Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Danda Pani Paudel

Publications and source records attributed to Danda Pani Paudel.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Exo2EgoSyn: Unlocking Foundation Video Generation Models for Exocentric-to-Egocentric Video Synthesis

Foundation video generation models such as WAN 2.2 exhibit strong text- and image-conditioned synthesis abilities but remain constrained to the same-view generation setting. In this work, we introduce Exo2EgoSyn, an adaptation of WAN 2.2 that unlocks Exocentric-to-Egocentric(Exo2Ego) cross-view video synthesis. Our framework consists of three key modules. Ego-Exo View Alignment(EgoExo-Align) enforces latent-space alignment between exocentric and egocentric first-frame representations, reorienting the generative space from the given exo view toward the ego view. Multi-view Exocentric Video Conditioning (MultiExoCon) aggregates multi-view exocentric videos into a unified conditioning signal, extending WAN2.2 beyond its vanilla single-image or text conditioning. Furthermore, Pose-Aware Latent Injection (PoseInj) injects relative exo-to-ego camera pose information into the latent state, guiding geometry-aware synthesis across viewpoints. Together, these modules enable high-fidelity ego view video generation from third-person observations without retraining from scratch. Experiments on ExoEgo4D validate that Exo2EgoSyn significantly improves Ego2Exo synthesis, paving the way for scalable cross-view video generation with foundation models. Source code and models will be released publicly.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Accelerated Decoding of Centroid Positional Encoding for Instance Segmentation

Beyond model inference, the decoding stage, which converts raw network outputs into task-level representations, constitutes a significant portion of the execution cost. Despite its practical impact, prediction decoding has received comparatively little attention and is often implemented using generic CPU routines or inefficient GPU kernels, limiting the benefits of advances in model efficiency. In this work, we investigate the decoding overhead associated with a recent sinusoidal centroid encoding for Instance Segmentation, in which each pixel regresses a positional embedding of its instance centroid. This approach allows flexible segmentation without predefined proposals, but extracting instance masks from dense embeddings incurs a high computational cost. We present an optimized CUDA-based implementation of the decoding algorithm tailored to this encoding, explicitly addressing challenges related to parallelization, synchronization, and memory access on modern GPUs. Our solution significantly reduces decoding overhead and improves End-to-End inference latency, outperforming both CPU-based approaches and naive GPU implementations. The results demonstrate that efficient decoding is essential to fully exploit the advantages of advanced output representations and highlight the importance of jointly designing encoding schemes and their decoding algorithms for real-time computer vision systems.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

SceneBench: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Vision-Language Understanding of 3D Scenes

Vision-language models excel at 2D image understanding but remain limited in 3D spatial reasoning. Progress is hindered by limitations in current benchmarks. First, 3D datasets often rely on point clouds that capture geometry but discard rich visual features like texture, text, and materials. Second, annotations treat objects in isolation while ignoring real-world hierarchical organization (scenes, rooms, functional areas, object groups). Third, evaluation tasks focus narrowly on basic recognition rather than multi-step spatial reasoning. In this context, we introduce SceneBench, a benchmark of 966 photorealistic 3D scenes reconstructed with Gaussian Splatting and densely annotated with hierarchical semantics spanning scenes, rooms, functional areas, object groups, and individual objects. These annotations are produced through a human-in-the-loop pipeline combining vision-language models with roughly 1,500 human-hours of iterative refinement and verification, producing over 183K annotated nodes with textual descriptions and 3D bounding boxes. Building on this representation, we define three evaluation tasks: Existence-Based Questions probing object attributes, Spatial Intelligence Questions covering counting, size comparison, distance, and directional relations, and Grounded Question-Reasoning-Answer (QRA) triplets requiring multi-step reasoning across semantic levels. Experiments with state-of-the-art vision-language models show that while models perform well on basic recognition tasks (e.g., up to 85% accuracy for detection), performance drops substantially on hierarchical and compositional reasoning (e.g., down to 60% for counting), revealing limitations not captured by existing benchmarks. SceneBench provides a realistic testbed for developing and evaluating models capable of fine-grained spatial reasoning in photorealistic 3D environments.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

ConeGaussian: Anti-Aliased Gaussian Ray-Tracing for Generic Central Cameras

In rendering, a camera is a sampling operator that maps each finite pixel to a bundle of rays. Different camera models change the geometry of this bundle, thus making a unified and faithful rendering formulation challenging. Consequently, Gaussian ray tracing supports generic cameras (with optical center) through their inverse ray mappings, yet typically reduces every pixel to a single center ray. This ignores the camera-dependent pixel footprint, causing aliasing under minification, while unconstrained Gaussians expose unsupported frequencies under magnification. We present ConeGaussian, a camera-model-agnostic anti-aliasing framework for Gaussian ray-based rendering. Instead of defining the pixel filter on a camera-specific image plane, ConeGaussian constructs an anisotropic footprint directly from neighboring rays produced by the camera's native inverse mapping. We derive a closed-form response under a locally linear, depth-local, moment-matched approximation of the finite pixel footprint, while the same geometry defines a per-Gaussian training-frequency floor. Notably, by construction, our filtering principle can be used unmodified across calibrated central camera models and multiple Gaussian ray-rendering backbones. Additionally, unlike in mip-splatting, our scene-space frequency floor and filtering enable trivial composition at render time, allowing us to remove excess blurring. On pinhole and strongly distorted fisheye captures, ConeGaussian consistently improves two distinct ray-based backbones, by up to 4.3 dB at 1/8 resolution, and reduces fisheye LPIPS by 30% where perspective screen-plane footprint formulations are not directly applicable.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

LangStreet: Persistent Language Fields for Anchor-Decoded Street Gaussians

Language Gaussian fields implicitly assume that the primitive carrying semantics remains identifiable across views. This assumption breaks in scalable anchor-decoded representations, where persistent anchors generate view-conditioned child Gaussians whose geometry and appearance vary with the camera. We introduce Ours, a persistent language field for such structured Gaussian scenes. Our key idea is semantic ownership: transient children route observations, while persistent decoder slots and their parent anchors own the language field. We use alpha-compositing responsibilities to accumulate additive directional evidence at slots; these statistics marginalize exactly to anchors. We then complete weakly supported slots with anchor-aligned evidence while preserving the anchor direction, and represent slot detail through low-rank residuals in anchor-relative semantic coordinates. Our primary model, Ours (base), stores anchor features together with compact slot residuals. Ours (light) retains only anchor features, whereas Ours (max) stores the full-dimensional completed slot features explicitly. Without scene-specific semantic optimization, Ours (base) nearly matches Ours (max) across KITTI, Virtual KITTI, and Waymo. On KITTI, it achieves 34.19 2D mIoU with a 2.72 GiB effective feature footprint, compared with 34.20 mIoU and 12.90 GiB for Ours (max). The same accuracy-storage trend holds on Virtual KITTI and Waymo. These results show that language fields on view-conditioned splats require persistent semantic ownership, conserved evidence, and a hierarchy that balances stability, detail, and representation cost. Our code, checkpoints, and benchmark suite will be publicly available.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Kairos: A Dataset for Fine-Grained Video-Language Modeling over Space, Time, and Dynamics

Many emerging video language modeling tasks require systems to move beyond clip-level abstraction and model visual content as it unfolds over extended time horizons. However, most existing video datasets rely on coarse or sparsely aligned supervision, which compresses temporal variation and limits the ability of models to learn reusable representations of continuous visual dynamics. We introduce Kairos, a video dataset for video-language modeling with time-resolved annotations. Kairos consists of long-duration videos, ranging from ten minutes to half an hour, annotated with fine-grained temporal alignment. The annotations capture ongoing actions, entity appearances and attributes, interactions, and evolving contextual cues along the video timeline. This time-resolved structure supports fine-grained evaluation, long-range modeling and reasoning, instruction data construction, representation learning, and video generation. Kairos provides a general-purpose foundation for modeling visual experiences over time.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Event-Based Motion Estimation via Oriented Distance Fields

Event-based motion estimation is central to tasks that demand high temporal resolution and robustness to fast motion. Existing methods typically rely on iterative optimization or repeated hypothesis comparison, offsetting the sensor's low-latency advantage. We propose Oriented Distance Field Motion Estimation (ODF Motion Estimation), which replaces this optimization with a single averaging step over a precomputed field of event distance vectors, combined with an adaptive event-count selection strategy and a parameter-free trail filter. On public and self-collected datasets, ODF motion estimation reaches sub-pixel accuracy at the lowest latency among compared methods. We validate its generality on two downstream applications rather than treating them as separate contributions. First, the estimated trajectory is converted into a blur kernel and paired with a compact iterative-unfolding network, trained on simulated motion-estimation noise, for real-time non-blind image deblurring, attaining competitive or superior PSNR/SSIM with under 1M parameters. Second, the same precomputed field is repurposed for directional event filtering in a low-power asynchronous pupil and glint tracker, sustaining stable tracking for tens of seconds while lowering a near-eye module's power draw.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

X-MULTI: VLM-based Imaging Factor Disentanglement for Factor-Aware Image Synthesis

Imaging factor disentanglement in text-to-image generation aims to independently control image acquisition properties such as types of camera lenses, sensor types, viewpoints, and domains to enable combinatorial generalization. This should let the model synthesize novel factor combinations unobserved in the training data, such as pairing a fisheye lens with an event sensor never observed in training data. Recent work, MULTI, introduced learnable, factor-specific embeddings to disentangle imaging factors, along with the Factor Alignment Accuracy (FAA) metric to evaluate disentanglement quality. We identify and address two independent limitations. First, MULTI's pixel-level reconstruction objective supervises the model only on observed imaging factor combinations, providing no direct training signal for novel combinations. We therefore propose X-MULTI, which uses a pretrained vision-language model (VLM) to supervise novel factor combinations synthesized during training. Second, we show the FAA metric exhibits severe cross-factor correlation leakage, misrepresenting true disentanglement quality. We therefore propose Improved-FAA (I-FAA), which employs factor-specific augmentation strategies to break these correlations and enables more rigorous evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that X-MULTI achieves improved factor alignment on novel combinations compared to MULTI. Moreover, we show that correlation leakage in FAA distorts the evaluation of true factor disentanglement and I-FAA reduces this leakage and therefore provides a more robust assessment of factor alignment.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

EvDiff: Event-Based Video Reconstruction using One-Step Diffusion Models

As neuromorphic sensors, event cameras asynchronously record changes in brightness as streams of sparse events with the advantages of high temporal resolution and high dynamic range. Reconstructing intensity images from events is a highly ill-posed task due to the inherent ambiguity of absolute brightness. Early methods generally follow an end-to-end regression paradigm, directly mapping events to intensity frames in a deterministic manner. While effective to some extent, these approaches often yield perceptually inferior results and struggle to scale up in model capacity and training data. In this work, we propose EvDiff, an event-based diffusion model that follows a surrogate training framework to produce high-quality videos. To reduce the high computational cost of high-frame-rate video generation, we design an event-based diffusion model that performs only a single forward diffusion step, equipped with a temporally consistent EvEncoder. Furthermore, our novel Surrogate Training Framework eliminates the dependence on paired event-image datasets, allowing the model to leverage large-scale image datasets for higher capacity. The proposed EvDiff is capable of generating high-quality colorful videos solely from monochromatic event streams. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method strikes a sweet spot between fidelity and realism, outperforming existing approaches on both pixel-level and perceptual metrics. The code will be released publicly.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

OSMDA: OpenStreetMap-based Domain Adaptation for Remote Sensing VLMs

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) adapted to remote sensing rely heavily on domain-specific image-text supervision, yet high-quality annotations for satellite and aerial imagery remain scarce and expensive to produce. Prevailing pseudo-labeling pipelines address this gap by distilling knowledge from large frontier models, but this dependence on large teachers is costly, limits scalability, and caps achievable performance at the ceiling of the teacher. We propose OSMDA: a self-contained domain adaptation framework that eliminates this dependency. Our key insight is that a capable base VLM can serve as its own annotation engine: by pairing aerial images with rendered OpenStreetMap (OSM) tiles, we leverage optical character recognition and chart comprehension capabilities of the model to generate captions enriched by OSM's vast auxiliary metadata. The model is then fine-tuned on the resulting corpus with satellite imagery alone, yielding OSMDA-VLM, a domain-adapted VLM that requires no manual labeling and no stronger external VLM teacher. We conduct exhaustive evaluations spanning six zero-shot and five in-distribution benchmarks across vision-language tasks, where OSMDA leads to substantial improvement. We further compare against nine competitive baselines, demonstrating that our method achieves superior overall performance, while being substantially cheaper to train than teacher-dependent alternatives. These results suggest that, given a strong foundation model, alignment with crowd-sourced geographic data is a practical and scalable path towards remote sensing domain adaptation. Dataset and model weights will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Knowledge-Centric Agents for Workflow Generation in ComfyUI

Workflow generation in visual creation systems such as ComfyUI demands not only syntactic accuracy but also expert-level reasoning over modular compositions. Existing large language model (LLM) approaches often treat this as a direct text-to-JSON generation task, struggling with structural brittleness and lacking the experiential knowledge required for effective design. We argue that successful workflow generation requires modeling knowledge itself, including its structure, hierarchy, and reasoning dynamics. To this end, we propose a knowledge-centric framework that learns to invert, inject, and infer with knowledge across multiple abstraction levels. We first perform knowledge inversion to distill hierarchical representations, ranging from full pseudo-codes and skeletons to high-level strategies, from large collections of real-world workflows. We then conduct knowledge injection through supervised fine-tuning, teaching the model to reason from task descriptions to strategies and from strategies to executable structures. During inference, the model performs reversible reasoning to synthesize executable workflows, augmented by self-refinement for structural coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces workflows with richer node diversity, more coherent structures, and higher execution success rates than existing systems, establishing a new foundation for knowledge-driven, agentic workflow generation.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

CityLoc: 6DoF Pose Distributional Localization for Text Descriptions in Large-Scale Scenes with Gaussian Representation

Localizing textual descriptions within large-scale 3D scenes presents inherent ambiguities, such as identifying all traffic lights in a city. Addressing this, we introduce a method to generate distributions of camera poses conditioned on textual descriptions, facilitating robust reasoning for broadly defined concepts. Our approach employs a diffusion-based architecture to refine noisy 6DoF camera poses towards plausible locations, with conditional signals derived from pre-trained text encoders. Integration with the pretrained Vision-Language Model, CLIP, establishes a strong linkage between text descriptions and pose distributions. Enhancement of localization accuracy is achieved by rendering candidate poses using 3D Gaussian splatting, which corrects misaligned samples through visual reasoning. We validate our method's superiority by comparing it against standard distribution estimation methods across five large-scale datasets, demonstrating consistent outperformance. Code, datasets and more information will be publicly available at our project page.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

From Synchrony to Sequence: Exo-to-Ego Generation via Interpolation

Exo-to-Ego video generation aims to synthesize a first-person video from a synchronized third-person view and corresponding camera poses. While paired supervision is available, synchronized exo-ego data inherently introduces substantial spatio-temporal and geometric discontinuities, violating the smooth-motion assumptions of standard video generation benchmarks. We identify this synchronization-induced jump as the central challenge and propose Syn2Seq-Forcing, a sequential formulation that interpolates between the source and target videos to form a single continuous signal. By reframing Exo2Ego as sequential signal modeling rather than a conventional condition-output task, our approach enables diffusion-based sequence models, e.g. Diffusion Forcing Transformers (DFoT), to capture coherent transitions across frames more effectively. Empirically, we show that interpolating only the videos, without performing pose interpolation already produces significant improvements, emphasizing that the dominant difficulty arises from spatio-temporal discontinuities. Beyond immediate performance gains, this formulation establishes a general and flexible framework capable of unifying both Exo2Ego and Ego2Exo generation within a single continuous sequence model, providing a principled foundation for future research in cross-view video synthesis.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

InterEdit: Navigating Text-Guided 3D Dyadic Human Motion Editing

Text-guided 3D motion editing has seen success in single-person scenarios, but its extension to multi-person settings is less explored due to limited paired data and the complexity of inter-person interactions. We introduce the task of multi-person 3D motion editing, where a target motion is generated from a source and a text instruction. To support this, we propose InterEdit3D, a new dataset with manual two-person motion change annotations, and a Text-guided Multi-human Motion Editing (TMME) benchmark. We present InterEdit, a synchronized classifier-free conditional diffusion model for TMME. It introduces Semantic-Aware Plan Token Alignment with learnable tokens to capture high-level interaction cues and an Interaction-Aware Frequency Token Alignment strategy using DCT and energy pooling to model periodic motion dynamics. Experiments show that InterEdit improves text-to-motion consistency and edit fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art TMME performance. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/YNG916/InterEdit.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($σ= 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

B-GRTO: Bootstrapped Group Relative Tool Optimization for Referring Segmentation

Segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision, underpinning pixel-level scene understanding and serving as a cornerstone for applications ranging from autonomous perception to medical image analysis. For complex referring segmentation, recent methods pair large vision-language models with segmentation decoders: the former analyzes the image and prompt, while the latter predicts the target mask. Although reinforcement learning improves reasoning-intensive vision-language systems, trainable tools such as segmentation decoders are typically optimized separately with differentiable objectives, and the principled integration of such objectives into reinforcement learning remains underexplored. Thus, we introduce group relative tool optimization (GRTO), a mathematically grounded framework for jointly optimizing a policy with differentiable tool use. GRTO reuses group relative policy optimization (GRPO) rollouts to optimize the auxiliary tool objective, letting decoder gradients complement policy rewards. Further, we derive Bootstrapped-GRTO (B-GRTO), a pre-training method that cheaply bootstraps the tool, leading to faster convergence and superior performance. Across three challenging referring segmentation settings, B-GRTO results in substantial improvements over plain GRPO, matching or surpassing domain-specific state-of-the-art methods. This demonstrates the value of unifying reinforcement learning with differentiable auxiliary objectives for reasoning-intensive segmentation.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

FireScope: Wildfire Risk Raster Prediction with a Chain-of-Thought Oracle

Predicting wildfire risk is a reasoning-intensive spatial problem that requires the integration of visual, climatic, and geographic factors to infer continuous risk maps. Existing methods lack the causal reasoning and multimodal understanding required for reliable generalization. We introduce FireScope-Bench, a large-scale dataset and benchmark that couples Sentinel-2 imagery and climate data with expert-defined risk rasters across the USA, and real wildfire events in Europe for cross-continental evaluation. Building on this dataset, we propose FireScope, a VLM-based reasoning-to-generation framework that learns from both reinforcement learning and visual supervision to predict risk rasters with complementary reasoning traces. When trained in the USA and tested in Europe, FireScope achieves substantial performance gains, while expert feedback and automated analysis confirm that its reasoning traces are faithful and semantically meaningful. Our findings demonstrate that reasoning can ground raster prediction models, improving both generalization and interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to (1) demonstrate that language-based reasoning can improve generalization in visual generation, (2) propose a high-resolution wildfire risk model that can be applied across continents, and (3) enable systematic studies of robust cross-continental generalization for multimodal fire risk models. We believe that FireScope-Bench has the potential to serve as a foundation for advancing reasoning-driven, interpretable and generalizable spatial modeling. Data and source code will be made publicly available.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Accelerating Vision Foundation Models with Drop-in Depthwise Convolution

Pretrained vision foundation models deliver strong performance across tasks with limited fine-tuning. However, their Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones impose high inference costs, limiting deployment on resource-constrained devices. In this work, we accelerate large-scale pretrained ViTs while preserving their feature extraction capabilities by exploiting the intrinsic convolution-like behavior of some attention heads. Specifically, we introduce an efficient depthwise convolution-based layer that serves as a drop-in replacement for these heads. Additionally, we propose simple strategies to identify which heads can be replaced and introduce a fine-tuning procedure that recovers downstream task performance. Across both image classification and segmentation tasks, our method achieves 17-20\% percent inference speedup with minimal performance degradation. We validate the approach through detailed derivations, extensive experiments, and efficiency benchmarks. The reference implementation is publicly available.

cs.CV↗