperform Otsu for $F_{0.5}$, Dice, and $F_2$. On developmental KITTI Road leave-one-corruption-family-out evaluation, Joint improves over scalar regression by 0.0082 [0.0064, 0.0101], while direct utility is 0.0022 higher. These results establish joint confusion prediction as a useful, metric-retargetable inductive bias, without claiming Bayes-optimal $F_\beta$ decisions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14279
World-Action Models improve robot control by predicting future visual dynamics, but iterative video denoising incurs substantial inference overhead. Recent approaches reduce this cost through partial future denoising, yet typically rely on fixed refinement budgets. Our empirical observations reveal that preferred refinement depths vary across tasks and states, while different future regions exhibit varying relevance to action generation. Motivated by these findings, we propose Elastic-WAM, which adaptively allocates world refinement computation across temporal denoising time and spatial future space. A unified spatiotemporal refinement demand field governs when to stop world refinement, how far to advance each denoising step, and which regions to refresh. We parameterize this field with a shared temporal basis and spatial amplitudes, and learn it through a three-stage action-grounded supervised procedure. At inference, the learned field guides recurrent sparse world refinement to improve task success while reducing inference overhead. Evaluations across diverse simulation benchmarks and real-world long-horizon manipulation demonstrate state-of-the-art control performance with reduced inference latency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14257
Text-to-image diffusion models can learn and reproduce an individual's identity from only a few reference photos, creating risks of unauthorized and misleading content generation. Proactive defenses address this risk by adding adversarial perturbations to facial images before release, thereby disrupting identity acquisition during downstream personalization. However, existing methods typically rely on dense $L_\infty$-bounded perturbations, whose accumulated distortions can become visible around facial structures. Recent methods improve protected-image quality, but often at the cost of reduced protection effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Sparse Encoder Attack on Latent Variance (SEAL), a sparse adversarial protection framework that modifies only 5% of the spatial locations in a facial image. SEAL combines a differentiable top-k masking scheme that jointly optimizes perturbation locations and values with a variance-oriented objective over the frozen VAE encoder's latent distribution to disrupt identity-consistent representations. A saliency-guided dispersion penalty further discourages perturbation concentration in perceptually salient facial regions. Experiments on CelebA-HQ and VGGFace2 show that SEAL achieves the best protected-image quality among the compared methods, exceeding 41 dB PSNR with 0.97 SSIM and at most 0.07 LPIPS, while reducing identity similarity to at most 0.15 after diffusion personalization. These results demonstrate that sparse location optimization enables strong identity protection while preserving high visual quality. Code and data are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14254
Estimating 3D head expression from a single image requires mapping visual appearance to underlying facial geometry. We propose ViGA-FLAME, a two-stage framework that aligns semantic visual features with a structured geometric latent space. First, a Parametric-Geometric Variational Autoencoder (PG-VAE) learns a unified representation of canonical head surfaces and FLAME parameters, supporting both detailed surface reconstruction and interpretable parameter recovery. Supervision on geometry and parameters, together with consistency between the two decoding branches, connects surface detail with parametric structure. Second, a trainable Visual-Geometric Adapter (ViGA) maps features from a pretrained semantic visual encoder into this latent space. Asymmetric attention enables ViGA to align semantic image features from the visual encoder with the structured geometric information represented in the PG-VAE latent space, without altering the original visual stream. By grounding image evidence in this latent prior, ViGA-FLAME enables robust 3D head expression estimation across severe facial deformations and large viewing angles, efficiently improving robustness over competing feed-forward methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14218