Enhanced LULC Segmentation via Lightweight Model Refinements on ALOS-2 SAR Data

This work focuses on national-scale land-use/land-cover (LULC) semantic segmentation using ALOS-2 single-polarization (HH) SAR data over Japan, together with a companion binary water detection task. Building on SAR-W-MixMAE self-supervised pretraining [1], we address common SAR dense-prediction failure modes, boundary over-smoothing, missed thin/slender structures, and rare-class degradation under long-tailed labels, without increasing pipeline complexity. We introduce three lightweight refinements: (i) injecting high-resolution features into multi-scale decoding, (ii) a progressive refine-up head that alternates convolutional refinement and stepwise upsampling, and (iii) an $α$-scale factor that tempers class reweighting within a focal+dice objective. The resulting model yields consistent improvements on the Japan-wide ALOS-2 LULC benchmark, particularly for under-represented classes, and improves water detection across standard evaluation metrics.

MVGD-Net: A Novel Motion-aware Video Glass Surface Detection Network

Glass surface ubiquitous in both daily life and professional environments presents a potential threat to vision-based systems, such as robot and drone navigation. To solve this challenge, most recent studies have shown significant interest in Video Glass Surface Detection (VGSD). We observe that objects in the reflection (or transmission) layer appear farther from the glass surfaces. Consequently, in video motion scenarios, the notable reflected (or transmitted) objects on the glass surface move slower than objects in non-glass regions within the same spatial plane, and this motion inconsistency can effectively reveal the presence of glass surfaces. Based on this observation, we propose a novel network, named MVGD-Net, for detecting glass surfaces in videos by leveraging motion inconsistency cues. Our MVGD-Net features three novel modules: the Cross-scale Multimodal Fusion Module (CMFM) that integrates extracted spatial features and estimated optical flow maps, the History Guided Attention Module (HGAM) and Temporal Cross Attention Module (TCAM), both of which further enhances temporal features. A Temporal-Spatial Decoder (TSD) is also introduced to fuse the spatial and temporal features for generating the glass region mask. Furthermore, for learning our network, we also propose a large-scale dataset, which comprises 312 diverse glass scenarios with a total of 19,268 frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MVGD-Net outperforms relevant state-of-the-art methods.

SpatialMem: Unified 3D Memory with Metric Anchoring and Fast Retrieval

We present SpatialMem, a memory-centric system that unifies 3D geometry, semantics, and language into a single, queryable representation. Starting from casually captured egocentric RGB video, SpatialMem reconstructs metrically scaled indoor environments, detects structural 3D anchors (walls, doors, windows) as the first-layer scaffold, and populates a hierarchical memory with open-vocabulary object nodes -- linking evidence patches, visual embeddings, and two-layer textual descriptions to 3D coordinates -- for compact storage and fast retrieval. This design enables interpretable reasoning over spatial relations (e.g., distance, direction, visibility) and supports downstream tasks such as language-guided navigation and object retrieval without specialized sensors. Experiments across three real-life indoor scenes demonstrate that SpatialMem maintains strong anchor-description-level navigation completion and hierarchical retrieval accuracy under increasing clutter and occlusion, offering an efficient and extensible framework for embodied spatial intelligence.

ISAC-over-NTN: HAPS-UAV Framework for Post-Disaster Responsive 6G Networks

In disaster scenarios, ensuring both reliable communication and situational awareness becomes a critical challenge due to the partial or complete collapse of terrestrial networks. This paper proposes an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) over non-terrestrial networks (NTN) architecture referred to as ISAC-over-NTN that integrates multiple uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) and a high-altitude platform station (HAPS) to maintain resilient and reliable network operations in post-disaster conditions. We aim to achieve two main objectives: i) provide a reliable communication infrastructure, thereby ensuring the continuity of search-and-rescue activities and connecting people to their loved ones, and ii) detect users, such as those trapped under rubble or those who are mobile, using a Doppler-based mobility detection model. We employ an innovative beamforming method that simultaneously transmits data and detects Doppler-based mobility by integrating multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) communication and monostatic sensing within the same transmission chain. The results show that the proposed framework maintains reliable connectivity and achieves high detection accuracy of users in critical locations, reaching 90% motion detection sensitivity and 88% detection accuracy.

SpatialBench-UC: Uncertainty-Aware Evaluation of Spatial Prompt Following in Text-to-Image Generation

Evaluating whether text-to-image models follow explicit spatial instructions is difficult to automate. Object detectors may miss targets or return multiple plausible detections, and simple geometric tests can become ambiguous in borderline cases. Spatial evaluation is naturally a selective prediction problem, the checker may abstain when evidence is weak and report confidence so that results can be interpreted as a risk coverage tradeoff rather than a single score. We introduce SpatialBench-UC, a small, reproducible benchmark for pairwise spatial relations. The benchmark contains 200 prompts (50 object pairs times 4 relations) grouped into 100 counterfactual pairs obtained by swapping object roles. We release a benchmark package, versioned prompts, pinned configs, per-sample checker outputs, and report tables, enabling reproducible and auditable comparisons across models. We also include a lightweight human audit used to calibrate the checker's abstention margin and confidence threshold. We evaluate three baselines, Stable Diffusion 1.5, SD 1.5 BoxDiff, and SD 1.4 GLIGEN. The checker reports pass rate and coverage as well as conditional pass rates on decided samples. The results show that grounding methods substantially improve both pass rate and coverage, while abstention remains a dominant factor due mainly to missing detections.

Towards Bound Consistency for the No-Overlap Constraint Using MDDs

Achieving bound consistency for the no-overlap constraint is known to be NP-complete. Therefore, several polynomial-time tightening techniques, such as edge finding, not-first-not-last reasoning, and energetic reasoning, have been introduced for this constraint. In this work, we derive the first bound-consistent algorithm for the no-overlap constraint. By building on the no-overlap MDD defined by Ciré and van Hoeve, we extract bounds of the time window of the jobs, allowing us to tighten start and end times in time polynomial in the number of nodes of the MDD. Similarly, to bound the size and time-complexity, we limit the width of the MDD to a threshold, creating a relaxed MDD that can also be used to relax the bound-consistent filtering. Through experiments on a sequencing problem with time windows and a just-in-time objective ($1 \mid r_j, d_j, \bar{d}_j \mid \sum E_j + \sum T_j$), we observe that the proposed filtering, even with a threshold on the width, achieves a stronger reduction in the number of nodes visited in the search tree compared to the previously proposed precedence-detection algorithm of Ciré and van Hoeve. The new filtering also appears to be complementary to classical propagation methods for the no-overlap constraint, allowing a substantial reduction in both the number of nodes and the solving time on several instances.

Active Cross-Modal Visuo-Tactile Perception of Deformable Linear Objects

This paper presents a novel cross-modal visuo-tactile perception framework for the 3D shape reconstruction of deformable linear objects (DLOs), with a specific focus on cables subject to severe visual occlusions. Unlike existing methods relying predominantly on vision, whose performance degrades under varying illumination, background clutter, or partial visibility, the proposed approach integrates foundation-model-based visual perception with adaptive tactile exploration. The visual pipeline exploits SAM for instance segmentation and Florence for semantic refinement, followed by skeletonization, endpoint detection, and point-cloud extraction. Occluded cable segments are autonomously identified and explored with a tactile sensor, which provides local point clouds that are merged with the visual data through Euclidean clustering and topology-preserving fusion. A B-spline interpolation driven by endpoint-guided point sorting yields a smooth and complete reconstruction of the cable shape. Experimental validation using a robotic manipulator equipped with an RGB-D camera and a tactile pad demonstrates that the proposed framework accurately reconstructs both simple and highly curved single or multiple cable configurations, even when large portions are occluded. These results highlight the potential of foundation-model-enhanced cross-modal perception for advancing robotic manipulation of deformable objects.

Order from Chaos: Physical World Understanding from Glitchy Gameplay Videos

Understanding the physical world, including object dynamics, material properties, and causal interactions, remains a core challenge in artificial intelligence. Although recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive general reasoning capabilities, they still fall short of achieving human-level understanding of physical principles. Existing datasets for physical reasoning either rely on real-world videos, which incur high annotation costs, or on synthetic simulations, which suffer from limited realism and diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm that leverages glitches in gameplay videos, referring to visual anomalies that violate predefined physical laws, as a rich and scalable supervision source for physical world understanding. We introduce PhysGame, an meta information guided instruction-tuning dataset containing 140,057 glitch-centric question-answer pairs across five physical domains and sixteen fine-grained categories. To ensure data accuracy, we design a prompting strategy that utilizes gameplay metadata such as titles and descriptions to guide high-quality QA generation. Complementing PhysGame, we construct GameBench, an expert-annotated benchmark with 880 glitch-identified gameplay videos designed to evaluate physical reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments show that PhysGame significantly enhances both Game2Real transferability, improving the real world physical reasoning performance of Qwen2.5VL by 2.5% on PhysBench, and Game2General transferability, yielding a 1.9% gain on the MVBench benchmark. Moreover, PhysGame-tuned models achieve a 3.7% absolute improvement on GameBench, demonstrating enhanced robustness in detecting physical implausibilities. These results indicate that learning from gameplay anomalies offers a scalable and effective pathway toward advancing physical world understanding in multimodal intelligence.

Human detectors are surprisingly powerful reward models

Video generation models have recently achieved impressive visual fidelity and temporal coherence. Yet, they continue to struggle with complex, non-rigid motions, especially when synthesizing humans performing dynamic actions such as sports, dance, etc. Generated videos often exhibit missing or extra limbs, distorted poses, or physically implausible actions. In this work, we propose a remarkably simple reward model, HuDA, to quantify and improve the human motion in generated videos. HuDA integrates human detection confidence for appearance quality, and a temporal prompt alignment score to capture motion realism. We show this simple reward function that leverages off-the-shelf models without any additional training, outperforms specialized models finetuned with manually annotated data. Using HuDA for Group Reward Policy Optimization (GRPO) post-training of video models, we significantly enhance video generation, especially when generating complex human motions, outperforming state-of-the-art models like Wan 2.1, with win-rate of 73%. Finally, we demonstrate that HuDA improves generation quality beyond just humans, for instance, significantly improving generation of animal videos and human-object interactions.

Are LLMs Smarter Than Chimpanzees? An Evaluation on Perspective Taking and Knowledge State Estimation

Cognitive anthropology suggests that the distinction of human intelligence lies in the ability to infer other individuals' knowledge states and understand their intentions. In comparison, our closest animal relative, chimpanzees, lack the capacity to do so. With this paper, we aim to evaluate LLM performance in the area of knowledge state tracking and estimation. We design two tasks to test (1) if LLMs can detect when story characters, through their actions, demonstrate knowledge they should not possess, and (2) if LLMs can predict story characters' next actions based on their own knowledge vs. objective truths they do not know. Results reveal that most current state-of-the-art LLMs achieve near-random performance on both tasks, and are substantially inferior to humans. We argue future LLM research should place more weight on the abilities of knowledge estimation and intention understanding.