Analysis of Converged 3D Gaussian Splatting Solutions: Density Effects and Prediction Limit

We investigate what structure emerges in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) solutions from standard multi-view optimization. We term these Rendering-Optimal References (RORs) and analyze their statistical properties, revealing stable patterns: mixture-structured scales and bimodal radiance across diverse scenes. To understand what determines these parameters, we apply learnability probes by training predictors to reconstruct RORs from point clouds without rendering supervision. Our analysis uncovers fundamental density-stratification. Dense regions exhibit geometry-correlated parameters amenable to render-free prediction, while sparse regions show systematic failure across architectures. We formalize this through variance decomposition, demonstrating that visibility heterogeneity creates covariance-dominated coupling between geometric and appearance parameters in sparse regions. This reveals the dual character of RORs: geometric primitives where point clouds suffice, and view synthesis primitives where multi-view constraints are essential. We provide density-aware strategies that improve training robustness and discuss architectural implications for systems that adaptively balance feed-forward prediction and rendering-based refinement.

ViCA: Efficient Multimodal LLMs with Vision-Only Cross-Attention

Modern multimodal large language models (MLLMs) adopt a unified self-attention design that processes visual and textual tokens at every Transformer layer, incurring substantial computational overhead. In this work, we revisit the necessity of such dense visual processing and show that projected visual embeddings are already well-aligned with the language space, while effective vision-language interaction occurs in only a small subset of layers. Based on these insights, we propose ViCA (Vision-only Cross-Attention), a minimal MLLM architecture in which visual tokens bypass all self-attention and feed-forward layers, interacting with text solely through sparse cross-attention at selected layers. Extensive evaluations across three MLLM backbones, nine multimodal benchmarks, and 26 pruning-based baselines show that ViCA preserves 98% of baseline accuracy while reducing visual-side computation to 4%, consistently achieving superior performance-efficiency trade-offs. Moreover, ViCA provides a regular, hardware-friendly inference pipeline that yields over 3.5x speedup in single-batch inference and over 10x speedup in multi-batch inference, reducing visual grounding to near-zero overhead compared with text-only LLMs. It is also orthogonal to token pruning methods and can be seamlessly combined for further efficiency gains. Our code is available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/ViCA.

Deep-Learning-Based Control of a Decoupled Two-Segment Continuum Robot for Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection

Manual endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) is technically demanding, and existing single-segment robotic tools offer limited dexterity. These limitations motivate the development of more advanced solutions. To address this, DESectBot, a novel dual segment continuum robot with a decoupled structure and integrated surgical forceps, enabling 6 degrees of freedom (DoFs) tip dexterity for improved lesion targeting in ESD, was developed in this work. Deep learning controllers based on gated recurrent units (GRUs) for simultaneous tip position and orientation control, effectively handling the nonlinear coupling between continuum segments, were proposed. The GRU controller was benchmarked against Jacobian based inverse kinematics, model predictive control (MPC), a feedforward neural network (FNN), and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. In nested-rectangle and Lissajous trajectory tracking tasks, the GRU achieved the lowest position/orientation RMSEs: 1.11 mm/ 4.62° and 0.81 mm/ 2.59°, respectively. For orientation control at a fixed position (four target poses), the GRU attained a mean RMSE of 0.14 mm and 0.72°, outperforming all alternatives. In a peg transfer task, the GRU achieved a 100% success rate (120 success/120 attempts) with an average transfer time of 11.8s, the STD significantly outperforms novice-controlled systems. Additionally, an ex vivo ESD demonstration grasping, elevating, and resecting tissue as the scalpel completed the cut confirmed that DESectBot provides sufficient stiffness to divide thick gastric mucosa and an operative workspace adequate for large lesions.These results confirm that GRU-based control significantly enhances precision, reliability, and usability in ESD surgical training scenarios.

Dual-Kernel Graph Community Contrastive Learning

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in the absence of task-specific labels. However, its scalability on large-scale graphs is hindered by the intensive message passing mechanism of GNN and the quadratic computational complexity of contrastive loss over positive and negative node pairs. To address these issues, we propose an efficient GCL framework that transforms the input graph into a compact network of interconnected node sets while preserving structural information across communities. We firstly introduce a kernelized graph community contrastive loss with linear complexity, enabling effective information transfer among node sets to capture hierarchical structural information of the graph. We then incorporate a knowledge distillation technique into the decoupled GNN architecture to accelerate inference while maintaining strong generalization performance. Extensive experiments on sixteen real-world datasets of varying scales demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art GCL baselines in both effectiveness and scalability.

AsyncFlow: An Asynchronous Streaming RL Framework for Efficient LLM Post-Training

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a pivotal technology in the post-training phase of large language models (LLMs). Traditional task-colocated RL frameworks suffer from significant scalability bottlenecks, while task-separated RL frameworks face challenges in complex dataflows and the corresponding resource idling and workload imbalance. Moreover, most existing frameworks are tightly coupled with LLM training or inference engines, making it difficult to support custom-designed engines. To address these challenges, we propose AsyncFlow, an asynchronous streaming RL framework for efficient post-training. Specifically, we introduce a distributed data storage and transfer module that provides a unified data management and fine-grained scheduling capability in a fully streamed manner. This architecture inherently facilitates automated pipeline overlapping among RL tasks and dynamic load balancing. Moreover, we propose a producer-consumer-based asynchronous workflow engineered to minimize computational idleness by strategically deferring parameter update process within staleness thresholds. Finally, the core capability of AsynFlow is architecturally decoupled from underlying training and inference engines and encapsulated by service-oriented user interfaces, offering a modular and customizable user experience. Extensive experiments demonstrate an average of 1.59 throughput improvement compared with state-of-the-art baseline. The presented architecture in this work provides actionable insights for next-generation RL training system designs.

DocShaDiffusion: Diffusion Model in Latent Space for Document Image Shadow Removal

Document shadow removal is a crucial task in the field of document image enhancement. However, existing methods tend to remove shadows with constant color background and ignore color shadows. In this paper, we first design a diffusion model in latent space for document image shadow removal, called DocShaDiffusion. It translates shadow images from pixel space to latent space, enabling the model to more easily capture essential features. To address the issue of color shadows, we design a shadow soft-mask generation module (SSGM). It is able to produce accurate shadow mask and add noise into shadow regions specially. Guided by the shadow mask, a shadow mask-aware guided diffusion module (SMGDM) is proposed to remove shadows from document images by supervising the diffusion and denoising process. We also propose a shadow-robust perceptual feature loss to preserve details and structures in document images. Moreover, we develop a large-scale synthetic document color shadow removal dataset (SDCSRD). It simulates the distribution of realistic color shadows and provides powerful supports for the training of models. Experiments on three public datasets validate the proposed method's superiority over state-of-the-art. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.

GT^2-GS: Geometry-aware Texture Transfer for Gaussian Splatting

Transferring 2D textures to 3D modalities is of great significance for improving the efficiency of multimedia content creation. Existing approaches have rarely focused on transferring image textures onto 3D representations. 3D style transfer methods are capable of transferring abstract artistic styles to 3D scenes. However, these methods often overlook the geometric information of the scene, which makes it challenging to achieve high-quality 3D texture transfer results. In this paper, we present GT^2-GS, a geometry-aware texture transfer framework for gaussian splitting. From the perspective of matching texture features with geometric information in rendered views, we identify the issue of insufficient texture features and propose a geometry-aware texture augmentation module to expand the texture feature set. Moreover, a geometry-consistent texture loss is proposed to optimize texture features into the scene representation. This loss function incorporates both camera pose and 3D geometric information of the scene, enabling controllable texture-oriented appearance editing. Finally, a geometry preservation strategy is introduced. By alternating between the texture transfer and geometry correction stages over multiple iterations, this strategy achieves a balance between learning texture features and preserving geometric integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and controllability of our method. Through geometric awareness, our approach achieves texture transfer results that better align with human visual perception. Our homepage is available at https://vpx-ecnu.github.io/GT2-GS-website.

ABC-GS: Alignment-Based Controllable Style Transfer for 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D scene stylization approaches based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieve promising results by optimizing with Nearest Neighbor Feature Matching (NNFM) loss. However, NNFM loss does not consider global style information. In addition, the implicit representation of NeRF limits their fine-grained control over the resulting scenes. In this paper, we introduce ABC-GS, a novel framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting to achieve high-quality 3D style transfer. To this end, a controllable matching stage is designed to achieve precise alignment between scene content and style features through segmentation masks. Moreover, a style transfer loss function based on feature alignment is proposed to ensure that the outcomes of style transfer accurately reflect the global style of the reference image. Furthermore, the original geometric information of the scene is preserved with the depth loss and Gaussian regularization terms. Extensive experiments show that our ABC-GS provides controllability of style transfer and achieves stylization results that are more faithfully aligned with the global style of the chosen artistic reference. Our homepage is available at https://vpx-ecnu.github.io/ABC-GS-website.

The RoboDrive Challenge: Drive Anytime Anywhere in Any Condition

In the realm of autonomous driving, robust perception under out-of-distribution conditions is paramount for the safe deployment of vehicles. Challenges such as adverse weather, sensor malfunctions, and environmental unpredictability can severely impact the performance of autonomous systems. The 2024 RoboDrive Challenge was crafted to propel the development of driving perception technologies that can withstand and adapt to these real-world variabilities. Focusing on four pivotal tasks -- BEV detection, map segmentation, semantic occupancy prediction, and multi-view depth estimation -- the competition laid down a gauntlet to innovate and enhance system resilience against typical and atypical disturbances. This year's challenge consisted of five distinct tracks and attracted 140 registered teams from 93 institutes across 11 countries, resulting in nearly one thousand submissions evaluated through our servers. The competition culminated in 15 top-performing solutions, which introduced a range of innovative approaches including advanced data augmentation, multi-sensor fusion, self-supervised learning for error correction, and new algorithmic strategies to enhance sensor robustness. These contributions significantly advanced the state of the art, particularly in handling sensor inconsistencies and environmental variability. Participants, through collaborative efforts, pushed the boundaries of current technologies, showcasing their potential in real-world scenarios. Extensive evaluations and analyses provided insights into the effectiveness of these solutions, highlighting key trends and successful strategies for improving the resilience of driving perception systems. This challenge has set a new benchmark in the field, providing a rich repository of techniques expected to guide future research in this field.

Extending RAIM with a Gaussian Mixture of Opportunistic Information

GNSS are indispensable for various applications, but they are vulnerable to spoofing attacks. The original receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM) was not designed for securing GNSS. In this context, RAIM was extended with wireless signals, termed signals of opportunity (SOPs), or onboard sensors, typically assumed benign. However, attackers might also manipulate wireless networks, raising the need for a solution that considers untrustworthy SOPs. To address this, we extend RAIM by incorporating all opportunistic information, i.e., measurements from terrestrial infrastructures and onboard sensors, culminating in one function for robust GNSS spoofing detection. The objective is to assess the likelihood of GNSS spoofing by analyzing locations derived from extended RAIM solutions, which include location solutions from GNSS pseudorange subsets and wireless signal subsets of untrusted networks. Our method comprises two pivotal components: subset generation and location fusion. Subsets of ranging information are created and processed through positioning algorithms, producing temporary locations. Onboard sensors provide speed, acceleration, and attitude data, aiding in location filtering based on motion constraints. The filtered locations, modeled with uncertainty, are fused into a composite likelihood function normalized for GNSS spoofing detection. Theoretical assessments of GNSS-only and multi-infrastructure scenarios under uncoordinated and coordinated attacks are conducted. The detection of these attacks is feasible when the number of benign subsets exceeds a specific threshold. A real-world dataset from the Kista area is used for experimental validation. Comparative analysis against baseline methods shows a significant improvement in detection accuracy achieved by our Gaussian Mixture RAIM approach. Moreover, we discuss leveraging RAIM results for plausible location recovery.