Revisiting Reliability in the Reasoning-based Pose Estimation Benchmark

The reasoning-based pose estimation (RPE) benchmark has emerged as a widely adopted evaluation standard for pose-aware multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Despite its significance, we identified critical reproducibility and benchmark-quality issues that hinder fair and consistent quantitative evaluations. Most notably, the benchmark utilizes different image indices from those of the original 3DPW dataset, forcing researchers into tedious and error-prone manual matching processes to obtain accurate ground-truth (GT) annotations for quantitative metrics (\eg, MPJPE, PA-MPJPE). Furthermore, our analysis reveals several inherent benchmark-quality limitations, including significant image redundancy, scenario imbalance, overly simplistic poses, and ambiguous textual descriptions, collectively undermining reliable evaluations across diverse scenarios. To alleviate manual effort and enhance reproducibility, we carefully refined the GT annotations through meticulous visual matching and publicly release these refined annotations as an open-source resource, thereby promoting consistent quantitative evaluations and facilitating future advancements in human pose-aware multimodal reasoning.

Pix2Next: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models for RGB to NIR Image Translation

This paper proposes Pix2Next, a novel image-to-image translation framework designed to address the challenge of generating high-quality Near-Infrared (NIR) images from RGB inputs. Our approach leverages a state-of-the-art Vision Foundation Model (VFM) within an encoder-decoder architecture, incorporating cross-attention mechanisms to enhance feature integration. This design captures detailed global representations and preserves essential spectral characteristics, treating RGB-to-NIR translation as more than a simple domain transfer problem. A multi-scale PatchGAN discriminator ensures realistic image generation at various detail levels, while carefully designed loss functions couple global context understanding with local feature preservation. We performed experiments on the RANUS dataset to demonstrate Pix2Next's advantages in quantitative metrics and visual quality, improving the FID score by 34.81% compared to existing methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical utility of Pix2Next by showing improved performance on a downstream object detection task using generated NIR data to augment limited real NIR datasets. The proposed approach enables the scaling up of NIR datasets without additional data acquisition or annotation efforts, potentially accelerating advancements in NIR-based computer vision applications.