Abstract:Understanding physical transformation processes is crucial for both human cognition and artificial intelligence systems, particularly from an egocentric perspective, which serves as a key bridge between humans and machines in action modeling. We define this modeling process as Egocentric Instructed Visual State Transition (EIVST), which involves generating intermediate frames that depict object transformations between initial and target states under a brief action instruction. EIVST poses two challenges for current generative models: (1) understanding the visual scenes of the initial and target states and reasoning about transformation steps from an egocentric view, and (2) generating a consistent intermediate transition that follows the given instruction while preserving object appearance across the two visual states. To address these challenges, we propose the EgoIn framework. It first infers the multi-step transition process between two given states using TransitionVLM, fine-tuned on our curated dataset to better adapt to this task and reduce hallucinated information. It then generates a sequence of frames based on transition conditions produced by the proposed Transition Conditioning module. Additionally, we introduce Object-aware Auxiliary Supervision to preserve consistent object appearance throughout the transition. Extensive experiments on human-object and robot-object interaction datasets demonstrate EgoIn's superior performance in generating semantically meaningful and visually coherent transformation sequences.
Abstract:Daily scenarios are characterized by visual richness, requiring Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to filter noise and identify decisive visual clues for accurate reasoning. Yet, current benchmarks predominantly aim at evaluating MLLMs' pre-existing knowledge or perceptual understanding, often neglecting the critical capability of reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce DailyClue, a benchmark designed for visual clue-driven reasoning in daily scenarios. Our construction is guided by two core principles: (1) strict grounding in authentic daily activities, and (2) challenging query design that necessitates more than surface-level perception. Instead of simple recognition, our questions compel MLLMs to actively explore suitable visual clues and leverage them for subsequent reasoning. To this end, we curate a comprehensive dataset spanning four major daily domains and 16 distinct subtasks. Comprehensive evaluation across MLLMs and agentic models underscores the formidable challenge posed by our benchmark. Our analysis reveals several critical insights, emphasizing that the accurate identification of visual clues is essential for robust reasoning.
Abstract:The ability to capture and segment sounding objects in dynamic visual scenes is crucial for the development of Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) tasks. While significant progress has been made in this area, the interaction between audio and visual modalities still requires further exploration. In this work, we aim to answer the following questions: How can a model effectively suppress audio noise while enhancing relevant audio information? How can we achieve discriminative interaction between the audio and visual modalities? To this end, we propose SDAVS, equipped with the Selective Noise-Resilient Processor (SNRP) module and the Discriminative Audio-Visual Mutual Fusion (DAMF) strategy. The proposed SNRP mitigates audio noise interference by selectively emphasizing relevant auditory cues, while DAMF ensures more consistent audio-visual representations. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark AVS datasets, especially in multi-source and complex scenes. \textit{The code and model are available at https://github.com/happylife-pk/SDAVS}.
Abstract:RGB-Thermal (RGBT) tracking aims to achieve robust object localization across diverse environmental conditions by fusing visible and thermal infrared modalities. However, existing RGBT trackers rely solely on initial-frame visual information for target modeling, failing to adapt to appearance variations due to the absence of language guidance. Furthermore, current methods suffer from redundant search regions and heterogeneous modality gaps, causing background distraction. To address these issues, we first introduce textual descriptions into RGBT tracking benchmarks. This is accomplished through a pipeline that leverages Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to automatically produce texual annotations. Afterwards, we propose RAGTrack, a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework for robust RGBT tracking. To this end, we introduce a Multi-modal Transformer Encoder (MTE) for unified visual-language modeling. Then, we design an Adaptive Token Fusion (ATF) to select target-relevant tokens and perform channel exchanges based on cross-modal correlations, mitigating search redundancies and modality gaps. Finally, we propose a Context-aware Reasoning Module (CRM) to maintain a dynamic knowledge base and employ a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to enable temporal linguistic reasoning for robust target modeling. Extensive experiments on four RGBT benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across various challenging scenarios. The source code is available https://github.com/IdolLab/RAGTrack.
Abstract:With growing real-world demands, efficient tracking has received increasing attention. However, most existing methods are limited to RGB inputs and struggle in multi-modal scenarios. Moreover, current multi-modal tracking approaches typically use complex designs, making them too heavy and slow for resource-constrained deployment. To tackle these limitations, we propose UETrack, an efficient framework for single object tracking. UETrack demonstrates high practicality and versatility, efficiently handling multiple modalities including RGB, Depth, Thermal, Event, and Language, and addresses the gap in efficient multi-modal tracking. It introduces two key components: a Token-Pooling-based Mixture-of-Experts mechanism that enhances modeling capacity through feature aggregation and expert specialization, and a Target-aware Adaptive Distillation strategy that selectively performs distillation based on sample characteristics, reducing redundant supervision and improving performance. Extensive experiments on 12 benchmarks across 3 hardware platforms show that UETrack achieves a superior speed-accuracy trade-off compared to previous methods. For instance, UETrack-B achieves 69.2% AUC on LaSOT and runs at 163/56/60 FPS on GPU/CPU/AGX, demonstrating strong practicality and versatility. Code is available at https://github.com/kangben258/UETrack.
Abstract:The Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF) is widely used in visibility evaluation to prevent occlusions and collisions during tracking. However, frequent ESDF updates introduce considerable computational overhead. To address this issue, we propose Eva-Tracker, a visibility-aware trajectory planning framework for aerial tracking that eliminates ESDF updates and incorporates a recovery-capable path generation method for target reacquisition. First, we design a target trajectory prediction method and a visibility-aware initial path generation algorithm that maintain an appropriate observation distance, avoid occlusions, and enable rapid replanning to reacquire the target when it is lost. Then, we propose the Field of View ESDF (FoV-ESDF), a precomputed ESDF tailored to the tracker's field of view, enabling rapid visibility evaluation without requiring updates. Finally, we optimize the trajectory using differentiable FoV-ESDF-based objectives to ensure continuous visibility throughout the tracking process. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that our approach delivers more robust tracking results with lower computational effort than existing state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/Yue-0/Eva-Tracker.
Abstract:Salient object detection is inherently a subjective problem, as observers with different priors may perceive different objects as salient. However, existing methods predominantly formulate it as an objective prediction task with a single groundtruth segmentation map for each image, which renders the problem under-determined and fundamentally ill-posed. To address this issue, we propose Observer-Centric Salient Object Detection (OC-SOD), where salient regions are predicted by considering not only the visual cues but also the observer-specific factors such as their preferences or intents. As a result, this formulation captures the intrinsic ambiguity and diversity of human perception, enabling personalized and context-aware saliency prediction. By leveraging multi-modal large language models, we develop an efficient data annotation pipeline and construct the first OC-SOD dataset named OC-SODBench, comprising 33k training, validation and test images with 152k textual prompts and object pairs. Built upon this new dataset, we further design OC-SODAgent, an agentic baseline which performs OC-SOD via a human-like "Perceive-Reflect-Adjust" process. Extensive experiments on our proposed OC-SODBench have justified the effectiveness of our contribution. Through this observer-centric perspective, we aim to bridge the gap between human perception and computational modeling, offering a more realistic and flexible understanding of what makes an object truly "salient." Code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/Dustzx/OC_SOD
Abstract:Multi-Modal Image Fusion (MMIF) aims to combine images from different modalities to produce fused images, retaining texture details and preserving significant information. Recently, some MMIF methods incorporate frequency domain information to enhance spatial features. However, these methods typically rely on simple serial or parallel spatial-frequency fusion without interaction. In this paper, we propose a novel Interactive Spatial-Frequency Fusion Mamba (ISFM) framework for MMIF. Specifically, we begin with a Modality-Specific Extractor (MSE) to extract features from different modalities. It models long-range dependencies across the image with linear computational complexity. To effectively leverage frequency information, we then propose a Multi-scale Frequency Fusion (MFF). It adaptively integrates low-frequency and high-frequency components across multiple scales, enabling robust representations of frequency features. More importantly, we further propose an Interactive Spatial-Frequency Fusion (ISF). It incorporates frequency features to guide spatial features across modalities, enhancing complementary representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on six MMIF datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our ISFM can achieve better performances than other state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/Namn23/ISFM.
Abstract:Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance in cross-modal understanding across textual and visual inputs, yet existing benchmarks predominantly focus on pure-text queries. In real-world scenarios, language also frequently appears as visualized text embedded in images, raising the question of whether current VLMs handle such input requests comparably. We introduce VISTA-Bench, a systematic benchmark from multimodal perception, reasoning, to unimodal understanding domains. It evaluates visualized text understanding by contrasting pure-text and visualized-text questions under controlled rendering conditions. Extensive evaluation of over 20 representative VLMs reveals a pronounced modality gap: models that perform well on pure-text queries often degrade substantially when equivalent semantic content is presented as visualized text. This gap is further amplified by increased perceptual difficulty, highlighting sensitivity to rendering variations despite unchanged semantics. Overall, VISTA-Bench provides a principled evaluation framework to diagnose this limitation and to guide progress toward more unified language representations across tokenized text and pixels. The source dataset is available at https://github.com/QingAnLiu/VISTA-Bench.
Abstract:Understanding and reasoning about the physical world requires spatial intelligence: the ability to interpret geometry, perspective, and spatial relations beyond 2D perception. While recent vision large models (VLMs) excel at visual understanding, they remain fundamentally 2D perceivers and struggle with genuine 3D reasoning. We introduce Think3D, a framework that enables VLM agents to think with 3D space. By leveraging 3D reconstruction models that recover point clouds and camera poses from images or videos, Think3D allows the agent to actively manipulate space through camera-based operations and ego/global-view switching, transforming spatial reasoning into an interactive 3D chain-of-thought process. Without additional training, Think3D significantly improves the spatial reasoning performance of advanced models such as GPT-4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, yielding average gains of +7.8% on BLINK Multi-view and MindCube, and +4.7% on VSI-Bench. We further show that smaller models, which struggle with spatial exploration, benefit significantly from a reinforcement learning policy that enables the model to select informative viewpoints and operations. With RL, the benefit from tool usage increases from +0.7% to +6.8%. Our findings demonstrate that training-free, tool-augmented spatial exploration is a viable path toward more flexible and human-like 3D reasoning in multimodal agents, establishing a new dimension of multimodal intelligence. Code and weights are released at https://github.com/zhangzaibin/spagent.