Daily Papers

We present a central-peripheral vision-inspired framework (CVP), a simple yet effective multimodal model for spatial reasoning that draws inspiration from the two types of human visual fields -- central vision and peripheral vision. Existing approaches primarily rely on unstructured representations, such as point clouds, voxels, or patch features, and inject scene context implicitly via coordinate embeddings. However, this often results in limited spatial reasoning capabilities due to the lack of explicit, high-level structural understanding. To address this limitation, we introduce two complementary components into a Large Multimodal Model-based architecture: target-affinity token, analogous to central vision, that guides the model's attention toward query-relevant objects; and allocentric grid, akin to peripheral vision, that captures global scene context and spatial arrangements. These components work in tandem to enable structured, context-aware understanding of complex 3D environments. Experiments show that CVP achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of 3D scene understanding benchmarks.

In the primate visual system, center-preferring cortical populations have higher spatial resolution and overlap face- and word-selective regions while periphery-preferring populations have lower spatial resolution and overlap scene-selective regions. This "eccentricity bias" may reflect differential task-relevance: central vision may better support fine-grained tasks like face recognition and reading, while peripheral vision may better support scene understanding. To test whether eccentricity-dependent coding can emerge from natural experience, we used egocentric video and eye-tracking data from the Visual Experience Dataset (VEDB). We trained ResNet-18 models using contrastive learning (SimCLR) on frames modified to isolate different eccentricities (gaze-contingent fovea-only crops, periphery-only crops, and periphery-only crops with a NeuroFovea transform applied). We evaluated downstream task performance and model alignment with human fMRI data (Natural Scenes Dataset; encoding models). In-domain VEDB frame classification showed systematic differences between fovea- and periphery-only models across categories, indicating differential informativeness across tasks. On downstream classification, VEDB-pretrained models generalized better to scene categorization (Places365) than face recognition (VGGFace2), with fovea-only models stronger on both. Across visual cortex, VEDB-pretrained models matched neural predictivity of models trained on mid-sized non-egocentric datasets (ImageNet-100), suggesting egocentric data supports emergence of cortically-aligned representations. In scene-selective cortex (PPA, RSC), periphery-only models held a small but consistent advantage in explained variance over fovea-only models, suggesting these regions are aligned with peripheral statistics. Together, these results suggest egocentric experience may adaptively constrain cortical information processing.

Recent self-supervised learning (SSL) models trained on human-like egocentric visual inputs substantially underperform on image recognition tasks compared to humans. These models train on raw, uniform visual inputs collected from head-mounted cameras. This is different from humans, as the anatomical structure of the retina and visual cortex relatively amplifies the central visual information, i.e. around humans' gaze location. This selective amplification in humans likely aids in forming object-centered visual representations. Here, we investigate whether focusing on central visual information boosts egocentric visual object learning. We simulate 5-months of egocentric visual experience using the large-scale Ego4D dataset and generate gaze locations with a human gaze prediction model. To account for the importance of central vision in humans, we crop the visual area around the gaze location. Finally, we train a time-based SSL model on these modified inputs. Our experiments demonstrate that focusing on central vision leads to better object-centered representations. Our analysis shows that the SSL model leverages the temporal dynamics of the gaze movements to build stronger visual representations. Overall, our work marks a significant step toward bio-inspired learning of visual representations.

The goal of this work is to characterize the representational impact that foveation operations have for machine vision systems, inspired by the foveated human visual system, which has higher acuity at the center of gaze and texture-like encoding in the periphery. To do so, we introduce models consisting of a first-stage fixed image transform followed by a second-stage learnable convolutional neural network, and we varied the first stage component. The primary model has a foveated-textural input stage, which we compare to a model with foveated-blurred input and a model with spatially-uniform blurred input (both matched for perceptual compression), and a final reference model with minimal input-based compression. We find that: 1) the foveated-texture model shows similar scene classification accuracy as the reference model despite its compressed input, with greater i.i.d. generalization than the other models; 2) the foveated-texture model has greater sensitivity to high-spatial frequency information and greater robustness to occlusion, w.r.t the comparison models; 3) both the foveated systems, show a stronger center image-bias relative to the spatially-uniform systems even with a weight sharing constraint. Critically, these results are preserved over different classical CNN architectures throughout their learning dynamics. Altogether, this suggests that foveation with peripheral texture-based computations yields an efficient, distinct, and robust representational format of scene information, and provides symbiotic computational insight into the representational consequences that texture-based peripheral encoding may have for processing in the human visual system, while also potentially inspiring the next generation of computer vision models via spatially-adaptive computation. Code + Data available here: https://github.com/ArturoDeza/EmergentProperties

Egocentric vision (a.k.a. first-person vision - FPV) applications have thrived over the past few years, thanks to the availability of affordable wearable cameras and large annotated datasets. The position of the wearable camera (usually mounted on the head) allows recording exactly what the camera wearers have in front of them, in particular hands and manipulated objects. This intrinsic advantage enables the study of the hands from multiple perspectives: localizing hands and their parts within the images; understanding what actions and activities the hands are involved in; and developing human-computer interfaces that rely on hand gestures. In this survey, we review the literature that focuses on the hands using egocentric vision, categorizing the existing approaches into: localization (where are the hands or parts of them?); interpretation (what are the hands doing?); and application (e.g., systems that used egocentric hand cues for solving a specific problem). Moreover, a list of the most prominent datasets with hand-based annotations is provided.

From a falcon detecting prey to humans recognizing faces, many species exhibit extraordinary abilities in rapid visual localization and classification. These are made possible by a specialized retinal region called the fovea, which provides high acuity at the center of vision while maintaining lower resolution in the periphery. This distinctive spatial organization, preserved along the early visual pathway through retinotopic mapping, is fundamental to biological vision, yet remains largely unexplored in machine learning. Our study investigates how incorporating foveated retinotopy may benefit deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification tasks. By implementing a foveated retinotopic transformation in the input layer of standard ResNet models and re-training them, we maintain comparable classification accuracy while enhancing the network's robustness to scale and rotational perturbations. Although this architectural modification introduces increased sensitivity to fixation point shifts, we demonstrate how this apparent limitation becomes advantageous: variations in classification probabilities across different gaze positions serve as effective indicators for object localization. Our findings suggest that foveated retinotopic mapping encodes implicit knowledge about visual object geometry, offering an efficient solution to the visual search problem - a capability crucial for many living species.

Spatiotemporal predictive learning (STPL) aims to forecast future frames from past observations and is essential across a wide range of applications. Compared with recurrent or hybrid architectures, pure convolutional models offer superior efficiency and full parallelism, yet their fixed receptive fields limit their ability to adaptively capture spatially varying motion patterns. Inspired by biological center-surround organization and frequency-selective signal processing, we propose PFGNet, a fully convolutional framework that dynamically modulates receptive fields through pixel-wise frequency-guided gating. The core Peripheral Frequency Gating (PFG) block extracts localized spectral cues and adaptively fuses multi-scale large-kernel peripheral responses with learnable center suppression, effectively forming spatially adaptive band-pass filters. To maintain efficiency, all large kernels are decomposed into separable 1D convolutions (1 times k followed by k times 1), reducing per-channel computational cost from O(k^2) to O(2k). PFGNet enables structure-aware spatiotemporal modeling without recurrence or attention. Experiments on Moving MNIST, TaxiBJ, Human3.6M, and KTH show that PFGNet delivers SOTA or near-SOTA forecasting performance with substantially fewer parameters and FLOPs. Our code is available at https://github.com/fhjdqaq/PFGNet.

Diffusion and flow matching models have unlocked unprecedented capabilities for creative content creation, such as interactive image and streaming video generation. The growing demand for higher resolutions, frame rates, and context lengths, however, makes efficient generation increasingly challenging, as computational complexity grows quadratically with the number of generated tokens. Our work seeks to optimize the efficiency of the generation process in settings where the user's gaze location is known or can be estimated, for example, by using eye tracking. In these settings, we leverage the eccentricity-dependent acuity of human vision: while a user perceives very high-resolution visual information in a small region around their gaze location (the foveal region), the ability to resolve detail quickly degrades in the periphery of the visual field. Our approach starts with a mask modeling the foveated resolution to allocate tokens non-uniformly, assigning higher token density to foveal regions and lower density to peripheral regions. An image or video is generated in a mixed-resolution token setting, yielding results perceptually indistinguishable from full-resolution generation, while drastically reducing the token count and generation time. To this end, we develop a principled mechanism for constructing mixed-resolution tokens directly from high-resolution data, allowing a foveated diffusion model to be post-trained from an existing base model while maintaining content consistency across resolutions. We validate our approach through extensive analysis and a carefully designed user study, demonstrating the efficacy of foveation as a practical and scalable axis for efficient generation.

Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) aims to adapt pretrained detectors from a source domain to target domains with limited annotations, suffering from severe domain shifts and data scarcity problems. In this work, we find a previously overlooked phenomenon: models exhibit dispersed and unfocused attention in target domains, leading to imprecise localization and redundant predictions, just like a human cannot focus on visual objects. Therefore, we call it the target-domain Astigmatism problem. Analysis on attention distances across transformer layers reveals that regular fine-tuning inherently shows a trend to remedy this problem, but results are still far from satisfactory, which we aim to enhance in this paper. Biologically inspired by the human fovea-style visual system, we enhance the fine-tuning's inherent trend through a center-periphery attention refinement framework, which contains (1) a Positive Pattern Refinement module to reshape attention toward semantic objects using class-specific prototypes, simulating the visual center region; (2) a Negative Context Modulation module to enhance boundary discrimination by modeling background context, simulating the visual periphery region; and (3) a Textual Semantic Alignment module to strengthen center-periphery distinction through cross-modal cues. Our bio-inspired approach transforms astigmatic attention into focused patterns, substantially improving adaptation to target domains. Experiments on six challenging CD-FSOD benchmarks consistently demonstrate improved detection accuracy and establish new state-of-the-art results.

Recent work suggests that representations learned by adversarially robust networks are more human perceptually-aligned than non-robust networks via image manipulations. Despite appearing closer to human visual perception, it is unclear if the constraints in robust DNN representations match biological constraints found in human vision. Human vision seems to rely on texture-based/summary statistic representations in the periphery, which have been shown to explain phenomena such as crowding and performance on visual search tasks. To understand how adversarially robust optimizations/representations compare to human vision, we performed a psychophysics experiment using a set of metameric discrimination tasks where we evaluated how well human observers could distinguish between images synthesized to match adversarially robust representations compared to non-robust representations and a texture synthesis model of peripheral vision (Texforms). We found that the discriminability of robust representation and texture model images decreased to near chance performance as stimuli were presented farther in the periphery. Moreover, performance on robust and texture-model images showed similar trends within participants, while performance on non-robust representations changed minimally across the visual field. These results together suggest that (1) adversarially robust representations capture peripheral computation better than non-robust representations and (2) robust representations capture peripheral computation similar to current state-of-the-art texture peripheral vision models. More broadly, our findings support the idea that localized texture summary statistic representations may drive human invariance to adversarial perturbations and that the incorporation of such representations in DNNs could give rise to useful properties like adversarial robustness.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies and wearable devices, egocentric vision understanding has emerged as a new and challenging research direction, gradually attracting widespread attention from both academia and industry. Egocentric vision captures visual and multimodal data through cameras or sensors worn on the human body, offering a unique perspective that simulates human visual experiences. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the research on egocentric vision understanding, systematically analyzing the components of egocentric scenes and categorizing the tasks into four main areas: subject understanding, object understanding, environment understanding, and hybrid understanding. We explore in detail the sub-tasks within each category. We also summarize the main challenges and trends currently existing in the field. Furthermore, this paper presents an overview of high-quality egocentric vision datasets, offering valuable resources for future research. By summarizing the latest advancements, we anticipate the broad applications of egocentric vision technologies in fields such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and embodied intelligence, and propose future research directions based on the latest developments in the field.

Human perception of the world is shaped by a multitude of viewpoints and modalities. While many existing datasets focus on scene understanding from a certain perspective (e.g. egocentric or third-person views), our dataset offers a panoptic perspective (i.e. multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities). Specifically, we encapsulate third-person panoramic and front views, as well as egocentric monocular/binocular views with rich modalities including video, multi-channel audio, directional binaural delay, location data and textual scene descriptions within each scene captured, presenting comprehensive observation of the world. Figure 1 offers a glimpse of all 28 scene categories of our 360+x dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first database that covers multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities to mimic how daily information is accessed in the real world. Through our benchmark analysis, we presented 5 different scene understanding tasks on the proposed 360+x dataset to evaluate the impact and benefit of each data modality and perspective in panoptic scene understanding. We hope this unique dataset could broaden the scope of comprehensive scene understanding and encourage the community to approach these problems from more diverse perspectives.

Driven by the demand for spatial intelligence and holistic scene perception, omnidirectional images (ODIs), which provide a complete 360 field of view, are receiving growing attention across diverse applications such as virtual reality, autonomous driving, and embodied robotics. Despite their unique characteristics, ODIs exhibit remarkable differences from perspective images in geometric projection, spatial distribution, and boundary continuity, making it challenging for direct domain adaption from perspective methods. This survey reviews recent panoramic vision techniques with a particular emphasis on the perspective-to-panorama adaptation. We first revisit the panoramic imaging pipeline and projection methods to build the prior knowledge required for analyzing the structural disparities. Then, we summarize three challenges of domain adaptation: severe geometric distortions near the poles, non-uniform sampling in Equirectangular Projection (ERP), and periodic boundary continuity. Building on this, we cover 20+ representative tasks drawn from more than 300 research papers in two dimensions. On one hand, we present a cross-method analysis of representative strategies for addressing panoramic specific challenges across different tasks. On the other hand, we conduct a cross-task comparison and classify panoramic vision into four major categories: visual quality enhancement and assessment, visual understanding, multimodal understanding, and visual generation. In addition, we discuss open challenges and future directions in data, models, and applications that will drive the advancement of panoramic vision research. We hope that our work can provide new insight and forward looking perspectives to advance the development of panoramic vision technologies. Our project page is https://insta360-research-team.github.io/Survey-of-Panorama

Redundancies and correlations in the responses of sensory neurons seem to waste neural resources but can carry cues about structured stimuli and may help the brain to correct for response errors. To assess how the retina negotiates this tradeoff, we measured simultaneous responses from populations of ganglion cells presented with natural and artificial stimuli that varied greatly in correlation structure. We found that pairwise correlations in the retinal output remained similar across stimuli with widely different spatio-temporal correlations including white noise and natural movies. Meanwhile, purely spatial correlations tended to increase correlations in the retinal response. Responding to more correlated stimuli, ganglion cells had faster temporal kernels and tended to have stronger surrounds. These properties of individual cells, along with gain changes that opposed changes in effective contrast at the ganglion cell input, largely explained the similarity of pairwise correlations across stimuli where receptive field measurements were possible.

Understanding motion in daily living requires context beyond kinematics, because similar inertial patterns during activities of daily living (ADLs) can reflect intentional stopping, object interaction, or pathological movement impairment. Egocentric vision provides task-related context that may help disambiguate these cases. We investigate this challenge through freezing of gait (FOG) detection in Parkinson's disease (PD), a symptom strongly influenced by contextual factors during ADLs. Using synchronized egocentric video, wearable IMUs, and expert-annotated FOG labels collected from 13 PD participants in their homes, we evaluate frozen representations from pretrained ego-video and time-series foundation models, alongside an IMU-based TCN trained from scratch, under leave-one-subject-out evaluation. The IMU-based TCN achieved the strongest event-detection performance, reaching 42.3 F1 and 83.0 AUROC, compared with 32.6 F1 and 77.2 AUROC for V-JEPA2 ego-video features. Although ego-video alone did not outperform IMU-based sensing, it showed above-chance discrimination, and qualitative analyses suggest that egocentric vision may capture FOG-relevant information independent of IMUs. Together, these results support the use of pretrained ego-video representations to add contextual information to wearable-sensor-based clinical motion understanding in daily living.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at complex visual tasks such as VQA and chart understanding, yet recent work suggests they struggle with simple perceptual tests. We present an evaluation of vision-language models' capacity for nonlocal visual reasoning: reasoning that requires chaining evidence collected from multiple, possibly distant regions of an image. We isolate three distinct forms of nonlocal vision: comparative perception, which demands holding two images in working memory and comparing them; saccadic search, which requires making discrete, evidence-driven jumps to locate successive targets; and smooth visual search, which involves following a continuous contour. Flagship models (e.g., GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4), even those that perform well on prior primitive-vision benchmarks, fail these tests and barely exceed random accuracy on two variants of our tasks that are trivial for humans. Our structured evaluation suite allows us to test whether VLMs can perform visual algorithms similar to those used by humans. Our findings show that despite gains in raw visual acuity, current models lack core visual reasoning capabilities.

This research proposes a new database and method to detect the reduction of alertness conditions due to alcohol, drug consumption and sleepiness deprivation from Near-Infra-Red (NIR) periocular eye images. The study focuses on determining the effect of external factors on the Central Nervous System (CNS). The goal is to analyse how this impacts iris and pupil movement behaviours and if it is possible to classify these changes with a standard iris NIR capture device. This paper proposes a modified MobileNetV2 to classify iris NIR images taken from subjects under alcohol/drugs/sleepiness influences. The results show that the MobileNetV2-based classifier can detect the Unfit alertness condition from iris samples captured after alcohol and drug consumption robustly with a detection accuracy of 91.3% and 99.1%, respectively. The sleepiness condition is the most challenging with 72.4%. For two-class grouped images belonging to the Fit/Unfit classes, the model obtained an accuracy of 94.0% and 84.0%, respectively, using a smaller number of parameters than the standard Deep learning Network algorithm. This work is a step forward in biometric applications for developing an automatic system to classify "Fitness for Duty" and prevent accidents due to alcohol/drug consumption and sleepiness.

Omnidirectional vision, using 360-degree vision to understand the environment, has become increasingly critical across domains like robotics, industrial inspection, and environmental monitoring. Compared to traditional pinhole vision, omnidirectional vision provides holistic environmental awareness, significantly enhancing the completeness of scene perception and the reliability of decision-making. However, foundational research in this area has historically lagged behind traditional pinhole vision. This talk presents an emerging trend in the embodied AI era: the rapid development of omnidirectional vision, driven by growing industrial demand and academic interest. We highlight recent breakthroughs in omnidirectional generation, omnidirectional perception, omnidirectional understanding, and related datasets. Drawing on insights from both academia and industry, we propose an ideal panoramic system architecture in the embodied AI era, PANORAMA, which consists of four key subsystems. Moreover, we offer in-depth opinions related to emerging trends and cross-community impacts at the intersection of panoramic vision and embodied AI, along with the future roadmap and open challenges. This overview synthesizes state-of-the-art advancements and outlines challenges and opportunities for future research in building robust, general-purpose omnidirectional AI systems in the embodied AI era.

Vital to primary visual processing, retinal circuitry shows many similar structures across a very broad array of species, both vertebrate and non-vertebrate, especially functional components such as lateral inhibition. This surprisingly conservative pattern raises a question of how evolution leads to it, and whether there is any alternative that can also prompt helpful preprocessing. Here we design a method using genetic algorithm that, with many degrees of freedom, leads to architectures whose functions are similar to biological retina, as well as effective alternatives that are different in structures and functions. We compare this model to natural evolution and discuss how our framework can come into goal-driven search and sustainable enhancement of neural network models in machine learning.

Egocentric vision systems aim to understand the spatial surroundings and the wearer's behavior inside it, including motions, activities, and interactions. We argue that egocentric systems must additionally detect physiological states to capture a person's attention and situational responses, which are critical for context-aware behavior modeling. In this paper, we propose egoPPG, a novel vision task for egocentric systems to recover a person's cardiac activity to aid downstream vision tasks. We introduce PulseFormer, a method to extract heart rate as a key indicator of physiological state from the eye tracking cameras on unmodified egocentric vision systems. PulseFormer continuously estimates the photoplethysmogram (PPG) from areas around the eyes and fuses motion cues from the headset's inertial measurement unit to track HR values. We demonstrate egoPPG's downstream benefit for a key task on EgoExo4D, an existing egocentric dataset for which we find PulseFormer's estimates of HR to improve proficiency estimation by 14%. To train and validate PulseFormer, we collected a dataset of 13+ hours of eye tracking videos from Project Aria and contact-based PPG signals as well as an electrocardiogram (ECG) for ground-truth HR values. Similar to EgoExo4D, 25 participants performed diverse everyday activities such as office work, cooking, dancing, and exercising, which induced significant natural motion and HR variation (44-164 bpm). Our model robustly estimates HR (MAE=7.67 bpm) and captures patterns (r=0.85). Our results show how egocentric systems may unify environmental and physiological tracking to better understand users and that egoPPG as a complementary task provides meaningful augmentations for existing datasets and tasks. We release our code, dataset, and HR augmentations for EgoExo4D to inspire research on physiology-aware egocentric tasks.

Bionic vision uses neuroprostheses to restore useful vision to people living with incurable blindness. However, a major outstanding challenge is predicting what people 'see' when they use their devices. The limited field of view of current devices necessitates head movements to scan the scene, which is difficult to simulate on a computer screen. In addition, many computational models of bionic vision lack biological realism. To address these challenges, we present VR-SPV, an open-source virtual reality toolbox for simulated prosthetic vision that uses a psychophysically validated computational model to allow sighted participants to 'see through the eyes' of a bionic eye user. To demonstrate its utility, we systematically evaluated how clinically reported visual distortions affect performance in a letter recognition and an immersive obstacle avoidance task. Our results highlight the importance of using an appropriate phosphene model when predicting visual outcomes for bionic vision.

Vision-language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in advancing general artificial intelligence, yet the irrational encoding of visual positions persists in inhibiting the models' comprehensive perception performance across different levels of granularity. In this work, we propose Pyramid-descent Visual Position Encoding (PyPE), a novel approach designed to enhance the perception of visual tokens within VLMs. By assigning visual position indexes from the periphery to the center and expanding the central receptive field incrementally, PyPE addresses the limitations of traditional raster-scan methods and mitigates the long-term decay effects induced by Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE). Our method reduces the relative distance between interrelated visual elements and instruction tokens, promoting a more rational allocation of attention weights and allowing for a multi-granularity perception of visual elements and countering the over-reliance on anchor tokens. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that PyPE consistently improves the general capabilities of VLMs across various sizes. Code is available at https://github.com/SakuraTroyChen/PyPE.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve strong data-driven scaling by leveraging all-to-all self-attention. However, this flexibility incurs a computational cost that scales quadratically with image resolution, limiting ViTs in high-resolution domains. Underlying this approach is the assumption that pairwise token interactions are necessary for learning rich visual-semantic representations. In this work, we challenge this assumption, demonstrating that effective visual representations can be learned without any direct patch-to-patch interaction. We propose VECA (Visual Elastic Core Attention), a vision transformer architecture that uses efficient linear-time core-periphery structured attention enabled by a small set of learned cores. In VECA, these cores act as a communication interface: patch tokens exchange information exclusively through the core tokens, which are initialized from scratch and propagated across layers. Because the N image patches only directly interact with a resolution invariant set of C learned "core" embeddings, this yields linear complexity O(N) for predetermined C, which bypasses quadratic scaling. Compared to prior cross-attention architectures, VECA maintains and iteratively updates the full set of N input tokens, avoiding a small C-way bottleneck. Combined with nested training along the core axis, our model can elastically trade off compute and accuracy during inference. Across classification and dense tasks, VECA achieves performance competitive with the latest vision foundation models while reducing computational cost. Our results establish elastic core-periphery attention as a scalable alternative building block for Vision Transformers.

With the advent of smartphone indirect ophthalmoscopy, teleophthalmology - the use of specialist ophthalmology assets at a distance from the patient - has experienced a breakthrough, promising enormous benefits especially for healthcare in distant, inaccessible or opthalmologically underserved areas, where specialists are either unavailable or too few in number. However, accurate teleophthalmology requires high-quality ophthalmoscopic imagery. This paper considers three feature families - statistical metrics, gradient-based metrics and wavelet transform coefficient derived indicators - as possible metrics to identify unsharp or blurry images. By using standard machine learning techniques, the suitability of these features for image quality assessment is confirmed, albeit on a rather small data set. With the increased availability and decreasing cost of digital ophthalmoscopy on one hand and the increased prevalence of diabetic retinopathy worldwide on the other, creating tools that can determine whether an image is likely to be diagnostically suitable can play a significant role in accelerating and streamlining the teleophthalmology process. This paper highlights the need for more research in this area, including the compilation of a diverse database of ophthalmoscopic imagery, annotated with quality markers, to train the Point of Acquisition error detection algorithms of the future.

Comprehending how humans process visual information in dynamic settings is crucial for psychology and designing user-centered interactions. While mobile eye-tracking systems combining egocentric video and gaze signals can offer valuable insights, manual analysis of these recordings is time-intensive. In this work, we present a novel human-centered learning algorithm designed for automated object recognition within mobile eye-tracking settings. Our approach seamlessly integrates an object detector with a spatial relation-aware inductive message-passing network (I-MPN), harnessing node profile information and capturing object correlations. Such mechanisms enable us to learn embedding functions capable of generalizing to new object angle views, facilitating rapid adaptation and efficient reasoning in dynamic contexts as users navigate their environment. Through experiments conducted on three distinct video sequences, our interactive-based method showcases significant performance improvements over fixed training/testing algorithms, even when trained on considerably smaller annotated samples collected through user feedback. Furthermore, we demonstrate exceptional efficiency in data annotation processes and surpass prior interactive methods that use complete object detectors, combine detectors with convolutional networks, or employ interactive video segmentation.

We present a simple mathematical model for the mammalian low visual pathway, taking into account its key elements: retina, lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), primary visual cortex (V1). The analogies between the cortical level of the visual system and the structure of popular CNNs, used in image classification tasks, suggests the introduction of an additional preliminary convolutional module inspired to precortical neuronal circuits to improve robustness with respect to global light intensity and contrast variations in the input images. We validate our hypothesis on the popular databases MNIST, FashionMNIST and SVHN, obtaining significantly more robust CNNs with respect to these variations, once such extra module is added.

Motor impairments, including tremor, bradykinesia, gait abnormalities, and postural instability, are common across many neurological and movement-related conditions. Conventional clinical assessments are often intermittent and may fail to capture subtle temporal variations in motor behavior. While wearable IMUs and third-person video have shown promise for objective motor assessment, third-person recordings raise privacy concerns and require constrained acquisition setups. In contrast, egocentric vision provides a more naturalistic and privacyaware alternative. In this work, we introduce EgoInertia-MI, a multimodal benchmark dataset combining synchronized egocentric video and wearable IMU signals for motor impairment analysis. The dataset contains 19 upper- and lower-body activities performed by healthy volunteers simulating varying levels of motor impairment severity levels: no impairment, mild impairment, and severe impairment. We establish two benchmark tasks: action recognition and motor impairment severity estimation, and evaluate multiple unimodal and multimodal baselines. Experimental results show that egocentric video provides strong cues for motor impairment assessment, while multimodal fusion achieves the best overall performance, reaching 0.78 Macro-F1 for severity estimation and 0.93 Macro-F1 for action recognition. These findings highlight the potential of combining egocentric vision and wearable sensing for ecologically valid and privacy-aware motor assessment. Code and data are available at:https://fatemah-alh.github.io/EgoInertia-MI-Page/.

A core aspect of human perception is situated awareness, the ability to relate ourselves to the surrounding physical environment and reason over possible actions in context. However, most existing benchmarks for multimodal foundation models (MFMs) emphasize environment-centric spatial relations (relations among objects in a scene), while largely overlooking observer-centric relationships that require reasoning relative to agent's viewpoint, pose, and motion. To bridge this gap, we introduce SAW-Bench (Situated Awareness in the Real World), a novel benchmark for evaluating egocentric situated awareness using real-world videos. SAW-Bench comprises 786 self-recorded videos captured with Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) smart glasses spanning diverse indoor and outdoor environments, and over 2,071 human-annotated question-answer pairs. It probes a model's observer-centric understanding with six different awareness tasks. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals a human-model performance gap of 37.66%, even with the best-performing MFM, Gemini 3 Flash. Beyond this gap, our in-depth analysis uncovers several notable findings; for example, while models can exploit partial geometric cues in egocentric videos, they often fail to infer a coherent camera geometry, leading to systematic spatial reasoning errors. We position SAW-Bench as a benchmark for situated spatial intelligence, moving beyond passive observation to understanding physically grounded, observer-centric dynamics.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant popularity in recent years and have proliferated into many applications. However, their behavior under different learning paradigms is not well explored. We compare ViTs trained through different methods of supervision, and show that they learn a diverse range of behaviors in terms of their attention, representations, and downstream performance. We also discover ViT behaviors that are consistent across supervision, including the emergence of Offset Local Attention Heads. These are self-attention heads that attend to a token adjacent to the current token with a fixed directional offset, a phenomenon that to the best of our knowledge has not been highlighted in any prior work. Our analysis shows that ViTs are highly flexible and learn to process local and global information in different orders depending on their training method. We find that contrastive self-supervised methods learn features that are competitive with explicitly supervised features, and they can even be superior for part-level tasks. We also find that the representations of reconstruction-based models show non-trivial similarity to contrastive self-supervised models. Project website (https://www.cs.umd.edu/~sakshams/vit_analysis) and code (https://www.github.com/mwalmer-umd/vit_analysis) are publicly available.

Human visual search is serial: the fovea must land on a candidate to confirm it, and those landings form a scanpath. Whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs), given the same foveated input, search as humans do bears on their use as models of human vision and on attention-alignment scores. We compare three general-purpose MLLMs with human eye-movement scanpaths on goal-directed search (COCO-Search18), driving each model fixation by fixation through an identical, human-matched foveated view and assessing it along three axes: the decision of target presence, the efficiency of reaching the target, and the gaze process itself. The axes dissociate. On the decision and on target acquisition the models match or exceed humans, detecting present targets near ceiling and reaching them on the first saccade more often than people do. The gaze process is not human. Under the human-matched condition, all three share one signature: low-entropy, large-amplitude, self-consistent scanpaths that agree with themselves far more closely than two humans agree with each other. That is consistent with a single-pass, non-serial architecture rather than a limit of acuity. Matched retinal input reproduces where humans look but not how the looking unfolds in time, and no degradation regime recovers human-like search at human-like success. The gap sits on a process axis that answer-alignment and saliency metrics do not measure. Because they miss it, such metrics cannot certify human-like vision, and zero-shot models suit outcome and spatial questions but not temporal, process-level ones.

Reliable embodied perception from an egocentric perspective is challenging yet essential for autonomous navigation technology of intelligent mobile agents. With the growing demand of social robotics, near-field scene understanding becomes an important research topic in the areas of egocentric perceptual tasks related to navigation in both crowded and unstructured environments. Due to the complexity of environmental conditions and difficulty of surrounding obstacles owing to truncation and occlusion, the perception capability under this circumstance is still inferior. To further enhance the intelligence of mobile robots, in this paper, we setup an egocentric multi-sensor data collection platform based on 3 main types of sensors (Camera, LiDAR and Fisheye), which supports flexible sensor configurations to enable dynamic sight of view from ego-perspective, capturing either near or farther areas. Meanwhile, a large-scale multimodal dataset is constructed, named RoboSense, to facilitate egocentric robot perception. Specifically, RoboSense contains more than 133K synchronized data with 1.4M 3D bounding box and IDs annotated in the full 360^{circ} view, forming 216K trajectories across 7.6K temporal sequences. It has 270times and 18times as many annotations of surrounding obstacles within near ranges as the previous datasets collected for autonomous driving scenarios such as KITTI and nuScenes. Moreover, we define a novel matching criterion for near-field 3D perception and prediction metrics. Based on RoboSense, we formulate 6 popular tasks to facilitate the future research development, where the detailed analysis as well as benchmarks are also provided accordingly. Data desensitization measures have been conducted for privacy protection.

Spatial perception and reasoning are core components of human cognition, encompassing object recognition, spatial relational understanding, and dynamic reasoning. Despite progress in computer vision, existing benchmarks reveal significant gaps in models' abilities to accurately recognize object attributes and reason about spatial relationships, both essential for dynamic reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose MIRAGE, a multi-modal benchmark designed to evaluate models' capabilities in Counting (object attribute recognition), Relation (spatial relational reasoning), and Counting with Relation. Through diverse and complex scenarios requiring fine-grained recognition and reasoning, MIRAGE highlights critical limitations in state-of-the-art models, underscoring the need for improved representations and reasoning frameworks. By targeting these foundational abilities, MIRAGE provides a pathway toward spatiotemporal reasoning in future research.

Most models of visual attention aim at predicting either top-down or bottom-up control, as studied using different visual search and free-viewing tasks. In this paper we propose the Human Attention Transformer (HAT), a single model that predicts both forms of attention control. HAT uses a novel transformer-based architecture and a simplified foveated retina that collectively create a spatio-temporal awareness akin to the dynamic visual working memory of humans. HAT not only establishes a new state-of-the-art in predicting the scanpath of fixations made during target-present and target-absent visual search and ``taskless'' free viewing, but also makes human gaze behavior interpretable. Unlike previous methods that rely on a coarse grid of fixation cells and experience information loss due to fixation discretization, HAT features a sequential dense prediction architecture and outputs a dense heatmap for each fixation, thus avoiding discretizing fixations. HAT sets a new standard in computational attention, which emphasizes effectiveness, generality, and interpretability. HAT's demonstrated scope and applicability will likely inspire the development of new attention models that can better predict human behavior in various attention-demanding scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/HAT.

A striking feature of the human visual system is that it ingests visual information through a series of local foveated glimpses, rather than a single global computation. This makes human vision distinctly different from most popular computer vision models in use today, which input images globally and in a single shot. A natural question therefore is whether local, sequential vision models may provide any fundamental computational benefits in addition to being biologically more plausible than global models. In this work, we investigate this question from the perspective of visual state tracking and length generalization. Inspired by recent studies of length generalization in language models, we study the behavior of vision models trained on simple vision tasks that require the aggregation of local information across an image. Our experiments reveal that, similar to language models, vision models can learn to exploit global shortcuts and thereby fail to generalize over task length or complexity. We also show that recurrent vision policies based on strictly local perception can mitigate these failures, thereby allowing models to generalize on these tasks. Our results show that local attention may be an essential overlooked requirement for robust compositional generalization.

Embodied systems must make knowledge acquired during one encounter usable in another despite changes in viewpoint, motion, and illumination. Yet aggregate cross-video accuracy conflates failures of local perception with failures to preserve observation identity, establish correspondence, and compose evidence, obscuring whether local video understanding actually transfers. We introduce EgoGears, a complementary single- and multi-video benchmark designed to diagnose this transition. It contains 567 single-video and 1,487 multi-video questions derived from 126 human-collected egocentric recordings covering 39 outdoor routes. Repeated traversals across movement speeds and lighting conditions ground comparisons in shared physical environments; 531 questions require alignment across independent recordings. Single-video questions measure the local visual, spatial, and motion evidence available to a model, while multi-video questions test whether evidence remains bound to the correct observation and can be composed into consistent route relationships. We report 29 single-video and 31 multi-video MLLM configurations across six model families in the main leaderboard. Among the 20 configurations evaluated comparably on both splits, every model performs worse on multi-video questions, with a mean decrease of 22.5 percentage points, and the gap persists when answer format and scoring are held fixed. The gap is not explained simply by additional videos or recording boundaries. The central bottlenecks are observation--evidence binding and ordered route-state tracking. The code and benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/lei-qi-233/EgoGears.

Visual search is a ubiquitous and often challenging daily task, exemplified by looking for the car keys at home or a friend in a crowd. An intriguing property of some classical search tasks is an asymmetry such that finding a target A among distractors B can be easier than finding B among A. To elucidate the mechanisms responsible for asymmetry in visual search, we propose a computational model that takes a target and a search image as inputs and produces a sequence of eye movements until the target is found. The model integrates eccentricity-dependent visual recognition with target-dependent top-down cues. We compared the model against human behavior in six paradigmatic search tasks that show asymmetry in humans. Without prior exposure to the stimuli or task-specific training, the model provides a plausible mechanism for search asymmetry. We hypothesized that the polarity of search asymmetry arises from experience with the natural environment. We tested this hypothesis by training the model on augmented versions of ImageNet where the biases of natural images were either removed or reversed. The polarity of search asymmetry disappeared or was altered depending on the training protocol. This study highlights how classical perceptual properties can emerge in neural network models, without the need for task-specific training, but rather as a consequence of the statistical properties of the developmental diet fed to the model. All source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/kreimanlab/VisualSearchAsymmetry.

Smart glasses are evolving from capture and display accessories into first-person intelligence platforms that connect human perception, persistent context, and digital or physical action. Their on-body viewpoint aligns with the wearer's vision, audition, motion, and hand-object interaction, but must operate under tight energy, thermal, privacy, and feedback constraints. Despite rapid progress in augmented reality, egocentric vision, multimodal models, human-computer interaction, and embodied intelligence, the literature remains fragmented across devices, tasks, and benchmarks. The key challenge is not whether a model can recognize, answer, remember, or act in isolation, but whether a complete system can sustain a reliable, temporally valid, correctable, and governable perception-state-interaction-action loop. This survey is the \textbf{first to systematically study smart glasses through such a unified framework}. We formalize first-person data flow and constrained task utility, characterize devices along eight verifiable hardware capability axes, organize the literature around seven interdependent foundational capabilities, and introduce an L0-L5 framework spanning capture, reactive perception, contextual assistance, persistent state, governed action, and embodied coupling. Across nine application scenes, we connect tasks with datasets, systems, products, stakeholders, failure consequences, and evidence gaps. We further present a nine-dimensional deployment framework, a claim-conditioned evaluation protocol, and an evidence ladder from controlled measurement to longitudinal field validation and audit. Together, these elements make smart glasses more comparable, deployable, and reproducibly evaluated, while outlining a roadmap toward trustworthy first-person intelligence.

A fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience is what shapes visual perception: the external world's structure or the brain's internal architecture. Although some perceptual variability can be traced to individual differences, brain responses to naturalistic stimuli evoke similar activity patterns across individuals, suggesting a convergent representational principle. Here, we test if this stimulus-driven convergence follows a common trajectory across people and deep neural networks (DNNs) during its transformation from sensory to high-level internal representations. We introduce a unified framework that traces representational flow by combining inter-subject similarity with alignment to model hierarchies. Applying this framework to three independent fMRI datasets of visual scene perception, we reveal a cortex-wide network, conserved across individuals, organized into two pathways: a medial-ventral stream for scene structure and a lateral-dorsal stream tuned for social and biological content. This functional organization is captured by the hierarchies of vision DNNs but not language models, reinforcing the specificity of the visual-to-semantic transformation. These findings show a convergent computational solution for visual encoding in both human and artificial vision, driven by the structure of the external world.

Egocentric visual context detection can support intelligence augmentation applications. We created a wearable system, called PAL, for wearable, personalized, and privacy-preserving egocentric visual context detection. PAL has a wearable device with a camera, heart-rate sensor, on-device deep learning, and audio input/output. PAL also has a mobile/web application for personalized context labeling. We used on-device deep learning models for generic object and face detection, low-shot custom face and context recognition (e.g., activities like brushing teeth), and custom context clustering (e.g., indoor locations). The models had over 80\% accuracy in in-the-wild contexts (~1000 images) and we tested PAL for intelligence augmentation applications like behavior change. We have made PAL is open-source to further support intelligence augmentation using personalized and privacy-preserving egocentric visual contexts.

Vision disorders significantly impact millions of lives, altering how visual information is processed and perceived. In this work, a computational framework was developed using the BrokenEyes system to simulate five common eye disorders: Age-related macular degeneration, cataract, glaucoma, refractive errors, and diabetic retinopathy and analyze their effects on neural-like feature representations in deep learning models. Leveraging a combination of human and non-human datasets, models trained under normal and disorder-specific conditions revealed critical disruptions in feature maps, particularly for cataract and glaucoma, which align with known neural processing challenges in these conditions. Evaluation metrics such as activation energy and cosine similarity quantified the severity of these distortions, providing insights into the interplay between degraded visual inputs and learned representations.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong visual perception, yet remain limited in reasoning about space under changing viewpoints. We study this challenge as Perspective-Conditioned Spatial Reasoning (PCSR) in 360-degree omnidirectional images, where broad scene coverage reduces ambiguity from partial observations without eliminating the need for viewpoint-dependent inference. To assess this capability, we introduce PCSR-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark of 84,373 question-answer pairs from 2,600 omnidirectional images across 26 indoor environments. PCSR-Bench contains eight tasks spanning foundational perception (e.g., object counting, relative distance, and relative direction) and advanced PCSR, including compositional chains, egocentric rotation, perspective re-anchoring, ego-distortion, and limited-FOV visibility. We evaluate 14 representative MLLMs and observe a substantial perception-reasoning gap: accuracy reaches 57.59% on foundational relative direction, but drops to 13.49% on egocentric rotation, 7.13% on egocentric distortion, and 0.64% on open-ended compositional reasoning. To probe the plasticity of this gap, we conduct an RL-based diagnostic study on a 7B-scale model. Reward shaping improves a matched 7B baseline from 31.10% to 60.06% under a controlled setting, suggesting that PCSR is partial plasticity rather than being fully immutable. Still, the gains are task-selective, sensitive to reward design including both weight allocation and reward formulation, and partially dependent on the evaluation protocol. These results position PCSR as a key bottleneck in current MLLMs and highlight limited but meaningful room for recovery under targeted optimization.

Automatically describing video, or video captioning, has been widely studied in the multimedia field. This paper proposes a new task of sensor-augmented egocentric-video captioning, a newly constructed dataset for it called MMAC Captions, and a method for the newly proposed task that effectively utilizes multi-modal data of video and motion sensors, or inertial measurement units (IMUs). While conventional video captioning tasks have difficulty in dealing with detailed descriptions of human activities due to the limited view of a fixed camera, egocentric vision has greater potential to be used for generating the finer-grained descriptions of human activities on the basis of a much closer view. In addition, we utilize wearable-sensor data as auxiliary information to mitigate the inherent problems in egocentric vision: motion blur, self-occlusion, and out-of-camera-range activities. We propose a method for effectively utilizing the sensor data in combination with the video data on the basis of an attention mechanism that dynamically determines the modality that requires more attention, taking the contextual information into account. We compared the proposed sensor-fusion method with strong baselines on the MMAC Captions dataset and found that using sensor data as supplementary information to the egocentric-video data was beneficial, and that our proposed method outperformed the strong baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We apply pre-trained architectures, originally developed for the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, for periocular recognition. These architectures have demonstrated significant success in various computer vision tasks beyond the ones for which they were designed. This work builds on our previous study using off-the-shelf Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and extends it to include the more recently proposed Vision Transformers (ViT). Despite being trained for generic object classification, middle-layer features from CNNs and ViTs are a suitable way to recognize individuals based on periocular images. We also demonstrate that CNNs and ViTs are highly complementary since their combination results in boosted accuracy. In addition, we show that a small portion of these pre-trained models can achieve good accuracy, resulting in thinner models with fewer parameters, suitable for resource-limited environments such as mobiles. This efficiency improves if traditional handcrafted features are added as well.

Given a pair of partially overlapping source and target images and a keypoint in the source image, the keypoint's correspondent in the target image can be either visible, occluded or outside the field of view. Local feature matching methods are only able to identify the correspondent's location when it is visible, while humans can also hallucinate its location when it is occluded or outside the field of view through geometric reasoning. In this paper, we bridge this gap by training a network to output a peaked probability distribution over the correspondent's location, regardless of this correspondent being visible, occluded, or outside the field of view. We experimentally demonstrate that this network is indeed able to hallucinate correspondences on pairs of images captured in scenes that were not seen at training-time. We also apply this network to an absolute camera pose estimation problem and find it is significantly more robust than state-of-the-art local feature matching-based competitors.

Image restoration is a challenging and ill-posed problem which also has been a long-standing issue. However, most of learning based restoration methods are proposed to target one degradation type which means they are lack of generalization. In this paper, we proposed a multi-branch restoration model inspired from the Human Visual System (i.e., Retinal Ganglion Cells) which can achieve multiple restoration tasks in a general framework. The experiments show that the proposed multi-branch architecture, called CMFNet, has competitive performance results on four datasets, including image dehazing, deraindrop, and deblurring, which are very common applications for autonomous cars. The source code and pretrained models of three restoration tasks are available at https://github.com/FanChiMao/CMFNet.

This study reveals an unexpected parallel between instructible vision-language models (VLMs) and human cognitive disorders, specifically constructive apraxia. We tested 25 state-of-the-art VLMs, including GPT-4 Vision, DALL-E 3, and Midjourney v5, on their ability to generate images of the Ponzo illusion, a task that requires basic spatial reasoning and is often used in clinical assessments of constructive apraxia. Remarkably, 24 out of 25 models failed to correctly render two horizontal lines against a perspective background, mirroring the deficits seen in patients with parietal lobe damage. The models consistently misinterpreted spatial instructions, producing tilted or misaligned lines that followed the perspective of the background rather than remaining horizontal. This behavior is strikingly similar to how apraxia patients struggle to copy or construct simple figures despite intact visual perception and motor skills. Our findings suggest that current VLMs, despite their advanced capabilities in other domains, lack fundamental spatial reasoning abilities akin to those impaired in constructive apraxia. This limitation in AI systems provides a novel computational model for studying spatial cognition deficits and highlights a critical area for improvement in VLM architecture and training methodologies.

Regeneration of the nervous system after injury remains an important therapeutic objective, especially in the central nervous system (CNS), in which regeneration is restricted by both neuronal limitations as well as adverse extracellular environments. Conversely, the peripheral nervous system (PNS) displays enhanced regenerative capability in the presence of supportive Schwann cells (SC) and pro-growth stimuli. While the structure and molecular mechanisms are thoroughly understood, functional biomarkers that can non-invasively monitor regeneration in real time are limited. In this review, we discuss the promise of electroencephalography (EEG) as well as electromyography (EMG) as real-time, non-invasive biomarkers to monitor damage to nerves and regeneration in both CNS and PNS contexts. First, we contrast biological and electrophysiological indicators of CNS/PNS injury, showing how EEG signs, including oscillatory power, connectivity, and evoked potential changes, reflect dysfunction due to injury as well as neuroplastic reorganization. Also, EMG provides direct insight into muscle activation and peripheral output, providing useful EEG complementation in neuromuscular pathway integrity and reactivation. In CNS injuries (e.g., stroke, spinal cord injury (SCI)), EEG typically shows global slowing, disrupted interhemispheric coherence, and partial recovery of higher frequencies. For PNS injuries, EEG can capture cortical remapping and return of somatosensory evoked responses with re-establishment of the peripheries' connectivity. EMG, in turn, enables monitoring of reinnervation and restoration of functional motor output. This review presents a dual-system perspective, positioning EEG and EMG not only as diagnostic tools but also as functional biomarkers of neural regeneration, thereby bridging electrophysiology, plasticity, and clinical recovery.

We present a technique that uses images, videos and sensor data taken from first-person point-of-view devices to perform egocentric field-of-view (FOV) localization. We define egocentric FOV localization as capturing the visual information from a person's field-of-view in a given environment and transferring this information onto a reference corpus of images and videos of the same space, hence determining what a person is attending to. Our method matches images and video taken from the first-person perspective with the reference corpus and refines the results using the first-person's head orientation information obtained using the device sensors. We demonstrate single and multi-user egocentric FOV localization in different indoor and outdoor environments with applications in augmented reality, event understanding and studying social interactions.

Vision language models (VLMs) excel at many tasks but still struggle with spatial reasoning when critical information is not directly observable. Many such problems require imaginative perception: inferring what would be seen from an unseen viewpoint, tracing paths through occluded spaces, or integrating partial observations into a coherent spatial representation. We introduce Imaginative Perception Tokens (IPT), intermediate perceptual representations that externalize what a VLM would perceive under alternative spatial configurations while remaining consistent with the observed input. To study this capability, we formulate three tasks, Perspective Taking (PET), Path Tracing (PT), and Multiview Counting (MVC), and construct datasets of approximately 20K examples with ground truth imaginations, answers, and evaluation benchmarks. Using the unified VLM BAGEL as the backbone, IPT supervision consistently improves spatial reasoning and often outperforms textual chain of thought training, even without generating images at inference time. On MVC, IPT improves accuracy by 3.4% and achieves competitive performance with strong closed-source models on PT. We further find that combining IPT and label-only supervision yields additional gains, whereas textual chain of thought can substantially degrade performance, suggesting a modality mismatch when spatial computation is forced through language. Overall, IPT provides a principled supervision signal for reasoning about unobserved spatial structure, improving generalization while producing interpretable intermediate representations.

Retinal imaging has emerged as a powerful, non-invasive modality for detecting and quantifying biomarkers of systemic diseases-ranging from diabetes and hypertension to Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular disorders but current insights remain dispersed across platforms and specialties. Recent technological advances in optical coherence tomography (OCT/OCTA) and adaptive optics (AO) now deliver ultra-high-resolution scans (down to 5 {\mu}m ) with superior contrast and spatial integration, allowing early identification of microvascular abnormalities and neurodegenerative changes. At the same time, AI-driven and machine learning (ML) algorithms have revolutionized the analysis of large-scale retinal datasets, increasing sensitivity and specificity; for example, deep learning models achieve > 90 \% sensitivity for diabetic retinopathy and AUC = 0.89 for the prediction of cardiovascular risk from fundus photographs. The proliferation of mobile health technologies and telemedicine platforms further extends access, reduces costs, and facilitates community-based screening and longitudinal monitoring. Despite these breakthroughs, translation into routine practice is hindered by heterogeneous imaging protocols, limited external validation of AI models, and integration challenges within clinical workflows. In this review, we systematically synthesize the latest OCT/OCT and AO developments, AI/ML approaches, and mHealth/Tele-ophthalmology initiatives and quantify their diagnostic performance across disease domains. Finally, we propose a roadmap for multicenter protocol standardization, prospective validation trials, and seamless incorporation of retinal screening into primary and specialty care pathways-paving the way for precision prevention, early intervention, and ongoing treatment of life-threatening systemic diseases.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently witnessed significant progress in visual comprehension. As the permitting length of image context grows, VLMs can now comprehend a broader range of views and spaces. Current benchmarks provide insightful analysis of VLMs in tasks involving complex visual instructions following, multi-image understanding and spatial reasoning. However, they usually focus on spatially irrelevant images or discrete images captured from varied viewpoints. The compositional characteristic of images captured from a static viewpoint remains underestimated. We term this characteristic as Continuous Space Perception. When observing a scene from a static viewpoint while shifting orientations, it produces a series of spatially continuous images, enabling the reconstruction of the entire space. In this paper, we present CoSpace, a multi-image visual understanding benchmark designed to assess the Continuous Space perception ability for VLMs. CoSpace contains 2,918 images and 1,626 question-answer pairs, covering seven types of tasks. We conduct evaluation across 19 proprietary and open-source VLMs. Results reveal that there exist pitfalls on the continuous space perception ability for most of the evaluated models, including proprietary ones. Interestingly, we find that the main discrepancy between open-source and proprietary models lies not in accuracy but in the consistency of responses. We believe that enhancing the ability of continuous space perception is essential for VLMs to perform effectively in real-world tasks and encourage further research to advance this capability.

Point-Based Neural Rendering (PBNR), i.e., the 3D Gaussian Splatting-family algorithms, emerges as a promising class of rendering techniques, which are permeating all aspects of society, driven by a growing demand for real-time, photorealistic rendering in AR/VR and digital twins. Achieving real-time PBNR on mobile devices is challenging. This paper proposes RTGS, a PBNR system that for the first time delivers real-time neural rendering on mobile devices while maintaining human visual quality. RTGS combines two techniques. First, we present an efficiency-aware pruning technique to optimize rendering speed. Second, we introduce a Foveated Rendering (FR) method for PBNR, leveraging humans' low visual acuity in peripheral regions to relax rendering quality and improve rendering speed. Our system executes in real-time (above 100 FPS) on Nvidia Jetson Xavier board without sacrificing subjective visual quality, as confirmed by a user study. The code is open-sourced at [https://github.com/horizon-research/Fov-3DGS].

Current vision-language models may incorporate single-dimensional spatial cues, such as depth, object boundary, and basic spatial directions (e.g. left, right, front, back), yet often lack the multi-dimensional spatial reasoning necessary for human-like understanding and real-world applications. To address this gap, we develop SPHERE (Spatial Perception and Hierarchical Evaluation of REasoning), a hierarchical evaluation framework with a new human-annotated dataset to pinpoint model strengths and weaknesses, advancing from single-skill tasks to multi-skill tasks, and ultimately to complex reasoning tasks that require the integration of multiple spatial and visual cues with logical reasoning. Benchmark evaluation of state-of-the-art open-source models reveal significant shortcomings, especially in the abilities to understand distance and proximity, to reason from both allocentric and egocentric viewpoints, and to perform complex reasoning in a physical context. This work underscores the need for more advanced approaches to spatial understanding and reasoning, paving the way for improvements in vision-language models and their alignment with human-like spatial capabilities. The dataset will be open-sourced upon publication.

Effectively representing medical images, especially retinal images, presents a considerable challenge due to variations in appearance, size, and contextual information of pathological signs called lesions. Precise discrimination of these lesions is crucial for diagnosing vision-threatening issues such as diabetic retinopathy. While visual attention-based neural networks have been introduced to learn spatial context and channel correlations from retinal images, they often fall short in capturing localized lesion context. Addressing this limitation, we propose a novel attention mechanism called Guided Context Gating, an unique approach that integrates Context Formulation, Channel Correlation, and Guided Gating to learn global context, spatial correlations, and localized lesion context. Our qualitative evaluation against existing attention mechanisms emphasize the superiority of Guided Context Gating in terms of explainability. Notably, experiments on the Zenodo-DR-7 dataset reveal a substantial 2.63% accuracy boost over advanced attention mechanisms & an impressive 6.53% improvement over the state-of-the-art Vision Transformer for assessing the severity grade of retinopathy, even with imbalanced and limited training samples for each class.

Humans experience the world through constantly changing visual stimuli, where scenes can shift and move, change in appearance, and vary in distance. The dynamic nature of visual perception is a fundamental aspect of our daily lives, yet the large majority of research on object and scene processing, particularly using fMRI, has focused on static stimuli. While studies of static image perception are attractive due to their computational simplicity, they impose a strong non-naturalistic constraint on our investigation of human vision. In contrast, dynamic visual stimuli offer a more ecologically-valid approach but present new challenges due to the interplay between spatial and temporal information, making it difficult to disentangle the representations of stable image features and motion. To overcome this limitation -- given dynamic inputs, we explicitly decouple the modeling of static image representations and motion representations in the human brain. Three results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. First, we show that visual motion information as optical flow can be predicted (or decoded) from brain activity as measured by fMRI. Second, we show that this predicted motion can be used to realistically animate static images using a motion-conditioned video diffusion model (where the motion is driven by fMRI brain activity). Third, we show prediction in the reverse direction: existing video encoders can be fine-tuned to predict fMRI brain activity from video imagery, and can do so more effectively than image encoders. This foundational work offers a novel, extensible framework for interpreting how the human brain processes dynamic visual information.

In human vision objects and their parts can be visually recognized from purely spatial or purely temporal information but the mechanisms integrating space and time are poorly understood. Here we show that human visual recognition of objects and actions can be achieved by efficiently combining spatial and motion cues in configurations where each source on its own is insufficient for recognition. This analysis is obtained by identifying minimal videos: these are short and tiny video clips in which objects, parts, and actions can be reliably recognized, but any reduction in either space or time makes them unrecognizable. State-of-the-art deep networks for dynamic visual recognition cannot replicate human behavior in these configurations. This gap between humans and machines points to critical mechanisms in human dynamic vision that are lacking in current models.

Egocentric gaze estimation is commonly studied using models that process the full video with access to future frames, while real-world applications require strictly causal, online prediction. This discrepancy raises key questions: Does future context inherently provide valuable signals for gaze estimation? If so, how much future look-ahead optimally supervises a causal model during training? To investigate, we propose a controlled framework featuring a future-aware branch that accesses a tunable look-ahead horizon during training but is discarded at inference. This design isolates the impact of future context while keeping the inference architecture fixed and strictly causal. Across EGTEA Gaze+ and Ego4D, we find that future-privileged supervision consistently improves causal gaze prediction, confirming its utility. However, performance gains do not increase monotonically with longer look-ahead, but rather peak within a bounded temporal regime. Specifically, optimal performance corresponds to roughly 1.7--3.3 seconds of future context (H{in}[5, 10]) on EGTEA Gaze+ and 2.7 seconds (H{=}10) on Ego4D. Our results demonstrate that lightweight causal models can effectively absorb future-aware signals, providing practical guidance for real-time egocentric gaze modeling.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and describing visual content, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various vision-language tasks. However, these models frequently exhibit hallucination behavior, where they generate descriptions containing objects or details absent in the input image. Our work investigates this phenomenon by analyzing attention patterns across transformer layers and heads, revealing that hallucinations often stem from progressive degradation of visual grounding in deeper layers. We propose a novel attention modification approach that combines selective token emphasis and head-specific modulation to maintain visual grounding throughout the generation process. Our method introduces two key components: (1) a dual-stream token selection mechanism that identifies and prioritizes both locally informative and spatially significant visual tokens, and (2) an attention head-specific modulation strategy that differentially amplifies visual information processing based on measured visual sensitivity of individual attention heads. Through extensive experimentation on the MSCOCO dataset, we demonstrate that our approach reduces hallucination rates by up to 62.3\% compared to baseline models while maintaining comparable task performance. Our analysis reveals that selectively modulating tokens across attention heads with varying levels of visual sensitivity can significantly improve visual grounding without requiring model retraining.

Egocentric vision is essential for both human and machine visual understanding, particularly in capturing the detailed hand-object interactions needed for manipulation tasks. Translating third-person views into first-person views significantly benefits augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and robotics applications. However, current exocentric-to-egocentric translation methods are limited by their dependence on 2D cues, synchronized multi-view settings, and unrealistic assumptions such as the necessity of an initial egocentric frame and relative camera poses during inference. To overcome these challenges, we introduce EgoWorld, a novel framework that reconstructs an egocentric view from rich exocentric observations, including point clouds, 3D hand poses, and textual descriptions. Our approach reconstructs a point cloud from estimated exocentric depth maps, reprojects it into the egocentric perspective, and then applies diffusion model to produce dense, semantically coherent egocentric images. Evaluated on four datasets (i.e., H2O, TACO, Assembly101, and Ego-Exo4D), EgoWorld achieves state-of-the-art performance and demonstrates robust generalization to new objects, actions, scenes, and subjects. Moreover, EgoWorld exhibits robustness on in-the-wild examples, underscoring its practical applicability. Project page is available at https://redorangeyellowy.github.io/EgoWorld/.

A major goal of neuroscience is to understand brain computations during visual processing in naturalistic settings. A dominant approach is to use image-computable deep neural networks trained with different task objectives as a basis for linear encoding models. However, in addition to requiring tuning a large number of parameters, the linear encoding approach ignores the structure of the feature maps both in the brain and the models. Recently proposed alternatives have focused on decomposing the linear mapping to spatial and feature components but focus on finding static receptive fields for units that are applicable only in early visual areas. In this work, we employ the attention mechanism used in the transformer architecture to study how retinotopic visual features can be dynamically routed to category-selective areas in high-level visual processing. We show that this computational motif is significantly more powerful than alternative methods in predicting brain activity during natural scene viewing, across different feature basis models and modalities. We also show that this approach is inherently more interpretable, without the need to create importance maps, by interpreting the attention routing signal for different high-level categorical areas. Our approach proposes a mechanistic model of how visual information from retinotopic maps can be routed based on the relevance of the input content to different category-selective regions.

Very recently, a variety of vision transformer architectures for dense prediction tasks have been proposed and they show that the design of spatial attention is critical to their success in these tasks. In this work, we revisit the design of the spatial attention and demonstrate that a carefully-devised yet simple spatial attention mechanism performs favourably against the state-of-the-art schemes. As a result, we propose two vision transformer architectures, namely, Twins-PCPVT and Twins-SVT. Our proposed architectures are highly-efficient and easy to implement, only involving matrix multiplications that are highly optimized in modern deep learning frameworks. More importantly, the proposed architectures achieve excellent performance on a wide range of visual tasks, including image level classification as well as dense detection and segmentation. The simplicity and strong performance suggest that our proposed architectures may serve as stronger backbones for many vision tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/Twins .

Estimation eye gaze direction is useful in various human-computer interaction tasks. Knowledge of gaze direction can give valuable information regarding users point of attention. Certain patterns of eye movements known as eye accessing cues are reported to be related to the cognitive processes in the human brain. We propose a real-time framework for the classification of eye gaze direction and estimation of eye accessing cues. In the first stage, the algorithm detects faces using a modified version of the Viola-Jones algorithm. A rough eye region is obtained using geometric relations and facial landmarks. The eye region obtained is used in the subsequent stage to classify the eye gaze direction. A convolutional neural network is employed in this work for the classification of eye gaze direction. The proposed algorithm was tested on Eye Chimera database and found to outperform state of the art methods. The computational complexity of the algorithm is very less in the testing phase. The algorithm achieved an average frame rate of 24 fps in the desktop environment.

In embodied intelligence systems, a key component is 3D perception algorithm, which enables agents to understand their surrounding environments. Previous algorithms primarily rely on point cloud, which, despite offering precise geometric information, still constrain perception performance due to inherent sparsity, noise, and data scarcity. In this work, we introduce a novel image-centric 3D perception model, BIP3D, which leverages expressive image features with explicit 3D position encoding to overcome the limitations of point-centric methods. Specifically, we leverage pre-trained 2D vision foundation models to enhance semantic understanding, and introduce a spatial enhancer module to improve spatial understanding. Together, these modules enable BIP3D to achieve multi-view, multi-modal feature fusion and end-to-end 3D perception. In our experiments, BIP3D outperforms current state-of-the-art results on the EmbodiedScan benchmark, achieving improvements of 5.69% in the 3D detection task and 15.25% in the 3D visual grounding task.

Surface electromyography (sEMG) records muscle activity during hand movement and can be decoded to recover detailed hand articulation. EMG and egocentric vision are complementary for hand sensing: EMG captures fine-grained finger articulation even under occlusion and poor lighting, while vision provides global hand configuration. However, no existing dataset synchronizes both modalities. We present EgoEMG, a multimodal egocentric dataset for bimanual hand pose estimation. EgoEMG includes bilateral wristband EMG with 16 total channels (8 per wrist) sampled at 2 kHz, 120 Hz IMU, egocentric wide-angle RGB video, external RGB-D video, and mocap-derived hand motion with wrist articulation angles. The dataset covers 41 participants performing 60 gesture classes, including 30 single-hand gestures and 30 bimanual gestures, totaling more than 10 hours of recording. We also introduce a benchmark with three tasks -- EMG-to-pose, vision-to-pose, and EMG+vision fusion -- under a shared joint-angle prediction target and common generalization split axes (cross-gesture, cross-user, and combined). As baselines, we evaluate EMGFormer for EMG-to-pose and generic ResNet/ViT backbones for vision-to-pose. We further study a residual fusion architecture that improves over matched lightweight vision-only baselines. Together, EgoEMG and its benchmark establish a foundation for future research on multimodal hand pose estimation with EMG and vision.

Proprioception is the "sixth sense" that detects limb postures with motor neurons. It requires a natural integration between the musculoskeletal systems and sensory receptors, which is challenging among modern robots that aim for lightweight, adaptive, and sensitive designs at a low cost. Here, we present the Soft Polyhedral Network with an embedded vision for physical interactions, capable of adaptive kinesthesia and viscoelastic proprioception by learning kinetic features. This design enables passive adaptations to omni-directional interactions, visually captured by a miniature high-speed motion tracking system embedded inside for proprioceptive learning. The results show that the soft network can infer real-time 6D forces and torques with accuracies of 0.25/0.24/0.35 N and 0.025/0.034/0.006 Nm in dynamic interactions. We also incorporate viscoelasticity in proprioception during static adaptation by adding a creep and relaxation modifier to refine the predicted results. The proposed soft network combines simplicity in design, omni-adaptation, and proprioceptive sensing with high accuracy, making it a versatile solution for robotics at a low cost with more than 1 million use cycles for tasks such as sensitive and competitive grasping, and touch-based geometry reconstruction. This study offers new insights into vision-based proprioception for soft robots in adaptive grasping, soft manipulation, and human-robot interaction.

Operating rooms (ORs) demand precise coordination among surgeons, nurses, and equipment in a fast-paced, occlusion-heavy environment, necessitating advanced perception models to enhance safety and efficiency. Existing datasets either provide partial egocentric views or sparse exocentric multi-view context, but do not explore the comprehensive combination of both. We introduce EgoExOR, the first OR dataset and accompanying benchmark to fuse first-person and third-person perspectives. Spanning 94 minutes (84,553 frames at 15 FPS) of two emulated spine procedures, Ultrasound-Guided Needle Insertion and Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery, EgoExOR integrates egocentric data (RGB, gaze, hand tracking, audio) from wearable glasses, exocentric RGB and depth from RGB-D cameras, and ultrasound imagery. Its detailed scene graph annotations, covering 36 entities and 22 relations (568,235 triplets), enable robust modeling of clinical interactions, supporting tasks like action recognition and human-centric perception. We evaluate the surgical scene graph generation performance of two adapted state-of-the-art models and offer a new baseline that explicitly leverages EgoExOR's multimodal and multi-perspective signals. This new dataset and benchmark set a new foundation for OR perception, offering a rich, multimodal resource for next-generation clinical perception.

Clinical decision-making relies heavily on understanding relative positions of anatomical structures and anomalies. Therefore, for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to be applicable in clinical practice, the ability to accurately determine relative positions on medical images is a fundamental prerequisite. Despite its importance, this capability remains highly underexplored. To address this gap, we evaluate the ability of state-of-the-art VLMs, GPT-4o, Llama3.2, Pixtral, and JanusPro, and find that all models fail at this fundamental task. Inspired by successful approaches in computer vision, we investigate whether visual prompts, such as alphanumeric or colored markers placed on anatomical structures, can enhance performance. While these markers provide moderate improvements, results remain significantly lower on medical images compared to observations made on natural images. Our evaluations suggest that, in medical imaging, VLMs rely more on prior anatomical knowledge than on actual image content for answering relative position questions, often leading to incorrect conclusions. To facilitate further research in this area, we introduce the MIRP , Medical Imaging Relative Positioning, benchmark dataset, designed to systematically evaluate the capability to identify relative positions in medical images.

Long-horizon humanoid vision--language--action (VLA) control with head-mounted stereo cameras requires visual interfaces that can exploit complementary views while maintaining compatibility with pretrained representations. Existing interfaces often discard complementary stereo evidence or fuse additional observations without preserving the native primary-view pathway and adapting auxiliary information to robot embodiment. We present EATR-Stereo, an embodiment-aware token-routing framework that retains primary-view tokens and constructs primary-aligned Cross-View Auxiliary Tokens (CVATs) by querying the synchronized auxiliary-view token sequence. A body-segmented proprioceptive encoder further conditions token-wise auxiliary usage on robot configuration history, enabling selective incorporation of stereo evidence during action generation. The routed auxiliary stream augments the language and primary-visual context of a pretrained VLA while keeping its vision--language model frozen. On a 33-DoF physical humanoid with a 37-D proprioceptive state, we evaluate nine configurations in over-100-s search--approach--grasp--place--return tasks. EATR-Stereo achieves 60.0% full-task success, 100.0% grasp success, and 80.0% stage success. Under severe asymmetric occlusion, it improves recovery to 80% compared with 30% for CVAT alone. Ablation studies further show the importance of preserving primary tokens and combining cross-view auxiliary features with structured proprioceptive routing. These results demonstrate that selectively routed paired stereo evidence improves spatial grounding for reliable long-horizon humanoid VLA control.

Egocentric cameras are becoming increasingly popular and provide us with large amounts of videos, captured from the first person perspective. At the same time, surveillance cameras and drones offer an abundance of visual information, often captured from top-view. Although these two sources of information have been separately studied in the past, they have not been collectively studied and related. Having a set of egocentric cameras and a top-view camera capturing the same area, we propose a framework to identify the egocentric viewers in the top-view video. We utilize two types of features for our assignment procedure. Unary features encode what a viewer (seen from top-view or recording an egocentric video) visually experiences over time. Pairwise features encode the relationship between the visual content of a pair of viewers. Modeling each view (egocentric or top) by a graph, the assignment process is formulated as spectral graph matching. Evaluating our method over a dataset of 50 top-view and 188 egocentric videos taken in different scenarios demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed approach in assigning egocentric viewers to identities present in top-view camera. We also study the effect of different parameters such as the number of egocentric viewers and visual features.

Vision is a primary means of how humans perceive the environment, but Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) people need assistance understanding their surroundings, especially in unfamiliar environments. The emergence of semantic-based systems as assistance tools for BLV users has motivated many researchers to explore responses from Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, it has yet been studied preferences of BLV users on diverse types/styles of responses from LVLMs, specifically for navigational aid. To fill this gap, we first construct Eye4B dataset, consisting of human-validated 1.1k curated outdoor/indoor scenes with 5-10 relevant requests per scene. Then, we conduct an in-depth user study with eight BLV users to evaluate their preferences on six LVLMs from five perspectives: Afraidness, Nonactionability, Sufficiency, and Conciseness. Finally, we introduce Eye4B benchmark for evaluating alignment between widely used model-based image-text metrics and our collected BLV preferences. Our work can be set as a guideline for developing BLV-aware LVLMs towards a Barrier-Free AI system.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multi-modality Models (LMMs) have demonstrated remarkable decision masking capabilities on a variety of tasks. However, they inherently operate planning within the language space, lacking the vision and spatial imagination ability. In contrast, humans utilize both left and right hemispheres of the brain for language and visual planning during the thinking process. Therefore, we introduce a novel vision-language planning framework in this work to perform concurrent visual and language planning for tasks with inputs of any form. Our framework incorporates visual planning to capture intricate environmental details, while language planning enhances the logical coherence of the overall system. We evaluate the effectiveness of our framework across vision-language tasks, vision-only tasks, and language-only tasks. The results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach, indicating that the integration of visual and language planning yields better contextually aware task execution.

Spatial reasoning is a key aspect of cognitive psychology and remains a major bottleneck for current vision-language models (VLMs). While extensive research has aimed to evaluate or improve VLMs' understanding of basic spatial relations, such as distinguishing left from right, near from far, and object counting, these tasks represent only the most fundamental level of spatial reasoning. In this work, we introduce OmniSpatial, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for spatial reasoning, grounded in cognitive psychology. OmniSpatial covers four major categories: dynamic reasoning, complex spatial logic, spatial interaction, and perspective-taking, with 50 fine-grained subcategories. Through Internet data crawling and careful manual annotation, we construct over 1.5K question-answer pairs. Extensive experiments show that both open- and closed-source VLMs, as well as existing reasoning and spatial understanding models, exhibit significant limitations in comprehensive spatial understanding. We further analyze failure cases and propose potential directions for future research.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at identifying and describing objects but struggle with spatial reasoning such as accurately understanding the relative positions of objects. Inspired by the dual-pathway (ventral-dorsal) model of human vision, we investigate why VLMs fail spatial tasks despite strong object recognition capabilities. Our interpretability-driven analysis reveals a critical underlying cause: vision embeddings in VLMs are treated primarily as semantic ``bag-of-tokens," overshadowing subtle yet crucial positional cues due to their disproportionately large embedding norms. We validate this insight through extensive diagnostic experiments, demonstrating minimal performance impact when token orders or fine-grained spatial details are removed. Guided by these findings, we propose simple, interpretable interventions, including normalizing vision embedding norms and extracting mid-layer spatially rich features, to restore spatial awareness. Empirical results on both our synthetic data and standard benchmarks demonstrate improved spatial reasoning capabilities, highlighting the value of interpretability-informed design choices. Our study not only uncovers fundamental limitations in current VLM architectures but also provides actionable insights for enhancing structured perception of visual scenes.

Spatial reasoning is a core aspect of human intelligence that allows perception, inference and planning in 3D environments. However, current vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to maintain geometric coherence and cross-view consistency for spatial reasoning in multi-view settings. We attribute this gap to the lack of fine-grained benchmarks that isolate multi-view reasoning from single-view perception and temporal factors. To address this, we present ReMindView-Bench, a cognitively grounded benchmark for evaluating how VLMs construct, align and maintain spatial mental models across complementary viewpoints. ReMindView-Bench systematically varies viewpoint spatial pattern and query type to probe key factors of spatial cognition. Evaluations of 15 current VLMs reveals consistent failures in cross-view alignment and perspective-taking in multi-view spatial reasoning, motivating deeper analysis on the reasoning process. Explicit phase-wise analysis using LLM-as-a-judge and self-consistency prompting shows that VLMs perform well on in-frame perception but degrade sharply when integrating information across views. Implicit analysis, including linear probing and entropy dynamics, further show progressive loss of task-relevant information and uncertainty separation between correct and incorrect trajectories. These results provide a cognitively grounded diagnosis of VLM spatial reasoning and reveal how multi-view spatial mental models are formed, degraded and destabilized across reasoning phases. The ReMindView-Bench benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Xue0823/ReMindView-Bench, and the source codes of benchmark construction and VLM reasoning analysis are available at https://github.com/pittisl/ReMindView-Bench.

In this work we introduce Steerable Transformers, an extension of the Vision Transformer mechanism that maintains equivariance to the special Euclidean group SE(d). We propose an equivariant attention mechanism that operates on features extracted by steerable convolutions. Operating in Fourier space, our network utilizes Fourier space non-linearities. Our experiments in both two and three dimensions show that adding a steerable transformer encoder layer to a steerable convolution network enhances performance.

Humans do not passively observe the visual world -- we actively look in order to act. Motivated by this principle, we introduce EyeRobot, a robotic system with gaze behavior that emerges from the need to complete real-world tasks. We develop a mechanical eyeball that can freely rotate to observe its surroundings and train a gaze policy to control it using reinforcement learning. We accomplish this by first collecting teleoperated demonstrations paired with a 360 camera. This data is imported into a simulation environment that supports rendering arbitrary eyeball viewpoints, allowing episode rollouts of eye gaze on top of robot demonstrations. We then introduce a BC-RL loop to train the hand and eye jointly: the hand (BC) agent is trained from rendered eye observations, and the eye (RL) agent is rewarded when the hand produces correct action predictions. In this way, hand-eye coordination emerges as the eye looks towards regions which allow the hand to complete the task. EyeRobot implements a foveal-inspired policy architecture allowing high resolution with a small compute budget, which we find also leads to the emergence of more stable fixation as well as improved ability to track objects and ignore distractors. We evaluate EyeRobot on five panoramic workspace manipulation tasks requiring manipulation in an arc surrounding the robot arm. Our experiments suggest EyeRobot exhibits hand-eye coordination behaviors which effectively facilitate manipulation over large workspaces with a single camera. See project site for videos: https://www.eyerobot.net/

Vision transformers (ViTs) are quickly becoming the de-facto architecture for computer vision, yet we understand very little about why they work and what they learn. While existing studies visually analyze the mechanisms of convolutional neural networks, an analogous exploration of ViTs remains challenging. In this paper, we first address the obstacles to performing visualizations on ViTs. Assisted by these solutions, we observe that neurons in ViTs trained with language model supervision (e.g., CLIP) are activated by semantic concepts rather than visual features. We also explore the underlying differences between ViTs and CNNs, and we find that transformers detect image background features, just like their convolutional counterparts, but their predictions depend far less on high-frequency information. On the other hand, both architecture types behave similarly in the way features progress from abstract patterns in early layers to concrete objects in late layers. In addition, we show that ViTs maintain spatial information in all layers except the final layer. In contrast to previous works, we show that the last layer most likely discards the spatial information and behaves as a learned global pooling operation. Finally, we conduct large-scale visualizations on a wide range of ViT variants, including DeiT, CoaT, ConViT, PiT, Swin, and Twin, to validate the effectiveness of our method.

The retina is the only part of the human body in which blood vessels can be accessed non-invasively using imaging techniques such as digital fundus images (DFI). The spatial distribution of the retinal microvasculature may change with cardiovascular diseases and thus the eyes may be regarded as a window to our hearts. Computerized segmentation of the retinal arterioles and venules (A/V) is essential for automated microvasculature analysis. Using active learning, we created a new DFI dataset containing 240 crowd-sourced manual A/V segmentations performed by fifteen medical students and reviewed by an ophthalmologist, and developed LUNet, a novel deep learning architecture for high resolution A/V segmentation. LUNet architecture includes a double dilated convolutional block that aims to enhance the receptive field of the model and reduce its parameter count. Furthermore, LUNet has a long tail that operates at high resolution to refine the segmentation. The custom loss function emphasizes the continuity of the blood vessels. LUNet is shown to significantly outperform two state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms on the local test set as well as on four external test sets simulating distribution shifts across ethnicity, comorbidities, and annotators. We make the newly created dataset open access (upon publication).

Camera-centric understanding and generation are two cornerstones of spatial intelligence, yet they are typically studied in isolation. We present Puffin, a unified camera-centric multimodal model that extends spatial awareness along the camera dimension. Puffin integrates language regression and diffusion-based generation to interpret and create scenes from arbitrary viewpoints. To bridge the modality gap between cameras and vision-language, we introduce a novel paradigm that treats camera as language, enabling thinking with camera. This guides the model to align spatially grounded visual cues with photographic terminology while reasoning across geometric context. Puffin is trained on Puffin-4M, a large-scale dataset of 4 million vision-language-camera triplets. We incorporate both global camera parameters and pixel-wise camera maps, yielding flexible and reliable spatial generation. Experiments demonstrate Puffin superior performance over specialized models for camera-centric generation and understanding. With instruction tuning, Puffin generalizes to diverse cross-view tasks such as spatial imagination, world exploration, and photography guidance. We will release the code, models, dataset pipeline, and benchmark to advance multimodal spatial intelligence research.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently "hallucinate" - generate plausible yet factually incorrect statements - posing a critical barrier to their trustworthy deployment. In this work, we propose a new paradigm for diagnosing hallucinations, recasting them from static output errors into dynamic pathologies of a model's computational cognition. Our framework is grounded in a normative principle of computational rationality, allowing us to model a VLM's generation as a dynamic cognitive trajectory. We design a suite of information-theoretic probes that project this trajectory onto an interpretable, low-dimensional Cognitive State Space. Our central discovery is a governing principle we term the geometric-information duality: a cognitive trajectory's geometric abnormality within this space is fundamentally equivalent to its high information-theoretic surprisal. Hallucination detection is counts as a geometric anomaly detection problem. Evaluated across diverse settings - from rigorous binary QA (POPE) and comprehensive reasoning (MME) to unconstrained open-ended captioning (MS-COCO) - our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. Crucially, it operates with high efficiency under weak supervision and remains highly robust even when calibration data is heavily contaminated. This approach enables a causal attribution of failures, mapping observable errors to distinct pathological states: perceptual instability (measured by Perceptual Entropy), logical-causal failure (measured by Inferential Conflict), and decisional ambiguity (measured by Decision Entropy). Ultimately, this opens a path toward building AI systems whose reasoning is transparent, auditable, and diagnosable by design.

Egocentric vision offers a first-person view of human perception and decision making, yet its potential for traffic-safety prediction remains underexplored. In this work, we study the decoding of pedestrian crossing intentions from short egocentric video clips. We approach this by formulating the task as a closed-ended visual question answering (VQA) problem and leveraging vision language models (VLMs) to predict the pedestrians' intent. We first benchmark three families of state-of-the-art VLMs in a zero-shot setting, finding that they achieve moderate gains over random guessing but exhibit limited higher-level traffic reasoning. Motivated by these findings, we further adapt VLMs to the target task using parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our results show that the fine-tuned models substantially outperform their zero-shot counterparts and achieve a 9\% accuracy improvement over a specialized transformer-based baseline. Finally, we demonstrate that incorporating additional contextual cues, including ego motion, vehicle motion, and eye gaze, further improves predictive performance. In particular, the fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-2B model guided by eye gaze and ego motion achieves a 14.5% accuracy improvement over the transformer baseline, establishing a new state of the art for egocentric pedestrian intent decoding.

Perceptual constancy is the ability to maintain stable perceptions of objects despite changes in sensory input, such as variations in distance, angle, or lighting. This ability is crucial for recognizing visual information in a dynamic world, making it essential for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, whether VLMs are currently and theoretically capable of mastering this ability remains underexplored. In this study, we evaluated 33 VLMs using 253 experiments across three domains: color, size, and shape constancy. The experiments included single-image and video adaptations of classic cognitive tasks, along with novel tasks in in-the-wild conditions, to evaluate the models' recognition of object properties under varying conditions. We found significant variability in VLM performance, with models performance in shape constancy clearly dissociated from that of color and size constancy.

Blind individuals face persistent challenges in last-mile navigation, including locating entrances, identifying obstacles, and navigating complex or cluttered spaces. Although wearable cameras are increasingly used in assistive systems, there has been no systematic, vantage-focused comparison to guide their design. This paper addresses that gap through a two-part investigation. First, we surveyed ten experienced blind cane users, uncovering navigation strategies, pain points, and technology preferences. Participants stressed the importance of multi-sensory integration, destination-focused travel, and assistive tools that complement (rather than replace) the cane's tactile utility. Second, we conducted controlled data collection with a blind participant navigating five real-world environments using synchronized head- and cane-mounted cameras, isolating vantage placement as the primary variable. To assess how each vantage supports spatial perception, we evaluated SLAM performance (for localization and mapping) and NeRF-based 3D reconstruction (for downstream scene understanding). Head-mounted sensors delivered superior localization accuracy, while cane-mounted views offered broader ground-level coverage and richer environmental reconstructions. A combined (head+cane) configuration consistently outperformed both. These results highlight the complementary strengths of different sensor placements and offer actionable guidance for developing hybrid navigation aids that are perceptive, robust, and user-aligned.

Image outpainting is a very intriguing problem as the outside of a given image can be continuously filled by considering as the context of the image. This task has two main challenges. The first is to maintain the spatial consistency in contents of generated regions and the original input. The second is to generate a high-quality large image with a small amount of adjacent information. Conventional image outpainting methods generate inconsistent, blurry, and repeated pixels. To alleviate the difficulty of an outpainting problem, we propose a novel image outpainting method using bidirectional boundary region rearrangement. We rearrange the image to benefit from the image inpainting task by reflecting more directional information. The bidirectional boundary region rearrangement enables the generation of the missing region using bidirectional information similar to that of the image inpainting task, thereby generating the higher quality than the conventional methods using unidirectional information. Moreover, we use the edge map generator that considers images as original input with structural information and hallucinates the edges of unknown regions to generate the image. Our proposed method is compared with other state-of-the-art outpainting and inpainting methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. We further compared and evaluated them using BRISQUE, one of the No-Reference image quality assessment (IQA) metrics, to evaluate the naturalness of the output. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other methods and generates new images with 360{\deg}panoramic characteristics.

View transformers process multi-view observations to predict actions and have shown impressive performance in robotic manipulation. Existing methods typically extract static visual representations in a view-specific manner, leading to inadequate 3D spatial reasoning ability and a lack of dynamic adaptation. Taking inspiration from how the human brain integrates static and dynamic views to address these challenges, we propose Cortical Policy, a novel dual-stream view transformer for robotic manipulation that jointly reasons from static-view and dynamic-view streams. The static-view stream enhances spatial understanding by aligning features of geometrically consistent keypoints extracted from a pretrained 3D foundation model. The dynamic-view stream achieves adaptive adjustment through position-aware pretraining of an egocentric gaze estimation model, computationally replicating the human cortical dorsal pathway. Subsequently, the complementary view representations of both streams are integrated to determine the final actions, enabling the model to handle spatially-complex and dynamically-changing tasks under language conditions. Empirical evaluations on RLBench, the challenging COLOSSEUM benchmark, and real-world tasks demonstrate that Cortical Policy outperforms state-of-the-art baselines substantially, validating the superiority of dual-stream design for visuomotor control. Our cortex-inspired framework offers a fresh perspective for robotic manipulation and holds potential for broader application in vision-based robot control.

Automated segmentation of retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) images has become an important recent direction in machine learning for medical applications. We hypothesize that the anatomic structure of layers and their high-frequency variation in OCT images make retinal OCT a fitting choice for extracting spectral-domain features and combining them with spatial domain features. In this work, we present Upsilon-Net, an architecture that combines the frequency domain features with the image domain to improve the segmentation performance of OCT images. The results of this work demonstrate that the introduction of two branches, one for spectral and one for spatial domain features, brings a very significant improvement in fluid segmentation performance and allows outperformance as compared to the well-known U-Net model. Our improvement was 13% on the fluid segmentation dice score and 1.9% on the average dice score. Finally, removing selected frequency ranges in the spectral domain demonstrates the impact of these features on the fluid segmentation outperformance.

In Marius von Senden's Space and Sight, a newly sighted blind patient describes the experience of a corner as lemon-like, because corners "prick" sight like lemons prick the tongue. Prickliness, here, is a dimension in the feature space of sensory experience, an effect of the perceived on the perceiver that arises where the two interact. In the account of the newly sighted, an effect familiar from one interaction translates to a novel context. Perception serves as the vehicle for generalization, in that an effect shared across different experiences produces a concrete abstraction grounded in those experiences. Cezanne and the post-impressionists, fluent in the language of experience translation, realized that the way to paint a concrete form that best reflected reality was to paint not what they saw, but what it was like to see. We envision a future of creation using AI where what it is like to see is replicable, transferrable, manipulable - part of the artist's palette that is both grounded in a particular context, and generalizable beyond it. An active line of research maps human-interpretable features onto directions in GAN latent space. Supervised and self-supervised approaches that search for anticipated directions or use off-the-shelf classifiers to drive image manipulation in embedding space are limited in the variety of features they can uncover. Unsupervised approaches that discover useful new directions show that the space of perceptually meaningful directions is nowhere close to being fully mapped. As this space is broad and full of creative potential, we want tools for direction discovery that capture the richness and generalizability of human perception. Our approach puts creators in the discovery loop during real-time tool use, in order to identify directions that are perceptually meaningful to them, and generate interpretable image translations along those directions.

The reflective nature of the human eye is an underappreciated source of information about what the world around us looks like. By imaging the eyes of a moving person, we can collect multiple views of a scene outside the camera's direct line of sight through the reflections in the eyes. In this paper, we reconstruct a 3D scene beyond the camera's line of sight using portrait images containing eye reflections. This task is challenging due to 1) the difficulty of accurately estimating eye poses and 2) the entangled appearance of the eye iris and the scene reflections. Our method jointly refines the cornea poses, the radiance field depicting the scene, and the observer's eye iris texture. We further propose a simple regularization prior on the iris texture pattern to improve reconstruction quality. Through various experiments on synthetic and real-world captures featuring people with varied eye colors, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to recover 3D scenes using eye reflections.

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is a fundamental yet challenging task due to the presence of noise, loss of detail, and poor contrast in images captured under insufficient lighting conditions. Recent methods often rely solely on pixel-level transformations of RGB images, neglecting the rich contextual information available from multiple visual modalities. In this paper, we present ModalFormer, the first large-scale multimodal framework for LLIE that fully exploits nine auxiliary modalities to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our model comprises two main components: a Cross-modal Transformer (CM-T) designed to restore corrupted images while seamlessly integrating multimodal information, and multiple auxiliary subnetworks dedicated to multimodal feature reconstruction. Central to the CM-T is our novel Cross-modal Multi-headed Self-Attention mechanism (CM-MSA), which effectively fuses RGB data with modality-specific features--including deep feature embeddings, segmentation information, geometric cues, and color information--to generate information-rich hybrid attention maps. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate ModalFormer's state-of-the-art performance in LLIE. Pre-trained models and results are made available at https://github.com/albrateanu/ModalFormer.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have made substantial progress in integrating large language models (LLMs) with visual inputs, enabling advanced multimodal reasoning. Despite their success, a persistent challenge is hallucination-where generated text fails to accurately reflect visual content-undermining both accuracy and reliability. Existing methods focus on alignment training or decoding refinements but primarily address symptoms at the generation stage without probing the underlying causes. In this work, we investigate the internal mechanisms driving hallucination in LVLMs, with an emphasis on the multi-head attention module. Specifically, we introduce Vision-aware Head Divergence (VHD), a metric that quantifies the sensitivity of attention head outputs to visual context. Based on this, our findings reveal the presence of vision-aware attention heads that are more attuned to visual information; however, the model's overreliance on its prior language patterns is closely related to hallucinations. Building on these insights, we propose Vision-aware Head Reinforcement (VHR), a training-free approach to mitigate hallucination by enhancing the role of vision-aware attention heads. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in mitigating hallucinations, while maintaining high efficiency with negligible additional time overhead.

We introduce Vision as LoRA (VoRA), a novel paradigm for transforming an LLM into an MLLM. Unlike prevalent MLLM architectures that rely on external vision modules for vision encoding, VoRA internalizes visual capabilities by integrating vision-specific LoRA layers directly into the LLM. This design allows the added parameters to be seamlessly merged into the LLM during inference, eliminating structural complexity and minimizing computational overhead. Moreover, inheriting the LLM's ability of handling flexible context, VoRA can process inputs at arbitrary resolutions. To further strengthen VoRA's visual capabilities, we introduce a block-wise distillation method that transfers visual priors from a pre-trained ViT into the LoRA layers, effectively accelerating training by injecting visual knowledge. Additionally, we apply bi-directional attention masks to better capture the context information of an image. We successfully demonstrate that with additional pre-training data, VoRA can perform comparably with conventional encode-based MLLMs. All training data, codes, and model weights will be released at https://github.com/Hon-Wong/VoRA.

Inspired by human vision, we introduce a framework using active gaze to enable fine-grained bimanual manipulation with only a single stereo camera. EyeRobot 2.0 physically attends to a 3D fixation point in the scene by swiveling two eye viewpoints to center their gaze on it. The resulting images are processed foveally by allocating more visual tokens to the image centers, focusing computation on task-relevant features. Such Active Visual Fixation (AVF) requires carefully coordinated gaze during task execution, which we accomplish hierarchically by first training a low-level gaze servoing policy conditioned on a goal object, then training a target selector which emits fixation goals based on task progress. Both modules are trained with RL on real-world data: the first is trained with a dense geometric reward and the second co-trains with the BC gripper policy which allows it to discover fixation sequences that can resemble a human's fixation sequence while performing the task. EyeRobot 2.0 further takes advantage of fixation by canonicalizing gripper information into a fixation-relative SE(3) frame, which compacts the size of the action distribution to learn. We collect teleoperation data for 7 real-world and 6 simulated tasks, and conduct over 1000 physical and 1800 simulated robot trials comparing EyeRobot 2.0 against passive stereo and ego + wrist camera policies trained on the same data. Removing wrist cameras is costly for standard policies: with only passive stereo, real-world success drops from 52% to 27%. EyeRobot 2.0 closes this gap with only stereo, outperforming passive stereo by 40% in real and 20% in sim. It matches ego + wrist policies when their wrist views are clear (69% vs. 64%), and more than doubles their success when grasped objects occlude the wrist cameras (48% vs. 22%)

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of retinal diseases. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated considerable potential in medical image analysis, existing benchmarks largely reduce OCT understanding to coarse-grained disease classification or isolated visual question answering, leaving the complete cognitive process from visual perception to clinical reasoning insufficiently evaluated. To address this limitation, we introduce OCT-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark dedicated to OCT image understanding. OCT-Bench comprises 10,076 high-quality multiple-choice questions constructed from 4,137 OCT images across seven public datasets. Following the real-world clinical interpretation workflow, we establish a hierarchical capability taxonomy consisting of 20 fine-grained tasks across three dimensions: Perception, Cognition, and Reasoning. These tasks cover a broad range of capabilities, including imaging attributes, retinal anatomy, lesion characteristics, spatial relationships, disease assessment, therapeutic decision-making, and prognostic management. We systematically evaluate 20 representative MLLMs, including proprietary models, open-source general-purpose models, and medical-domain models. Experimental results demonstrate that current models remain substantially short of reliable OCT understanding. Moreover, neither medical-domain adaptation nor increased model scale consistently improves performance across capability levels. OCT-Bench enables comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation of MLLMs, providing a foundation for identifying capability bottlenecks and advancing clinically grounded OCT understanding.

Traditional computer vision generally solves each single task independently by a dedicated model with the task instruction implicitly designed in the model architecture, arising two limitations: (1) it leads to task-specific models, which require multiple models for different tasks and restrict the potential synergies from diverse tasks; (2) it leads to a pre-defined and fixed model interface that has limited interactivity and adaptability in following user' task instructions. To address them, Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) has been intensively studied recently, which finetunes a large vision model with language as task instructions, aiming to learn from a wide range of vision tasks described by language instructions a general-purpose multimodal model that can follow arbitrary instructions and thus solve arbitrary tasks specified by the user. This work aims to provide a systematic review of visual instruction tuning, covering (1) the background that presents computer vision task paradigms and the development of VIT; (2) the foundations of VIT that introduce commonly used network architectures, visual instruction tuning frameworks and objectives, and evaluation setups and tasks; (3) the commonly used datasets in visual instruction tuning and evaluation; (4) the review of existing VIT methods that categorizes them with a taxonomy according to both the studied vision task and the method design and highlights the major contributions, strengths, and shortcomings of them; (5) the comparison and discussion of VIT methods over various instruction-following benchmarks; (6) several challenges, open directions and possible future works in visual instruction tuning research.

This investigation reports on the results of convolutional neural networks developed for the recently introduced PathologicAL Myopia (PALM) dataset, which consists of 1200 fundus images. We propose a new Optic Nerve Head (ONH)-based prediction enhancement for the segmentation of atrophy and fovea. Models trained with 400 available training images achieved an AUC of 0.9867 for pathological myopia classification, and a Euclidean distance of 58.27 pixels on the fovea localization task, evaluated on a test set of 400 images. Dice and F1 metrics for semantic segmentation of lesions scored 0.9303 and 0.9869 on optic disc, 0.8001 and 0.9135 on retinal atrophy, and 0.8073 and 0.7059 on retinal detachment, respectively. Our work was acknowledged with an award in the context of the "PathologicAL Myopia detection from retinal images" challenge held during the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (April 2019). Considering that (pathological) myopia cases are often identified as false positives and negatives in classification systems for glaucoma, we envision that the current work could aid in future research to discriminate between glaucomatous and highly-myopic eyes, complemented by the localization and segmentation of landmarks such as fovea, optic disc and atrophy.

We present DualFocus, a novel framework for integrating macro and micro perspectives within multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to enhance vision-language task performance. Current MLLMs typically singularly focus on inputs at a predefined resolution, resulting in deficiencies in detailed questions involving local regions. We introduced a DualFocus mechanism where the model concentrates on the image from a macro perspective, responses to the question, and identifies suitable sub-regions to zoom in for subsequent micro perspective analysis. Via the integration of answers from both macro and micro perspectives, the model is adept at addressing tasks that encompass global, detailed, and combined considerations. To endows the DualFocus mechanism in MLLMs, we curated a tailored dataset derived from the Visual Genome (VG) and adapted it to align with the training regimen of DualFocus. Through comparative studies across different model sizes and benchmarks, we demonstrate DualFocus's superiority in balancing detailed examination with holistic insight, significantly reducing hallucination instances in MLLMs and improving their performance in various vision-language tasks.