Aerial Multi-View Stereo via Adaptive Depth Range Inference and Normal Cues

Three-dimensional digital urban reconstruction from multi-view aerial images is a critical application where deep multi-view stereo (MVS) methods outperform traditional techniques. However, existing methods commonly overlook the key differences between aerial and close-range settings, such as varying depth ranges along epipolar lines and insensitive feature-matching associated with low-detailed aerial images. To address these issues, we propose an Adaptive Depth Range MVS (ADR-MVS), which integrates monocular geometric cues to improve multi-view depth estimation accuracy. The key component of ADR-MVS is the depth range predictor, which generates adaptive range maps from depth and normal estimates using cross-attention discrepancy learning. In the first stage, the range map derived from monocular cues breaks through predefined depth boundaries, improving feature-matching discriminability and mitigating convergence to local optima. In later stages, the inferred range maps are progressively narrowed, ultimately aligning with the cascaded MVS framework for precise depth regression. Moreover, a normal-guided cost aggregation operation is specially devised for aerial stereo images to improve geometric awareness within the cost volume. Finally, we introduce a normal-guided depth refinement module that surpasses existing RGB-guided techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that ADR-MVS achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WHU, LuoJia-MVS, and M\"unchen datasets, while exhibits superior computational complexity.

Let Them Talk: Audio-Driven Multi-Person Conversational Video Generation

Audio-driven human animation methods, such as talking head and talking body generation, have made remarkable progress in generating synchronized facial movements and appealing visual quality videos. However, existing methods primarily focus on single human animation and struggle with multi-stream audio inputs, facing incorrect binding problems between audio and persons. Additionally, they exhibit limitations in instruction-following capabilities. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel task: Multi-Person Conversational Video Generation, and introduce a new framework, MultiTalk, to address the challenges during multi-person generation. Specifically, for audio injection, we investigate several schemes and propose the Label Rotary Position Embedding (L-RoPE) method to resolve the audio and person binding problem. Furthermore, during training, we observe that partial parameter training and multi-task training are crucial for preserving the instruction-following ability of the base model. MultiTalk achieves superior performance compared to other methods on several datasets, including talking head, talking body, and multi-person datasets, demonstrating the powerful generation capabilities of our approach.

PathBench: A comprehensive comparison benchmark for pathology foundation models towards precision oncology

The emergence of pathology foundation models has revolutionized computational histopathology, enabling highly accurate, generalized whole-slide image analysis for improved cancer diagnosis, and prognosis assessment. While these models show remarkable potential across cancer diagnostics and prognostics, their clinical translation faces critical challenges including variability in optimal model across cancer types, potential data leakage in evaluation, and lack of standardized benchmarks. Without rigorous, unbiased evaluation, even the most advanced PFMs risk remaining confined to research settings, delaying their life-saving applications. Existing benchmarking efforts remain limited by narrow cancer-type focus, potential pretraining data overlaps, or incomplete task coverage. We present PathBench, the first comprehensive benchmark addressing these gaps through: multi-center in-hourse datasets spanning common cancers with rigorous leakage prevention, evaluation across the full clinical spectrum from diagnosis to prognosis, and an automated leaderboard system for continuous model assessment. Our framework incorporates large-scale data, enabling objective comparison of PFMs while reflecting real-world clinical complexity. All evaluation data comes from private medical providers, with strict exclusion of any pretraining usage to avoid data leakage risks. We have collected 15,888 WSIs from 8,549 patients across 10 hospitals, encompassing over 64 diagnosis and prognosis tasks. Currently, our evaluation of 19 PFMs shows that Virchow2 and H-Optimus-1 are the most effective models overall. This work provides researchers with a robust platform for model development and offers clinicians actionable insights into PFM performance across diverse clinical scenarios, ultimately accelerating the translation of these transformative technologies into routine pathology practice.

What Can RL Bring to VLA Generalization? An Empirical Study

Large Vision-Language Action (VLA) models have shown significant potential for embodied AI. However, their predominant training via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) limits generalization due to susceptibility to compounding errors under distribution shifts. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a path to overcome these limitations by optimizing for task objectives via trial-and-error, yet a systematic understanding of its specific generalization benefits for VLAs compared to SFT is lacking. To address this, our study introduces a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLA generalization and systematically investigates the impact of RL fine-tuning across diverse visual, semantic, and execution dimensions. Our extensive experiments reveal that RL fine-tuning, particularly with PPO, significantly enhances generalization in semantic understanding and execution robustness over SFT, while maintaining comparable visual robustness. We identify PPO as a more effective RL algorithm for VLAs than LLM-derived methods like DPO and GRPO. We also develop a simple recipe for efficient PPO training on VLAs, and demonstrate its practical utility for improving VLA generalization. The project page is at https://rlvla.github.io

Fine-tuning Diffusion Policies with Backpropagation Through Diffusion Timesteps

Diffusion policies, widely adopted in decision-making scenarios such as robotics, gaming and autonomous driving, are capable of learning diverse skills from demonstration data due to their high representation power. However, the sub-optimal and limited coverage of demonstration data could lead to diffusion policies that generate sub-optimal trajectories and even catastrophic failures. While reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has emerged as a promising solution to address these limitations, existing approaches struggle to effectively adapt Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to diffusion models. This challenge stems from the computational intractability of action likelihood estimation during the denoising process, which leads to complicated optimization objectives. In our experiments starting from randomly initialized policies, we find that online tuning of Diffusion Policies demonstrates much lower sample efficiency compared to directly applying PPO on MLP policies (MLP+PPO). To address these challenges, we introduce NCDPO, a novel framework that reformulates Diffusion Policy as a noise-conditioned deterministic policy. By treating each denoising step as a differentiable transformation conditioned on pre-sampled noise, NCDPO enables tractable likelihood evaluation and gradient backpropagation through all diffusion timesteps. Our experiments demonstrate that NCDPO achieves sample efficiency comparable to MLP+PPO when training from scratch, outperforming existing methods in both sample efficiency and final performance across diverse benchmarks, including continuous robot control and multi-agent game scenarios. Furthermore, our experimental results show that our method is robust to the number denoising timesteps in the Diffusion Policy.

Mastering Multi-Drone Volleyball through Hierarchical Co-Self-Play Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning to play 3v3 multi-drone volleyball, a new embodied competitive task that requires both high-level strategic coordination and low-level agile control. The task is turn-based, multi-agent, and physically grounded, posing significant challenges due to its long-horizon dependencies, tight inter-agent coupling, and the underactuated dynamics of quadrotors. To address this, we propose Hierarchical Co-Self-Play (HCSP), a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that separates centralized high-level strategic decision-making from decentralized low-level motion control. We design a three-stage population-based training pipeline to enable both strategy and skill to emerge from scratch without expert demonstrations: (I) training diverse low-level skills, (II) learning high-level strategy via self-play with fixed low-level controllers, and (III) joint fine-tuning through co-self-play. Experiments show that HCSP achieves superior performance, outperforming non-hierarchical self-play and rule-based hierarchical baselines with an average 82.9\% win rate and a 71.5\% win rate against the two-stage variant. Moreover, co-self-play leads to emergent team behaviors such as role switching and coordinated formations, demonstrating the effectiveness of our hierarchical design and training scheme.

Prototype-Based Information Compensation Network for Multi-Source Remote Sensing Data Classification

Multi-source remote sensing data joint classification aims to provide accuracy and reliability of land cover classification by leveraging the complementary information from multiple data sources. Existing methods confront two challenges: inter-frequency multi-source feature coupling and inconsistency of complementary information exploration. To solve these issues, we present a Prototype-based Information Compensation Network (PICNet) for land cover classification based on HSI and SAR/LiDAR data. Specifically, we first design a frequency interaction module to enhance the inter-frequency coupling in multi-source feature extraction. The multi-source features are first decoupled into high- and low-frequency components. Then, these features are recoupled to achieve efficient inter-frequency communication. Afterward, we design a prototype-based information compensation module to model the global multi-source complementary information. Two sets of learnable modality prototypes are introduced to represent the global modality information of multi-source data. Subsequently, cross-modal feature integration and alignment are achieved through cross-attention computation between the modality-specific prototype vectors and the raw feature representations. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the significant superiority of our PICNet over state-of-the-art methods. The codes are available at https://github.com/oucailab/PICNet.

MLICv2: Enhanced Multi-Reference Entropy Modeling for Learned Image Compression

Recent advancements in learned image compression (LIC) have yielded impressive performance gains. Notably, the learned image compression models with multi-reference entropy models (MLIC series) have significantly outperformed existing traditional image codecs such as the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) Intra. In this paper, we present MLICv2 and MLICv2$^+$, enhanced versions of the MLIC series, featuring improved transform techniques, entropy modeling, and instance adaptability. For better transform, we introduce a simple token mixing transform block inspired by the meta transformer architecture, addressing the performance degradation at high bit-rates observed in previous MLIC series while maintaining computational efficiency. To enhance entropy modeling, we propose a hyperprior-guided global correlation prediction, enabling the capture of global contexts in the initial slice of the latent representation. We also develop a channel reweighting module to dynamically prioritize important channels within each context. Additionally, advanced positional embedding for context modeling and selective compression with guided optimization are investigated. To boost instance adaptability, we employ stochastic Gumbel annealing to iteratively refine the latent representation according to the rate-distortion optimization of a specific input image. This approach further enhances performance without impacting decoding speed. Experimental results demonstrate that our MLICv2 and MLICv2$^+$ achieve state-of-the-art performance, reducing Bjontegaard-Delta rate (BD-rate) by 16.54%, 21.61%, 16.05% and 20.46%, 24.35%, 19.14% respectively, compared to VTM-17.0 Intra on the Kodak, Tecnick, CLIC Pro Val dataset, respectively.

Frequency-Compensated Network for Daily Arctic Sea Ice Concentration Prediction

Accurately forecasting sea ice concentration (SIC) in the Arctic is critical to global ecosystem health and navigation safety. However, current methods still is confronted with two challenges: 1) these methods rarely explore the long-term feature dependencies in the frequency domain. 2) they can hardly preserve the high-frequency details, and the changes in the marginal area of the sea ice cannot be accurately captured. To this end, we present a Frequency-Compensated Network (FCNet) for Arctic SIC prediction on a daily basis. In particular, we design a dual-branch network, including branches for frequency feature extraction and convolutional feature extraction. For frequency feature extraction, we design an adaptive frequency filter block, which integrates trainable layers with Fourier-based filters. By adding frequency features, the FCNet can achieve refined prediction of edges and details. For convolutional feature extraction, we propose a high-frequency enhancement block to separate high and low-frequency information. Moreover, high-frequency features are enhanced via channel-wise attention, and temporal attention unit is employed for low-frequency feature extraction to capture long-range sea ice changes. Extensive experiments are conducted on a satellite-derived daily SIC dataset, and the results verify the effectiveness of the proposed FCNet. Our codes and data will be made public available at: https://github.com/oucailab/FCNet .

Grounding-MD: Grounded Video-language Pre-training for Open-World Moment Detection

Temporal Action Detection and Moment Retrieval constitute two pivotal tasks in video understanding, focusing on precisely localizing temporal segments corresponding to specific actions or events. Recent advancements introduced Moment Detection to unify these two tasks, yet existing approaches remain confined to closed-set scenarios, limiting their applicability in open-world contexts. To bridge this gap, we present Grounding-MD, an innovative, grounded video-language pre-training framework tailored for open-world moment detection. Our framework incorporates an arbitrary number of open-ended natural language queries through a structured prompt mechanism, enabling flexible and scalable moment detection. Grounding-MD leverages a Cross-Modality Fusion Encoder and a Text-Guided Fusion Decoder to facilitate comprehensive video-text alignment and enable effective cross-task collaboration. Through large-scale pre-training on temporal action detection and moment retrieval datasets, Grounding-MD demonstrates exceptional semantic representation learning capabilities, effectively handling diverse and complex query conditions. Comprehensive evaluations across four benchmark datasets including ActivityNet, THUMOS14, ActivityNet-Captions, and Charades-STA demonstrate that Grounding-MD establishes new state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot and supervised settings in open-world moment detection scenarios. All source code and trained models will be released.