Evolutionary Intelligence for Scientific Discovery: From Evolutionary Computation to Cumulative Discovery Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) is shifting scientific discovery from task-specific workflows towards autonomous systems that organize exploration with experimental and human feedback in open-ended candidate spaces. Evolutionary computation (EC) provides a computational basis for feedback-driven discovery because population-based search can maintain diverse scientific candidates while steering exploration through accumulated evidence. However, EC predominantly focuses on candidate refinement for predefined problems, whereas cumulative discovery requires experience retention. To bridge this gap, this review introduces evolutionary intelligence (EI) for scientific discovery. EI characterizes scientific AI systems that sustain exploration by linking candidate refinement with experience retention across evolutionary cycles. We introduce a five-dimensional analytical framework that asks what evolves, how candidates change, why candidates are selected, where feedback originates, and when evolution occurs. This framework clarifies how EI transforms isolated search trajectories into cumulative scientific insight. We further demonstrate this paradigm across diverse discovery modes, from evolving concrete scientific entities to orchestrating automated research workflows. Finally, we identify critical bottlenecks regarding evaluation, process traceability, and shared infrastructure, providing a concrete roadmap for advancing the transition from EC to EI in scientific discovery.

DKDNet: Dual Knowledge and Data-Driven Network for Cross-Domain Automatic Modulation Classification

The dynamics of communication environments induce significant distribution shifts across domains, challenging the generalization of deep learning-based automatic modulation classification (AMC) models. While existing UDA methods alleviate this problem by aligning source and target features, they give limited consideration to modulation-specific structures that remain informative across domain conditions. In this paper, we consider signal prior knowledge, grounded in communication protocols and physical principles, as a potential way to enhance cross-domain representation learning. Given that different priors may vary in modulation discriminability, domain stability, and complementarity, this paper first analyzes five commonly adopted signal representations that instantiate different signal priors. From them, in-phase/quadrature (IQ), amplitude--phase (AP), and autocorrelation function (ACF) are selected as compact prior-guided inputs. Based on that, a dual knowledge and data-driven network (DKDNet) is proposed for cross-domain AMC. The multi-representation feature encoder (MRFE) and dynamic lightweight fusion unit (DLFU) are designed to achieve unified representation learning and adaptive feature fusion, and the resulting fused features are optimized with modulation classification and adversarial domain alignment objectives. Experiments on both simulated and public datasets validate the rationality of the prior selection and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

ExACT: Exemplar-Driven Calibrated Refinement for Training-Free Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing Images

Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to locate specific objects in high-resolution RS imagery using free-form natural language descriptions. While recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show great potential for such open-vocabulary RSVG, their training-free adaptation is hindered by the modality gap between abstract linguistic semantics and fine-grained visual cues. In cluttered RS scenes, this gap inevitably causes severe localization drift. To bridge this gap, we propose Exemplar-driven Calibrated Refinement (ExACT), a novel training-free framework driven by a one-shot visual prompting mechanism to explicitly provide discriminative structural guidance for precise pixel-level localization. Specifically, we propose a Vision Exemplar-based Calibrator (VEC) that extracts fine-grained visual correspondences from the given exemplar to rectify the rough cross-modal priors from frozen MLLMs, effectively suppressing background artifacts and accurately outlining target boundaries. Subsequently, a Structure-Aware Refiner (SAR) employs an iterative merge-and-select clustering strategy to consolidate the calibrated priors into high-quality positive and negative geometric prompts. These prompts then guide the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to achieve precise pixel-level predictions. Extensive experiments confirm the superiority of ExACT over existing training-free and weakly-supervised methods.

A Robust Semantic Segmentation Pipeline for the CVPR 2026 8th UG2+ Challenge Track 2

This report presents our solution for the WeatherProof Dataset Challenge, namely CVPR 2026 8th UG2+ Challenge Track 2: Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather. For the semantic segmentation task under adverse weather conditions, we propose a semi-supervised segmentation pipeline. Our method is trained exclusively on the WeatherProof dataset, without using any additional external data. Specifically, we adopt UniMatch V2 as the baseline model and treat all degraded-weather images as unlabeled data for semi-supervised training, thereby fully exploiting the data distribution provided by the challenge. During inference, we further apply test-time augmentation to improve the robustness and segmentation accuracy of the final predictions. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ylb888/weatherproof-challenge-unimatchv2.

TAR: Text Semantic Assisted Cross-modal Image Registration Framework for Optical and SAR Images

Existing deep learning-based methods can capture shared features from optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images for spatial alignment. However, optical-SAR registration remains challenging under large geometric deformations, because the model needs to simultaneously handle cross-modal appearance discrepancies and complex spatial transformations. To address this issue, this paper proposes a text semantic-assisted cross-modal image registration framework, named TAR, for optical and SAR images. TAR exploits text semantic priors from remote sensing scenes and land-cover categories to alleviate the modality gap and enhance cross-modal feature learning. TAR consists of three components: a multi-scale visual feature learning (MSFL) module, a text-assisted feature enhancement (TAFE) module, and a coarse-to-fine dense matching (CFDM) module. MSFL extracts multi-scale visual features from optical and SAR images. TAFE constructs text descriptors related to remote sensing scenes and land-cover objects, and uses a frozen RemoteCLIP text encoder to extract text features. These text features are introduced through visual-text interaction to enhance high-level visual features for more reliable coarse matching. CFDM then establishes coarse correspondences based on the enhanced high-level features and refines the matched locations using low-level features. Experimental results on cross-modal remote sensing images demonstrate the effectiveness of TAR, which achieves stronger matching performance than several state-of-the-art methods and yields significant gains under large geometric deformations.

Modulation Consistency-based Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Automatic Modulation Classification

Deep learning-based AMC methods have achieved remarkable performance, but their practical deployment remains constrained by the high cost of labeled data. Although self-supervised learning (SSL) reduces the reliance on labels, existing SSL-based AMC methods often rely on task-agnostic pretext objectives misaligned with modulation classification, leading to representations entangled with nuisance factors such as symbol, channel, and noise. In this paper, we identify intra-instance modulation consistency as a task-aware structural prior, whereby different temporal segments of the same signal may differ in waveform while preserving the same modulation type, thus providing a principled cue for task-aligned self-supervision. Based on this prior, we propose Mod-CL, a Modulation consistency-based Contrastive Learning framework that constructs positive pairs from different temporal segments of the same signal instance, to encourage the model to learn shared modulation information while suppressing nuisance variations. We further develop a contrastive objective tailored to Mod-CL, which jointly exploits temporal segmentation and data augmentation to pull together views sharing the same modulation semantics while avoiding supervisory conflicts within each signal instance. Extensive experiments on RadioML datasets show that Mod-CL consistently outperforms strong baselines, especially in low-label regimes, achieving substantial improvements in linear probing accuracy.

BGG: Bridging the Geometric Gap between Cross-View images by Vision Foundation Model Adaptation for Geo-Localization

Geometric differences between cross-view images, such as drone and satellite views, significantly increase the challenge of Cross-View Geo-Localization (CVGL), which aims to acquire the geolocation of images by image retrieval. To further enhance the CVGL performance, this paper proposes a parameter-efficient adaptation framework for bridging the geometric gap across images based on the vision foundation model (VFM) (e.g., DINOv3), termed BGG. BGG not only effectively leverages the general visual representations of VFM and captures the robust and consistent features from cross-view images, but also utilizes the generalization capabilities of the VFM, significantly improving the CVGL performance. It mainly contains a Multi-granularity Feature Enhancement Adapter (MFEA) and a Frequency-Aware Structural Aggregation (FASA) module. Specifically, MFEA enhances the scale adaptability and viewpoint robustness of features by multi-level dilated convolutions, effectively bridging the cross-view geometric gap with small training costs. Additionally, considering the [CLS] token lacks spatial details for precise image retrieval and localization, the FASA module modulates patch tokens in the frequency domain and performs adaptive aggregation for local structural feature enhancement. Finally, BGG fuses the enhanced local features with the [CLS] token for more accurate CVGL. Extensive experiments on University-1652 and SUES-200 datasets demonstrate that BGG has significant advantages over other methods and achieves state-of-the-art localization performance with low training costs.

LoViF 2026 The First Challenge on Holistic Quality Assessment for 4D World Model (PhyScore)

This paper reports on the LoViF 2026 PhyScore challenge, a competition on holistic quality assessment of world-model-generated videos across both 2D and 4D generation settings. The challenge is motivated by a central gap in current evaluation practice: perceptual quality alone is insufficient to judge whether generated dynamics are physically plausible, temporally coherent, and consistent with input conditions. Participants are required to build a metric that jointly predicts four dimensions, i.e., Video Quality, Physical Realism, Condition-Video Alignment, and Temporal Consistency. Depart from that, participants also need to localize physical anomaly timestamps for fine-grained diagnosis. The benchmark dataset contains 1,554 videos generated by seven representative world generative models, organized into three tracks (text-2D, image-to-4D, and video-to-4D) and spanning 26 categories. These categories explicitly cover physics-relevant scenarios, including dynamics, optics, and thermodynamics, together with diverse real-world and creative content. To ensure label reliability, scores and anomaly timestamps are produced through trained human annotation with an additional automated quality-control pass. Evaluation is based on both score prediction and anomaly localization, with a composite protocol that combines TimeStamp_IOU and SRCC/PLCC. This report summarizes the challenge design and provides method-level insights from submitted solutions.

Delving Aleatoric Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentation via Vision Foundation Models

Medical image segmentation supports clinical workflows by precisely delineating anatomical structures and lesions. However, medical image datasets medical image datasets suffer from acquisition noise and annotation ambiguity, causing pervasive data uncertainty that substantially undermines model robustness. Existing research focuses primarily on model architectural improvements and predictive reliability estimation, while systematic exploration of the intrinsic data uncertainty remains insufficient. To address this gap, this work proposes leveraging the universal representation capabilities of visual foundation models to estimate inherent data uncertainty. Specifically, we analyze the feature diversity of the model's decoded representations and quantify their singular value energy to define the semantic perception scale for each class, thereby measuring sample difficulty and aleatoric uncertainty. Based on this foundation, we design two uncertainty-driven application strategies: (1) the aleatoric uncertainty-aware data filtering mechanism to eliminate potentially noisy samples and enhance model learning quality; (2) the dynamic uncertainty-aware optimization strategy that adaptively adjusts class-specific loss weights during training based on the semantic perception scale, combined with a label denoising mechanism to improve training stability. Experimental results on five public datasets encompassing CT and MRI modalities and involving multi-organ and tumor segmentation tasks demonstrate that our method achieves significant and robust performance improvements across various mainstream network architectures, revealing the broad application potential of aleatoric uncertainty in medical image understanding and segmentation tasks.

STVG-R1: Incentivizing Instance-Level Reasoning and Grounding in Videos via Reinforcement Learning

In vision-language models (VLMs), misalignment between textual descriptions and visual coordinates often induces hallucinations. This issue becomes particularly severe in dense prediction tasks such as spatial-temporal video grounding (STVG). Prior approaches typically focus on enhancing visual-textual alignment or attaching auxiliary decoders. However, these strategies inevitably introduce additional trainable modules, leading to significant annotation costs and computational overhead. In this work, we propose a novel visual prompting paradigm that avoids the difficult problem of aligning coordinates across modalities. Specifically, we reformulate per-frame coordinate prediction as a compact instance-level identification problem by assigning each object a unique, temporally consistent ID. These IDs are embedded into the video as visual prompts, providing explicit and interpretable inputs to the VLMs. Furthermore, we introduce STVG-R1, the first reinforcement learning framework for STVG, which employs a task-driven reward to jointly optimize temporal accuracy, spatial consistency, and structural format regularization. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. STVG-R1 surpasses the baseline Qwen2.5-VL-7B by a remarkable margin of 20.9% on m_IoU on the HCSTVG-v2 benchmark, establishing a new state of the art (SOTA). Surprisingly, STVG-R1 also exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to multi-object referring video object segmentation tasks, achieving a SOTA 47.3% J&F on MeViS.