From Pixels to Concepts: Do Segmentation Models Understand What They Segment?

Segmentation is a fundamental vision task underlying numerous downstream applications. Recent promptable segmentation models, such as Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3), extend segmentation from category-agnostic mask prediction to concept-guided localization conditioned on high-level textual prompts. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate mask accuracy or object presence, leaving unclear whether these models faithfully ground the queried concept or instead rely on visually salient but semantically misleading cues. We introduce CAFE: \textbf{C}ounterfactual \textbf{A}ttribute \textbf{F}actuality \textbf{E}valuation, a novel benchmark for evaluating concept-faithful segmentation in promptable segmentation models. Our \textbf{CAFE} is built on attribute-level counterfactual manipulation: the target region and ground-truth mask are preserved, while attributes such as surface appearance, context, or material composition are modified to introduce misleading semantic cues. The benchmark contains 2,146 paired test samples, each consisting of a target image, a ground-truth mask, a positive prompt, and a misleading negative prompt. These samples cover three counterfactual categories: Superficial Mimicry (\textbf{SM}), Context Conflict (\textbf{CC}), and Ontological Conflict (\textbf{OC}). We evaluate various model types and sizes on our CAFE. Experiments reveal a systematic gap between localization quality and concept discrimination: models often generate accurate masks even for misleading prompts, suggesting that strong mask prediction does not necessarily imply faithful semantic grounding. Our CAFE provides a controlled benchmark for diagnosing whether promptable segmentation models perform concept-faithful grounding rather than shortcut-driven mask retrieval.

Sparse Video Generation Propels Real-World Beyond-the-View Vision-Language Navigation

Why must vision-language navigation be bound to detailed and verbose language instructions? While such details ease decision-making, they fundamentally contradict the goal for navigation in the real-world. Ideally, agents should possess the autonomy to navigate in unknown environments guided solely by simple and high-level intents. Realizing this ambition introduces a formidable challenge: Beyond-the-View Navigation (BVN), where agents must locate distant, unseen targets without dense and step-by-step guidance. Existing large language model (LLM)-based methods, though adept at following dense instructions, often suffer from short-sighted behaviors due to their reliance on short-horimzon supervision. Simply extending the supervision horizon, however, destabilizes LLM training. In this work, we identify that video generation models inherently benefit from long-horizon supervision to align with language instructions, rendering them uniquely suitable for BVN tasks. Capitalizing on this insight, we propose introducing the video generation model into this field for the first time. Yet, the prohibitive latency for generating videos spanning tens of seconds makes real-world deployment impractical. To bridge this gap, we propose SparseVideoNav, achieving sub-second trajectory inference guided by a generated sparse future spanning a 20-second horizon. This yields a remarkable 27x speed-up compared to the unoptimized counterpart. Extensive real-world zero-shot experiments demonstrate that SparseVideoNav achieves 2.5x the success rate of state-of-the-art LLM baselines on BVN tasks and marks the first realization of such capability in challenging night scenes.

Secure Resource Allocation via Constrained Deep Reinforcement Learning

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the advent of 6G technologies have introduced computationally intensive tasks that often surpass the processing capabilities of user devices. Efficient and secure resource allocation in serverless multi-cloud edge computing environments is essential for supporting these demands and advancing distributed computing. However, existing solutions frequently struggle with the complexity of multi-cloud infrastructures, robust security integration, and effective application of traditional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques under system constraints. To address these challenges, we present SARMTO, a novel framework that integrates an action-constrained DRL model. SARMTO dynamically balances resource allocation, task offloading, security, and performance by utilizing a Markov decision process formulation, an adaptive security mechanism, and sophisticated optimization techniques. Extensive simulations across varying scenarios, including different task loads, data sizes, and MEC capacities, show that SARMTO consistently outperforms five baseline approaches, achieving up to a 40% reduction in system costs and a 41.5% improvement in energy efficiency over state-of-the-art methods. These enhancements highlight SARMTO's potential to revolutionize resource management in intricate distributed computing environments, opening the door to more efficient and secure IoT and edge computing applications.