PerceptionLM: Open-Access Data and Models for Detailed Visual Understanding

Vision-language models are integral to computer vision research, yet many high-performing models remain closed-source, obscuring their data, design and training recipe. The research community has responded by using distillation from black-box models to label training data, achieving strong benchmark results, at the cost of measurable scientific progress. However, without knowing the details of the teacher model and its data sources, scientific progress remains difficult to measure. In this paper, we study building a Perception Language Model (PLM) in a fully open and reproducible framework for transparent research in image and video understanding. We analyze standard training pipelines without distillation from proprietary models and explore large-scale synthetic data to identify critical data gaps, particularly in detailed video understanding. To bridge these gaps, we release 2.8M human-labeled instances of fine-grained video question-answer pairs and spatio-temporally grounded video captions. Additionally, we introduce PLM-VideoBench, a suite for evaluating challenging video understanding tasks focusing on the ability to reason about "what", "where", "when", and "how" of a video. We make our work fully reproducible by providing data, training recipes, code & models.

Deep Learning in Concealed Dense Prediction

Deep learning is developing rapidly and handling common computer vision tasks well. It is time to pay attention to more complex vision tasks, as model size, knowledge, and reasoning capabilities continue to improve. In this paper, we introduce and review a family of complex tasks, termed Concealed Dense Prediction (CDP), which has great value in agriculture, industry, etc. CDP's intrinsic trait is that the targets are concealed in their surroundings, thus fully perceiving them requires fine-grained representations, prior knowledge, auxiliary reasoning, etc. The contributions of this review are three-fold: (i) We introduce the scope, characteristics, and challenges specific to CDP tasks and emphasize their essential differences from generic vision tasks. (ii) We develop a taxonomy based on concealment counteracting to summarize deep learning efforts in CDP through experiments on three tasks. We compare 25 state-of-the-art methods across 12 widely used concealed datasets. (iii) We discuss the potential applications of CDP in the large model era and summarize 6 potential research directions. We offer perspectives for the future development of CDP by constructing a large-scale multimodal instruction fine-tuning dataset, CvpINST, and a concealed visual perception agent, CvpAgent.

Aurelia: Test-time Reasoning Distillation in Audio-Visual LLMs

Recent advancements in reasoning optimization have greatly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, existing work fails to address the complexities of audio-visual scenarios, underscoring the need for further research. In this paper, we introduce AURELIA, a novel actor-critic based audio-visual (AV) reasoning framework that distills structured, step-by-step reasoning into AVLLMs at test time, improving their ability to process complex multi-modal inputs without additional training or fine-tuning. To further advance AVLLM reasoning skills, we present AVReasonBench, a challenging benchmark comprising 4500 audio-visual questions, each paired with detailed step-by-step reasoning. Our benchmark spans six distinct tasks, including AV-GeoIQ, which evaluates AV reasoning combined with geographical and cultural knowledge. Evaluating 18 AVLLMs on AVReasonBench reveals significant limitations in their multi-modal reasoning capabilities. Using AURELIA, we achieve up to a 100% relative improvement, demonstrating its effectiveness. This performance gain highlights the potential of reasoning-enhanced data generation for advancing AVLLMs in real-world applications. Our code and data will be publicly released at: https: //github.com/schowdhury671/aurelia.

Mobile-VideoGPT: Fast and Accurate Video Understanding Language Model

Video understanding models often struggle with high computational requirements, extensive parameter counts, and slow inference speed, making them inefficient for practical use. To tackle these challenges, we propose Mobile-VideoGPT, an efficient multimodal framework designed to operate with fewer than a billion parameters. Unlike traditional video large multimodal models (LMMs), Mobile-VideoGPT consists of lightweight dual visual encoders, efficient projectors, and a small language model (SLM), enabling real-time throughput. To further improve efficiency, we present an Attention-Based Frame Scoring mechanism to select the key-frames, along with an efficient token projector that prunes redundant visual tokens and preserves essential contextual cues. We evaluate our model across well-established six video understanding benchmarks (e.g., MVBench, EgoSchema, NextQA, and PercepTest). Our results show that Mobile-VideoGPT-0.5B can generate up to 46 tokens per second while outperforming existing state-of-the-art 0.5B-parameter models by 6 points on average with 40% fewer parameters and more than 2x higher throughput. Our code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/Amshaker/Mobile-VideoGPT.

Tracking Meets Large Multimodal Models for Driving Scenario Understanding

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently gained prominence in autonomous driving research, showcasing promising capabilities across various emerging benchmarks. LMMs specifically designed for this domain have demonstrated effective perception, planning, and prediction skills. However, many of these methods underutilize 3D spatial and temporal elements, relying mainly on image data. As a result, their effectiveness in dynamic driving environments is limited. We propose to integrate tracking information as an additional input to recover 3D spatial and temporal details that are not effectively captured in the images. We introduce a novel approach for embedding this tracking information into LMMs to enhance their spatiotemporal understanding of driving scenarios. By incorporating 3D tracking data through a track encoder, we enrich visual queries with crucial spatial and temporal cues while avoiding the computational overhead associated with processing lengthy video sequences or extensive 3D inputs. Moreover, we employ a self-supervised approach to pretrain the tracking encoder to provide LMMs with additional contextual information, significantly improving their performance in perception, planning, and prediction tasks for autonomous driving. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, with a gain of 9.5% in accuracy, an increase of 7.04 points in the ChatGPT score, and 9.4% increase in the overall score over baseline models on DriveLM-nuScenes benchmark, along with a 3.7% final score improvement on DriveLM-CARLA. Our code is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/TrackingMeetsLMM

How Good is my Histopathology Vision-Language Foundation Model? A Holistic Benchmark

Recently, histopathology vision-language foundation models (VLMs) have gained popularity due to their enhanced performance and generalizability across different downstream tasks. However, most existing histopathology benchmarks are either unimodal or limited in terms of diversity of clinical tasks, organs, and acquisition instruments, as well as their partial availability to the public due to patient data privacy. As a consequence, there is a lack of comprehensive evaluation of existing histopathology VLMs on a unified benchmark setting that better reflects a wide range of clinical scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce HistoVL, a fully open-source comprehensive benchmark comprising images acquired using up to 11 various acquisition tools that are paired with specifically crafted captions by incorporating class names and diverse pathology descriptions. Our Histo-VL includes 26 organs, 31 cancer types, and a wide variety of tissue obtained from 14 heterogeneous patient cohorts, totaling more than 5 million patches obtained from over 41K WSIs viewed under various magnification levels. We systematically evaluate existing histopathology VLMs on Histo-VL to simulate diverse tasks performed by experts in real-world clinical scenarios. Our analysis reveals interesting findings, including large sensitivity of most existing histopathology VLMs to textual changes with a drop in balanced accuracy of up to 25% in tasks such as Metastasis detection, low robustness to adversarial attacks, as well as improper calibration of models evident through high ECE values and low model prediction confidence, all of which can affect their clinical implementation.

O-TPT: Orthogonality Constraints for Calibrating Test-time Prompt Tuning in Vision-Language Models

Test-time prompt tuning for vision-language models (VLMs) is getting attention because of their ability to learn with unlabeled data without fine-tuning. Although test-time prompt tuning methods for VLMs can boost accuracy, the resulting models tend to demonstrate poor calibration, which casts doubts on the reliability and trustworthiness of these models. Notably, more attention needs to be devoted to calibrating the test-time prompt tuning in vision-language models. To this end, we propose a new approach, called O-TPT that introduces orthogonality constraints on the textual features corresponding to the learnable prompts for calibrating test-time prompt tuning in VLMs. Towards introducing orthogonality constraints, we make the following contributions. First, we uncover new insights behind the suboptimal calibration performance of existing methods relying on textual feature dispersion. Second, we show that imposing a simple orthogonalization of textual features is a more effective approach towards obtaining textual dispersion. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets with different backbones and baselines. The results indicate that our method consistently outperforms the prior state of the art in significantly reducing the overall average calibration error. Also, our method surpasses the zero-shot calibration performance on fine-grained classification tasks.

Hierarchical Self-Supervised Adversarial Training for Robust Vision Models in Histopathology

Adversarial attacks pose significant challenges for vision models in critical fields like healthcare, where reliability is essential. Although adversarial training has been well studied in natural images, its application to biomedical and microscopy data remains limited. Existing self-supervised adversarial training methods overlook the hierarchical structure of histopathology images, where patient-slide-patch relationships provide valuable discriminative signals. To address this, we propose Hierarchical Self-Supervised Adversarial Training (HSAT), which exploits these properties to craft adversarial examples using multi-level contrastive learning and integrate it into adversarial training for enhanced robustness. We evaluate HSAT on multiclass histopathology dataset OpenSRH and the results show that HSAT outperforms existing methods from both biomedical and natural image domains. HSAT enhances robustness, achieving an average gain of 54.31% in the white-box setting and reducing performance drops to 3-4% in the black-box setting, compared to 25-30% for the baseline. These results set a new benchmark for adversarial training in this domain, paving the way for more robust models. Our Code for training and evaluation is available at https://github.com/HashmatShadab/HSAT.

DriveLMM-o1: A Step-by-Step Reasoning Dataset and Large Multimodal Model for Driving Scenario Understanding

While large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks, certain challenges require complex multi-step reasoning to reach accurate answers. One particularly challenging task is autonomous driving, which demands thorough cognitive processing before decisions can be made. In this domain, a sequential and interpretive understanding of visual cues is essential for effective perception, prediction, and planning. Nevertheless, common VQA benchmarks often focus on the accuracy of the final answer while overlooking the reasoning process that enables the generation of accurate responses. Moreover, existing methods lack a comprehensive framework for evaluating step-by-step reasoning in realistic driving scenarios. To address this gap, we propose DriveLMM-o1, a new dataset and benchmark specifically designed to advance step-wise visual reasoning for autonomous driving. Our benchmark features over 18k VQA examples in the training set and more than 4k in the test set, covering diverse questions on perception, prediction, and planning, each enriched with step-by-step reasoning to ensure logical inference in autonomous driving scenarios. We further introduce a large multimodal model that is fine-tuned on our reasoning dataset, demonstrating robust performance in complex driving scenarios. In addition, we benchmark various open-source and closed-source methods on our proposed dataset, systematically comparing their reasoning capabilities for autonomous driving tasks. Our model achieves a +7.49% gain in final answer accuracy, along with a 3.62% improvement in reasoning score over the previous best open-source model. Our framework, dataset, and model are available at https://github.com/ayesha-ishaq/DriveLMM-o1.

Handwritten Digit Recognition: An Ensemble-Based Approach for Superior Performance

Handwritten digit recognition remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision, with applications ranging from postal code reading to document digitization. This paper presents an ensemble-based approach that combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with traditional machine learning techniques to improve recognition accuracy and robustness. We evaluate our method on the MNIST dataset, comprising 70,000 handwritten digit images. Our hybrid model, which uses CNNs for feature extraction and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for classification, achieves an accuracy of 99.30%. We also explore the effectiveness of data augmentation and various ensemble techniques in enhancing model performance. Our results demonstrate that this approach not only achieves high accuracy but also shows improved generalization across diverse handwriting styles. The findings contribute to the development of more reliable handwritten digit recognition systems and highlight the potential of combining deep learning with traditional machine learning methods in pattern recognition tasks.