SA-VIS: Sparse frame Annotations for training Video Instance Segmentation

Recent online video instance segmentation (VIS) methods have achieved impressive results, thus becoming the preferred approach to segment instances in videos. Despite the resurgence of impressive single image models, the online (or semi-online) VIS approaches outperform single-image models (e.g., based on SAM) by using long sequences of densely annotated frames during training. However,such a training setup of VIS is expensive in the sense of compute as well as dense annotations required. In order to solve these major flaws, we argue that the effective modeling of the instances and their evolution in videos do not require densely annotated frames. To that end, we propose a simple and effective module, called Past-frames Feature Propagation (PFP) which aggregates low-dimensional features from the image encoder of multiple frames. This simple low-compute module provides tremendous learning capability in using sparse video frame labels for end-to-end training. Combined with a light-weight frame-specific Instance Queries, our Sparse frame Annotation VIS (SA-VIS) significantly improves performance over its baseline. Most interestingly, our simple design that avoids complexities effectively bridges the gap in accuracy between training on sparsely and densely annotated video sequences. This translates to a mere 0.4% drop in performance of SA-VIS when using annotations for only 1/5 of the images in the dataset. Empirically, SA-VIS shows strong improvements over the baseline on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS) and an over 1% improvement in AP on the state-of-the-art in a limited annotations scenario.

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($σ= 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

B-GRTO: Bootstrapped Group Relative Tool Optimization for Referring Segmentation

Segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision, underpinning pixel-level scene understanding and serving as a cornerstone for applications ranging from autonomous perception to medical image analysis. For complex referring segmentation, recent methods pair large vision-language models with segmentation decoders: the former analyzes the image and prompt, while the latter predicts the target mask. Although reinforcement learning improves reasoning-intensive vision-language systems, trainable tools such as segmentation decoders are typically optimized separately with differentiable objectives, and the principled integration of such objectives into reinforcement learning remains underexplored. Thus, we introduce group relative tool optimization (GRTO), a mathematically grounded framework for jointly optimizing a policy with differentiable tool use. GRTO reuses group relative policy optimization (GRPO) rollouts to optimize the auxiliary tool objective, letting decoder gradients complement policy rewards. Further, we derive Bootstrapped-GRTO (B-GRTO), a pre-training method that cheaply bootstraps the tool, leading to faster convergence and superior performance. Across three challenging referring segmentation settings, B-GRTO results in substantial improvements over plain GRPO, matching or surpassing domain-specific state-of-the-art methods. This demonstrates the value of unifying reinforcement learning with differentiable auxiliary objectives for reasoning-intensive segmentation.

Accelerating Vision Foundation Models with Drop-in Depthwise Convolution

Pretrained vision foundation models deliver strong performance across tasks with limited fine-tuning. However, their Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones impose high inference costs, limiting deployment on resource-constrained devices. In this work, we accelerate large-scale pretrained ViTs while preserving their feature extraction capabilities by exploiting the intrinsic convolution-like behavior of some attention heads. Specifically, we introduce an efficient depthwise convolution-based layer that serves as a drop-in replacement for these heads. Additionally, we propose simple strategies to identify which heads can be replaced and introduce a fine-tuning procedure that recovers downstream task performance. Across both image classification and segmentation tasks, our method achieves 17-20\% percent inference speedup with minimal performance degradation. We validate the approach through detailed derivations, extensive experiments, and efficiency benchmarks. The reference implementation is publicly available.

Seeing Together: Multi-Robot Cooperative Egocentric Spatial Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made substantial progress in egocentric video understanding, but their ability to reason cooperatively from multiple embodied viewpoints remains largely unexplored. We study this problem through multi-robot cooperative dynamic spatial reasoning, where a model must answer spatial, temporal, visibility, and coordination questions by integrating synchronized egocentric videos from a team of moving robots. To support this setting, we introduce CoopSR, the first benchmark for this task, together with EgoTeam, a multi-robot egocentric QA dataset. EgoTeam contains 114,227 QA pairs spanning 19 question types, four difficulty tiers, and three team sizes in Habitat and iGibson, along with a real-world test set of around 2,326 QAs collected using two quadruped robots. We further propose SP-CoR (Spectral and Physics-Informed Cooperative Reasoner), an MLLM framework for fine-grained cooperative spatial reasoning. SP-CoR combines dynamics-aware multi-robot frame sampling, spectral- and physics-guided view fusion, and physics-aligned prompt distillation, enabling the model to benefit from privileged robot-pose supervision during training while requiring only egocentric videos at test time. Across 22 MLLM baselines, SP-CoR consistently improves cooperative reasoning, outperforming the strongest fine-tuned baseline by +3.87% on Habitat and +7.12% on iGibson. It also shows stronger generalization to unseen team sizes and real-world robot tests. Code can be found at https://github.com/KPeng9510/seeing-together.git.

Self-supervised pretraining for an iterative image size agnostic vision transformer

Vision Transformers (ViTs) dominate self-supervised learning (SSL). While they have proven highly effective for large-scale pretraining, they are computationally inefficient and scale poorly with image size. Consequently, foundational models like DINO are constrained to low-resolution processing. A recent foveal-inspired transformer achieves resolution agnosticism by iteratively processing a fixed-size context of multi-zoom patches. This model demonstrated promising results via supervised learning, utilizing a sequential, recurrent-like process without backpropagation through time. To unlock its potential as a foundational backbone, we introduce a novel sequential-to-global SSL framework based on DINO's self-distillation objective. Supported by an efficient integral-image patch extraction method, our approach enables large-scale pretraining for image-size agnostic vision encoders. We achieve competitive performance on ImageNet-1K and downstream classification tasks, maintaining a constant computational budget regardless of input resolution.

From Synchrony to Sequence: Exo-to-Ego Generation via Interpolation

Exo-to-Ego video generation aims to synthesize a first-person video from a synchronized third-person view and corresponding camera poses. While paired supervision is available, synchronized exo-ego data inherently introduces substantial spatio-temporal and geometric discontinuities, violating the smooth-motion assumptions of standard video generation benchmarks. We identify this synchronization-induced jump as the central challenge and propose Syn2Seq-Forcing, a sequential formulation that interpolates between the source and target videos to form a single continuous signal. By reframing Exo2Ego as sequential signal modeling rather than a conventional condition-output task, our approach enables diffusion-based sequence models, e.g. Diffusion Forcing Transformers (DFoT), to capture coherent transitions across frames more effectively. Empirically, we show that interpolating only the videos, without performing pose interpolation already produces significant improvements, emphasizing that the dominant difficulty arises from spatio-temporal discontinuities. Beyond immediate performance gains, this formulation establishes a general and flexible framework capable of unifying both Exo2Ego and Ego2Exo generation within a single continuous sequence model, providing a principled foundation for future research in cross-view video synthesis.

IMPACT: A Dataset for Multi-Granularity Human Procedural Action Understanding in Industrial Assembly

We introduce IMPACT, a synchronized five-view RGB-D dataset for deployment-oriented industrial procedural understanding, built around real assembly and disassembly of a commercial angle grinder with professional-grade tools. To our knowledge, IMPACT is the first real industrial assembly benchmark that jointly provides synchronized ego-exo RGB-D capture, decoupled bimanual annotation, compliance-aware state tracking, and explicit anomaly--recovery supervision within a single real industrial workflow. It comprises 112 trials from 13 participants totaling 39.5 hours, with multi-route execution governed by a partial-order prerequisite graph, a six-category anomaly taxonomy, and operator cognitive load measured via NASA-TLX. The annotation hierarchy links hand-specific atomic actions to coarse procedural steps, component assembly states, and per-hand compliance phases, with synchronized null spans across views to decouple perceptual limitations from algorithmic failure. Systematic baselines reveal fundamental limitations that remain invisible to single-task benchmarks, particularly under realistic deployment conditions that involve incomplete observations, flexible execution paths, and corrective behavior. The full dataset, annotations, and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/Kratos-Wen/IMPACT.

VOID: Video Object and Interaction Deletion

Existing video object removal methods excel at inpainting content "behind" the object and correcting appearance-level artifacts such as shadows and reflections. However, when the removed object has more significant interactions, such as collisions with other objects, current models fail to correct them and produce implausible results. We present VOID, a video object removal framework designed to perform physically-plausible inpainting in these complex scenarios. To train the model, we generate a new paired dataset of counterfactual object removals using Kubric and HUMOTO, where removing an object requires altering downstream physical interactions. During inference, a vision-language model identifies regions of the scene affected by the removed object. These regions are then used to guide a video diffusion model that generates physically consistent counterfactual outcomes. Experiments on both synthetic and real data show that our approach better preserves consistent scene dynamics after object removal compared to prior video object removal methods. We hope this framework sheds light on how to make video editing models better simulators of the world through high-level causal reasoning.

ProOOD: Prototype-Guided Out-of-Distribution 3D Occupancy Prediction

3D semantic occupancy prediction is central to autonomous driving, yet current methods are vulnerable to long-tailed class bias and out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, often overconfidently assigning anomalies to rare classes. We present ProOOD, a lightweight, plug-and-play method that couples prototype-guided refinement with training-free OOD scoring. ProOOD comprises (i) prototype-guided semantic imputation that fills occluded regions with class-consistent features, (ii) prototype-guided tail mining that strengthens rare-class representations to curb OOD absorption, and (iii) EchoOOD, which fuses local logit coherence with local and global prototype matching to produce reliable voxel-level OOD scores. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that ProOOD achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution 3D occupancy prediction and OOD detection. On SemanticKITTI, it surpasses baselines by +3.57% mIoU overall and +24.80% tail-class mIoU; on VAA-KITTI, it improves AuPRCr by +19.34 points, with consistent gains across benchmarks. These improvements yield more calibrated occupancy estimates and more reliable OOD detection in safety-critical urban driving. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/7uHeng/ProOOD.