Exploring Vision-Language Models for Open-Vocabulary Zero-Shot Action Segmentation

Temporal Action Segmentation (TAS) requires dividing videos into action segments, yet the vast space of activities and alternative breakdowns makes collecting comprehensive datasets infeasible. Existing methods remain limited to closed vocabularies and fixed label sets. In this work, we explore the largely unexplored problem of Open-Vocabulary Zero-Shot Temporal Action Segmentation (OVTAS) by leveraging the strong zero-shot capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce a training-free pipeline that follows a segmentation-by-classification design: Frame-Action Embedding Similarity (FAES) matches video frames to candidate action labels, and Similarity-Matrix Temporal Segmentation (SMTS) enforces temporal consistency. Beyond proposing OVTAS, we present a systematic study across 14 diverse VLMs, providing the first broad analysis of their suitability for open-vocabulary action segmentation. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that OVTAS achieves strong results without task-specific supervision, underscoring the potential of VLMs for structured temporal understanding.

DYNAMO: Dependency-Aware Deep Learning Framework for Articulated Assembly Motion Prediction

Understanding the motion of articulated mechanical assemblies from static geometry remains a core challenge in 3D perception and design automation. Prior work on everyday articulated objects such as doors and laptops typically assumes simplified kinematic structures or relies on joint annotations. However, in mechanical assemblies like gears, motion arises from geometric coupling, through meshing teeth or aligned axes, making it difficult for existing methods to reason about relational motion from geometry alone. To address this gap, we introduce MechBench, a benchmark dataset of 693 diverse synthetic gear assemblies with part-wise ground-truth motion trajectories. MechBench provides a structured setting to study coupled motion, where part dynamics are induced by contact and transmission rather than predefined joints. Building on this, we propose DYNAMO, a dependency-aware neural model that predicts per-part SE(3) motion trajectories directly from segmented CAD point clouds. Experiments show that DYNAMO outperforms strong baselines, achieving accurate and temporally consistent predictions across varied gear configurations. Together, MechBench and DYNAMO establish a novel systematic framework for data-driven learning of coupled mechanical motion in CAD assemblies.

A Comparative Study of Garment Draping Techniques

We present a comparison review that evaluates popular techniques for garment draping for 3D fashion design, virtual try-ons, and animations. A comparative study is performed between various methods for garment draping of clothing over the human body. These include numerous models, such as physics and machine learning based techniques, collision handling, and more. Performance evaluations and trade-offs are discussed to ensure informed decision-making when choosing the most appropriate approach. These methods aim to accurately represent deformations and fine wrinkles of digital garments, considering the factors of data requirements, and efficiency, to produce realistic results. The research can be insightful to researchers, designers, and developers in visualizing dynamic multi-layered 3D clothing.

Weakly Supervised Detection of Pheochromocytomas and Paragangliomas in CT

Pheochromocytomas and Paragangliomas (PPGLs) are rare adrenal and extra-adrenal tumors which have the potential to metastasize. For the management of patients with PPGLs, CT is the preferred modality of choice for precise localization and estimation of their progression. However, due to the myriad variations in size, morphology, and appearance of the tumors in different anatomical regions, radiologists are posed with the challenge of accurate detection of PPGLs. Since clinicians also need to routinely measure their size and track their changes over time across patient visits, manual demarcation of PPGLs is quite a time-consuming and cumbersome process. To ameliorate the manual effort spent for this task, we propose an automated method to detect PPGLs in CT studies via a proxy segmentation task. As only weak annotations for PPGLs in the form of prospectively marked 2D bounding boxes on an axial slice were available, we extended these 2D boxes into weak 3D annotations and trained a 3D full-resolution nnUNet model to directly segment PPGLs. We evaluated our approach on a dataset consisting of chest-abdomen-pelvis CTs of 255 patients with confirmed PPGLs. We obtained a precision of 70% and sensitivity of 64.1% with our proposed approach when tested on 53 CT studies. Our findings highlight the promising nature of detecting PPGLs via segmentation, and furthers the state-of-the-art in this exciting yet challenging area of rare cancer management.