BAP-MOS: Bandit-Based Adaptive Prompting for Boundary-Sensitive Multi-Organ Segmentation

Multi-organ ultrasound segmentation remains challenging when anatomically adjacent structures must be delineated jointly, as localized boundary errors can persist even when Dice scores are high. To address these challenges, we propose Boundary-Adaptive Prompting for Multi-Organ Segmentation (BAP-MOS), a closed-loop adaptive prompting framework. BAP-MOS formulates prompt selection as an organ-specific multi-armed bandit problem over box, point, and combined prompts. An outer Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) loop selects the prompt-selection parameter vector, while an inner UCB-Tuned loop adapts per-organ prompt preferences during fine-tuning using a bounded Dice--MSD--HD95 validation-probe reward. The framework further introduces an organ-scaled negative prompt ring to adapt sparse prompt geometry across anatomical scales, while keeping the image and prompt encoders frozen and updating only the mask decoder. We evaluate BAP-MOS on pooled prostate-region TRUS cohorts against U-Net, nnU-Net, MedSAM, fixed-prompt SAM/MedSAM, and adaptive policy variants. On this benchmark, BAP-MOS achieves Dice 0.982, HD95 0.482, and MSD 0.204, reducing HD95 by approximately 48% and MSD by 45% relative to the strongest conventional baseline. To verify the generalization ability of the framework, we tested it on the external PFUS1 pelvic-floor ultrasound corpus using MedSAM and its adaptive strategy variants, and the results were good. These results support adaptive prompt allocation as an effective mechanism for improving boundary-sensitive multi-organ ultrasound segmentation without modifying the foundation-model backbone. Source Code is available at: https://github.com/SatvikPraveen/BAP-MOS

How Should Video LLMs Output Time? An Analysis of Efficient Temporal Grounding Paradigms

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced Video Temporal Grounding (VTG), existing methods often couple output paradigms with different backbones, datasets, and training protocols. This makes it challenging to isolate the specific impact of the output design. Additionally, as VTG systems are increasingly considered for resource-constrained edge deployment, the trade-off between output formulation and system-level efficiency requires systematic investigation. In this paper, we present a controlled empirical study comparing three dominant VTG output paradigms: Text Numeral Generation, Temporal Token Generation, and Continuous Temporal Decoding. We evaluate these paradigms across identical compact VLMs (SmolVLM2, FastVLM, and Molmo2) using consistent datasets and LoRA fine-tuning protocols. Evaluations on Charades-STA, QVHighlights, and YouCook2 measure both localization accuracy and system efficiency, including inference latency, training throughput, and parameter overhead. Our results demonstrate that the choice of output formulation significantly affects both grounding accuracy and computational cost, independent of model scale. Specifically, the continuous distribution paradigm consistently achieves the most favorable efficiency-accuracy trade-off on the Pareto frontier, delivering robust localization with minimal latency overhead. These findings provide objective empirical guidelines for designing efficient, deployment-ready VTG systems.

A.I.R.: Enabling Adaptive, Iterative, and Reasoning-based Frame Selection For Video Question Answering

Effectively applying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to Video Question Answering (VideoQA) hinges on selecting a concise yet comprehensive set of frames, as processing entire videos is computationally infeasible. However, current frame selection methods face a critical trade-off: approaches relying on lightweight similarity models, such as CLIP, often fail to capture the nuances of complex queries, resulting in inaccurate similarity scores that cannot reflect the authentic query-frame relevance, which further undermines frame selection. Meanwhile, methods that leverage a VLM for deeper analysis achieve higher accuracy but incur prohibitive computational costs. To address these limitations, we propose A.I.R., a training-free approach for Adaptive, Iterative, and Reasoning-based frame selection. We leverage a powerful VLM to perform deep, semantic analysis on complex queries, and this analysis is deployed within a cost-effective iterative loop that processes only a small batch of the most high-potential frames at a time. Extensive experiments on various VideoQA benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing frame selection methods, significantly boosts the performance of the foundation VLM, and achieves substantial gains in computational efficiency over other VLM-based techniques.