Scene Graph-guided SegCaptioning Transformer with Fine-grained Alignment for Controllable Video Segmentation and Captioning

Recent advancements in multimodal large models have significantly bridged the representation gap between diverse modalities, catalyzing the evolution of video multimodal interpretation, which enhances users' understanding of video content by generating correlated modalities. However, most existing video multimodal interpretation methods primarily concentrate on global comprehension with limited user interaction. To address this, we propose a novel task, Controllable Video Segmentation and Captioning (SegCaptioning), which empowers users to provide specific prompts, such as a bounding box around an object of interest, to simultaneously generate correlated masks and captions that precisely embody user intent. An innovative framework Scene Graph-guided Fine-grained SegCaptioning Transformer (SG-FSCFormer) is designed that integrates a Prompt-guided Temporal Graph Former to effectively captures and represents user intent through an adaptive prompt adaptor, ensuring that the generated content well aligns with the user's requirements. Furthermore, our model introduces a Fine-grained Mask-linguistic Decoder to collaboratively predict high-quality caption-mask pairs using a Multi-entity Contrastive loss, as well as provide fine-grained alignment between each mask and its corresponding caption tokens, thereby enhancing users' comprehension of videos. Comprehensive experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that SG-FSCFormer achieves remarkable performance, effectively capturing user intent and generating precise multimodal outputs tailored to user specifications. Our code is available at https://github.com/XuZhang1211/SG-FSCFormer.

O3N: Omnidirectional Open-Vocabulary Occupancy Prediction

Understanding and reconstructing the 3D world through omnidirectional perception is an inevitable trend in the development of autonomous agents and embodied intelligence. However, existing 3D occupancy prediction methods are constrained by limited perspective inputs and predefined training distribution, making them difficult to apply to embodied agents that require comprehensive and safe perception of scenes in open world exploration. To address this, we present O3N, the first purely visual, end-to-end Omnidirectional Open-vocabulary Occupancy predictioN framework. O3N embeds omnidirectional voxels in a polar-spiral topology via the Polar-spiral Mamba (PsM) module, enabling continuous spatial representation and long-range context modeling across 360°. The Occupancy Cost Aggregation (OCA) module introduces a principled mechanism for unifying geometric and semantic supervision within the voxel space, ensuring consistency between the reconstructed geometry and the underlying semantic structure. Moreover, Natural Modality Alignment (NMA) establishes a gradient-free alignment pathway that harmonizes visual features, voxel embeddings, and text semantics, forming a consistent "pixel-voxel-text" representation triad. Extensive experiments on multiple models demonstrate that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on QuadOcc and Human360Occ benchmarks but also exhibits remarkable cross-scene generalization and semantic scalability, paving the way toward universal 3D world modeling. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/MengfeiD/O3N.

PanoAffordanceNet: Towards Holistic Affordance Grounding in 360° Indoor Environments

Global perception is essential for embodied agents in 360° spaces, yet current affordance grounding remains largely object-centric and restricted to perspective views. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task: Holistic Affordance Grounding in 360° Indoor Environments. This task faces unique challenges, including severe geometric distortions from Equirectangular Projection (ERP), semantic dispersion, and cross-scale alignment difficulties. We propose PanoAffordanceNet, an end-to-end framework featuring a Distortion-Aware Spectral Modulator (DASM) for latitude-dependent calibration and an Omni-Spherical Densification Head (OSDH) to restore topological continuity from sparse activations. By integrating multi-level constraints comprising pixel-wise, distributional, and region-text contrastive objectives, our framework effectively suppresses semantic drift under low supervision. Furthermore, we construct 360-AGD, the first high-quality panoramic affordance grounding dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PanoAffordanceNet significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing a solid baseline for scene-level perception in embodied intelligence. The source code and benchmark dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/GL-ZHU925/PanoAffordanceNet.

TRACER: Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-Thought for Deformable-Object Refinement

The central challenge in robotic manipulation of deformable objects lies in aligning high-level semantic instructions with physical interaction points under complex appearance and texture variations. Due to near-infinite degrees of freedom, complex dynamics, and heterogeneous patterns, existing vision-based affordance prediction methods often suffer from boundary overflow and fragmented functional regions. To address these issues, we propose TRACER, a Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-thought with dEformable-object Refinement framework, which establishes a cross-hierarchical mapping from hierarchical semantic reasoning to appearance-robust and physically consistent functional region refinement. Specifically, a Tree-structured Affordance Chain-of-Thought (TA-CoT) is formulated to decompose high-level task intentions into hierarchical sub-task semantics, providing consistent guidance across various execution stages. To ensure spatial integrity, a Spatial-Constrained Boundary Refinement (SCBR) mechanism is introduced to suppress prediction spillover, guiding the perceptual response to converge toward authentic interaction manifolds. Furthermore, an Interactive Convergence Refinement Flow (ICRF) is developed to aggregate discrete pixels corrupted by appearance noise, significantly enhancing the spatial continuity and physical plausibility of the identified functional regions. Extensive experiments conducted on the Fine-AGDDO15 dataset and a real-world robotic platform demonstrate that TRACER significantly improves affordance grounding precision across diverse textures and patterns inherent to deformable objects. More importantly, it enhances the success rate of long-horizon tasks, effectively bridging the gap between high-level semantic reasoning and low-level physical execution. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Dikay1/TRACER.

Learning Fine-Grained Correspondence with Cross-Perspective Perception for Open-Vocabulary 6D Object Pose Estimation

Open-vocabulary 6D object pose estimation empowers robots to manipulate arbitrary unseen objects guided solely by natural language. However, a critical limitation of existing approaches is their reliance on unconstrained global matching strategies. In open-world scenarios, trying to match anchor features against the entire query image space introduces excessive ambiguity, as target features are easily confused with background distractors. To resolve this, we propose Fine-grained Correspondence Pose Estimation (FiCoP), a framework that transitions from noise-prone global matching to spatially-constrained patch-level correspondence. Our core innovation lies in leveraging a patch-to-patch correlation matrix as a structural prior to narrowing the matching scope, effectively filtering out irrelevant clutter to prevent it from degrading pose estimation. Firstly, we introduce an object-centric disentanglement preprocessing to isolate the semantic target from environmental noise. Secondly, a Cross-Perspective Global Perception (CPGP) module is proposed to fuse dual-view features, establishing structural consensus through explicit context reasoning. Finally, we design a Patch Correlation Predictor (PCP) that generates a precise block-wise association map, acting as a spatial filter to enforce fine-grained, noise-resilient matching. Experiments on the REAL275 and Toyota-Light datasets demonstrate that FiCoP improves Average Recall by 8.0% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art method, highlighting its capability to deliver robust and generalized perception for robotic agents operating in complex, unconstrained open-world environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zjjqinyu/FiCoP.

Cross-modal Context-aware Learning for Visual Prompt Guided Multimodal Image Understanding in Remote Sensing

Recent advances in image understanding have enabled methods that leverage large language models for multimodal reasoning in remote sensing. However, existing approaches still struggle to steer models to the user-relevant regions when only simple, generic text prompts are available. Moreover, in large-scale aerial imagery many objects exhibit highly similar visual appearances and carry rich inter-object relationships, which further complicates accurate recognition. To address these challenges, we propose Cross-modal Context-aware Learning for Visual Prompt-Guided Multimodal Image Understanding (CLV-Net). CLV-Net lets users supply a simple visual cue, a bounding box, to indicate a region of interest, and uses that cue to guide the model to generate correlated segmentation masks and captions that faithfully reflect user intent. Central to our design is a Context-Aware Mask Decoder that models and integrates inter-object relationships to strengthen target representations and improve mask quality. In addition, we introduce a Semantic and Relationship Alignment module: a Cross-modal Semantic Consistency Loss enhances fine-grained discrimination among visually similar targets, while a Relationship Consistency Loss enforces alignment between textual relations and visual interactions. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that CLV-Net outperforms existing methods and establishes new state-of-the-art results. The model effectively captures user intent and produces precise, intention-aligned multimodal outputs.

AIonopedia: an LLM agent orchestrating multimodal learning for ionic liquid discovery

The discovery of novel Ionic Liquids (ILs) is hindered by critical challenges in property prediction, including limited data, poor model accuracy, and fragmented workflows. Leveraging the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce AIonopedia, to the best of our knowledge, the first LLM agent for IL discovery. Powered by an LLM-augmented multimodal domain foundation model for ILs, AIonopedia enables accurate property predictions and incorporates a hierarchical search architecture for molecular screening and design. Trained and evaluated on a newly curated and comprehensive IL dataset, our model delivers superior performance. Complementing these results, evaluations on literature-reported systems indicate that the agent can perform effective IL modification. Moving beyond offline tests, the practical efficacy was further confirmed through real-world wet-lab validation, in which the agent demonstrated exceptional generalization capabilities on challenging out-of-distribution tasks, underscoring its ability to accelerate real-world IL discovery.

AVAM: Universal Training-free Adaptive Visual Anchoring Embedded into Multimodal Large Language Model for Multi-image Question Answering

The advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has driven significant progress in Visual Question Answering (VQA), evolving from Single to Multi Image VQA (MVQA). However, the increased number of images in MVQA inevitably introduces substantial visual redundancy that is irrelevant to question answering, negatively impacting both accuracy and efficiency. To address this issue, existing methods lack flexibility in controlling the number of compressed visual tokens and tend to produce discrete visual fragments, which hinder MLLMs' ability to comprehend images holistically. In this paper, we propose a straightforward yet universal Adaptive Visual Anchoring strategy, which can be seamlessly integrated into existing MLLMs, offering significant accuracy improvements through adaptive compression. Meanwhile, to balance the results derived from both global and compressed visual input, we further introduce a novel collaborative decoding mechanism, enabling optimal performance. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating consistent performance improvements across various MLLMs. The code will be publicly available.

Panoramic Out-of-Distribution Segmentation

Panoramic imaging enables capturing 360{\deg} images with an ultra-wide Field-of-View (FoV) for dense omnidirectional perception. However, current panoramic semantic segmentation methods fail to identify outliers, and pinhole Out-of-distribution Segmentation (OoS) models perform unsatisfactorily in the panoramic domain due to background clutter and pixel distortions. To address these issues, we introduce a new task, Panoramic Out-of-distribution Segmentation (PanOoS), achieving OoS for panoramas. Furthermore, we propose the first solution, POS, which adapts to the characteristics of panoramic images through text-guided prompt distribution learning. Specifically, POS integrates a disentanglement strategy designed to materialize the cross-domain generalization capability of CLIP. The proposed Prompt-based Restoration Attention (PRA) optimizes semantic decoding by prompt guidance and self-adaptive correction, while Bilevel Prompt Distribution Learning (BPDL) refines the manifold of per-pixel mask embeddings via semantic prototype supervision. Besides, to compensate for the scarcity of PanOoS datasets, we establish two benchmarks: DenseOoS, which features diverse outliers in complex environments, and QuadOoS, captured by a quadruped robot with a panoramic annular lens system. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance of POS, with AuPRC improving by 34.25% and FPR95 decreasing by 21.42% on DenseOoS, outperforming state-of-the-art pinhole-OoS methods. Moreover, POS achieves leading closed-set segmentation capabilities. Code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/MengfeiD/PanOoS.

HierDAMap: Towards Universal Domain Adaptive BEV Mapping via Hierarchical Perspective Priors

The exploration of Bird's-Eye View (BEV) mapping technology has driven significant innovation in visual perception technology for autonomous driving. BEV mapping models need to be applied to the unlabeled real world, making the study of unsupervised domain adaptation models an essential path. However, research on unsupervised domain adaptation for BEV mapping remains limited and cannot perfectly accommodate all BEV mapping tasks. To address this gap, this paper proposes HierDAMap, a universal and holistic BEV domain adaptation framework with hierarchical perspective priors. Unlike existing research that solely focuses on image-level learning using prior knowledge, this paper explores the guiding role of perspective prior knowledge across three distinct levels: global, sparse, and instance levels. With these priors, HierDA consists of three essential components, including Semantic-Guided Pseudo Supervision (SGPS), Dynamic-Aware Coherence Learning (DACL), and Cross-Domain Frustum Mixing (CDFM). SGPS constrains the cross-domain consistency of perspective feature distribution through pseudo labels generated by vision foundation models in 2D space. To mitigate feature distribution discrepancies caused by spatial variations, DACL employs uncertainty-aware predicted depth as an intermediary to derive dynamic BEV labels from perspective pseudo-labels, thereby constraining the coarse BEV features derived from corresponding perspective features. CDFM, on the other hand, leverages perspective masks of view frustum to mix multi-view perspective images from both domains, which guides cross-domain view transformation and encoding learning through mixed BEV labels. The proposed method is verified on multiple BEV mapping tasks, such as BEV semantic segmentation, high-definition semantic, and vectorized mapping. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lynn-yu/HierDAMap.