RSONet: Region-guided Selective Optimization Network for RGB-T Salient Object Detection

This paper focuses on the inconsistency in salient regions between RGB and thermal images. To address this issue, we propose the Region-guided Selective Optimization Network for RGB-T Salient Object Detection, which consists of the region guidance stage and saliency generation stage. In the region guidance stage, three parallel branches with same encoder-decoder structure equipped with the context interaction (CI) module and spatial-aware fusion (SF) module are designed to generate the guidance maps which are leveraged to calculate similarity scores. Then, in the saliency generation stage, the selective optimization (SO) module fuses RGB and thermal features based on the previously obtained similarity values to mitigate the impact of inconsistent distribution of salient targets between the two modalities. After that, to generate high-quality detection result, the dense detail enhancement (DDE) module which adopts the multiple dense connections and visual state space blocks is applied to low-level features for optimizing the detail information. In addition, the mutual interaction semantic (MIS) module is placed in the high-level features to dig the location cues by the mutual fusion strategy. We conduct extensive experiments on the RGB-T dataset, and the results demonstrate that the proposed RSONet achieves competitive performance against 27 state-of-the-art SOD methods.

Bin~Wan,G2HFNet: GeoGran-Aware Hierarchical Feature Fusion Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images

Remote sensing images captured from aerial perspectives often exhibit significant scale variations and complex backgrounds, posing challenges for salient object detection (SOD). Existing methods typically extract multi-level features at a single scale using uniform attention mechanisms, leading to suboptimal representations and incomplete detection results. To address these issues, we propose a GeoGran-Aware Hierarchical Feature Fusion Network (G2HFNet) that fully exploits geometric and granular cues in optical remote sensing images. Specifically, G2HFNet adopts Swin Transformer as the backbone to extract multi-level features and integrates three key modules: the multi-scale detail enhancement (MDE) module to handle object scale variations and enrich fine details, the dual-branch geo-gran complementary (DGC) module to jointly capture fine-grained details and positional information in mid-level features, and the deep semantic perception (DSP) module to refine high-level positional cues via self-attention. Additionally, a local-global guidance fusion (LGF) module is introduced to replace traditional convolutions for effective multi-level feature integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that G2HFNet achieves high-quality saliency maps and significantly improves detection performance in challenging remote sensing scenarios.

RDNet: Region Proportion-Aware Dynamic Adaptive Salient Object Detection Network in Optical Remote Sensing Images

Salient object detection (SOD) in remote sensing images faces significant challenges due to large variations in object sizes, the computational cost of self-attention mechanisms, and the limitations of CNN-based extractors in capturing global context and long-range dependencies. Existing methods that rely on fixed convolution kernels often struggle to adapt to diverse object scales, leading to detail loss or irrelevant feature aggregation. To address these issues, this work aims to enhance robustness to scale variations and achieve precise object localization. We propose the Region Proportion-Aware Dynamic Adaptive Salient Object Detection Network (RDNet), which replaces the CNN backbone with the SwinTransformer for global context modeling and introduces three key modules: (1) the Dynamic Adaptive Detail-aware (DAD) module, which applies varied convolution kernels guided by object region proportions; (2) the Frequency-matching Context Enhancement (FCE) module, which enriches contextual information through wavelet interactions and attention; and (3) the Region Proportion-aware Localization (RPL) module, which employs cross-attention to highlight semantic details and integrates a Proportion Guidance (PG) block to assist the DAD module. By combining these modules, RDNet achieves robustness against scale variations and accurate localization, delivering superior detection performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

VisualActBench: Can VLMs See and Act like a Human?

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive progress in perceiving and describing visual environments. However, their ability to proactively reason and act based solely on visual inputs, without explicit textual prompts, remains underexplored. We introduce a new task, Visual Action Reasoning, and propose VisualActBench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 1,074 videos and 3,733 human-annotated actions across four real-world scenarios. Each action is labeled with an Action Prioritization Level (APL) and a proactive-reactive type to assess models' human-aligned reasoning and value sensitivity. We evaluate 29 VLMs on VisualActBench and find that while frontier models like GPT4o demonstrate relatively strong performance, a significant gap remains compared to human-level reasoning, particularly in generating proactive, high-priority actions. Our results highlight limitations in current VLMs' ability to interpret complex context, anticipate outcomes, and align with human decision-making frameworks. VisualActBench establishes a comprehensive foundation for assessing and improving the real-world readiness of proactive, vision-centric AI agents.

NP-LoRA: Null Space Projection Unifies Subject and Style in LoRA Fusion

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fusion has emerged as a key technique for reusing and composing learned subject and style representations for controllable generation without costly retraining. However, existing methods rely on weight-based merging, where one LoRA often dominates the other, leading to interference and degraded fidelity. This interference is structural: separately trained LoRAs occupy low-rank high-dimensional subspaces, leading to non-orthogonal and overlapping representations. In this work, we analyze the internal structure of LoRAs and find their generative behavior is dominated by a few principal directions in the low-rank subspace, which should remain free from interference during fusion. To achieve this, we propose Null Space Projection LoRA (NP-LoRA), a projection-based framework for LoRA fusion that enforces subspace separation to prevent structural interference among principal directions. Specifically, we first extract principal style directions via singular value decomposition (SVD) and then project the subject LoRA into its orthogonal null space. Furthermore, we introduce a soft projection mechanism that enables smooth control over the trade-off between subject fidelity and style consistency. Experiments show NP-LoRA consistently improves fusion quality over strong baselines (e.g., DINO and CLIP-based metrics, with human and LLM preference scores), and applies broadly across backbones and LoRA pairs without retraining.

SAM-DAQ: Segment Anything Model with Depth-guided Adaptive Queries for RGB-D Video Salient Object Detection

Recently segment anything model (SAM) has attracted widespread concerns, and it is often treated as a vision foundation model for universal segmentation. Some researchers have attempted to directly apply the foundation model to the RGB-D video salient object detection (RGB-D VSOD) task, which often encounters three challenges, including the dependence on manual prompts, the high memory consumption of sequential adapters, and the computational burden of memory attention. To address the limitations, we propose a novel method, namely Segment Anything Model with Depth-guided Adaptive Queries (SAM-DAQ), which adapts SAM2 to pop-out salient objects from videos by seamlessly integrating depth and temporal cues within a unified framework. Firstly, we deploy a parallel adapter-based multi-modal image encoder (PAMIE), which incorporates several depth-guided parallel adapters (DPAs) in a skip-connection way. Remarkably, we fine-tune the frozen SAM encoder under prompt-free conditions, where the DPA utilizes depth cues to facilitate the fusion of multi-modal features. Secondly, we deploy a query-driven temporal memory (QTM) module, which unifies the memory bank and prompt embeddings into a learnable pipeline. Concretely, by leveraging both frame-level queries and video-level queries simultaneously, the QTM module can not only selectively extract temporal consistency features but also iteratively update the temporal representations of the queries. Extensive experiments are conducted on three RGB-D VSOD datasets, and the results show that the proposed SAM-DAQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of all evaluation metrics.

Divide-and-Conquer Decoupled Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation

Cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to tackle the dual challenge of recognizing novel classes and adapting to unseen domains with limited annotations. However, encoder features often entangle domain-relevant and category-relevant information, limiting both generalization and rapid adaptation to new domains. To address this issue, we propose a Divide-and-Conquer Decoupled Network (DCDNet). In the training stage, to tackle feature entanglement that impedes cross-domain generalization and rapid adaptation, we propose the Adversarial-Contrastive Feature Decomposition (ACFD) module. It decouples backbone features into category-relevant private and domain-relevant shared representations via contrastive learning and adversarial learning. Then, to mitigate the potential degradation caused by the disentanglement, the Matrix-Guided Dynamic Fusion (MGDF) module adaptively integrates base, shared, and private features under spatial guidance, maintaining structural coherence. In addition, in the fine-tuning stage, to enhanced model generalization, the Cross-Adaptive Modulation (CAM) module is placed before the MGDF, where shared features guide private features via modulation ensuring effective integration of domain-relevant information. Extensive experiments on four challenging datasets show that DCDNet outperforms existing CD-FSS methods, setting a new state-of-the-art for cross-domain generalization and few-shot adaptation.

WXSOD: A Benchmark for Robust Salient Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions

Salient object detection (SOD) in complex environments remains a challenging research topic. Most existing methods perform well in natural scenes with negligible noise, and tend to leverage multi-modal information (e.g., depth and infrared) to enhance accuracy. However, few studies are concerned with the damage of weather noise on SOD performance due to the lack of dataset with pixel-wise annotations. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a novel Weather-eXtended Salient Object Detection (WXSOD) dataset. It consists of 14,945 RGB images with diverse weather noise, along with the corresponding ground truth annotations and weather labels. To verify algorithm generalization, WXSOD contains two test sets, i.e., a synthesized test set and a real test set. The former is generated by adding weather noise to clean images, while the latter contains real-world weather noise. Based on WXSOD, we propose an efficient baseline, termed Weather-aware Feature Aggregation Network (WFANet), which adopts a fully supervised two-branch architecture. Specifically, the weather prediction branch mines weather-related deep features, while the saliency detection branch fuses semantic features extracted from the backbone with weather features for SOD. Comprehensive comparisons against 17 SOD methods shows that our WFANet achieves superior performance on WXSOD. The code and benchmark results will be made publicly available at https://github.com/C-water/WXSOD

Identifying Signatures of Image Phenotypes to Track Treatment Response in Liver Disease

Quantifiable image patterns associated with disease progression and treatment response are critical tools for guiding individual treatment, and for developing novel therapies. Here, we show that unsupervised machine learning can identify a pattern vocabulary of liver tissue in magnetic resonance images that quantifies treatment response in diffuse liver disease. Deep clustering networks simultaneously encode and cluster patches of medical images into a low-dimensional latent space to establish a tissue vocabulary. The resulting tissue types capture differential tissue change and its location in the liver associated with treatment response. We demonstrate the utility of the vocabulary on a randomized controlled trial cohort of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis patients. First, we use the vocabulary to compare longitudinal liver change in a placebo and a treatment cohort. Results show that the method identifies specific liver tissue change pathways associated with treatment, and enables a better separation between treatment groups than established non-imaging measures. Moreover, we show that the vocabulary can predict biopsy derived features from non-invasive imaging data. We validate the method on a separate replication cohort to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method.

Why Reasoning Matters? A Survey of Advancements in Multimodal Reasoning (v1)

Reasoning is central to human intelligence, enabling structured problem-solving across diverse tasks. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced their reasoning abilities in arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic domains. However, effectively extending these capabilities into multimodal contexts-where models must integrate both visual and textual inputs-continues to be a significant challenge. Multimodal reasoning introduces complexities, such as handling conflicting information across modalities, which require models to adopt advanced interpretative strategies. Addressing these challenges involves not only sophisticated algorithms but also robust methodologies for evaluating reasoning accuracy and coherence. This paper offers a concise yet insightful overview of reasoning techniques in both textual and multimodal LLMs. Through a thorough and up-to-date comparison, we clearly formulate core reasoning challenges and opportunities, highlighting practical methods for post-training optimization and test-time inference. Our work provides valuable insights and guidance, bridging theoretical frameworks and practical implementations, and sets clear directions for future research.