Fus3D: Decoding Consolidated 3D Geometry from Feed-forward Geometry Transformer Latents

We propose a feed-forward method for dense Signed Distance Field (SDF) regression from unstructured image collections in less than three seconds, without camera calibration or post-hoc fusion. Our key insight is that the intermediate feature space of pretrained multi-view feed-forward geometry transformers already encodes a powerful joint world representation; yet, existing pipelines discard it, routing features through per-view prediction heads before assembling 3D geometry post-hoc, which discards valuable completeness information and accumulates inaccuracies. We instead perform 3D extraction directly from geometry transformer features via learned volumetric extraction: voxelized canonical embeddings that progressively absorb multi-view geometry information through interleaved cross- and self-attention into a structured volumetric latent grid. A simple convolutional decoder then maps this grid to a dense SDF. We additionally propose a scalable, validity-aware supervision scheme directly using SDFs derived from depth maps or 3D assets, tackling practical issues like non-watertight meshes. Our approach yields complete and well-defined distance values across sparse- and dense-view settings and demonstrates geometrically plausible completions. Code and further material can be found at https://lorafib.github.io/fus3d.

ColBERT-Att: Late-Interaction Meets Attention for Enhanced Retrieval

Vector embeddings from pre-trained language models form a core component in Neural Information Retrieval systems across a multitude of knowledge extraction tasks. The paradigm of late interaction, introduced in ColBERT, demonstrates high accuracy along with runtime efficiency. However, the current formulation fails to take into account the attention weights of query and document terms, which intuitively capture the "importance" of similarities between them, that might lead to a better understanding of relevance between the queries and documents. This work proposes ColBERT-Att, to explicitly integrate attention mechanism into the late interaction framework for enhanced retrieval performance. Empirical evaluation of ColBERT-Att depicts improvements in recall accuracy on MS-MARCO as well as on a wide range of BEIR and LoTTE benchmark datasets.

Face2Parts: Exploring Coarse-to-Fine Inter-Regional Facial Dependencies for Generalized Deepfake Detection

Multimedia data, particularly images and videos, is integral to various applications, including surveillance, visual interaction, biometrics, evidence gathering, and advertising. However, amateur or skilled counterfeiters can simulate them to create deepfakes, often for slanderous motives. To address this challenge, several forensic methods have been developed to ensure the authenticity of the content. The effectiveness of these methods depends on their focus, with challenges arising from the diverse nature of manipulations. In this article, we analyze existing forensic methods and observe that each method has unique strengths in detecting deepfake traces by focusing on specific facial regions, such as the frame, face, lips, eyes, or nose. Considering these insights, we propose a novel hybrid approach called Face2Parts based on hierarchical feature representation ($HFR$) that takes advantage of coarse-to-fine information to improve deepfake detection. The proposed method involves extracting features from the frame, face, and key facial regions (i.e., lips, eyes, and nose) separately to explore the coarse-to-fine relationships. This approach enables us to capture inter-dependencies among facial regions using a channel-attention mechanism and deep triplet learning. We evaluated the proposed method on benchmark deepfake datasets in both intra-, inter-dataset, and inter-manipulation settings. The proposed method achieves an average AUC of 98.42\% on FF++, 79.80\% on CDF1, 85.34\% on CDF2, 89.41\% on DFD, 84.07\% on DFDC, 95.62\% on DTIM, 80.76\% on PDD, and 100\% on WLDR, respectively. The results demonstrate that our approach generalizes effectively and achieves promising performance to outperform the existing methods.

Beyond Ground-Truth: Leveraging Image Quality Priors for Real-World Image Restoration

Real-world image restoration aims to restore high-quality (HQ) images from degraded low-quality (LQ) inputs captured under uncontrolled conditions. Existing methods typically depend on ground-truth (GT) supervision, assuming that GT provides perfect reference quality. However, GT can still contain images with inconsistent perceptual fidelity, causing models to converge to the average quality level of the training data rather than achieving the highest perceptual quality attainable. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework, termed IQPIR, that introduces an Image Quality Prior (IQP)-extracted from pre-trained No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) models-to guide the restoration process toward perceptually optimal outputs explicitly. Our approach synergistically integrates IQP with a learned codebook prior through three key mechanisms: (1) a quality-conditioned Transformer, where NR-IQA-derived scores serve as conditioning signals to steer the predicted representation toward maximal perceptual quality. This design provides a plug-and-play enhancement compatible with existing restoration architectures without structural modification; and (2) a dual-branch codebook structure, which disentangles common and HQ-specific features, ensuring a comprehensive representation of both generic structural information and quality-sensitive attributes; and (3) a discrete representation-based quality optimization strategy, which mitigates over-optimization effects commonly observed in continuous latent spaces. Extensive experiments on real-world image restoration demonstrate that our method not only surpasses cutting-edge methods but also serves as a generalizable quality-guided enhancement strategy for existing methods. The code is available.

Towards Practical Lossless Neural Compression for LiDAR Point Clouds

LiDAR point clouds are fundamental to various applications, yet the extreme sparsity of high-precision geometric details hinders efficient context modeling, thereby limiting the compression speed and performance of existing methods. To address this challenge, we propose a compact representation for efficient predictive lossless coding. Our framework comprises two lightweight modules. First, the Geometry Re-Densification Module iteratively densifies encoded sparse geometry, extracts features at a dense scale, and then sparsifies the features for predictive coding. This module avoids costly computation on highly sparse details while maintaining a lightweight prediction head. Second, the Cross-scale Feature Propagation Module leverages occupancy cues from multiple resolution levels to guide hierarchical feature propagation, enabling information sharing across scales and reducing redundant feature extraction. Additionally, we introduce an integer-only inference pipeline to enable bit-exact cross-platform consistency, which avoids the entropy-coding collapse observed in existing neural compression methods and further accelerates coding. Experiments demonstrate competitive compression performance at real-time speed. Code will be released upon acceptance. Code is available at https://github.com/pengpeng-yu/FastPCC.

TrackMAE: Video Representation Learning via Track Mask and Predict

Masked video modeling (MVM) has emerged as a simple and scalable self-supervised pretraining paradigm, but only encodes motion information implicitly, limiting the encoding of temporal dynamics in the learned representations. As a result, such models struggle on motion-centric tasks that require fine-grained motion awareness. To address this, we propose TrackMAE, a simple masked video modeling paradigm that explicitly uses motion information as a reconstruction signal. In TrackMAE, we use an off-the-shelf point tracker to sparsely track points in the input videos, generating motion trajectories. Furthermore, we exploit the extracted trajectories to improve random tube masking with a motion-aware masking strategy. We enhance video representations learned in both pixel and feature semantic reconstruction spaces by providing a complementary supervision signal in the form of motion targets. We evaluate on six datasets across diverse downstream settings and find that TrackMAE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art video self-supervised learning baselines, learning more discriminative and generalizable representations. Code available at https://github.com/rvandeghen/TrackMAE

PeopleSearchBench: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Evaluating AI-Powered People Search Platforms

AI-powered people search platforms are increasingly used in recruiting, sales prospecting, and professional networking, yet no widely accepted benchmark exists for evaluating their performance. We introduce PeopleSearchBench, an open-source benchmark that compares four people search platforms on 119 real-world queries across four use cases: corporate recruiting, B2B sales prospecting, expert search with deterministic answers, and influencer/KOL discovery. A key contribution is Criteria-Grounded Verification, a factual relevance pipeline that extracts explicit, verifiable criteria from each query and uses live web search to determine whether returned people satisfy them. This produces binary relevance judgments grounded in factual verification rather than subjective holistic LLM-as-judge scores. We evaluate systems on three dimensions: Relevance Precision (padded nDCG@10), Effective Coverage (task completion and qualified result yield), and Information Utility (profile completeness and usefulness), averaged equally into an overall score. Lessie, a specialized AI people search agent, performs best overall, scoring 65.2, 18.5% higher than the second-ranked system, and is the only system to achieve 100% task completion across all 119 queries. We also report confidence intervals, human validation of the verification pipeline (Cohen's kappa = 0.84), ablations, and full documentation of queries, prompts, and normalization procedures. Code, query definitions, and aggregated results are available on GitHub.

Contour-Guided Query-Based Feature Fusion for Boundary-Aware and Generalizable Cardiac Ultrasound Segmentation

Accurate cardiac ultrasound segmentation is essential for reliable assessment of ventricular function in intelligent healthcare systems. However, echocardiographic images are challenging due to low contrast, speckle noise, irregular boundaries, and domain shifts across devices and patient populations. Existing methods, largely based on appearance-driven learning, often fail to preserve boundary precision and structural consistency under these conditions. To address these issues, we propose a Contour-Guided Query Refinement Network (CGQR-Net) for boundary-aware cardiac ultrasound segmentation. The framework integrates multi-resolution feature representations with contour-derived structural priors. An HRNet backbone preserves high-resolution spatial details while capturing multi-scale context. A coarse segmentation is first generated, from which anatomical contours are extracted and encoded into learnable query embeddings. These contour-guided queries interact with fused feature maps via cross-attention, enabling structure-aware refinement that improves boundary delineation and reduces noise artifacts. A dual-head supervision strategy jointly optimizes segmentation and boundary prediction to enforce structural consistency. The proposed method is evaluated on the CAMUS dataset and further validated on the CardiacNet dataset to assess cross-dataset generalization. Experimental results demonstrate improved segmentation accuracy, enhanced boundary precision, and robust performance across varying imaging conditions. These results highlight the effectiveness of integrating contour-level structural information with feature-level representations for reliable cardiac ultrasound segmentation.

FEAST: Fully Connected Expressive Attention for Spatial Transcriptomics

Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) provides spatially-resolved gene expression, offering crucial insights into tissue architecture and complex diseases. However, its prohibitive cost limits widespread adoption, leading to significant attention on inferring spatial gene expression from readily available whole slide images. While graph neural networks have been proposed to model interactions between tissue regions, their reliance on pre-defined sparse graphs prevents them from considering potentially interacting spot pairs, resulting in a structural limitation in capturing complex biological relationships. To address this, we propose FEAST (Fully connected Expressive Attention for Spatial Transcriptomics), an attention-based framework that models the tissue as a fully connected graph, enabling the consideration of all pairwise interactions. To better reflect biological interactions, we introduce negative-aware attention, which models both excitatory and inhibitory interactions, capturing essential negative relationships that standard attention often overlooks. Furthermore, to mitigate the information loss from truncated or ignored context in standard spot image extraction, we introduce an off-grid sampling strategy that gathers additional images from intermediate regions, allowing the model to capture a richer morphological context. Experiments on public ST datasets show that FEAST surpasses state-of-the-art methods in gene expression prediction while providing biologically plausible attention maps that clarify positive and negative interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/starforTJ/ FEAST.

DSO: Dual-Scale Neural Operators for Stable Long-term Fluid Dynamics Forecasting

Long-term fluid dynamics forecasting is a critically important problem in science and engineering. While neural operators have emerged as a promising paradigm for modeling systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), they often struggle with long-term stability and precision. We identify two fundamental failure modes in existing architectures: (1) local detail blurring, where fine-scale structures such as vortex cores and sharp gradients are progressively smoothed, and (2) global trend deviation, where the overall motion trajectory drifts from the ground truth during extended rollouts. We argue that these failures arise because existing neural operators treat local and global information processing uniformly, despite their inherently different evolution characteristics in physical systems. To bridge this gap, we propose the Dual-Scale Neural Operator (DSO), which explicitly decouples information processing into two complementary modules: depthwise separable convolutions for fine-grained local feature extraction and an MLP-Mixer for long-range global aggregation. Through numerical experiments on vortex dynamics, we demonstrate that nearby perturbations primarily affect local vortex structure while distant perturbations influence global motion trends, providing empirical validation for our design choice. Extensive experiments on turbulent flow benchmarks show that DSO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while maintaining robust long-term stability, reducing prediction error by over 88% compared to existing neural operators.