Abstract:This paper presents a multi-agent perception-action exploration alliance, dubbed A4VL, for efficient long-video reasoning. A4VL operates in a multi-round perception-action exploration loop with a selection of VLM agents. In each round, the team of agents performs video question-answer (VideoQA) via perception exploration followed by action exploration. During perception exploration, each agent learns to extract query-specific perception clue(s) from a few sampled frames and performs clue-based alignment to find the video block(s) that are most relevant to the query-specific event. During action exploration, A4VL performs video reasoning in three steps: (1) each agent produces its initial answer with rational, (2) all agents collaboratively scores one another through cross-reviews and relevance ranking, and (3) based on whether a satisfactory consensus is reached, the decision is made either to start a new round of perception-action deliberation by pruning (e.g., filtering out the lowest performing agent) and re-staging (e.g., new-clue and matching block based perception-action exploration), or to conclude by producing its final answer. The integration of the multi-agent alliance through multi-round perception-action exploration, coupled with event-driven partitioning and cue-guided block alignment, enables A4VL to effectively scale to real world long videos while preserving high quality video reasoning. Evaluation Results on five popular VideoQA benchmarks show that A4VL outperforms 18 existing representative VLMs and 10 recent methods optimized for long-video reasoning, while achieving significantly lower inference latency. Our code is released at https://github.com/git-disl/A4VL.
Abstract:With the growing number and diversity of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), many works explore language-based ensemble, collaboration, and routing techniques across multiple VLMs to improve multi-model reasoning. In contrast, we address the diverse model selection using both vision and language modalities. We introduce focal error diversity to capture complementary reasoning across VLMs and a CKA-based focal diversity metric (CKA-focal) to measure disagreement in their visual embeddings. On the constructed ensemble surface from a pool of candidate VLMs, we applied a Genetic Algorithm to effectively prune out those component VLMs that do not add value to the fusion performance. We identify the best combination for each task as well as fuse the outputs of each VLMs in the model pool, and show that heterogeneous models can capture epistemic uncertainty dynamically and mitigate hallucinations. Our V3Fusion approach is capable of producing dual focal-diversity fused predictions with high performance for vision-language reasoning, even when there is no majority consensus or the majority of VLMs make incorrect predictions. Extensive experiments validate V3Fusion on four popular VLM benchmarks (A-OKVQA, MMMU, MMMU-Pro, and OCR-VQA). The results show that V3Fusion outperforms the best-performing VLM on MMMU by 8.09% and MMMU-Pro by 4.87% gain in accuracy. For generative tasks, V3Fusion outperforms Intern-VL2-8b and Qwen2.5-VL-7b, the top-2 VLM performers on both A-OKVQA and OCR-VQA. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/sftekin/v3fusion.
Abstract:Depth-guided 3D reconstruction has gained popularity as a fast alternative to optimization-heavy approaches, yet existing methods still suffer from scale drift, multi-view inconsistencies, and the need for substantial refinement to achieve high-fidelity geometry. Here, we propose SwiftNDC, a fast and general framework built around a Neural Depth Correction field that produces cross-view consistent depth maps. From these refined depths, we generate a dense point cloud through back-projection and robust reprojection-error filtering, obtaining a clean and uniformly distributed geometric initialization for downstream reconstruction. This reliable dense geometry substantially accelerates 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for mesh reconstruction, enabling high-quality surfaces with significantly fewer optimization iterations. For novel-view synthesis, SwiftNDC can also improve 3DGS rendering quality, highlighting the benefits of strong geometric initialization. We conduct a comprehensive study across five datasets, including two for mesh reconstruction, as well as three for novel-view synthesis. SwiftNDC consistently reduces running time for accurate mesh reconstruction and boosts rendering fidelity for view synthesis, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining neural depth refinement with robust geometric initialization for high-fidelity and efficient 3D reconstruction.
Abstract:Vision-language foundation models (VLFMs) promise zero-shot and retrieval understanding for Earth observation. While operational satellite systems often lack full multi-spectral coverage, making RGB-only inference highly desirable for scalable deployment, the adoption of VLFMs for satellite imagery remains hindered by two factors: (1) multi-spectral inputs are informative but difficult to exploit consistently due to band redundancy and misalignment; and (2) CLIP-style text encoders limit semantic expressiveness and weaken fine-grained alignment. We present SATtxt, a spectrum-aware VLFM that operates with RGB inputs only at inference while retaining spectral cues learned during training. Our framework comprises two stages. First, Spectral Representation Distillation transfers spectral priors from a frozen multi-spectral teacher to an RGB student via a lightweight projector. Second, Spectrally Grounded Alignment with Instruction-Augmented LLMs bridges the distilled visual space and an expressive LLM embedding space. Across EuroSAT, BigEarthNet, and ForestNet, SATtxt improves zero-shot classification on average by 4.2%, retrieval by 5.9%, and linear probing by 2.7% over baselines, showing an efficient path toward spectrum-aware vision-language learning for Earth observation. Project page: https://ikhado.github.io/sattxt/
Abstract:Feed-forward 3D reconstruction offers substantial runtime advantages over per-scene optimization, which remains slow at inference and often fragile under sparse views. However, existing feed-forward methods still have potential for further performance gains, especially for out-of-domain data, and struggle to retain second-level inference time once a generative prior is introduced. These limitations stem from the one-shot prediction paradigm in existing feed-forward pipeline: models are strictly bounded by capacity, lack inference-time refinement, and are ill-suited for continuously injecting generative priors. We introduce GIFSplat, a purely feed-forward iterative refinement framework for 3D Gaussian Splatting from sparse unposed views. A small number of forward-only residual updates progressively refine current 3D scene using rendering evidence, achieve favorable balance between efficiency and quality. Furthermore, we distill a frozen diffusion prior into Gaussian-level cues from enhanced novel renderings without gradient backpropagation or ever-increasing view-set expansion, thereby enabling per-scene adaptation with generative prior while preserving feed-forward efficiency. Across DL3DV, RealEstate10K, and DTU, GIFSplat consistently outperforms state-of-the-art feed-forward baselines, improving PSNR by up to +2.1 dB, and it maintains second-scale inference time without requiring camera poses or any test-time gradient optimization.
Abstract:Action chunking has recently emerged as a standard practice in flow-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, the effect and choice of the execution horizon - the number of actions to be executed from each predicted chunk - remains underexplored. In this work, we first show that varying the execution horizon leads to substantial performance deviations, with performance initially improving and then declining as the horizon increases. To uncover the reasons, we analyze the cross- and self-attention weights in flow-based VLAs and reveal two key phenomena: (i) intra-chunk actions attend invariantly to vision-language tokens, limiting adaptability to environmental changes; and (ii) the initial and terminal action tokens serve as stable anchors, forming latent centers around which intermediate actions are organized. Motivated by these insights, we interpret action self-attention weights as a proxy for the model's predictive limit and propose AutoHorizon, the first test-time method that dynamically estimates the execution horizon for each predicted action chunk to adapt to changing perceptual conditions. Across simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, AutoHorizon is performant, incurs negligible computational overhead, and generalizes across diverse tasks and flow-based models.
Abstract:Real-time execution is essential for cyber-physical systems such as robots. These systems operate in dynamic real-world environments where even small delays can undermine responsiveness and compromise performance. Asynchronous inference has recently emerged as a system-level paradigm for real-time robot manipulation, enabling the next action chunk to be predicted while the current one is being executed. While this approach achieves real-time responsiveness, naive integration often results in execution failure. Previous methods attributed this failure to inter-chunk discontinuity and developed test-time algorithms to smooth chunk boundaries. In contrast, we identify another critical yet overlooked factor: intra-chunk inconsistency, where the robot's executed action chunk partially misaligns with its current perception. To address this, we propose REMAC, which learns corrective adjustments on the pretrained policy through masked action chunking, enabling the policy to remain resilient under mismatches between intended actions and actual execution during asynchronous inference. In addition, we introduce a prefix-preserved sampling procedure to reinforce inter-chunk continuity. Overall, our method delivers more reliable policies without incurring additional latency. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our method enables faster task execution, maintains robustness across varying delays, and consistently achieves higher completion rates.
Abstract:Quantum generative models based on instantaneous quantum polynomial (IQP) circuits show great promise in learning complex distributions while maintaining classical trainability. However, current implementations suffer from two key limitations: lack of controllability over generated outputs and severe generation bias towards certain expected patterns. We present a Controllable Quantum Generative Framework, ConQuER, which addresses both challenges through a modular circuit architecture. ConQuER embeds a lightweight controller circuit that can be directly combined with pre-trained IQP circuits to precisely control the output distribution without full retraining. Leveraging the advantages of IQP, our scheme enables precise control over properties such as the Hamming Weight distribution with minimal parameter and gate overhead. In addition, inspired by the controller design, we extend this modular approach through data-driven optimization to embed implicit control paths in the underlying IQP architecture, significantly reducing generation bias on structured datasets. ConQuER retains efficient classical training properties and high scalability. We experimentally validate ConQuER on multiple quantum state datasets, demonstrating its superior control accuracy and balanced generation performance, only with very low overhead cost over original IQP circuits. Our framework bridges the gap between the advantages of quantum computing and the practical needs of controllable generation modeling.
Abstract:The advancement in large language models (LLMs) and large vision models has fueled the rapid progress in multi-modal visual-text reasoning capabilities. However, existing vision-language models (VLMs) to date suffer from generalization performance. Inspired by recent development in LLMs for visual reasoning, this paper presents VLAgent, an AI system that can create a step-by-step visual reasoning plan with an easy-to-understand script and execute each step of the plan in real time by integrating planning script with execution verifications via an automated process supported by VLAgent. In the task planning phase, VLAgent fine-tunes an LLM through in-context learning to generate a step-by-step planner for each user-submitted text-visual reasoning task. During the plan execution phase, VLAgent progressively refines the composition of neuro-symbolic executable modules to generate high-confidence reasoning results. VLAgent has three unique design characteristics: First, we improve the quality of plan generation through in-context learning, improving logic reasoning by reducing erroneous logic steps, incorrect programs, and LLM hallucinations. Second, we design a syntax-semantics parser to identify and correct additional logic errors of the LLM-generated planning script prior to launching the plan executor. Finally, we employ the ensemble method to improve the generalization performance of our step-executor. Extensive experiments with four visual reasoning benchmarks (GQA, MME, NLVR2, VQAv2) show that VLAgent achieves significant performance enhancement for multimodal text-visual reasoning applications, compared to the exiting representative VLMs and LLM based visual composition approaches like ViperGPT and VisProg, thanks to the novel optimization modules of VLAgent back-engine (SS-Parser, Plan Repairer, Output Verifiers). Code and data will be made available upon paper acceptance.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in various robot control tasks. However, their deployment in real-world applications remains constrained. Even state-ofthe-art LLMs, such as GPT-o4mini, frequently produce invalid action plans that violate physical constraints, such as directing a robot to an unreachable location or causing collisions between robots. This issue primarily arises from a lack of awareness of these physical constraints during the reasoning process. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that integrates reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to incentivize knowledge of physical constraints into LLMs to induce constraints-aware reasoning during plan generation. In this approach, only valid action plans that successfully complete a control task receive positive rewards. We applied our method to two small-scale LLMs: a non-reasoning Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct and a reasoning Qwen3-4B. The experiment results demonstrate that constraint-aware small LLMs largely outperform large-scale models without constraints, grounded on both the BoxNet task and a newly developed BoxNet3D environment built using MuJoCo. This work highlights the effectiveness of grounding even small LLMs with physical constraints to enable scalable and efficient multi-robot control in complex, physically constrained environments.