Abstract:Dynamic urban environments are often captured by cameras placed at spatially separated locations with little or no view overlap. However, most existing 4D reconstruction methods assume densely overlapping views. When applied to such sparse observations, these methods fail to reconstruct intermediate regions and often introduce temporal artifacts. To address this practical yet underexplored sparse multi-location setting, we propose Stitch4D, a unified 4D reconstruction framework that explicitly compensates for missing spatial coverage in sparse observations. Stitch4D (i) synthesizes intermediate bridge views to densify spatial constraints and improve spatial coverage, and (ii) jointly optimizes real and synthesized observations within a unified coordinate frame under explicit inter-location consistency constraints. By restoring intermediate coverage before optimization, Stitch4D prevents geometric collapse and reconstructs coherent geometry and smooth scene dynamics even in sparsely observed environments. To evaluate this setting, we introduce Urban Sparse 4D (U-S4D), a CARLA-based benchmark designed to assess spatiotemporal alignment under sparse multi-location configurations. Experimental results on U-S4D show that Stitch4D surpasses representative 4D reconstruction baselines and achieves superior visual quality. These results indicate that recovering intermediate spatial coverage is essential for stable 4D reconstruction in sparse urban environments.
Abstract:Counting in long videos remains a fundamental yet underexplored challenge in computer vision. Real-world recordings often span tens of minutes or longer and contain sparse, diverse events, making long-range temporal reasoning particularly difficult. However, most existing video counting benchmarks focus on short clips and evaluate only the final numerical answer, providing little insight into what should be counted or whether models consistently identify relevant instances across time. We introduce EC-Bench, a benchmark that jointly evaluates enumeration, counting, and temporal evidence grounding in long-form videos. EC-Bench contains 152 videos longer than 30 minutes and 1,699 queries paired with explicit evidence spans. Across 22 multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the best model achieves only 29.98% accuracy on Enumeration and 23.74% on Counting, while human performance reaches 78.57% and 82.97%, respectively. Our analysis reveals strong relationships between enumeration accuracy, temporal grounding, and counting performance. These results highlight fundamental limitations of current MLLMs and establish EC-Bench as a challenging benchmark for long-form quantitative video reasoning.
Abstract:Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly applied to robotic perception and manipulation, yet their ability to infer physical properties required for manipulation remains limited. In particular, estimating the mass of real-world objects is essential for determining appropriate grasp force and ensuring safe interaction. However, current VLMs lack reliable mass reasoning capabilities, and most existing benchmarks do not explicitly evaluate physical quantity estimation under realistic sensing conditions. In this work, we propose PhysQuantAgent, a framework for real-world object mass estimation using VLMs, together with VisPhysQuant, a new benchmark dataset for evaluation. VisPhysQuant consists of RGB-D videos of real objects captured from multiple viewpoints, annotated with precise mass measurements. To improve estimation accuracy, we introduce three visual prompting methods that enhance the input image with object detection, scale estimation, and cross-sectional image generation to help the model comprehend the size and internal structure of the target object. Experiments show that visual prompting significantly improves mass estimation accuracy on real-world data, suggesting the efficacy of integrating spatial reasoning with VLM knowledge for physical inference.
Abstract:Legal documents including judgments and court orders require highly sophisticated legal knowledge for understanding. To disclose expert knowledge for non-experts, we explore the problem of visualizing legal texts with easy-to-understand diagrams and propose a novel dataset of LegalViz with 23 languages and 7,010 cases of legal document and visualization pairs, using the DOT graph description language of Graphviz. LegalViz provides a simple diagram from a complicated legal corpus identifying legal entities, transactions, legal sources, and statements at a glance, that are essential in each judgment. In addition, we provide new evaluation metrics for the legal diagram visualization by considering graph structures, textual similarities, and legal contents. We conducted empirical studies on few-shot and finetuning large language models for generating legal diagrams and evaluated them with these metrics, including legal content-based evaluation within 23 languages. Models trained with LegalViz outperform existing models including GPTs, confirming the effectiveness of our dataset.




Abstract:In an era characterized by advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics, enabling machines to interact with and understand their environment is a critical research endeavor. In this paper, we propose Answerability Fields, a novel approach to predicting answerability within complex indoor environments. Leveraging a 3D question answering dataset, we construct a comprehensive Answerability Fields dataset, encompassing diverse scenes and questions from ScanNet. Using a diffusion model, we successfully infer and evaluate these Answerability Fields, demonstrating the importance of objects and their locations in answering questions within a scene. Our results showcase the efficacy of Answerability Fields in guiding scene-understanding tasks, laying the foundation for their application in enhancing interactions between intelligent agents and their environments.




Abstract:Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) aims to guide autonomous agents through real-world environments by integrating visual and linguistic cues. While substantial progress has been made in understanding these interactive modalities in ground-level navigation, aerial navigation remains largely underexplored. This is primarily due to the scarcity of resources suitable for real-world, city-scale aerial navigation studies. To bridge this gap, we introduce CityNav, a new dataset for language-goal aerial navigation using a 3D point cloud representation from real-world cities. CityNav includes 32,637 natural language descriptions paired with human demonstration trajectories, collected from participants via a new web-based 3D simulator developed for this research. Each description specifies a navigation goal, leveraging the names and locations of landmarks within real-world cities. We also provide baseline models of navigation agents that incorporate an internal 2D spatial map representing landmarks referenced in the descriptions. We benchmark the latest aerial navigation baselines and our proposed model on the CityNav dataset. The results using this dataset reveal the following key findings: (i) Our aerial agent models trained on human demonstration trajectories outperform those trained on shortest path trajectories, highlighting the importance of human-driven navigation strategies; (ii) The integration of a 2D spatial map significantly enhances navigation efficiency at city scale. Our dataset and code are available at https://water-cookie.github.io/city-nav-proj/
Abstract:Building robots capable of interacting with humans through natural language in the visual world presents a significant challenge in the field of robotics. To overcome this challenge, Embodied Question Answering (EQA) has been proposed as a benchmark task to measure the ability to identify an object navigating through a previously unseen environment in response to human-posed questions. Although some methods have been proposed, their evaluations have been limited to simulations, without experiments in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, all of these methods are constrained by a limited vocabulary for question-and-answer interactions, making them unsuitable for practical applications. In this work, we propose a map-based modular EQA method that enables real robots to navigate unknown environments through frontier-based map creation and address unknown QA pairs using foundation models that support open vocabulary. Unlike the questions of the previous EQA dataset on Matterport 3D (MP3D), questions in our real-world experiments contain various question formats and vocabularies not included in the training data. We conduct comprehensive experiments on virtual environments (MP3D-EQA) and two real-world house environments and demonstrate that our method can perform EQA even in the real world.




Abstract:Document question answering is a task of question answering on given documents such as reports, slides, pamphlets, and websites, and it is a truly demanding task as paper and electronic forms of documents are so common in our society. This is known as a quite challenging task because it requires not only text understanding but also understanding of figures and tables, and hence visual question answering (VQA) methods are often examined in addition to textual approaches. We introduce Japanese Document Question Answering (JDocQA), a large-scale document-based QA dataset, essentially requiring both visual and textual information to answer questions, which comprises 5,504 documents in PDF format and annotated 11,600 question-and-answer instances in Japanese. Each QA instance includes references to the document pages and bounding boxes for the answer clues. We incorporate multiple categories of questions and unanswerable questions from the document for realistic question-answering applications. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our dataset with text-based large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models. Incorporating unanswerable questions in finetuning may contribute to harnessing the so-called hallucination generation.




Abstract:Given the accelerating progress of vision and language modeling, accurate evaluation of machine-generated image captions remains critical. In order to evaluate captions more closely to human preferences, metrics need to discriminate between captions of varying quality and content. However, conventional metrics fail short of comparing beyond superficial matches of words or embedding similarities; thus, they still need improvement. This paper presents VisCE$^2$, a vision language model-based caption evaluation method. Our method focuses on visual context, which refers to the detailed content of images, including objects, attributes, and relationships. By extracting and organizing them into a structured format, we replace the human-written references with visual contexts and help VLMs better understand the image, enhancing evaluation performance. Through meta-evaluation on multiple datasets, we validated that VisCE$^2$ outperforms the conventional pre-trained metrics in capturing caption quality and demonstrates superior consistency with human judgment.
Abstract:City-scale 3D point cloud is a promising way to express detailed and complicated outdoor structures. It encompasses both the appearance and geometry features of segmented city components, including cars, streets, and buildings, that can be utilized for attractive applications such as user-interactive navigation of autonomous vehicles and drones. However, compared to the extensive text annotations available for images and indoor scenes, the scarcity of text annotations for outdoor scenes poses a significant challenge for achieving these applications. To tackle this problem, we introduce the CityRefer dataset for city-level visual grounding. The dataset consists of 35k natural language descriptions of 3D objects appearing in SensatUrban city scenes and 5k landmarks labels synchronizing with OpenStreetMap. To ensure the quality and accuracy of the dataset, all descriptions and labels in the CityRefer dataset are manually verified. We also have developed a baseline system that can learn encoded language descriptions, 3D object instances, and geographical information about the city's landmarks to perform visual grounding on the CityRefer dataset. To the best of our knowledge, the CityRefer dataset is the largest city-level visual grounding dataset for localizing specific 3D objects.