TreeSRNF: Square-Root Normal Fields for Generative Modelling of the Geometric and Structural Variability in Tree-like 3D Objects

We introduce a novel mathematical framework for analyzing and generating complex tree-shaped 3D objects, such as botanical trees and plants, which deform both in their 3D geometry and branching structure. Unlike previous works, which either consider only the skeletal structure of tree-like objects or approximate their 3D geometry using branch thickness, the proposed framework accurately models both the 3D geometry of the tree branches and the way they are interconnected. In this paper, we first generalize the Square Root Normal Fields (SRNF) representation, originally proposed for the statistical analysis of genus-0 surfaces, to tree-shaped 3D objects. We then treat tree-shaped 3D objects as points on a novel Riemannian tree-shape space equipped with a novel Riemannian metric that measures the amount of surface bending and stretching, and structural changes one needs to apply to one 3D tree-shape to align it with another. This way, deformations become trajectories in this novel tree-shape space. We analyze the theoretical properties of this novel tree-shape space and the corresponding metric and develop algorithms for computing point-wise and branch-wise correspondences and geodesic paths between complex 3D trees. We finally show how to use these building blocks for (1) computing statistical summaries, \ie means and modes of variation, of collections of tree-shaped 3D objects, and (2) synthesizing novel tree-shaped 3D objects by sampling from probability distributions fitted to a population of tree-shaped 3D objects. We demonstrate the performance and utility of the proposed framework on real and synthetic plants and botanical trees and show that it significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Learning Structured Visual Compositional Representations for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension

Referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to localize the object in an image described by natural language. In Weakly supervised REC (WREC), existing approaches primarily operate on anchor-level visual representations. Even when enriched with auxiliary cues, relational interactions remain implicitly encoded within individual anchor features. The resulting visual representation remains flat and unary-only, limiting its ability to align with the structured nature of language. In this work, we propose a Structured Visual Compositional Representation (SVCR) learning framework for WREC. Rather than implicitly encoding relations within unary anchors, the proposed SVCR explicitly models both unary object embeddings and pairwise relational embeddings, forming a structured visual representation space. We further introduce a compositional alignment mechanism that matches unary and pairwise visual representations with their corresponding textual embeddings in a unified manner, enabling compositional visual-textual matching under weak supervision. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg show that the proposed SVCR achieves state-of-the-art performance. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of explicit structured visual representations and visual-textual alignment for WREC.

SkelHCC: A Hyperbolic CLIP-Driven Cache Adaptation Framework for Skeleton-based One-Shot Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition aims to understand human behaviors from body joint sequences and is especially challenging in the one-shot setting, where only a single labeled exemplar is available for each novel action. A key challenge is learning representations that capture the hierarchical and compositional structure of human motion while aligning effectively with high-level action semantics under extreme data scarcity. Existing approaches, largely based on Euclidean embeddings and low-level motion cues, struggle to model the tree-like organization of skeleton data, limiting cross-modal alignment and generalization to unseen action categories. We propose SkelHCC, a unified skeleton hyperbolic CLIP-driven cache adaptation framework for one-shot skeleton-based action recognition. SkelHCC introduces an Explicitly Hierarchical Hyperbolic CLIP (EH-HCLIP) module that embeds skeleton sequences and action language into a shared hyperbolic space. By leveraging the negative curvature and exponential volume growth of hyperbolic geometry, EH-HCLIP naturally encodes the joint-part-body hierarchy of human anatomy and yields structurally consistent cross-modal representations. To support efficient one-shot adaptation, SkelHCC further integrates a training-free LLM-guided Multi-granularity Voting Cache (LMV-Cache) for context-aware inference. Experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD demonstrate that SkelHCC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Structured Causal Video Reasoning via Multi-Objective Alignment

Human understanding of video dynamics is typically grounded in a structured mental representation of entities, actions, and temporal relations, rather than relying solely on immediate deductive reasoning. In contrast, existing Video-LLMs largely depend on unstructured video reasoning, where critical visual evidence is embedded in verbose textual descriptions and temporal causality is often weakly modeled. This leads to inefficient processes and fragile causal inference. To bridge this cognitive gap, we propose constructing a compact representation of salient events and their causal relationships, which we name Structured Event Facts, prior to the reasoning stage. This structured prior serves as an explicit constraint to promote concise and causally grounded reasoning, while also making intermediate evidence easier to verify. To effectively train models on such structured facts, we introduce CausalFact-60K and a four-stage training pipeline comprising facts alignment, format warm-start, thinking warm-start, and reinforcement learning-based post-training. During RL stage, we find that this framework introduces competing objectives, as structural completeness and causal fidelity must be balanced against reasoning length, making it difficult to optimize. We address this challenge by formulating the optimization as a Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) problem and explicitly optimizing toward the Pareto-Frontier to balance these trade-offs. As a result, we introduce Factum-4B, which yields more reliable reasoning and delivers stronger performance on challenging video understanding tasks requiring fine-grained temporal inference.

SkeletonContext: Skeleton-side Context Prompt Learning for Zero-Shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition aims to recognize unseen actions by transferring knowledge from seen categories through semantic descriptions. Most existing methods typically align skeleton features with textual embeddings within a shared latent space. However, the absence of contextual cues, such as objects involved in the action, introduces an inherent gap between skeleton and semantic representations, making it difficult to distinguish visually similar actions. To address this, we propose SkeletonContext, a prompt-based framework that enriches skeletal motion representations with language-driven contextual semantics. Specifically, we introduce a Cross-Modal Context Prompt Module, which leverages a pretrained language model to reconstruct masked contextual prompts under guidance derived from LLMs. This design effectively transfers linguistic context to the skeleton encoder for instance-level semantic grounding and improved cross-modal alignment. In addition, a Key-Part Decoupling Module is incorporated to decouple motion-relevant joint features, ensuring robust action understanding even in the absence of explicit object interactions. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SkeletonContext achieves state-of-the-art performance under both conventional and generalized zero-shot settings, validating its effectiveness in reasoning about context and distinguishing fine-grained, visually similar actions.

Controllable Complex Human Motion Video Generation via Text-to-Skeleton Cascades

Generating videos of complex human motions such as flips, cartwheels, and martial arts remains challenging for current video diffusion models. Text-only conditioning is temporally ambiguous for fine-grained motion control, while explicit pose-based controls, though effective, require users to provide complete skeleton sequences that are costly to produce for long and dynamic actions. We propose a two-stage cascaded framework that addresses both limitations. First, an autoregressive text-to-skeleton model generates 2D pose sequences from natural language descriptions by predicting each joint conditioned on previously generated poses. This design captures long-range temporal dependencies and inter-joint coordination required for complex motions. Second, a pose-conditioned video diffusion model synthesizes videos from a reference image and the generated skeleton sequence. It employs DINO-ALF (Adaptive Layer Fusion), a multi-level reference encoder that preserves appearance and clothing details under large pose changes and self-occlusions. To address the lack of publicly available datasets for complex human motion video generation, we introduce a Blender-based synthetic dataset containing 2,000 videos with diverse characters performing acrobatic and stunt-like motions. The dataset provides full control over appearance, motion, and environment. It fills an important gap because existing benchmarks significantly under-represent acrobatic motions while web-collected datasets raise copyright and privacy concerns. Experiments on our synthetic dataset and the Motion-X Fitness benchmark show that our text-to-skeleton model outperforms prior methods on FID, R-precision, and motion diversity. Our pose-to-video model also achieves the best results among all compared methods on VBench metrics for temporal consistency, motion smoothness, and subject preservation.

Fact or Fake? Assessing the Role of Deepfake Detectors in Multimodal Misinformation Detection

In multimodal misinformation, deception usually arises not just from pixel-level manipulations in an image, but from the semantic and contextual claim jointly expressed by the image-text pair. Yet most deepfake detectors, engineered to detect pixel-level forgeries, do not account for claim-level meaning, despite their growing integration in automated fact-checking (AFC) pipelines. This raises a central scientific and practical question: Do pixel-level detectors contribute useful signal for verifying image-text claims, or do they instead introduce misleading authenticity priors that undermine evidence-based reasoning? We provide the first systematic analysis of deepfake detectors in the context of multimodal misinformation detection. Using two complementary benchmarks, MMFakeBench and DGM4, we evaluate: (1) state-of-the-art image-only deepfake detectors, (2) an evidence-driven fact-checking system that performs tool-guided retrieval via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and engages in deliberative inference through Multi-Agent Debate (MAD), and (3) a hybrid fact-checking system that injects detector outputs as auxiliary evidence. Results across both benchmark datasets show that deepfake detectors offer limited standalone value, achieving F1 scores in the range of 0.26-0.53 on MMFakeBench and 0.33-0.49 on DGM4, and that incorporating their predictions into fact-checking pipelines consistently reduces performance by 0.04-0.08 F1 due to non-causal authenticity assumptions. In contrast, the evidence-centric fact-checking system achieves the highest performance, reaching F1 scores of approximately 0.81 on MMFakeBench and 0.55 on DGM4. Overall, our findings demonstrate that multimodal claim verification is driven primarily by semantic understanding and external evidence, and that pixel-level artifact signals do not reliably enhance reasoning over real-world image-text misinformation.

DynaPURLS: Dynamic Refinement of Part-aware Representations for Skeleton-based Zero-Shot Action Recognition

Zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition (ZS-SAR) is fundamentally constrained by prevailing approaches that rely on aligning skeleton features with static, class-level semantics. This coarse-grained alignment fails to bridge the domain shift between seen and unseen classes, thereby impeding the effective transfer of fine-grained visual knowledge. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{DynaPURLS}, a unified framework that establishes robust, multi-scale visual-semantic correspondences and dynamically refines them at inference time to enhance generalization. Our framework leverages a large language model to generate hierarchical textual descriptions that encompass both global movements and local body-part dynamics. Concurrently, an adaptive partitioning module produces fine-grained visual representations by semantically grouping skeleton joints. To fortify this fine-grained alignment against the train-test domain shift, DynaPURLS incorporates a dynamic refinement module. During inference, this module adapts textual features to the incoming visual stream via a lightweight learnable projection. This refinement process is stabilized by a confidence-aware, class-balanced memory bank, which mitigates error propagation from noisy pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on three large-scale benchmark datasets, including NTU RGB+D 60/120 and PKU-MMD, demonstrate that DynaPURLS significantly outperforms prior art, setting new state-of-the-art records. The source code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Alchemist0754/DynaPURLS

Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Architecture for Weakly Supervised Volumetric Medical Segmentation

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation offers a label-efficient solution to train segmentation models for volumetric medical imaging. However, existing approaches often rely on 2D encoders that neglect the inherent volumetric nature of the data. We propose TranSamba, a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture designed to capture 3D context for weakly supervised volumetric medical segmentation. TranSamba augments a standard Vision Transformer backbone with Cross-Plane Mamba blocks, which leverage the linear complexity of state space models for efficient information exchange across neighboring slices. The information exchange enhances the pairwise self-attention within slices computed by the Transformer blocks, directly contributing to the attention maps for object localization. TranSamba achieves effective volumetric modeling with time complexity that scales linearly with the input volume depth and maintains constant memory usage for batch processing. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that TranSamba establishes new state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming existing methods across diverse modalities and pathologies. Our source code and trained models are openly accessible at: https://github.com/YihengLyu/TranSamba.

LatentMove: Towards Complex Human Movement Video Generation

Image-to-video (I2V) generation seeks to produce realistic motion sequences from a single reference image. Although recent methods exhibit strong temporal consistency, they often struggle when dealing with complex, non-repetitive human movements, leading to unnatural deformations. To tackle this issue, we present LatentMove, a DiT-based framework specifically tailored for highly dynamic human animation. Our architecture incorporates a conditional control branch and learnable face/body tokens to preserve consistency as well as fine-grained details across frames. We introduce Complex-Human-Videos (CHV), a dataset featuring diverse, challenging human motions designed to benchmark the robustness of I2V systems. We also introduce two metrics to assess the flow and silhouette consistency of generated videos with their ground truth. Experimental results indicate that LatentMove substantially improves human animation quality--particularly when handling rapid, intricate movements--thereby pushing the boundaries of I2V generation. The code, the CHV dataset, and the evaluation metrics will be available at https://github.com/ --.