Artic-O: End-to-End Articulated Object Reconstruction via Latent Geometry Learning

Reconstructing articulated objects from sparse images requires recovering complete geometry, movable parts, and motion parameters. Recent methods typically separate geometry reconstruction, part reasoning, and articulation estimation into different stages. This separation can weaken consistency between shape, active parts, and motion, while also incurring substantial inference cost. We introduce Artic-O, an end-to-end, feed-forward framework for articulated object reconstruction via latent geometry learning. Instead of fitting geometry in image or view space, Artic-O maps sparse multi-state observations into a pretrained latent geometry space, where a frozen flow-matching decoder provides a complete-shape prior for recovering visible and occluded structures. To connect geometry with articulation, Artic-O fuses visual tokens, geometry latents, and point-wise decoder features in an image-grounded part-reasoning module for active-part segmentation and articulation prediction. We further train the model with a geometry-to-articulation curriculum and a decoupled two-pass strategy to balance reconstruction and part-level supervision. On PartNet-Mobility, Artic-O achieves strong reconstruction quality while being substantially more efficient than LARM, a strong prior method. It reduces Chamfer Distance, improves F-score, and achieves comparable or better articulation accuracy across most joint metrics, while reducing inference time from 9 minutes to about 0.3 seconds per object.

Beyond Semantics: Modeling Factual and Affective Perceptual Experiences from Vision-Language Data

We present P-Topics (Perception Topics) modeling, a novel problem for understanding how images are perceived affectively and across cultures. The goal is to (1) discover and model the different perception experiences in a dataset of images and captions, where each experience is defined by an objective factual and a subjective affective aspect, and (2) associate images to their relevant perception experiences. We introduce **PercepT** (**Percep**tion topic **T**ransformer), a two-stage architecture that tackles P-Topics modeling. In the formation stage, percepT discovers *P-Topics* as visual-textual clusters using an unsupervised training objective, and dynamically selects the number of clusters to match the perceptual richness of the dataset. In the mapping stage, it learns *P-Topic mapping functions* via attention pooling to associate images to their respective clusters. On ArtELingo, PercepT achieves a silhouette score of **0.97** compared to **0.37** from the closest baseline reflecting better perceptual clusters. PercepT also achieves an AUC score of **0.94** compared to **0.77** showing better mapping to perceptual clusters. Human evaluation confirms that PercepT captures semantically meaningful perception experiences and significantly outperforms existing methods. Our implementation will be made public.

A Shared Valence Axis Across Modern LLMs and Human EEG: The Saturation Regularity

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful representation learners whose internal features increasingly align with human cognition. We study whether modern LLMs can serve as a lens for understanding neural representations in the human brain, focusing on emotional valence in EEG. We first build a one-dimensional valence direction, the V-axis, from modern LLMs using only nine emotion-evocative sentences. We validate it through zero-shot transfer to sentiment benchmarks and cross-model consistency across fourteen LLMs. We then show that this LLM-derived direction maps onto human neural activity. On a public EEG cohort of 123 subjects watching affective videos, a single linear projection on EEG features tracks the V-axis position of each stimulus. Moreover, 36 EEG emotion classifiers trained without exposure to the V-axis spontaneously rediscover the same direction in their internal representations, suggesting that the same valence structure emerges in both language models and human electrophysiology. Yet this convergence does not provide an effective training signal. We test twenty-five alignment strategies, including knowledge distillation, representational similarity, contrastive, and topographic losses; none improve decoding, and sixteen significantly reduce accuracy. We formalize this result as the saturation regularity: once task labels alone drive a brain-decoding network onto the target direction, additional supervision mainly distorts an already-saturated basin, while the load-bearing within-class residual receives little useful gradient. This regularity also indicates where improvement should come from: the residual subspace unreachable by supervision. Motivated by this insight, we ensemble across residual diversity rather than supervising the basin, improving balanced accuracy by 10.5% over the prior best on FACED, with the same effect replicated on SEED-V.

Afford-VLA: Action-Aligned Visual Planning via Internalized Affordance

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for generalist robot manipulation, yet they remain limited by insufficient spatial reasoning, particularly in determining where to interact in complex visual scenes. While recent efforts introduce various forms of visual planning to address this issue, existing approaches either rely on global geometric cues, symbolic intermediate representations, or externally generated visual signals, which are often weakly coupled with downstream action prediction. In this work, we revisit visual planning in VLA systems and argue that effective planning should be local, visually grounded, internally generated, and directly aligned with action. Based on this insight, we propose Afford-VLA, a unified framework that internalizes task-conditioned affordance as an explicit visual planning interface within VLA models. Concretely, we introduce learnable <AFF> tokens to query task-relevant interaction regions, decode affordance masks from multimodal features, and convert them into compact embeddings that directly condition action generation. This design enables affordance to be both generated and utilized within the VLA, forming a tightly coupled perception-action pathway. To further support this integration, we adopt a training strategy that allows the affordance pathway to be jointly optimized with action prediction, improving its effectiveness for downstream control. We evaluate our method on multiple simulation benchmarks, including LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and SimplerEnv, achieving consistent state-of-the-art performance, along with strong real-world results. These findings demonstrate that internalizing affordance as action-aligned visual planning provides a powerful paradigm for improving VLA systems.

CompoSE: Compositional Synthesis and Editing of 3D Shapes via Part-Aware Control

Creating and editing high-quality 3D content remains a central challenge in computer graphics. We address this challenge by introducing CompoSE, a novel method for Compositional Synthesis and Editing of 3D shapes via part-aware control. Our method takes as input a set of coarse geometric primitives (e.g., bounding boxes) that represent distinct object parts arranged in a particular spatial configuration, and synthesizes as output part-separated 3D objects that support localized granular (i.e., compositional) editing of individual parts. The key insight that enables our method is our use of a diffusion transformer architecture that alternates between processing each part locally and aggregating contextual information across parts globally, and features a novel conditioning technique that ensures strong adherence to the user's input. Importantly, our method learns to infer part semantics and symmetries directly from the user's coarse layout guidance, and does not require part-level text prompts. We demonstrate that our method enables powerful part-level editing capabilities, including context-aware substitution, addition, deletion, and style-preserving resizing operations. We show through extensive experiments that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches on guided synthesis, as measured by objective metrics and LLM-based evaluations.

The Second Challenge on Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) remains a challenging problem for existing object detectors and few-shot learning approaches, particularly when generalizing across distinct domains. As part of NTIRE 2026, we hosted the second CD-FSOD Challenge to systematically evaluate and promote progress in detecting objects in unseen target domains under limited annotation conditions. The challenge received strong community interest, with 128 registered participants and a total of 696 submissions. Among them, 31 teams actively participated, and 19 teams submitted valid final results. Participants explored a wide range of strategies, introducing innovative methods that push the performance frontier under both open-source and closed-source tracks. This report presents a detailed overview of the NTIRE 2026 CD-FSOD Challenge, including a summary of the submitted approaches and an analysis of the final results across all participating teams. Challenge Codes: https://github.com/ohMargin/NTIRE2026_CDFSOD.

Small Vision-Language Models are Smart Compressors for Long Video Understanding

Adapting Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for hour-long videos is bottlenecked by context limits. Dense visual streams saturate token budgets and exacerbate the lost-in-the-middle phenomenon. Existing heuristics, like sparse sampling or uniform pooling, blindly sacrifice fidelity by discarding decisive moments and wasting bandwidth on irrelevant backgrounds. We propose Tempo, an efficient query-aware framework compressing long videos for downstream understanding. Tempo leverages a Small Vision-Language Model (SVLM) as a local temporal compressor, casting token reduction as an early cross-modal distillation process to generate compact, intent-aligned representations in a single forward pass. To enforce strict budgets without breaking causality, we introduce Adaptive Token Allocation (ATA). Exploiting the SVLM's zero-shot relevance prior and semantic front-loading, ATA acts as a training-free $O(1)$ dynamic router. It allocates dense bandwidth to query-critical segments while compressing redundancies into minimal temporal anchors to maintain the global storyline. Extensive experiments show our 6B architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance with aggressive dynamic compression (0.5-16 tokens/frame). On the extreme-long LVBench (4101s), Tempo scores 52.3 under a strict 8K visual budget, outperforming GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. Scaling to 2048 frames reaches 53.7. Crucially, Tempo compresses hour-long videos substantially below theoretical limits, proving true long-form video understanding relies on intent-driven efficiency rather than greedily padded context windows.

M-MiniGPT4: Multilingual VLLM Alignment via Translated Data

This paper presents a Multilingual Vision Large Language Model, named M-MiniGPT4. Our model exhibits strong vision-language understanding (VLU) capabilities across 11 languages. We utilize a mixture of native multilingual and translated data to push the multilingual VLU performance of the MiniGPT4 architecture. In addition, we propose a multilingual alignment training stage that uses parallel text corpora to further enhance the multilingual capabilities of our model. M-MiniGPT4 achieves 36% accuracy on the multilingual MMMU benchmark, outperforming state-of-the-art models in the same weight class, including foundation models released after the majority of this work was completed. We open-source our models, code, and translated datasets to facilitate future research in low-resource and multilingual settings.

dTRPO: Trajectory Reduction in Policy Optimization of Diffusion Large Language Models

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) introduce a new paradigm for language generation, which in turn presents new challenges for aligning them with human preferences. In this work, we aim to improve the policy optimization for dLLMs by reducing the cost of the trajectory probability calculation, thereby enabling scaled-up offline policy training. We prove that: (i) under reference policy regularization, the probability ratio of the newly unmasked tokens is an unbiased estimate of that of intermediate diffusion states, and (ii) the probability of the full trajectory can be effectively estimated with a single forward pass of a re-masked final state. By integrating these two trajectory reduction strategies into a policy optimization objective, we propose Trajectory Reduction Policy Optimization (dTRPO). We evaluate dTRPO on 7B dLLMs across instruction-following and reasoning benchmarks. Results show that it substantially improves the core performance of state-of-the-art dLLMs, achieving gains of up to 9.6% on STEM tasks, up to 4.3% on coding tasks, and up to 3.0% on instruction-following tasks. Moreover, dTRPO exhibits strong training efficiency due to its offline, single-forward nature, and achieves improved generation efficiency through high-quality outputs.

InfinityStory: Unlimited Video Generation with World Consistency and Character-Aware Shot Transitions

Generating long-form storytelling videos with consistent visual narratives remains a significant challenge in video synthesis. We present a novel framework, dataset, and a model that address three critical limitations: background consistency across shots, seamless multi-subject shot-to-shot transitions, and scalability to hour-long narratives. Our approach introduces a background-consistent generation pipeline that maintains visual coherence across scenes while preserving character identity and spatial relationships. We further propose a transition-aware video synthesis module that generates smooth shot transitions for complex scenarios involving multiple subjects entering or exiting frames, going beyond the single-subject limitations of prior work. To support this, we contribute with a synthetic dataset of 10,000 multi-subject transition sequences covering underrepresented dynamic scene compositions. On VBench, InfinityStory achieves the highest Background Consistency (88.94), highest Subject Consistency (82.11), and the best overall average rank (2.80), showing improved stability, smoother transitions, and better temporal coherence.