Amodal SAM: A Unified Amodal Segmentation Framework with Generalization

Amodal segmentation is a challenging task that aims to predict the complete geometric shape of objects, including their occluded regions. Although existing methods primarily focus on amodal segmentation within the training domain, these approaches often lack the generalization capacity to extend effectively to novel object categories and unseen contexts. This paper introduces Amodal SAM, a unified framework that leverages SAM (Segment Anything Model) for both amodal image and amodal video segmentation. Amodal SAM preserves the powerful generalization ability of SAM while extending its inherent capabilities to the amodal segmentation task. The improvements lie in three aspects: (1) a lightweight Spatial Completion Adapter that enables occluded region reconstruction, (2) a Target-Aware Occlusion Synthesis (TAOS) pipeline that addresses the scarcity of amodal annotations by generating diverse synthetic training data, and (3) novel learning objectives that enforce regional consistency and topological regularization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Amodal SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, while simultaneously exhibiting robust generalization to novel scenarios. We anticipate that this research will advance the field toward practical amodal segmentation systems capable of operating effectively in unconstrained real-world environments.

Video-ToC: Video Tree-of-Cue Reasoning

Existing Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) struggle with complex video understanding, exhibiting limited reasoning capabilities and potential hallucinations. In particular, these methods tend to perform reasoning solely relying on the pretrained inherent reasoning rationales whilst lacking perception-aware adaptation to the input video content. To address this, we propose \textbf{Video-ToC}, a novel video reasoning framework that enhances video understanding through tree-of-cue reasoning. Specifically, our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) A tree-guided visual cue localization mechanism, which endows the model with enhanced fine-grained perceptual capabilities through structured reasoning patterns; (2) A reasoning-demand reward mechanism, which dynamically adjusts the reward value for reinforcement learning (RL) based on the estimation of reasoning demands, enabling on-demand incentives for more effective reasoning strategies; and (3) An automated annotation pipeline that constructs the Video-ToC-SFT-1k and Video-ToC-RL-2k datasets for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and RL training, respectively. Extensive evaluations on six video understanding benchmarks and a video hallucination benchmark demonstrate the superiority of Video-ToC over baselines and recent methods. Code is available at https://github.com/qizhongtan/Video-ToC.

LLMs Should Incorporate Explicit Mechanisms for Human Empathy

This paper argues that Large Language Models (LLMs) should incorporate explicit mechanisms for human empathy. As LLMs become increasingly deployed in high-stakes human-centered settings, their success depends not only on correctness or fluency but on faithful preservation of human perspectives. Yet, current LLMs systematically fail at this requirement: even when well-aligned and policy-compliant, they often attenuate affect, misrepresent contextual salience, and rigidify relational stance in ways that distort meaning. We formalize empathy as an observable behavioral property: the capacity to model and respond to human perspectives while preserving intention, affect, and context. Under this framing, we identify four recurring mechanisms of empathic failure in contemporary LLMs--sentiment attenuation, empathic granularity mismatch, conflict avoidance, and linguistic distancing--arising as structural consequences of prevailing training and alignment practices. We further organize these failures along three dimensions: cognitive, cultural, and relational empathy, to explain their manifestation across tasks. Empirical analyses show that strong benchmark performance can mask systematic empathic distortions, motivating empathy-aware objectives, benchmarks, and training signals as first-class components of LLM development.

NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction in Real-world Adverse Conditions: RealX3D Challenge Results

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction (3DRR) Challenge, detailing the proposed methods and results. The challenge seeks to identify robust reconstruction pipelines that are robust under real-world adverse conditions, specifically extreme low-light and smoke-degraded environments, as captured by our RealX3D benchmark. A total of 279 participants registered for the competition, of whom 33 teams submitted valid results. We thoroughly evaluate the submitted approaches against state-of-the-art baselines, revealing significant progress in 3D reconstruction under adverse conditions. Our analysis highlights shared design principles among top-performing methods and provides insights into effective strategies for handling 3D scene degradation.

MG$^2$-RAG: Multi-Granularity Graph for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing systems struggle with complex cross-modal reasoning. Flat vector retrieval often ignores structural dependencies, while current graph-based methods rely on costly ``translation-to-text'' pipelines that discard fine-grained visual information. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{MG$^2$-RAG}, a lightweight \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{G}ranularity \textbf{G}raph \textbf{RAG} framework that jointly improves graph construction, modality fusion, and cross-modal retrieval. MG$^2$-RAG constructs a hierarchical multimodal knowledge graph by combining lightweight textual parsing with entity-driven visual grounding, enabling textual entities and visual regions to be fused into unified multimodal nodes that preserve atomic evidence. Building on this representation, we introduce a multi-granularity graph retrieval mechanism that aggregates dense similarities and propagates relevance across the graph to support structured multi-hop reasoning. Extensive experiments across four representative multimodal tasks (i.e., retrieval, knowledge-based VQA, reasoning, and classification) demonstrate that MG$^2$-RAG consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing graph construction overhead with an average 43.3$\times$ speedup and 23.9$\times$ cost reduction compared with advanced graph-based frameworks.

GenSmoke-GS: A Multi-Stage Method for Novel View Synthesis from Smoke-Degraded Images Using a Generative Model

This paper describes our method for Track 2 of the NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction (3DRR) Challenge on smoke-degraded images. In this task, smoke reduces image visibility and weakens the cross-view consistency required by scene optimization and rendering. We address this problem with a multi-stage pipeline consisting of image restoration, dehazing, MLLM-based enhancement, 3DGS-MCMC optimization, and averaging over repeated runs. The main purpose of the pipeline is to improve visibility before rendering while limiting scene-content changes across input views. Experimental results on the challenge benchmark show improved quantitative performance and better visual quality than the provided baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/plbbl/GenSmoke-GS. Our method achieved a ranking of 1 out of 14 participants in Track 2 of the NTIRE 3DRR Challenge, as reported on the official competition website: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/13993/#/results-tab.

Anchoring Emotions in Text: Robust Multimodal Fusion for Mimicry Intensity Estimation

Estimating Emotional Mimicry Intensity (EMI) in naturalistic environments is a critical yet challenging task in affective computing. The primary difficulty lies in effectively modeling the complex, nonlinear temporal dynamics across highly heterogeneous modalities, especially when physical signals are corrupted or missing. To tackle this, we propose TAEMI (Text-Anchored Emotional Mimicry Intensity estimation), a novel multimodal framework designed for the 10th ABAW Competition. Motivated by the observation that continuous visual and acoustic signals are highly susceptible to transient environmental noise, we break the traditional symmetric fusion paradigm. Instead, we leverage textual transcript--which inherently encode a stable, time-independent semantic prior--as central anchors. Specifically, we introduce a Text-Anchored Dual Cross-Attention mechanism that utilizes these robust textual queries to actively filter out frame-level redundancies and align the noisy physical streams. Furthermore, to prevent catastrophic performance degradation caused by inevitably missing data in unconstrained real-world scenarios, we integrate Learnable Missing-Modality Tokens and a Modality Dropout strategy during training. Extensive experiments on the Hume-Vidmimic2 dataset demonstrate that TAEMI effectively captures fine-grained emotional variations and maintains robust predictive resilience under imperfect conditions. Our framework achieves a state-of-the-art mean Pearson correlation coefficient across six continuous emotional dimensions, significantly outperforming existing baseline methods.

Joint Optimization of Storage and Loading for High-Performance 3D Point Cloud Data Processing

With the rapid development of computer vision and deep learning, significant advancements have been made in 3D vision, partic- ularly in autonomous driving, robotic perception, and augmented reality. 3D point cloud data, as a crucial representation of 3D information, has gained widespread attention. However, the vast scale and complexity of point cloud data present significant chal- lenges for loading and processing and traditional algorithms struggle to handle large-scale datasets.The diversity of storage formats for point cloud datasets (e.g., PLY, XYZ, BIN) adds complexity to data handling and results in inefficiencies in data preparation. Al- though binary formats like BIN and NPY have been used to speed up data access, they still do not fully address the time-consuming data loading and processing phase. To overcome these challenges, we propose the .PcRecord format, a unified data storage solution designed to reduce the storage occupation and accelerate the processing of point cloud data. We also introduce a high-performance data processing pipeline equipped with multiple modules. By leveraging a multi-stage parallel pipeline architecture, our system optimizes the use of computational resources, significantly improving processing speed and efficiency. This paper details the im- plementation of this system and demonstrates its effectiveness in addressing the challenges of handling large-scale point cloud datasets.On average, our system achieves performance improvements of 6.61x (ModelNet40), 2.69x (S3DIS), 2.23x (ShapeNet), 3.09x (Kitti), 8.07x (SUN RGB-D), and 5.67x (ScanNet) with GPU and 6.9x, 1.88x, 1.29x, 2.28x, 25.4x, and 19.3x with Ascend.

Hierarchical Granularity Alignment and State Space Modeling for Robust Multimodal AU Detection in the Wild

Facial Action Unit (AU) detection in in-the-wild environments remains a formidable challenge due to severe spatial-temporal heterogeneity, unconstrained poses, and complex audio-visual dependencies. While recent multimodal approaches have made progress, they often rely on capacity-limited encoders and shallow fusion mechanisms that fail to capture fine-grained semantic shifts and ultra-long temporal contexts. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel multimodal framework driven by Hierarchical Granularity Alignment and State Space Models.Specifically, we leverage powerful foundation models, namely DINOv2 and WavLM, to extract robust and high-fidelity visual and audio representations, effectively replacing traditional feature extractors. To handle extreme facial variations, our Hierarchical Granularity Alignment module dynamically aligns global facial semantics with fine-grained local active patches. Furthermore, we overcome the receptive field limitations of conventional temporal convolutional networks by introducing a Vision-Mamba architecture. This approach enables temporal modeling with O(N) linear complexity, effectively capturing ultra-long-range dynamics without performance degradation. A novel asymmetric cross-attention mechanism is also introduced to deeply synchronize paralinguistic audio cues with subtle visual movements.Extensive experiments on the challenging Aff-Wild2 dataset demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Notably, this framework secured top rankings in the AU Detection track of the 10th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild Competition.

Too Vivid to Be Real? Benchmarking and Calibrating Generative Color Fidelity

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have greatly improved visual quality, yet producing images that appear visually authentic to real-world photography remains challenging. This is partly due to biases in existing evaluation paradigms: human ratings and preference-trained metrics often favor visually vivid images with exaggerated saturation and contrast, which make generations often too vivid to be real even when prompted for realistic-style images. To address this issue, we present Color Fidelity Dataset (CFD) and Color Fidelity Metric (CFM) for objective evaluation of color fidelity in realistic-style generations. CFD contains over 1.3M real and synthetic images with ordered levels of color realism, while CFM employs a multimodal encoder to learn perceptual color fidelity. In addition, we propose a training-free Color Fidelity Refinement (CFR) that adaptively modulates spatial-temporal guidance scale in generation, thereby enhancing color authenticity. Together, CFD supports CFM for assessment, whose learned attention further guides CFR to refine T2I fidelity, forming a progressive framework for assessing and improving color fidelity in realistic-style T2I generation. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ZhengyaoFang/CFM.