Abstract:Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to enable a single model to solve multiple tasks efficiently; however, current parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods remain largely limited to single-task adaptation. We introduce \textbf{Free Sinewich}, a parameter-efficient multi-task learning framework that enables near-zero-cost weight modulation via frequency switching (\textbf{Free}). Specifically, a \textbf{Sine-AWB (Sinewich)} layer combines low-rank factors and convolutional priors into a single kernel, which is then modulated elementwise by a sinusoidal transformation to produce task-specialized weights. A lightweight Clock Net is introduced to produce bounded frequencies that stabilize this modulation during training. Theoretically, sine modulation enhances the rank of low-rank adapters, while frequency separation decorrelates the weights of different tasks. On dense prediction benchmarks, Free Sinewich achieves state-of-the-art performance-efficiency trade-offs (e.g., up to +5.39\% improvement over single-task fine-tuning with only 6.53M trainable parameters), offering a compact and scalable paradigm based on frequency-based parameter sharing. Project page: \href{https://casperliuliuliu.github.io/projects/Free-Sinewich/}{https://casperliuliuliu.github.io/projects/Free-Sinewich}.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used as knowledge backbones of Large Audio Language Models (LALMs), yet how much auditory knowledge they encode through text-only pre-training and how this affects downstream performance remains unclear. We study this gap by comparing different LLMs under two text-only and one audio-grounded setting: (1) direct probing on AKB-2000, a curated benchmark testing the breadth and depth of auditory knowledge; (2) cascade evaluation, where LLMs reason over text descriptions from an audio captioner; and (3) audio-grounded evaluation, where each LLM is fine-tuned into a Large Audio Language Model (LALM) with an audio encoder. Our findings reveal that auditory knowledge varies substantially across families, and text-only results are strongly correlated with audio performance. Our work provides empirical grounding for a comprehensive understanding of LLMs in audio research.
Abstract:Capsule endoscopy event detection is challenging because diagnostically relevant findings are sparse, visually heterogeneous, and embedded in long, noisy video streams, while evaluation is performed at the event level rather than by frame accuracy alone. We therefore formulate the RARE-VISION task as a metric-aligned event detection problem instead of a purely frame-wise classification task. Our framework combines two complementary backbones, EndoFM-LV for local temporal context and DINOv3 ViT-L/16 for strong frame-level visual semantics, followed by a Diverse Head Ensemble, Validation-Guided Hierarchical Fusion, and Anatomy-Aware Temporal Event Decoding. The fusion stage uses validation-derived class-wise model weighting, backbone weighting, and probability calibration, while the decoding stage applies temporal smoothing, anatomical constraints, threshold refinement, and per-label event generation to produce stable event predictions. Validation ablations indicate that complementary backbones, validation-guided fusion, and anatomy-aware temporal decoding all contribute to event-level performance. On the official hidden test set, the proposed method achieved an overall temporal mAP@0.5 of 0.3530 and temporal mAP@0.95 of 0.3235.
Abstract:Reconstructing accurate surfaces with radiance fields has progressed rapidly, yet two promising explicit representations, 3D Gaussian Splatting and sparse-voxel rasterization, exhibit complementary strengths and weaknesses. 3D Gaussian Splatting converges quickly and carries useful geometric priors, but surface fidelity is limited by its point-like parameterization. Sparse-voxel rasterization provides continuous opacity fields and crisp geometry, but its typical uniform dense-grid initialization slows convergence and underutilizes scene structure. We combine the advantages of both by introducing a voxel initialization method that places voxels at plausible locations and with appropriate levels of detail, yielding a strong starting point for per-scene optimization. To further enhance depth consistency without blurring edges, we propose refined depth geometry supervision that converts multi-view cues into direct per-ray depth regularization. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate improvements over prior methods in geometric accuracy, better fine-structure recovery, and more complete surfaces, while maintaining fast convergence.
Abstract:Promptable segmentation has emerged as a powerful paradigm in computer vision, enabling users to guide models in parsing complex scenes with prompts such as clicks, boxes, or textual cues. Recent advances, exemplified by the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have extended this paradigm to videos and multi-view images. However, the lack of 3D awareness often leads to inconsistent results, necessitating costly per-scene optimization to enforce 3D consistency. In this work, we introduce MV-SAM, a framework for multi-view segmentation that achieves 3D consistency using pointmaps -- 3D points reconstructed from unposed images by recent visual geometry models. Leveraging the pixel-point one-to-one correspondence of pointmaps, MV-SAM lifts images and prompts into 3D space, eliminating the need for explicit 3D networks or annotated 3D data. Specifically, MV-SAM extends SAM by lifting image embeddings from its pretrained encoder into 3D point embeddings, which are decoded by a transformer using cross-attention with 3D prompt embeddings. This design aligns 2D interactions with 3D geometry, enabling the model to implicitly learn consistent masks across views through 3D positional embeddings. Trained on the SA-1B dataset, our method generalizes well across domains, outperforming SAM2-Video and achieving comparable performance with per-scene optimization baselines on NVOS, SPIn-NeRF, ScanNet++, uCo3D, and DL3DV benchmarks. Code will be released.
Abstract:We present GaussExplorer, a framework for embodied exploration and reasoning built on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). While prior approaches to language-embedded 3DGS have made meaningful progress in aligning simple text queries with Gaussian embeddings, they are generally optimized for relatively simple queries and struggle to interpret more complex, compositional language queries. Alternative studies based on object-centric RGB-D structured memories provide spatial grounding but are constrained by pre-fixed viewpoints. To address these issues, GaussExplorer introduces Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on top of 3DGS to enable question-driven exploration and reasoning within 3D scenes. We first identify pre-captured images that are most correlated with the query question, and subsequently adjust them into novel viewpoints to more accurately capture visual information for better reasoning by VLMs. Experiments show that ours outperforms existing methods on several benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating VLM-based reasoning with 3DGS for embodied tasks.
Abstract:We propose OpenVoxel, a training-free algorithm for grouping and captioning sparse voxels for the open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding tasks. Given the sparse voxel rasterization (SVR) model obtained from multi-view images of a 3D scene, our OpenVoxel is able to produce meaningful groups that describe different objects in the scene. Also, by leveraging powerful Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), our OpenVoxel successfully build an informative scene map by captioning each group, enabling further 3D scene understanding tasks such as open-vocabulary segmentation (OVS) or referring expression segmentation (RES). Unlike previous methods, our method is training-free and does not introduce embeddings from a CLIP/BERT text encoder. Instead, we directly proceed with text-to-text search using MLLMs. Through extensive experiments, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to recent studies, particularly in complex referring expression segmentation (RES) tasks. The code will be open.
Abstract:We introduce a voice-agentic framework that learns one critical omni-understanding skill: knowing when to trust itself versus when to consult external audio perception. Our work is motivated by a crucial yet counterintuitive finding: naively fine-tuning an omni-model on both speech recognition and external sound understanding tasks often degrades performance, as the model can be easily misled by noisy hypotheses. To address this, our framework, Speech-Hands, recasts the problem as an explicit self-reflection decision. This learnable reflection primitive proves effective in preventing the model from being derailed by flawed external candidates. We show that this agentic action mechanism generalizes naturally from speech recognition to complex, multiple-choice audio reasoning. Across the OpenASR leaderboard, Speech-Hands consistently outperforms strong baselines by 12.1% WER on seven benchmarks. The model also achieves 77.37% accuracy and high F1 on audio QA decisions, showing robust generalization and reliability across diverse audio question answering datasets. By unifying perception and decision-making, our work offers a practical path toward more reliable and resilient audio intelligence.
Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) tasks require reasoning over complex visual scenes and executing adaptive actions in dynamic environments. While recent studies on reasoning VLAs show that explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) can improve generalization, they suffer from high inference latency due to lengthy reasoning traces. We propose Fast-ThinkAct, an efficient reasoning framework that achieves compact yet performant planning through verbalizable latent reasoning. Fast-ThinkAct learns to reason efficiently with latent CoTs by distilling from a teacher, driven by a preference-guided objective to align manipulation trajectories that transfers both linguistic and visual planning capabilities for embodied control. This enables reasoning-enhanced policy learning that effectively connects compact reasoning to action execution. Extensive experiments across diverse embodied manipulation and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Fast-ThinkAct achieves strong performance with up to 89.3\% reduced inference latency over state-of-the-art reasoning VLAs, while maintaining effective long-horizon planning, few-shot adaptation, and failure recovery.
Abstract:Dense video captioning aims to interpret and describe all temporally localized events throughout an input video. Recent state-of-the-art methods leverage large language models (LLMs) to provide detailed moment descriptions for video data. However, existing VideoLLMs remain challenging in identifying precise event boundaries in untrimmed videos, causing the generated captions to be not properly grounded. In this paper, we propose TA-Prompting, which enhances VideoLLMs via Temporal Anchors that learn to precisely localize events and prompt the VideoLLMs to perform temporal-aware video event understanding. During inference, in order to properly determine the output caption sequence from an arbitrary number of events presented within a video, we introduce an event coherent sampling strategy to select event captions with sufficient coherence across temporal events and cross-modal similarity with the given video. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we show that our TA-Prompting is favorable against state-of-the-art VideoLLMs, yielding superior performance on dense video captioning and temporal understanding tasks including moment retrieval and temporalQA.