Harnessing Weak Pair Uncertainty for Text-based Person Search

In this paper, we study the text-based person search, which is to retrieve the person of interest via natural language description. Prevailing methods usually focus on the strict one-to-one correspondence pair matching between the visual and textual modality, such as contrastive learning. However, such a paradigm unintentionally disregards the weak positive image-text pairs, which are of the same person but the text descriptions are annotated from different views (cameras). To take full use of weak positives, we introduce an uncertainty-aware method to explicitly estimate image-text pair uncertainty, and incorporate the uncertainty into the optimization procedure in a smooth manner. Specifically, our method contains two modules: uncertainty estimation and uncertainty regularization. (1) Uncertainty estimation is to obtain the relative confidence on the given positive pairs; (2) Based on the predicted uncertainty, we propose the uncertainty regularization to adaptively adjust loss weight. Additionally, we introduce a group-wise image-text matching loss to further facilitate the representation space among the weak pairs. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method explicitly prevents the model from pushing away potentially weak positive candidates. Extensive experiments on three widely-used datasets, .e.g, CUHK-PEDES, RSTPReid and ICFG-PEDES, verify the mAP improvement of our method against existing competitive methods +3.06%, +3.55% and +6.94%, respectively.

UAVReason: A Unified, Large-Scale Benchmark for Multimodal Aerial Scene Reasoning and Generation

Vision-Language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in ground-view visual understanding but often fracture when deployed on high-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The failure largely stems from a pronounced domain shift, characterized by tiny and densely packed objects, repetitive textures, and ambiguous top-down orientations. These factors severely disrupt semantic grounding and hinder both spatial reasoning and controllable generation. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce UAVReason, the first unified large-scale multi-modal benchmark dedicated to nadir-view UAV scenarios, derived from a high-fidelity UAV simulation platform. In contrast to existing UAV benchmarks, which are largely siloed and focus on single tasks like object detection or segmentation, UAVReason uniquely consolidates over 273K Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs, including 23.6K single frames with detailed captions, 68.2K 2-frame temporal sequences, and 188.8K cross-modal generation samples. The benchmark probes 22 diverse reasoning types across spatial and temporal axes while simultaneously evaluating high-fidelity generation across RGB, depth, and segmentation modalities. We further establish a strong, unified baseline model via multi-task learning. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our unified approach across diverse metrics, such as EM/F1 for VQA, mIoU for segmentation, and CLIP Score for generation. These results indicate limitations of general-domain vision-language models and show that unified multi-task learning substantially improves UAV-native performance. All data, code, and evaluation tools will be publicly released to advance UAV multimodal research.

Pretrain-then-Adapt: Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for Text-based Person Search

Text-based person search faces inherent limitations due to data scarcity, driven by stringent privacy constraints and the high cost of manual annotation. To mitigate this, existing methods usually rely on a Pretrain-then-Finetune paradigm, where models are first pretrained on synthetic person-caption data to establish cross-modal alignment, followed by fine-tuning on labeled real-world datasets. However, this paradigm lacks practicality in real-world deployment scenarios, where large-scale annotated target-domain data is typically inaccessible. In this work, we propose a new Pretrain-then-Adapt paradigm that eliminates reliance on extensive target-domain supervision through an offline test-time adaptation manner, enabling dynamic model adaptation using only unlabeled test data with minimal post-train time cost. To mitigate overconfidence with false positives of previous entropy-based test-time adaptation, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Adaptation (UATTA) framework, which introduces a bidirectional retrieval disagreement mechanism to estimate uncertainty, i.e., low uncertainty is assigned when an image-text pair ranks highly in both image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval, indicating high alignment; otherwise, high uncertainty is detected. This indicator drives offline test-time model recalibration without labels, effectively mitigating domain shift. We validate UATTA on four benchmarks, i.e., CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, RSTPReid, and PAB, showing consistent improvements across both CLIP-based (one-stage) and XVLM-based (two-stage) frameworks. Ablation studies confirm that UATTA outperforms existing offline test-time adaptation strategies, establishing a new benchmark for label-efficient, deployable person search systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/nkuzjh/UATTA.

Can Video Diffusion Models Predict Past Frames? Bidirectional Cycle Consistency for Reversible Interpolation

Video frame interpolation aims to synthesize realistic intermediate frames between given endpoints while adhering to specific motion semantics. While recent generative models have improved visual fidelity, they predominantly operate in a unidirectional manner, lacking mechanisms to self-verify temporal consistency. This often leads to motion drift, directional ambiguity, and boundary misalignment, especially in long-range sequences. Inspired by the principle of temporal cycle-consistency in self-supervised learning, we propose a novel bidirectional framework that enforces symmetry between forward and backward generation trajectories. Our approach introduces learnable directional tokens to explicitly condition a shared backbone on temporal orientation, enabling the model to jointly optimize forward synthesis and backward reconstruction within a single unified architecture. This cycle-consistent supervision acts as a powerful regularizer, ensuring that generated motion paths are logically reversible. Furthermore, we employ a curriculum learning strategy that progressively trains the model from short to long sequences, stabilizing dynamics across varying durations. Crucially, our cyclic constraints are applied only during training; inference requires a single forward pass, maintaining the high efficiency of the base model. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in imaging quality, motion smoothness, and dynamic control on both 37-frame and 73-frame tasks, outperforming strong baselines while incurring no additional computational overhead.

Uncertainty-Aware Trajectory Prediction: A Unified Framework Harnessing Positional and Semantic Uncertainties

Trajectory prediction seeks to forecast the future motion of dynamic entities, such as vehicles and pedestrians, given a temporal horizon of historical movement data and environmental context. A central challenge in this domain is the inherent uncertainty in real-time maps, arising from two primary sources: (1) positional inaccuracies due to sensor limitations or environmental occlusions, and (2) semantic errors stemming from misinterpretations of scene context. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unified framework that jointly models positional and semantic uncertainties and explicitly integrates them into the trajectory prediction pipeline. Our approach employs a dual-head architecture to independently estimate semantic and positional predictions in a dual-pass manner, deriving prediction variances as uncertainty indicators in an end-to-end fashion. These uncertainties are subsequently fused with the semantic and positional predictions to enhance the robustness of trajectory forecasts. We evaluate our uncertainty-aware framework on the nuScenes real-world driving dataset, conducting extensive experiments across four map estimation methods and two trajectory prediction baselines. Results verify that our method (1) effectively quantifies map uncertainties through both positional and semantic dimensions, and (2) consistently improves the performance of existing trajectory prediction models across multiple metrics, including minimum Average Displacement Error (minADE), minimum Final Displacement Error (minFDE), and Miss Rate (MR). Code will available at https://github.com/JT-Sun/UATP.

Look, Compare and Draw: Differential Query Transformer for Automatic Oil Painting

This work introduces a new approach to automatic oil painting that emphasizes the creation of dynamic and expressive brushstrokes. A pivotal challenge lies in mitigating the duplicate and common-place strokes, which often lead to less aesthetic outcomes. Inspired by the human painting process, \ie, observing, comparing, and drawing, we incorporate differential image analysis into a neural oil painting model, allowing the model to effectively concentrate on the incremental impact of successive brushstrokes. To operationalize this concept, we propose the Differential Query Transformer (DQ-Transformer), a new architecture that leverages differentially derived image representations enriched with positional encoding to guide the stroke prediction process. This integration enables the model to maintain heightened sensitivity to local details, resulting in more refined and nuanced stroke generation. Furthermore, we incorporate adversarial training into our framework, enhancing the accuracy of stroke prediction and thereby improving the overall realism and fidelity of the synthesized paintings. Extensive qualitative evaluations, complemented by a controlled user study, validate that our DQ-Transformer surpasses existing methods in both visual realism and artistic authenticity, typically achieving these results with fewer strokes. The stroke-by-stroke painting animations are available on our project website.

VSearcher: Long-Horizon Multimodal Search Agent via Reinforcement Learning

Large models are increasingly becoming autonomous agents that interact with real-world environments and use external tools to augment their static capabilities. However, most recent progress has focused on text-only large language models, which are limited to a single modality and therefore have narrower application scenarios. On the other hand, multimodal large models, while offering stronger perceptual capabilities, remain limited to static knowledge and lack the ability to access and leverage up-to-date web information. In this paper, we propose VSearcher, turning static multimodal model into multimodal search agent capable of long-horizon, multi-turn tool use in real-world web environments, including text search, image search, and web browsing, via reinforcement learning. Specifically, we introduce Iterative Injection Data Synthesis pipeline to generate large-scale, complex multimodal QA questions, which are further filtered with comprehensive metrics to ensure high quality and sufficient difficulty. We then adopt an SFT-then-RL training pipeline to turn base multimodal models to agent capable of multi-turn tool calling in real-world web environments. Besides, we propose a multimodal search benchmark MM-SearchExam dedicated to evaluating search capabilities of multimodal search agents, which proves highly challenging for recent proprietary models. Extensive evaluations across multiple multimodal search benchmarks reveal effectiveness of our method. VSearcher achieves superior performance compared to recent multimodal search agents and even surpasses several proprietary models on multimodal web search tasks.

Process Over Outcome: Cultivating Forensic Reasoning for Generalizable Multimodal Manipulation Detection

Recent advances in generative AI have significantly enhanced the realism of multimodal media manipulation, thereby posing substantial challenges to manipulation detection. Existing manipulation detection and grounding approaches predominantly focus on manipulation type classification under result-oriented supervision, which not only lacks interpretability but also tends to overfit superficial artifacts. In this paper, we argue that generalizable detection requires incorporating explicit forensic reasoning, rather than merely classifying a limited set of manipulation types, which fails to generalize to unseen manipulation patterns. To this end, we propose REFORM, a reasoning-driven framework that shifts learning from outcome fitting to process modeling. REFORM adopts a three-stage curriculum that first induces forensic rationales, then aligns reasoning with final judgments, and finally refines logical consistency via reinforcement learning. To support this paradigm, we introduce ROM, a large-scale dataset with rich reasoning annotations. Extensive experiments show that REFORM establishes new state-of-the-art performance with superior generalization, achieving 81.52% ACC on ROM, 76.65% ACC on DGM4, and 74.9 F1 on MMFakeBench.

From Instruction to Event: Sound-Triggered Mobile Manipulation

Current mobile manipulation research predominantly follows an instruction-driven paradigm, where agents rely on predefined textual commands to execute tasks. However, this setting confines agents to a passive role, limiting their autonomy and ability to react to dynamic environmental events. To address these limitations, we introduce sound-triggered mobile manipulation, where agents must actively perceive and interact with sound-emitting objects without explicit action instructions. To support these tasks, we develop Habitat-Echo, a data platform that integrates acoustic rendering with physical interaction. We further propose a baseline comprising a high-level task planner and low-level policy models to complete these tasks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed baseline empowers agents to actively detect and respond to auditory events, eliminating the need for case-by-case instructions. Notably, in the challenging dual-source scenario, the agent successfully isolates the primary source from overlapping acoustic interference to execute the first interaction, and subsequently proceeds to manipulate the secondary object, verifying the robustness of the baseline.

The RoboSense Challenge: Sense Anything, Navigate Anywhere, Adapt Across Platforms

Autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in open and dynamic environments -- from city streets to aerial and indoor spaces -- where perception models must remain reliable under sensor noise, environmental variation, and platform shifts. However, even state-of-the-art methods often degrade under unseen conditions, highlighting the need for robust and generalizable robot sensing. The RoboSense 2025 Challenge is designed to advance robustness and adaptability in robot perception across diverse sensing scenarios. It unifies five complementary research tracks spanning language-grounded decision making, socially compliant navigation, sensor configuration generalization, cross-view and cross-modal correspondence, and cross-platform 3D perception. Together, these tasks form a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating real-world sensing reliability under domain shifts, sensor failures, and platform discrepancies. RoboSense 2025 provides standardized datasets, baseline models, and unified evaluation protocols, enabling large-scale and reproducible comparison of robust perception methods. The challenge attracted 143 teams from 85 institutions across 16 countries, reflecting broad community engagement. By consolidating insights from 23 winning solutions, this report highlights emerging methodological trends, shared design principles, and open challenges across all tracks, marking a step toward building robots that can sense reliably, act robustly, and adapt across platforms in real-world environments.