Multipath Extended Target Tracking with Labeled Random Finite Sets

High-resolution radar sensors are critical for autonomous systems but pose significant challenges to traditional tracking algorithms due to the generation of multiple measurements per object and the presence of multipath effects. Existing solutions often rely on the point target assumption or treat multipath measurements as clutter, whereas current extended target trackers often lack the capability to maintain trajectory continuity in complex multipath environments. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the multipath extended target generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli (MPET-GLMB) filter. A unified Bayesian framework based on labeled random finite set theory is derived to jointly model target existence, measurement partitioning, and the association between measurements, targets, and propagation paths. This formulation enables simultaneous trajectory estimation for both targets and reflectors without requiring heuristic post-processing. To enhance computational efficiency, a joint prediction and update implementation based on Gibbs sampling is developed. Furthermore, a measurement-driven adaptive birth model is introduced to initialize tracks without prior knowledge of target positions. Experimental results from simulated scenarios and real-world automotive radar data demonstrate that the proposed filter outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior state estimation accuracy and robust trajectory maintenance in dynamic multipath environments.

GLAD: Generative Language-Assisted Visual Tracking for Low-Semantic Templates

Vision-language tracking has gained increasing attention in many scenarios. This task simultaneously deals with visual and linguistic information to localize objects in videos. Despite its growing utility, the development of vision-language tracking methods remains in its early stage. Current vision-language trackers usually employ Transformer architectures for interactive integration of template, search, and text features. However, persistent challenges about low-semantic images including prevalent image blurriness, low resolution and so on, may compromise model performance through degraded cross-modal understanding. To solve this problem, language assistance is usually used to deal with the obstacles posed by low-semantic images. However, due to the existing gap between current textual and visual features, direct concatenation and fusion of these features may have limited effectiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce a pioneering Generative Language-AssisteD tracking model, GLAD, which utilizes diffusion models for the generative multi-modal fusion of text description and template image to bolster compatibility between language and image and enhance template image semantic information. Our approach demonstrates notable improvements over the existing fusion paradigms. Blurry and semantically ambiguous template images can be restored to improve multi-modal features in the generative fusion paradigm. Experiments show that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks and achieves an impressive inference speed. The code and models will be released at: https://github.com/Confetti-lxy/GLAD

An AI Framework for Microanastomosis Motion Assessment

Proficiency in microanastomosis is a fundamental competency across multiple microsurgical disciplines. These procedures demand exceptional precision and refined technical skills, making effective, standardized assessment methods essential. Traditionally, the evaluation of microsurgical techniques has relied heavily on the subjective judgment of expert raters. They are inherently constrained by limitations such as inter-rater variability, lack of standardized evaluation criteria, susceptibility to cognitive bias, and the time-intensive nature of manual review. These shortcomings underscore the urgent need for an objective, reliable, and automated system capable of assessing microsurgical performance with consistency and scalability. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel AI framework for the automated assessment of microanastomosis instrument handling skills. The system integrates four core components: (1) an instrument detection module based on the You Only Look Once (YOLO) architecture; (2) an instrument tracking module developed from Deep Simple Online and Realtime Tracking (DeepSORT); (3) an instrument tip localization module employing shape descriptors; and (4) a supervised classification module trained on expert-labeled data to evaluate instrument handling proficiency. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework, achieving an instrument detection precision of 97%, with a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 96%, measured by Intersection over Union (IoU) thresholds ranging from 50% to 95% (mAP50-95).

Eye-Tracking-Driven Control in Daily Task Assistance for Assistive Robotic Arms

Shared control improves Human-Robot Interaction by reducing the user's workload and increasing the robot's autonomy. It allows robots to perform tasks under the user's supervision. Current eye-tracking-driven approaches face several challenges. These include accuracy issues in 3D gaze estimation and difficulty interpreting gaze when differentiating between multiple tasks. We present an eye-tracking-driven control framework, aimed at enabling individuals with severe physical disabilities to perform daily tasks independently. Our system uses task pictograms as fiducial markers combined with a feature matching approach that transmits data of the selected object to accomplish necessary task related measurements with an eye-in-hand configuration. This eye-tracking control does not require knowledge of the user's position in relation to the object. The framework correctly interpreted object and task selection in up to 97.9% of measurements. Issues were found in the evaluation, that were improved and shared as lessons learned. The open-source framework can be adapted to new tasks and objects due to the integration of state-of-the-art object detection models.

UBATrack: Spatio-Temporal State Space Model for General Multi-Modal Tracking

Multi-modal object tracking has attracted considerable attention by integrating multiple complementary inputs (e.g., thermal, depth, and event data) to achieve outstanding performance. Although current general-purpose multi-modal trackers primarily unify various modal tracking tasks (i.e., RGB-Thermal infrared, RGB-Depth or RGB-Event tracking) through prompt learning, they still overlook the effective capture of spatio-temporal cues. In this work, we introduce a novel multi-modal tracking framework based on a mamba-style state space model, termed UBATrack. Our UBATrack comprises two simple yet effective modules: a Spatio-temporal Mamba Adapter (STMA) and a Dynamic Multi-modal Feature Mixer. The former leverages Mamba's long-sequence modeling capability to jointly model cross-modal dependencies and spatio-temporal visual cues in an adapter-tuning manner. The latter further enhances multi-modal representation capacity across multiple feature dimensions to improve tracking robustness. In this way, UBATrack eliminates the need for costly full-parameter fine-tuning, thereby improving the training efficiency of multi-modal tracking algorithms. Experiments show that UBATrack outperforms state-of-the-art methods on RGB-T, RGB-D, and RGB-E tracking benchmarks, achieving outstanding results on the LasHeR, RGBT234, RGBT210, DepthTrack, VOT-RGBD22, and VisEvent datasets.

A Computer Vision Pipeline for Iterative Bullet Hole Tracking in Rifle Zeroing

Adjusting rifle sights, a process commonly called "zeroing," requires shooters to identify and differentiate bullet holes from multiple firing iterations. Traditionally, this process demands physical inspection, introducing delays due to range safety protocols and increasing the risk of human error. We present an end-to-end computer vision system for automated bullet hole detection and iteration-based tracking directly from images taken at the firing line. Our approach combines YOLOv8 for accurate small-object detection with Intersection over Union (IoU) analysis to differentiate bullet holes across sequential images. To address the scarcity of labeled sequential data, we propose a novel data augmentation technique that removes rather than adds objects to simulate realistic firing sequences. Additionally, we introduce a preprocessing pipeline that standardizes target orientation using ORB-based perspective correction, improving model accuracy. Our system achieves 97.0% mean average precision on bullet hole detection and 88.8% accuracy in assigning bullet holes to the correct firing iteration. While designed for rifle zeroing, this framework offers broader applicability in domains requiring the temporal differentiation of visually similar objects.

Diffusion-based Inverse Model of a Distributed Tactile Sensor for Object Pose Estimation

Tactile sensing provides a promising sensing modality for object pose estimation in manipulation settings where visual information is limited due to occlusion or environmental effects. However, efficiently leveraging tactile data for estimation remains a challenge due to partial observability, with single observations corresponding to multiple possible contact configurations. This limits conventional estimation approaches largely tailored to vision. We propose to address these challenges by learning an inverse tactile sensor model using denoising diffusion. The model is conditioned on tactile observations from a distributed tactile sensor and trained in simulation using a geometric sensor model based on signed distance fields. Contact constraints are enforced during inference through single-step projection using distance and gradient information from the signed distance field. For online pose estimation, we integrate the inverse model with a particle filter through a proposal scheme that combines generated hypotheses with particles from the prior belief. Our approach is validated in simulated and real-world planar pose estimation settings, without access to visual data or tight initial pose priors. We further evaluate robustness to unmodeled contact and sensor dynamics for pose tracking in a box-pushing scenario. Compared to local sampling baselines, the inverse sensor model improves sampling efficiency and estimation accuracy while preserving multimodal beliefs across objects with varying tactile discriminability.

Cell Behavior Video Classification Challenge, a benchmark for computer vision methods in time-lapse microscopy

The classification of microscopy videos capturing complex cellular behaviors is crucial for understanding and quantifying the dynamics of biological processes over time. However, it remains a frontier in computer vision, requiring approaches that effectively model the shape and motion of objects without rigid boundaries, extract hierarchical spatiotemporal features from entire image sequences rather than static frames, and account for multiple objects within the field of view. To this end, we organized the Cell Behavior Video Classification Challenge (CBVCC), benchmarking 35 methods based on three approaches: classification of tracking-derived features, end-to-end deep learning architectures to directly learn spatiotemporal features from the entire video sequence without explicit cell tracking, or ensembling tracking-derived with image-derived features. We discuss the results achieved by the participants and compare the potential and limitations of each approach, serving as a basis to foster the development of computer vision methods for studying cellular dynamics.

Latent Object Permanence: Topological Phase Transitions, Free-Energy Principles, and Renormalization Group Flows in Deep Transformer Manifolds

We study the emergence of multi-step reasoning in deep Transformer language models through a geometric and statistical-physics lens. Treating the hidden-state trajectory as a flow on an implicit Riemannian manifold, we analyze the layerwise covariance spectrum of activations, where $C^{(\ell)}=\mathbb{E}[h^{(\ell)}h^{(\ell)\top}]$, and track deviations from a random-matrix bulk. Across model scales (1.5B--30B), we observe a sharp reduction in effective dimensionality consistent with a phase transition: an order parameter based on sparsity/localization, $Ω(h)=1-\|h\|_1/(\sqrt{d}\|h\|_2)$, exhibits a discontinuity near a critical normalized depth $γ_c\approx 0.42$ in sufficiently large models. We formalize the forward pass as a discrete coarse-graining map and relate the appearance of stable "concept basins" to fixed points of this renormalization-like dynamics. The resulting low-entropy regime is characterized by a spectral tail collapse and by the formation of transient, reusable object-like structures in representation space, which we call Transient Class Objects (TCOs). We provide theoretical conditions connecting logical separability to spectral decay and validate the predicted signatures with layerwise probes on multiple open-weight model families.

Perception Test 2025: Challenge Summary and a Unified VQA Extension

The Third Perception Test challenge was organised as a full-day workshop alongside the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2025. Its primary goal is to benchmark state-of-the-art video models and measure the progress in multimodal perception. This year, the workshop featured 2 guest tracks as well: KiVA (an image understanding challenge) and Physic-IQ (a video generation challenge). In this report, we summarise the results from the main Perception Test challenge, detailing both the existing tasks as well as novel additions to the benchmark. In this iteration, we placed an emphasis on task unification, as this poses a more challenging test for current SOTA multimodal models. The challenge included five consolidated tracks: unified video QA, unified object and point tracking, unified action and sound localisation, grounded video QA, and hour-long video QA, alongside an analysis and interpretability track that is still open for submissions. Notably, the unified video QA track introduced a novel subset that reformulates traditional perception tasks (such as point tracking and temporal action localisation) as multiple-choice video QA questions that video-language models can natively tackle. The unified object and point tracking merged the original object tracking and point tracking tasks, whereas the unified action and sound localisation merged the original temporal action localisation and temporal sound localisation tracks. Accordingly, we required competitors to use unified approaches rather than engineered pipelines with task-specific models. By proposing such a unified challenge, Perception Test 2025 highlights the significant difficulties existing models face when tackling diverse perception tasks through unified interfaces.