SAMamba: Adaptive State Space Modeling with Hierarchical Vision for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is vital for long-range surveillance in military, maritime, and early warning applications. ISTD is challenged by targets occupying less than 0.15% of the image and low distinguishability from complex backgrounds. Existing deep learning methods often suffer from information loss during downsampling and inefficient global context modeling. This paper presents SAMamba, a novel framework integrating SAM2's hierarchical feature learning with Mamba's selective sequence modeling. Key innovations include: (1) A Feature Selection Adapter (FS-Adapter) for efficient natural-to-infrared domain adaptation via dual-stage selection (token-level with a learnable task embedding and channel-wise adaptive transformations); (2) A Cross-Channel State-Space Interaction (CSI) module for efficient global context modeling with linear complexity using selective state space modeling; and (3) A Detail-Preserving Contextual Fusion (DPCF) module that adaptively combines multi-scale features with a gating mechanism to balance high-resolution and low-resolution feature contributions. SAMamba addresses core ISTD challenges by bridging the domain gap, maintaining fine-grained details, and efficiently modeling long-range dependencies. Experiments on NUAA-SIRST, IRSTD-1k, and NUDT-SIRST datasets show SAMamba significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in challenging scenarios with heterogeneous backgrounds and varying target scales. Code: https://github.com/zhengshuchen/SAMamba.

FDBPL: Faster Distillation-Based Prompt Learning for Region-Aware Vision-Language Models Adaptation

Prompt learning as a parameter-efficient method that has been widely adopted to adapt Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. While hard-prompt design requires domain expertise and iterative optimization, soft-prompt methods rely heavily on task-specific hard labels, limiting their generalization to unseen categories. Recent popular distillation-based prompt learning methods improve generalization by exploiting larger teacher VLMs and unsupervised knowledge transfer, yet their repetitive teacher model online inference sacrifices the inherent training efficiency advantage of prompt learning. In this paper, we propose {{\large {\textbf{F}}}}aster {{\large {\textbf{D}}}}istillation-{{\large {\textbf{B}}}}ased {{\large {\textbf{P}}}}rompt {{\large {\textbf{L}}}}earning (\textbf{FDBPL}), which addresses these issues by sharing soft supervision contexts across multiple training stages and implementing accelerated I/O. Furthermore, FDBPL introduces a region-aware prompt learning paradigm with dual positive-negative prompt spaces to fully exploit randomly cropped regions that containing multi-level information. We propose a positive-negative space mutual learning mechanism based on similarity-difference learning, enabling student CLIP models to recognize correct semantics while learning to reject weakly related concepts, thereby improving zero-shot performance. Unlike existing distillation-based prompt learning methods that sacrifice parameter efficiency for generalization, FDBPL maintains dual advantages of parameter efficiency and strong downstream generalization. Comprehensive evaluations across 11 datasets demonstrate superior performance in base-to-new generalization, cross-dataset transfer, and robustness tests, achieving $2.2\times$ faster training speed.

Image Recognition with Online Lightweight Vision Transformer: A Survey

The Transformer architecture has achieved significant success in natural language processing, motivating its adaptation to computer vision tasks. Unlike convolutional neural networks, vision transformers inherently capture long-range dependencies and enable parallel processing, yet lack inductive biases and efficiency benefits, facing significant computational and memory challenges that limit its real-world applicability. This paper surveys various online strategies for generating lightweight vision transformers for image recognition, focusing on three key areas: Efficient Component Design, Dynamic Network, and Knowledge Distillation. We evaluate the relevant exploration for each topic on the ImageNet-1K benchmark, analyzing trade-offs among precision, parameters, throughput, and more to highlight their respective advantages, disadvantages, and flexibility. Finally, we propose future research directions and potential challenges in the lightweighting of vision transformers with the aim of inspiring further exploration and providing practical guidance for the community. Project Page: https://github.com/ajxklo/Lightweight-VIT

RoBridge: A Hierarchical Architecture Bridging Cognition and Execution for General Robotic Manipulation

Operating robots in open-ended scenarios with diverse tasks is a crucial research and application direction in robotics. While recent progress in natural language processing and large multimodal models has enhanced robots' ability to understand complex instructions, robot manipulation still faces the procedural skill dilemma and the declarative skill dilemma in open environments. Existing methods often compromise cognitive and executive capabilities. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose RoBridge, a hierarchical intelligent architecture for general robotic manipulation. It consists of a high-level cognitive planner (HCP) based on a large-scale pre-trained vision-language model (VLM), an invariant operable representation (IOR) serving as a symbolic bridge, and a generalist embodied agent (GEA). RoBridge maintains the declarative skill of VLM and unleashes the procedural skill of reinforcement learning, effectively bridging the gap between cognition and execution. RoBridge demonstrates significant performance improvements over existing baselines, achieving a 75% success rate on new tasks and an 83% average success rate in sim-to-real generalization using only five real-world data samples per task. This work represents a significant step towards integrating cognitive reasoning with physical execution in robotic systems, offering a new paradigm for general robotic manipulation.

CAE-DFKD: Bridging the Transferability Gap in Data-Free Knowledge Distillation

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) enables the knowledge transfer from the given pre-trained teacher network to the target student model without access to the real training data. Existing DFKD methods focus primarily on improving image recognition performance on associated datasets, often neglecting the crucial aspect of the transferability of learned representations. In this paper, we propose Category-Aware Embedding Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (CAE-DFKD), which addresses at the embedding level the limitations of previous rely on image-level methods to improve model generalization but fail when directly applied to DFKD. The superiority and flexibility of CAE-DFKD are extensively evaluated, including: \textit{\textbf{i.)}} Significant efficiency advantages resulting from altering the generator training paradigm; \textit{\textbf{ii.)}} Competitive performance with existing DFKD state-of-the-art methods on image recognition tasks; \textit{\textbf{iii.)}} Remarkable transferability of data-free learned representations demonstrated in downstream tasks.

A0: An Affordance-Aware Hierarchical Model for General Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation faces critical challenges in understanding spatial affordances--the "where" and "how" of object interactions--essential for complex manipulation tasks like wiping a board or stacking objects. Existing methods, including modular-based and end-to-end approaches, often lack robust spatial reasoning capabilities. Unlike recent point-based and flow-based affordance methods that focus on dense spatial representations or trajectory modeling, we propose A0, a hierarchical affordance-aware diffusion model that decomposes manipulation tasks into high-level spatial affordance understanding and low-level action execution. A0 leverages the Embodiment-Agnostic Affordance Representation, which captures object-centric spatial affordances by predicting contact points and post-contact trajectories. A0 is pre-trained on 1 million contact points data and fine-tuned on annotated trajectories, enabling generalization across platforms. Key components include Position Offset Attention for motion-aware feature extraction and a Spatial Information Aggregation Layer for precise coordinate mapping. The model's output is executed by the action execution module. Experiments on multiple robotic systems (Franka, Kinova, Realman, and Dobot) demonstrate A0's superior performance in complex tasks, showcasing its efficiency, flexibility, and real-world applicability.

Focus on Local: Finding Reliable Discriminative Regions for Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is aimed at predicting the location of a query image by referencing a database of geotagged images. For VPR task, often fewer discriminative local regions in an image produce important effects while mundane background regions do not contribute or even cause perceptual aliasing because of easy overlap. However, existing methods lack precisely modeling and full exploitation of these discriminative regions. In this paper, we propose the Focus on Local (FoL) approach to stimulate the performance of image retrieval and re-ranking in VPR simultaneously by mining and exploiting reliable discriminative local regions in images and introducing pseudo-correlation supervision. First, we design two losses, Extraction-Aggregation Spatial Alignment Loss (SAL) and Foreground-Background Contrast Enhancement Loss (CEL), to explicitly model reliable discriminative local regions and use them to guide the generation of global representations and efficient re-ranking. Second, we introduce a weakly-supervised local feature training strategy based on pseudo-correspondences obtained from aggregating global features to alleviate the lack of local correspondences ground truth for the VPR task. Third, we suggest an efficient re-ranking pipeline that is efficiently and precisely based on discriminative region guidance. Finally, experimental results show that our FoL achieves the state-of-the-art on multiple VPR benchmarks in both image retrieval and re-ranking stages and also significantly outperforms existing two-stage VPR methods in terms of computational efficiency. Code and models are available at https://github.com/chenshunpeng/FoL

Multimodal Fusion and Vision-Language Models: A Survey for Robot Vision

Robot vision has greatly benefited from advancements in multimodal fusion techniques and vision-language models (VLMs). We systematically review the applications of multimodal fusion in key robotic vision tasks, including semantic scene understanding, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), 3D object detection, navigation and localization, and robot manipulation. We compare VLMs based on large language models (LLMs) with traditional multimodal fusion methods, analyzing their advantages, limitations, and synergies. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of commonly used datasets, evaluating their applicability and challenges in real-world robotic scenarios. Furthermore, we identify critical research challenges such as cross-modal alignment, efficient fusion strategies, real-time deployment, and domain adaptation, and propose future research directions, including self-supervised learning for robust multimodal representations, transformer-based fusion architectures, and scalable multimodal frameworks. Through a comprehensive review, comparative analysis, and forward-looking discussion, we provide a valuable reference for advancing multimodal perception and interaction in robotic vision. A comprehensive list of studies in this survey is available at https://github.com/Xiaofeng-Han-Res/MF-RV.

Structured Preference Optimization for Vision-Language Long-Horizon Task Planning

Existing methods for vision-language task planning excel in short-horizon tasks but often fall short in complex, long-horizon planning within dynamic environments. These challenges primarily arise from the difficulty of effectively training models to produce high-quality reasoning processes for long-horizon tasks. To address this, we propose Structured Preference Optimization (SPO), which aims to enhance reasoning and action selection in long-horizon task planning through structured preference evaluation and optimized training strategies. Specifically, SPO introduces: 1) Preference-Based Scoring and Optimization, which systematically evaluates reasoning chains based on task relevance, visual grounding, and historical consistency; and 2) Curriculum-Guided Training, where the model progressively adapts from simple to complex tasks, improving its generalization ability in long-horizon scenarios and enhancing reasoning robustness. To advance research in vision-language long-horizon task planning, we introduce ExtendaBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering 1,509 tasks across VirtualHome and Habitat 2.0, categorized into ultra-short, short, medium, and long tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that SPO significantly improves reasoning quality and final decision accuracy, outperforming prior methods on long-horizon tasks and underscoring the effectiveness of preference-driven optimization in vision-language task planning. Specifically, SPO achieves a +5.98% GCR and +4.68% SR improvement in VirtualHome and a +3.30% GCR and +2.11% SR improvement in Habitat over the best-performing baselines.

Constraint-Aware Zero-Shot Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments

We address the task of Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) under the zero-shot setting. Zero-shot VLN-CE is particularly challenging due to the absence of expert demonstrations for training and minimal environment structural prior to guide navigation. To confront these challenges, we propose a Constraint-Aware Navigator (CA-Nav), which reframes zero-shot VLN-CE as a sequential, constraint-aware sub-instruction completion process. CA-Nav continuously translates sub-instructions into navigation plans using two core modules: the Constraint-Aware Sub-instruction Manager (CSM) and the Constraint-Aware Value Mapper (CVM). CSM defines the completion criteria for decomposed sub-instructions as constraints and tracks navigation progress by switching sub-instructions in a constraint-aware manner. CVM, guided by CSM's constraints, generates a value map on the fly and refines it using superpixel clustering to improve navigation stability. CA-Nav achieves the state-of-the-art performance on two VLN-CE benchmarks, surpassing the previous best method by 12 percent and 13 percent in Success Rate on the validation unseen splits of R2R-CE and RxR-CE, respectively. Moreover, CA-Nav demonstrates its effectiveness in real-world robot deployments across various indoor scenes and instructions.