Target-Aware Video Diffusion Models

We present a target-aware video diffusion model that generates videos from an input image in which an actor interacts with a specified target while performing a desired action. The target is defined by a segmentation mask and the desired action is described via a text prompt. Unlike existing controllable image-to-video diffusion models that often rely on dense structural or motion cues to guide the actor's movements toward the target, our target-aware model requires only a simple mask to indicate the target, leveraging the generalization capabilities of pretrained models to produce plausible actions. This makes our method particularly effective for human-object interaction (HOI) scenarios, where providing precise action guidance is challenging, and further enables the use of video diffusion models for high-level action planning in applications such as robotics. We build our target-aware model by extending a baseline model to incorporate the target mask as an additional input. To enforce target awareness, we introduce a special token that encodes the target's spatial information within the text prompt. We then fine-tune the model with our curated dataset using a novel cross-attention loss that aligns the cross-attention maps associated with this token with the input target mask. To further improve performance, we selectively apply this loss to the most semantically relevant transformer blocks and attention regions. Experimental results show that our target-aware model outperforms existing solutions in generating videos where actors interact accurately with the specified targets. We further demonstrate its efficacy in two downstream applications: video content creation and zero-shot 3D HOI motion synthesis.

Semantic Segmentation of Transparent and Opaque Drinking Glasses with the Help of Zero-shot Learning

Segmenting transparent structures in images is challenging since they are difficult to distinguish from the background. Common examples are drinking glasses, which are a ubiquitous part of our lives and appear in many different shapes and sizes. In this work we propose TransCaGNet, a modified version of the zero-shot model CaGNet. We exchange the segmentation backbone with the architecture of Trans4Trans to be capable of segmenting transparent objects. Since some glasses are rarely captured, we use zeroshot learning to be able to create semantic segmentations of glass categories not given during training. We propose a novel synthetic dataset covering a diverse set of different environmental conditions. Additionally we capture a real-world evaluation dataset since most applications take place in the real world. Comparing our model with Zeg-Clip we are able to show that TransCaGNet produces better mean IoU and accuracy values while ZegClip outperforms it mostly for unseen classes. To improve the segmentation results, we combine the semantic segmentation of the models with the segmentation results of SAM 2. Our evaluation emphasizes that distinguishing between different classes is challenging for the models due to similarity, points of view, or coverings. Taking this behavior into account, we assign glasses multiple possible categories. The modification leads to an improvement up to 13.68% for the mean IoU and up to 17.88% for the mean accuracy values on the synthetic dataset. Using our difficult synthetic dataset for training, the models produce even better results on the real-world dataset. The mean IoU is improved up to 5.55% and the mean accuracy up to 5.72% on the real-world dataset.

SPNeRF: Open Vocabulary 3D Neural Scene Segmentation with Superpoints

Open-vocabulary segmentation, powered by large visual-language models like CLIP, has expanded 2D segmentation capabilities beyond fixed classes predefined by the dataset, enabling zero-shot understanding across diverse scenes. Extending these capabilities to 3D segmentation introduces challenges, as CLIP's image-based embeddings often lack the geometric detail necessary for 3D scene segmentation. Recent methods tend to address this by introducing additional segmentation models or replacing CLIP with variations trained on segmentation data, which lead to redundancy or loss on CLIP's general language capabilities. To overcome this limitation, we introduce SPNeRF, a NeRF based zero-shot 3D segmentation approach that leverages geometric priors. We integrate geometric primitives derived from the 3D scene into NeRF training to produce primitive-wise CLIP features, avoiding the ambiguity of point-wise features. Additionally, we propose a primitive-based merging mechanism enhanced with affinity scores. Without relying on additional segmentation models, our method further explores CLIP's capability for 3D segmentation and achieves notable improvements over original LERF.

OpenCity3D: What do Vision-Language Models know about Urban Environments?

Vision-language models (VLMs) show great promise for 3D scene understanding but are mainly applied to indoor spaces or autonomous driving, focusing on low-level tasks like segmentation. This work expands their use to urban-scale environments by leveraging 3D reconstructions from multi-view aerial imagery. We propose OpenCity3D, an approach that addresses high-level tasks, such as population density estimation, building age classification, property price prediction, crime rate assessment, and noise pollution evaluation. Our findings highlight OpenCity3D's impressive zero-shot and few-shot capabilities, showcasing adaptability to new contexts. This research establishes a new paradigm for language-driven urban analytics, enabling applications in planning, policy, and environmental monitoring. See our project page: opencity3d.github.io

EIAD: Explainable Industrial Anomaly Detection Via Multi-Modal Large Language Models

Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) is critical to ensure product quality during manufacturing. Although existing zero-shot defect segmentation and detection methods have shown effectiveness, they cannot provide detailed descriptions of the defects. Furthermore, the application of large multi-modal models in IAD remains in its infancy, facing challenges in balancing question-answering (QA) performance and mask-based grounding capabilities, often owing to overfitting during the fine-tuning process. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that introduces a dedicated multi-modal defect localization module to decouple the dialog functionality from the core feature extraction. This decoupling is achieved through independent optimization objectives and tailored learning strategies. Additionally, we contribute to the first multi-modal industrial anomaly detection training dataset, named Defect Detection Question Answering (DDQA), encompassing a wide range of defect types and industrial scenarios. Unlike conventional datasets that rely on GPT-generated data, DDQA ensures authenticity and reliability and offers a robust foundation for model training. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method, Explainable Industrial Anomaly Detection Assistant (EIAD), achieves outstanding performance in defect detection and localization tasks. It not only significantly enhances accuracy but also improves interpretability. These advancements highlight the potential of EIAD for practical applications in industrial settings.

Adapting to the Unknown: Training-Free Audio-Visual Event Perception with Dynamic Thresholds

In the domain of audio-visual event perception, which focuses on the temporal localization and classification of events across distinct modalities (audio and visual), existing approaches are constrained by the vocabulary available in their training data. This limitation significantly impedes their capacity to generalize to novel, unseen event categories. Furthermore, the annotation process for this task is labor-intensive, requiring extensive manual labeling across modalities and temporal segments, limiting the scalability of current methods. Current state-of-the-art models ignore the shifts in event distributions over time, reducing their ability to adjust to changing video dynamics. Additionally, previous methods rely on late fusion to combine audio and visual information. While straightforward, this approach results in a significant loss of multimodal interactions. To address these challenges, we propose Audio-Visual Adaptive Video Analysis ($\text{AV}^2\text{A}$), a model-agnostic approach that requires no further training and integrates a score-level fusion technique to retain richer multimodal interactions. $\text{AV}^2\text{A}$ also includes a within-video label shift algorithm, leveraging input video data and predictions from prior frames to dynamically adjust event distributions for subsequent frames. Moreover, we present the first training-free, open-vocabulary baseline for audio-visual event perception, demonstrating that $\text{AV}^2\text{A}$ achieves substantial improvements over naive training-free baselines. We demonstrate the effectiveness of $\text{AV}^2\text{A}$ on both zero-shot and weakly-supervised state-of-the-art methods, achieving notable improvements in performance metrics over existing approaches.

VEGGIE: Instructional Editing and Reasoning of Video Concepts with Grounded Generation

Recent video diffusion models have enhanced video editing, but it remains challenging to handle instructional editing and diverse tasks (e.g., adding, removing, changing) within a unified framework. In this paper, we introduce VEGGIE, a Video Editor with Grounded Generation from Instructions, a simple end-to-end framework that unifies video concept editing, grounding, and reasoning based on diverse user instructions. Specifically, given a video and text query, VEGGIE first utilizes an MLLM to interpret user intentions in instructions and ground them to the video contexts, generating frame-specific grounded task queries for pixel-space responses. A diffusion model then renders these plans and generates edited videos that align with user intent. To support diverse tasks and complex instructions, we employ a curriculum learning strategy: first aligning the MLLM and video diffusion model with large-scale instructional image editing data, followed by end-to-end fine-tuning on high-quality multitask video data. Additionally, we introduce a novel data synthesis pipeline to generate paired instructional video editing data for model training. It transforms static image data into diverse, high-quality video editing samples by leveraging Image-to-Video models to inject dynamics. VEGGIE shows strong performance in instructional video editing with different editing skills, outperforming the best instructional baseline as a versatile model, while other models struggle with multi-tasking. VEGGIE also excels in video object grounding and reasoning segmentation, where other baselines fail. We further reveal how the multiple tasks help each other and highlight promising applications like zero-shot multimodal instructional and in-context video editing.

Breaking the Box: Enhancing Remote Sensing Image Segmentation with Freehand Sketches

This work advances zero-shot interactive segmentation for remote sensing imagery through three key contributions. First, we propose a novel sketch-based prompting method, enabling users to intuitively outline objects, surpassing traditional point or box prompts. Second, we introduce LTL-Sensing, the first dataset pairing human sketches with remote sensing imagery, setting a benchmark for future research. Third, we present LTL-Net, a model featuring a multi-input prompting transport module tailored for freehand sketches. Extensive experiments show our approach significantly improves segmentation accuracy and robustness over state-of-the-art methods like SAM, fostering more intuitive human-AI collaboration in remote sensing analysis and enhancing its applications.

Eye on the Target: Eye Tracking Meets Rodent Tracking

Analyzing animal behavior from video recordings is crucial for scientific research, yet manual annotation remains labor-intensive and prone to subjectivity. Efficient segmentation methods are needed to automate this process while maintaining high accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel pipeline that utilizes eye-tracking data from Aria glasses to generate prompt points, which are then used to produce segmentation masks via a fast zero-shot segmentation model. Additionally, we apply post-processing to refine the prompts, leading to improved segmentation quality. Through our approach, we demonstrate that combining eye-tracking-based annotation with smart prompt refinement can enhance segmentation accuracy, achieving an improvement of 70.6% from 38.8 to 66.2 in the Jaccard Index for segmentation results in the rats dataset.

CAM-Seg: A Continuous-valued Embedding Approach for Semantic Image Generation

Traditional transformer-based semantic segmentation relies on quantized embeddings. However, our analysis reveals that autoencoder accuracy on segmentation mask using quantized embeddings (e.g. VQ-VAE) is 8% lower than continuous-valued embeddings (e.g. KL-VAE). Motivated by this, we propose a continuous-valued embedding framework for semantic segmentation. By reformulating semantic mask generation as a continuous image-to-embedding diffusion process, our approach eliminates the need for discrete latent representations while preserving fine-grained spatial and semantic details. Our key contribution includes a diffusion-guided autoregressive transformer that learns a continuous semantic embedding space by modeling long-range dependencies in image features. Our framework contains a unified architecture combining a VAE encoder for continuous feature extraction, a diffusion-guided transformer for conditioned embedding generation, and a VAE decoder for semantic mask reconstruction. Our setting facilitates zero-shot domain adaptation capabilities enabled by the continuity of the embedding space. Experiments across diverse datasets (e.g., Cityscapes and domain-shifted variants) demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness to distribution shifts, including adverse weather (e.g., fog, snow) and viewpoint variations. Our model also exhibits strong noise resilience, achieving robust performance ($\approx$ 95% AP compared to baseline) under gaussian noise, moderate motion blur, and moderate brightness/contrast variations, while experiencing only a moderate impact ($\approx$ 90% AP compared to baseline) from 50% salt and pepper noise, saturation and hue shifts. Code available: https://github.com/mahmed10/CAMSS.git