Point-Vlms

We developed BrainVLM to classify all 12 World Health Organization (WHO) 2021 brain tumor types. BrainVLM integrates an uncertainty quantification strategy to indicate prediction reliability and a module for generating radiology reports to elucidate the clinical rationale. BrainVLM was trained on multi-modal data (MRI scans, demographics, and radiology reports) from 40,043 individuals. It was validated on 5,211 patients with pathologically confirmed brain tumors, including 3,877 held-out patients from the primary hospital and 1,334 patients from 11 independent hospitals. We further conducted two proof-of-concept studies to validate its clinical utility in AI-clinician workflows: 1) a blinded multireader study where 12 neuroradiologists across varying experience levels interpreted 248 retrospective cases with or without AI assistance, and 2) a real-world prospective study in which 1,009 patients were independently and blindly assessed by BrainVLM and radiologists before surgery. Additionally, we demonstrated BrainVLM's utility in preoperative molecular subgroup prediction for adult-type diffuse gliomas, using a multi-center cohort of 632 patients. In primary evaluation, BrainVLM achieved an area under the curve (macro-AUC) of 0.85 (95% CI: 0.84-0.86), and an F1 score of 0.82 (95% CI: 0.81-0.83), surpassing neuroradiologists (F1 = 0.80 (95% CI: 0.79-0.81)). In external validation across 11 centers, BrainVLM achieved an AUC = 0.80 (95% CI: 0.79-0.82) and F1 = 0.75 (95% CI: 0.73-0.78), compared with F1 = 0.71 (95% CI: 0.69-0.73) for neuroradiologists. In prospective real-world evaluation, BrainVLM maintained performance comparable to neuroradiologists.

Language models learn about grammatical number primarily from co-occurrence, and show frequency effects as a result---sometimes taken to indicate that they do not learn abstract ``rules'', and are instead dependent on specific lexical items. Testing generalization with text stimuli alone cannot settle this debate, since distributional cues (is/are, this/these) easily give number away. We instead use cross-modal generalization as a tool to investigate abstractions in LMs that can also accept visual inputs (VLMs), restricting the evidence that diagnoses number to an extra-linguistic modality. We teach VLMs pairs of new nouns by adding new embeddings and only updating them during learning, comparing conditions where number is diagnosed by visual cues alone against ones where it is disambiguated by text. Across behavior, representational dynamics, and causal mechanisms, we find non-trivial evidence for cross-modal generalization across both exposure conditions, and that linguistic vs. extra-linguistic cue conditions are treated in similar ways in the internal mechanisms of the model. This suggests that statistical learners like VLMs can generalize beyond surface-level co-occurrence and show genuine abstraction-compatible behavior.

Hysteroscopic surgical scene segmentation plays a pivotal role in understanding the hysteroscopic intraoperative environment as well as computer-assisted intervention. However, this task presents unique challenges due to the high morphological similarity among different lesions and the presence of artifacts such as specular reflections, motion blur, and fluid occlusions in surgical videos. In this work, we propose the first vision-language model (VLM)-based hysteroscopic surgical scene segmentation method, which performs pixel-wise localization for fifteen representative categories in hysteroscopic surgical scenes. Our VLM-hyster has a segmentation backbone that utilizes the pretrained image encoder for robust visual feature extraction, coupled with a transformer-based decoder for dense prediction. Moreover, we design category-specific text prompts and incorporate a masked distillation branch to filter out visual features with low correlation to the text prompts, enabling the model to focus more effectively on category-specific image regions and thereby enhancing segmentation performance. We collect a large multicentric hysteroscopic surgical scene dataset, containing 4,020 high-resolution images with detailed mask annotations, for model training and evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that VLM-hyster substantially outperforms state-of-the-art AI models. Furthermore, extensive assessments by gynecologists, as well as multicentre and prospective validations, demonstrate VLM-hyster's robustness and generalizability. The results suggest that VLM-hyster earns considerable potential in enabling AI-assisted localization of surgical instruments and lesions in hysteroscopic surgeries. Code is available at https://github.com/viscom-tongji/VLM-hyster.

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in processing and understanding both text and images, their large parameter sizes lead to significant computational overhead, limiting their deployment on resource-constrained devices. While pruning has been effective for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs), directly applying it to VLMs leads to significant performance drops, largely due to redundant visual tokens interfering with importance estimation. To this end, we propose SlimVLM, a structured pruning framework designed to compress VLMs while preserving their task performance. We introduce an adaptive visual token selection strategy for VLMs that leverages average text-to-visual attention scores to assess the importance of visual tokens, removing redundant ones during pruning based on a set threshold, thereby optimizing the importance calculation. Recognizing the varying tolerance to sparsity across different modules, we also propose a Sensitivity-aware dynamic pruning mechanism that determines the appropriate pruning ratio for each module by calculating the linear reconstruction error between the outputs of the pruned and unpruned modules, ensuring overall performance stability. Experimental results show that SlimVLM outperforms existing methods across multiple multimodal benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved remote sensing (RS) multimodal understanding. Language-conditioned segmentation is crucial for fine-grained target understanding in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) videos. However, this task remains challenging due to the prevalence of small, visually ambiguous targets and dynamic aerial perspectives. In this paper, we propose SkyVLaM, a multimodal large language model for UAV video understanding. SkyVLaM constructs sparse tokens directly from patch-level video representations through a temporal basis perceiver, regularizes the sparse basis to encourage complementary temporal cues, and adaptively selects a temporally coherent dense segment for high-resolution inspection. The resulting sparse and dense tokens are jointly processed by a large language model for query-conditioned segmentation. We further build SkyVid, consisting of SkyVid-VGCG and SkyVid-RVOS for video grounded conversation generation and referring video object segmentation, respectively. SkyVid contains 101 videos, 33.6K frames, and 1.53M pixel-level object instances. Experiments show that SkyVLaM provides a more effective allocation of the visual token budget and improves language-conditioned video segmentation in UAV scenarios.

Vision-language models normally execute the same complete vision encoder for every question, even when OCR, counting, object, attribute, and spatial queries may not require identical computation. We study whether fixed-budget combinations of vision blocks can be skipped without fine-tuning. A shared K-block route skips one searched set of exactly K blocks for every question, while a capability-specific K-block policy selects one same-size route using a known capability label. We introduce a source-balanced evolutionary search and compare it with independent ranking, contiguous removal, and random routes at matched budgets. Experiments use Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct, SmolVLM2-2.2B-Instruct, and an 876-example image-disjoint selection split. Search transfers across architectures: on SmolVLM2, the searched shared four-block route beats independent construction by 4.91 percentage points. Capability specialization is less stable. On Qwen, the six-block capability policy beats the shared route by 2.17 points, driven by a 7.10-point OCR gain. On sealed IIIT5K, however, the SmolVLM2 OCR-specific route trails its shared route by 13.6 points. Combinatorial search reliably improves route construction, but capability labels do not define universally transferable vision pathways.

Traffic signs are crucial components of road safety, serving as visual tools under all lighting conditions. The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) specifies daytime visual factors such as legibility and color contrast, and nighttime retroreflectivity requirements. Traditional assessment methods rely on manual inspections, which the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) notes are subjective, labor-intensive and pose safety concerns, while retroreflectometers are expensive and unaffordable for smaller agencies. Most existing studies focus on either daytime factors or nighttime retroreflectivity but rarely integrate both aspects comprehensively. This study develops a novel framework that systematically evaluates traffic signs through integrated daytime-nighttime assessment. The methodology employs three fine-tuned Vision Language Models (VLMs) for daytime visual performance assessment across four key factors: legibility, color, surface and shape integrity, and surrounding environment conditions. VLM predictions are converted to numerical scores through sentiment analysis and Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) scoring, while nighttime performance is assessed using LiDAR-derived retroreflectivity following established calibration procedures. The framework integrates these components into a comprehensive Sign Condition Index (SCI) for maintenance guidance. Evaluation results demonstrated that LLaVA and Qwen outperformed InternVL, achieving bidirectional cosine similarity scores of 0.67-0.76 across all factors. Among 462 validated traffic signs, 68 were flagged by the proposed framework as requiring immediate replacement due to inadequate retroreflectivity performance. This research provides a cost-effective alternative to traditional manual inspections for comprehensive traffic sign condition assessment.

JD$.$com, one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms, serves over 700 million active users and millions of merchants, with a catalog of tens of billions of SKUs. At this scale, high-quality, structured item knowledge underpins a better consumer experience, lower management costs, and higher operational efficiency-yet producing and serving it poses three industrial-scale challenges: fast-emerging concepts, high-quality knowledge production for massive SKUs, and diverse downstream requirements. To address these challenges, we present the JD Oxygen AI Item Center (Oxygen AIIC), an industrial-scale platform built on LLMs/VLMs for item-knowledge production and service. Oxygen AIIC is built around four core pillars: (i) ontology engineering driven by efficient human-AI collaboration, which supports the dynamic evolution and agile expansion of an ontology with millions of entries; (ii) a "Semantic Search then Discrimination"(S2D) knowledge identification architecture that, combined with throughput improvement strategies, enables scalable, extensible, and high-throughput AI Item Library production for tens of billions of SKUs; (iii) self-evolving item-understanding LLMs/VLMs that improve in a stable and controllable manner, enabling knowledge production with 94.2% precision and 82.8% recall; and (iv) a unified item tunnel that serves as the data and service hub. Oxygen AIIC now covers tens of thousands of JD categories and processes hundreds of millions of item updates per day on Huawei Ascend NPUs. It has accumulated hundreds of billions of item-knowledge assets. Deployed across core business scenarios-including search, recommendation, operations, category planning-Oxygen AIIC has delivered measurable gains at scale. Search-traffic coverage reaches 80.4%, item-information quality issues drop by 37%, the automated fill rate of core attributes during item listing exceeds 80%.

Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) planning requires meticulous multimodal reasoning. However, adapting Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to this high-stakes domain is severely impeded by diagnostic hallucinations, where generated text lacks anatomical grounding. To address this, TAVR-VLM is introduced: a novel framework featuring Risk-Conditioned Causal Grounding Attention (R-CGA) that instantiates a model-internal ``Risk $\rightarrow$ Region $\rightarrow$ Word'' structural grounding pathway. R-CGA compresses multimodal inputs into a causal risk bottleneck, purifying dense visual features into a global risk mask. During autoregressive generation, a support-projected causal consistency objective constrains token-level grounding within the risk-defined support mask. Evaluated on $\text{M}^3\text{TAVR}$, a comprehensive 1,482-patient cohort, TAVR-VLM establishes a new state-of-the-art. It achieves an AUROC of 0.896, boosts CIDEr to 0.936, and drastically reduces the hallucination rate to 8.1%, thereby improving interpretability for evidence-based surgical AI.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) enable a unified model to solve various vision tasks through prompting. They have shown promising performance in semantic understanding. However, 3D understanding still largely relies on expert vision models with complex task-specific designs. The key argument this work wants to make is that VLMs are native 3D learners. Our in-depth large scale study shows that 1) focal length unification, 2) text-based pixel reference and 3) data mixture and scaling, are all you need for effective 3D learning. Model architecture changes, large models, heavy data augmentations, and complex losses including the regression formulation, many of which form the foundation of expert vision models, are actually not necessary conditions. As a result, we propose VLM3, a scalable method with the simplest design that enables standard VLMs to master diverse 3D tasks. VLM3 not only advances the VLM depth estimation accuracy by a large margin (0.84 -> 0.9), but also enables diverse 3D tasks such as pixel correspondence, camera pose estimation and object-level 3D understanding, matching expert vision model accuracy while maintaining standard architectures and text-based training. We believe VLM3 opens up a new paradigm for simple and scalable 3D learning.

Global localization in geometrically aliased, quasi-static environments such as grocery stores, offices, schools, and hospitals poses a significant challenge for mobile robots. Grocery stores with parallel aisles and a long tailed distribution of products, as well as offices and labs with repetitive furniture such as chairs, desks, monitors, and doors, exemplify common indoor environments that present geometric and even semantic ambiguity. Traditional approaches rely either on distinct geometric features or on domain-specific vision pipelines that struggle with long-tail semantic distributions and transient visual clutter. We present VLM-GLoc, a method for hierarchical semantic Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) that leverages open-vocabulary Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as a unified semantic observation front-end. We hypothesize a three-fold benefit from VLMs: (1) extracting highly discriminative rich text features, (2) implicit quality filtering of blurry or dynamic objects, and (3) permanence reasoning for targeted data augmentation. We introduce an inverse semantic proposal mechanism that seeds particles via text-to-map retrieval. Evaluated across two real-world environments with different characteristics and two different platforms: a 3,500 sq. ft. grocery store with a cellphone and a 3,700 sq. ft. lab space with a quadruped, VLM-GLoc achieves 70% and 74% global localization success respectively, substantially outperforming traditional geometry-only and domain-specific baselines.

The development of generative artificial intelligence technologies has propelled the visual realism of synthetic images to an unprecedented level. Although current interpretable detection methods based on Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have made certain progress, they still rely on imitation learning derived from massive volumes of forged data. Consequently, they lack genuine causal reasoning capabilities and are prone to explanatory hallucinations. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose FakeVLM-R1, aiming to endow the model with human-like critical thinking capabilities when performing synthetic detection tasks. Building upon Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), this framework integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a Critical Thinking Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mechanism. During the inference phase, the model executes a "bidirectional dialectical reasoning" process: while proposing a forgery hypothesis, it must simultaneously invoke physical commonsense to construct an authenticity counter-proof. Furthermore, we constructed the FakeClue++ dataset with high-quality samples, which extensively introduces annotations guided by the physical laws of authentic images, providing a unified authenticity anchor for the model. Experiments confirm that FakeVLM-R1 achieves SOTA performance the evaluated models across multiple benchmarks. It not only achieves high-precision, logically interpretable detection but also resolves the over-rejection bias of existing methods against real images, demonstrating generalization and robustness against perturbations.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) process thousands of visual tokens per image alongside comparatively few text tokens, yet existing compression methods treat both modalities uniformly. We observe that the two modalities have fundamentally different properties: vision tokens are spatially redundant and dominate prefill, while text tokens are causally dependent and accumulate during decoding. Based on this asymmetry, we propose and empirically evaluate AsymVLM, which applies aggressive pruning to vision tokens before prefill using a learned importance scorer with per-sample adaptive budgeting, and temporal threshold-based eviction to text tokens only when they exceed a fixed budget. Our experiments indicate that AsymVLM achieves the highest FLOPs savings (up to 54%) among state-of-the-art methods while outperforming existing approaches by 2--3% on document and chart understanding tasks where visual information is spatially localized and query-specific, and maintaining competitive accuracy on holistic benchmarks. In text-dominated scenarios, our eviction strategy substantially outperforms standard LLM cache compression methods by adapting to the short-context nature of VLM.

Color constancy aims to keep object colors consistent under varying illumination. Cross-camera generalization in color constancy remains challenging because learning-based models often overfit to the color response characteristics of the training camera, resulting in degraded performance on images captured by other cameras. We propose VLM-CC, a feedback-guided framework that formulates color constancy as an iterative refinement process. Instead of directly estimating the illuminant from raw input, VLM-CC performs iterative correction driven by vision-language model (VLM)-based evaluation. At each iteration, the image is white-balanced using the current estimate and converted to pseudo-sRGB. A lightweight LoRA-tuned VLM then assesses the corrected image, identifying the dominant residual color cast and providing qualitative feedback. This feedback is mapped to a residual illumination direction (red, green, or blue) and used to update the illuminant estimate until convergence. Our key idea is to reframe color constancy as an iterative perceptual feedback problem, leveraging VLM evaluation instead of direct RGB regression. By replacing direct RGB estimation with VLM-guided perceptual feedback, VLM-CC achieves state-of-the-art robustness in cross-camera color constancy across multiple datasets. Code will be available at https://github.com/NothingIknow/VLM-CC.

In large vision-language models, visual tokens typically constitute the majority of input tokens, leading to substantial computational overhead. To address this, recent studies have explored pruning redundant or less informative visual tokens for image understanding tasks. However, these methods struggle with pixel grounding tasks, where token importance is highly contingent on the input text. Through an in-depth analysis of CLIP, we observe that visual tokens within referent regions often exhibit low similarity to their textual representation. Motivated by this insight, we introduce LiteLVLM, a training-free, text-guided token pruning strategy for efficient pixel grounding inference. By reversing the ranking of CLIP's visual-text similarity, LiteLVLM effectively retains visual tokens covering the referent regions, while recovering context tokens to enable clear foreground-background separation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiteLVLM significantly outperforms existing methods by over 5% across diverse token budgets. Without any training or fine-tuning, LiteLVLM maintains 90% of the original performance with a 22% speedup and a 2.3X memory reduction. Our code is available at https://github.com/sejong-rcv/LiteLVLM.

While machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) accelerate phonon dispersion calculations, merely identifying dynamical instabilities in computationally predicted materials is insufficient; automated pathways to resolve them are required. We introduce VibroML, an open-source Python toolkit driven by foundational MLIPs that shifts the paradigm from stability verification to automated structural remediation. VibroML employs an energy-guided genetic algorithm that vastly outperforms traditional soft-mode following, efficiently navigating the potential energy surface to uncover diverse, dynamically stable polymorphs. As 0 K harmonic stability does not guarantee macroscopic viability, an automated molecular dynamics workflow evaluates finite-temperature structural retention. VibroML also couples with ProtoCSP, our combinatorial structure prediction engine, to stabilize frustrated crystal topologies via targeted alloying, successfully rescuing functional perovskite networks like Cs$_2$KInI$_6$ and KTaSe$_3$. Demonstrating broader applicability, we mined the Alexandria database -- where ~50% of quaternary and 99.5% of quinary elemental combinations lack any structural entries -- to identify thousands of abandoned, high-symmetry stoichiometries. Deploying ProtoCSP's "cold start" retrieval and VibroML's evolutionary search on a sample, we successfully identified dynamically stable low-symmetry candidates. Through integrated structural remediation, thermal validation, and systematic compositional exploration, VibroML enables a comprehensive deep-screening approach, yielding physically sound structural propositions that far surpass standard high-throughput workflows.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a prevalent backbone for large vision-language models (VLMs), yet how modality-specific signals should guide expert routing remains under-explored. Existing routing strategies are either hand-crafted or modality-agnostic, relying on idealized priors that ignore the layer-dependent modality fusion patterns in MoE-VLMs and provide little guidance for expert specialization. We propose Soft Modality-guided Expert Specialization (SMoES), which consists of dynamic soft modality scores that capture layer-dependent fusion patterns, an expert binning mechanism aligned with expert-parallel deployment, and an inter-bin mutual information regularization that encourages coherent modality specialization. Our method leverages attention-based or Gaussian-statistics modality scores to optimize mutual information regularization. Experiments across four MoE-based VLMs and 16 benchmarks demonstrate improvement on both effectiveness and efficiency: 0.9% and 4.2% average gain on multimodal and language-only tasks, 56.1% reduction in EP communication overhead, and 12.3% throughput improvement under realistic deployment. These results validate that aligning routing with modality-aware expert specialization unlocks MoE-VLM capacity and efficiency.

Point-Vision-Language Models promise to empower embodied agents with executable spatial reasoning, yet they frequently succumb to geometric hallucination where predicted 3D structures contradict the observed 2D reality. We identify a key cause of this failure not as a representation bottleneck but as a structural misalignment in reinforcement learning, where sparse geometric tokens are drowned out by noisy and broadcasted sequence-level rewards. To resolve this causal dilution, we propose Geometric Reward Credit Assignment, a framework that disentangles holistic supervision into field-specific signals and routes them exclusively to their responsible token spans. This mechanism transforms vague feedback into precise gradient updates and effectively turns generic policy optimization into targeted structural alignment. Furthermore, we internalize physical constraints via a Reprojection-Consistency term which serves as a cross-modal verifier to penalize physically impossible geometries. Validated on a calibrated benchmark derived from ShapeNetCore, our approach bridges the reliability gap by boosting 3D KPA from 0.64 to 0.93, increasing 3D bounding box intersection over union to 0.686, and raising reprojection consistency scores to 0.852. Crucially, these gains are achieved while maintaining robust 2D localization performance, marking a meaningful step from plausible textual outputs toward physically verifiable spatial predictions.

Pretrained biomedical vision-language models (VLMs) such as BioMedCLIP perform well on average but often degrade on challenging modalities where inter-class margins are small and acquisition-specific variations are pronounced, especially under few-shot supervision and when modality priors differ from pretraining corpora substantially. We propose BioVLM, a prompt-learning framework that improves cross-domain generalization without extensive backbone fine-tuning. BioVLM learns a diverse prompt bank and introduces dynamic prompt selection: for each input, it selects the most discriminative prompts via a low-entropy criterion on the predictive distribution, effectively coupling sparse few-shot evidence with rich LLM semantic priors. To strengthen this coupling, we distill high-confidence LLM-derived attributes and enforce robust knowledge transfer through strong/weak augmentation consistency. At test time, BioVLM adapts by choosing modality-appropriate prompts, enabling transfer to unseen categories and domains, while keeping training lightweight and inference efficient. On 11 MedMNIST+ 2D datasets, BioVLM achieves new state of the art across three distinct generalization settings. Codes are available at https://github.com/mainaksingha01/BioVLM.

The rapid progress of vision--language models (VLMs) has sparked growing interest in robotic control, where natural language can express the operation goals while visual feedback links perception to action. However, directly deploying VLM-driven policies on aerial manipulators remains unsafe and unreliable since the generated actions are often inconsistent, hallucination-prone, and dynamically infeasible for flight. In this work, we present AERMANI-VLM, the first framework to adapt pretrained VLMs for aerial manipulation by separating high-level reasoning from low-level control, without any task-specific fine-tuning. Our framework encodes natural language instructions, task context, and safety constraints into a structured prompt that guides the model to generate a step-by-step reasoning trace in natural language. This reasoning output is used to select from a predefined library of discrete, flight-safe skills, ensuring interpretable and temporally consistent execution. By decoupling symbolic reasoning from physical action, AERMANI-VLM mitigates hallucinated commands and prevents unsafe behavior, enabling robust task completion. We validate the framework in both simulation and hardware on diverse multi-step pick-and-place tasks, demonstrating strong generalization to previously unseen commands, objects, and environments.