Vision Foundation Model Adaptation

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22 papers in the last four weeks, up 83% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 204

Oct 8, 2026cs.CV

SV-TAD: Native Sparse Convs for Efficient Temporal Action Detection

To adapt billion-parameter Vision Transformers for long-video understanding, recent methods freeze the backbone and train lightweight convolutional modules. While effective for parameter-efficient training, existing adapters do not reduce inference-time computation, leaving scalability with respect to video length largely unaddressed. Token selection can reduce attention cost by pruning redundant tokens, but it breaks the spatial grid structure required by convolutional adapters. This forces an expensive dense reconstruction, nullifying much of the potential speedup. We address this by introducing native sparse 2D convolutions, a primitive that allows these adapters, for the first time, to operate directly and efficiently on dynamically pruned token sets. We integrate this primitive into SV-TAD, an adapter framework for temporal action detection, reducing VideoMAEv2-L computation by up to 64% and achieving 2.2x faster inference, while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy on THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3. When scaled to InternVideoNext-L, our approach surpasses the previous state of the art at roughly half its computational cost. Moreover, the sparse formulation naturally supports auxiliary task tokens, which improves fine-grained assembly detection on ATTACH.

Ricardo Pizarro, Roberto Valle, José M. Buenaposada +2

Universidad de Alcal´a, Alcal´a de Henares, Spain · Universidad Polit´ecnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain · Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, M´ostoles, Spain

Temporal Action Detection Efficient ViTs Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Convolutional Neural Networks

Oct 8, 2026cs.CV

Diffusion Meta-Prompting and Steering for Generalizable Foundation Model Adaptation

Prompt learning is a popular method for adapting foundation models, but learned prompts are typically task-specific and fail to generalize to new classes, domains, or compositions of tasks. In this paper, we introduce a Diffusion Meta-Prompt (DMP) model , a framework that models the distribution of learned prompts using diffusion models. Given a repository of previously learned prompts, DMP is trained and sampled without access to the original task examples or task losses, and synthesizes new prompts conditioned on natural language task descriptions. To improve the sampling stability, we introduce a test-time steering strategy for DMP, which uses the best training-selected prompt in the repository as a latent anchor during diffusion sampling, without retraining the DMP or accessing test classes. DMP improves generalization across classification, retrieval and text-to-image generation tasks, supports concept composition and negative prompting without explicit training. It reduces storage and inference costs by over 90% compared to prompt retrieval methods. For composite classification, DMP achieves upto 2.0% average gain over prior meta-learning methods across 55 pairs of datasets with gains as high as 8.5% on specific pairs such as Eurosat and Flowers. DMP also enhances cross-task generalization with ~2-9% improvement for hierarchical classification task. We further provide a theoretical guarantee bounding the expected task loss of prompts sampled from a DMP. Code is available: https://github.com/DeepakSridhar/dmp

Deepak Sridhar, Yi Li, Kartikeya Bhardwaj +7

University of California, San Diego · Qualcomm AI Research

Prompt Learning Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Diffusion Model Guidance

Oct 7, 2026cs.CV

One-Shot Adaptive Segmentation For Scientific Images

Scientific image segmentation methods rely on extensive annotation and task-specific training, limiting adaptation across imaging modalities and experimental conditions. We present a training-free, one-shot framework that specializes vision foundation models using a single annotated reference image. The framework combines DINOv3 representations with background-adaptive feature orthogonalization to suppress artifact-related feature directions, after which cosine similarity localizes candidate regions for SAM segmentation. We evaluate the framework on red-blood-cell microscopy, structured-illumination pool boiling, and chest radiography. Relative to the strongest baseline, the proposed method improves mean IoU by 5.91% and 78.62% on the microscopy and pool-boiling datasets, respectively, while achieving comparable performance on chest radiographs. These results demonstrate that one-shot reference conditioning can adapt general-purpose vision models to specialized scientific segmentation tasks.

Tejaswi V. Panchagnula, Allison M. Davis, Fengqing Zhu

Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana, USA 47907

Image Segmentation Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Promptable Image Segmentation

Oct 7, 2026cs.CV

BagDINO: Multi-View Baggage Re-Identification with DINOv3

Mishandled checked baggage remains a recurrent issue in airport operations, and current recovery workflows still largely rely on tag-based tracking, which does not directly support visual identification when tag evidence is missing or unavailable. This paper investigates baggage re-identification as an instance-level retrieval problem in a multi-camera setting, leveraging DINOv3 foundation-model representations to match a query image against a gallery of registered baggage images. A Torchreid-style BNNeck re-identification head is placed on top of a DINOv3 backbone, and parameter-efficient adaptation is performed via LoRA. Experiments are conducted on the MVB benchmark using a progressive study that compares a fully frozen backbone against LoRA and fine-tuning strategies. Results indicate that parameter-efficient adaptation of foundation-model features provides an effective and stable approach for multi-view baggage re-identification under limited training data.

Vita Santa Barletta, Danilo Caivano, Rebecca Margiotta +2

University of Bari Aldo moro Department of Computer Science Bari, Italia · University of Bari Aldo Moro, SER&Practices Department of Computer Science Bari, Italia · SER&Practices Spin-off of the University of Bari Aldo Moro Bari, Italia

Vision Foundation Model Adaptation

Oct 7, 2026cs.RO

Do Better Visual Representations Always Lead to Better End-to-End Autonomous Driving?

Visual foundation models (VFMs) are increasingly integrated into end-to-end autonomous driving for their powerful representations, yet it remains unclear when these representations improve driving performance. To investigate this question, we introduce ViRA, a planner-agnostic visual representation alignment framework that keeps the planner architecture and inference cost unchanged. Our study reveals three findings: (1) VFM-guided visual representations consistently improve driving performance across diverse end-to-end planners, with gains extending to zero-shot closed-loop evaluation. (2) The choice of VFM target matters for planning performance, and alignment to a different VFM can further benefit planners with pre-trained VFM encoders. (3) Auxiliary perception supervision reduces sensitivity to VFM target selection, narrowing the EPDMS spread across five targets from 2.7 to 0.5 points and potentially compensating for less effective VFM targets. Guided by these findings, we develop ViRA-Diffusion, a diffusion-based planner trained without auxiliary perception supervision, which achieves 92.3 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2 navtest, outperforming recent methods in our comparison by at least 1.9 points. The results motivate jointly considering target selection and planner supervision when integrating VFMs into end-to-end autonomous driving. The results and demo are available at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/ViRA.

Zihao Zhang, Haochen Tian, Tianyu Li +5

Southeast University · OpenDriveLab at The University of Hong Kong · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute

End-to-End Autonomous Driving Representation Alignment Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Autonomous Driving Planning

Oct 7, 2026cs.CV

TIRA: Tumor Immune Representation Adaptation for Zero-Shot Cross-Cancer MSI and TMB Prediction

Microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) and high tumor mutational burden (TMB-H) are clinically relevant biomarkers, yet their histopathological prediction remains challenging when models are transferred across morphologically distinct cancer types. Immune-associated spatial patterns can persist across cancers despite these morphological differences, but foundation-model-based predictors trained on a single cancer do not explicitly use this information, limiting cross-cancer generalization. To address this limitation, we propose TIRA (Tumor Immune Representation Adaptation), a target-free framework that refines frozen foundation-model representations using spatial immune topology, without requiring target-domain data during model development or test-time adaptation. TIRA uses a topology-supervised biology representation to condition tile-level attention while pooling only morphological features for joint MSI and TMB prediction. We train TIRA on TCGA-COAD+READ and evaluate it zero-shot on CPTAC-COAD, TCGA-STAD, TCGA-UCEC, and CPTAC-UCEC, covering cross-site, cross-cancer, and combined cross-cancer-site distribution shifts under UNI2, CONCH, and Virchow2. With UNI2, TIRA improved zero-shot AUROC on TCGA-STAD from 0.633 to 0.766 for MSI and from 0.651 to 0.772 for TMB. Source-derived spatial immune topology improved the cross-cancer robustness of frozen pathology foundation-model representations.

Dasari Naga Raju

Independent Researcher, Andhra Pradesh, India

Clinical Prediction Domain Generalization Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Topological Representation Learning

Oct 6, 2026cs.CV

Forensic Reserve: Eliciting Latent Knowledge for Image Forgery Detection

As generated images become increasingly realistic, reliable forgery detection is essential for maintaining trust in visual information. However, existing methods primarily rely on task-specific supervision to adapt vision foundation model representations, without fully exploiting internal forensic knowledge to guide detection. To address this limitation, we propose Reserve-Guided Elicitation (RGE), a framework that treats sparse, origin-sensitive internal components in pretrained models as a forensic reserve and translates their localization into structural constraints for lightweight adaptation. Specifically, we first use the Forensic Lens (F-lens) to decompose activations across layers and token groups into independent components and globally screen them by their response differences between real and generated images, identifying reserve sites and directions. Next, we map the selected directions back to hidden-state space to construct fixed reserve subspaces and insert Forensic Reserve Adapters (FRA) only at the identified sites. Finally, with the backbone parameters, previously fitted reference classifier, and subspace bases fixed, we train only the FRA coefficient maps to generate input-dependent residual updates constrained to the corresponding subspaces, strengthening existing forensic responses. Using only 500 labeled training images and a trainable parameter budget below 0.2% of the backbone, RGE achieves competitive performance across three detection benchmarks without target-benchmark adaptation. Furthermore, RGE consistently improves over the corresponding frozen detectors across eight encoders spanning self-supervised and vision-language pretraining, eliciting a latent forensic capacity broadly shared across pretrained vision models.

Jiahua Li, Zixu John, Tom Zhong +5

University of Oxford, the United Kingdom · Independent Researcher · Imperial College London, the United Kingdom +1

Image Forgery Detection Vision Foundation Model Adaptation AI-Generated Image Detection Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Oct 6, 2026cs.CV

Beyond Training from Scratch: Foundation Models for Data-Efficient and Generalizable Cardiac MRI Reconstruction

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging reconstruction aims to recover high-quality images from undersampled acquisitions, enabling faster scans while preserving diagnostic fidelity. Recent reconstruction methods are typically trained from scratch and often require large amounts of task-specific data, limiting their robustness under data scarcity and distribution shifts. In this work, we investigate whether pretrained vision foundation models can serve as effective priors for accelerated cardiac MRI reconstruction. We propose a reconstruction framework that integrates frozen and parameter-efficiently adapted visual encoders, including CLIP, BiomedCLIP, and DINOv2, within a transformer-based reconstruction architecture. Extensive experiments on the CMRxRecon2023 and CMRxRecon2024 benchmarks demonstrate that pretrained representations consistently outperform a transformer trained from scratch across multiple acceleration factors. We further evaluate performance under limited supervision and cross-dataset transfer, showing that foundation models provide superior data efficiency and generalization. While frozen representations are particularly effective in extreme low-data regimes, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) yields additional gains when moderate amounts of training data are available. Among the evaluated backbones, DINOv2 achieves the strongest overall performance. These findings highlight the potential of vision foundation models as robust and transferable priors for cardiac MRI reconstruction.

Anam Hashmi, Mayug Maniparambil, Julia Dietlmeier +2

Research Ireland Centre for Research Training in Machine Learning, Ireland · Dublin City University, Ireland · University College Dublin, Ireland +1

Image Reconstruction Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Accelerated MRI Reconstruction Cardiac MRI

Oct 5, 2026cs.CV

Localize Any Object in X-Ray Security Scans without Human Annotation

Universal object localization in X-ray security inspection is critical for automated threat detection in safety-critical venues. However, unlike everyday RGB images that dominate web-scale visual data, X-ray scans exhibit distinct color patterns, ambiguous boundaries, and compositional structures caused by volumetric superposition. These gaps hinder the direct zero-shot transfer of dense perception foundation models trained on web-scale RGB data. Moreover, annotated X-ray data is scarce and requires expert labeling, limiting both the training of generalizable X-ray native models and the adaptation of RGB foundation models for X-ray data via fine-tuning. Given these challenges, the bright promise of highly generalizable perception models, enabled by data scaling laws in the RGB domain, remains largely out of reach for X-ray inspection. To this end, we introduce LAO-X, a self-supervised adaptation framework that Locates Any Object in X-ray scans using diverse synthesized image--annotation pairs with granularity-aware supervision. LAO-X first designs a saliency-guided X-ray object mining module to separate diverse object instances, which are then used for physics-guided synthesis in the absorbance domain. LAO-X further incorporates an occlusion-controlled curriculum strategy to fine-tune a Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) localizer, progressively adapting it to X-ray scans with increasing object counts and overlap levels. Experiments on six X-ray benchmarks show that LAO-X substantially improves category-agnostic localization, achieving 2% to 23% mAP gains over SAM2 and X-ray specific baselines in heavily cluttered scenarios, entirely without human-annotated labels.

Yaqi Cai, Mingxuan Liu, Lorenzo Vaquero +5

University of Trento · Fondazione Bruno Kessler · Dalian University of Technology +1

Self-Supervised Learning Synthetic Data Generation Vision Foundation Model Adaptation

Sep 30, 2026cs.CV

FAST: Flow Any Scene Transformer

Scaling has become a primary driver of progress in language and vision foundation models, yet its role in precise correspondence matching remains underexplored. In this work, we present Flow Any Scene Transformer (FAST), a scalable correspondence model driven by two key insights. First, we reveal that the query-key projections inside single-view vision foundation models encode a coarse yet reusable prior for cross-view matching. Second, reusing these pretrained projections in cross-attention form yields a highly effective initialization for a ViT-based matcher built from a single-view encoder. Guided by these insights, we build FAST upon a vanilla single-view foundation model, utilizing a zero-parameter rewiring strategy to convert selected self-attention layers into cross-attention for cross-view interaction. This design allows ViT-based matchers to scale with advances in single-view foundation models, bypassing the need for a dedicated pair-centric pretraining stage. To fully unlock the scaling potential of this formulation, we assemble a 6-million-pair training corpus for general-purpose dense 2D displacement estimation across diverse co-visible image pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FAST achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of benchmarks, while scaling favorably with both backbone size and training data.

Yongjian Zhang, Longguang Wang, Zhuo Song +3

School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, the Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, China · Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HKSAR, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

Optical Flow Vision Transformer Vision Foundation Model Adaptation

Sep 30, 2026cs.CV

DCM-SAM: Defect-Conditioned Mixture of LoRA Experts for NPU-Deployed AM Defect Segmentation

Metal additive manufacturing parts are inspected by X-ray computed tomography, where labelled data is scarce, the pores and inclusions that matter span a few pixels, and inspection must happen at the machine. We present DCM-SAM, a defect-conditioned adaptive mixture of LoRA experts: one frozen Segment Anything backbone carries a separate Conv-LoRA expert bank and mask decoder per defect class, each trained in its own pass, without prompts, on synthetic slices alone, updating only 4.4% of the parameters. On benchmarks that XCT-SAM reports, DCM-SAM improves on every baseline for both classes from a ViT-B backbone against their ViT-H, and reaches 64.2% pore IoU on real NIST scans having seen no real images during training. Deployment then exposes what adaptation work rarely measures: on a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, ViT-H and ViT-L compile yet cannot allocate at 1024x1024 image resolution, since activations rather than weights exceed the device ceiling, and quantizing weights does not help. ViT-B alone runs, but the adapted encoder then fails to allocate where the stock one succeeds, until a numerically identical rewrite of the attention lets the complete DCM-SAM run in FP16 at 1024x1024, with no operator falling back to the CPU, masks within 0.01% of pixels of the FP32 reference. Code: https://github.com/MushfiqShovon/DCM-SAM.

Md Mushfiqur Rahaman, Md Mahedi Hasan, Imtiaz Ahmed +1

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV · School of Mathematical and Data Sciences West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV · Lane Department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV

Mixture of Experts Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Low-Rank Adaptation Additive Manufacturing Computed Tomography Edge AI

Sep 29, 2026cs.RO

When to Adapt: Multi-Signal Domain Shift Detection for Efficient Training-Free Adaptation in Open-Vocabulary Segmentation

Robust and reliable perception is essential for autonomous robots operating in real-world environments, particularly in long-term missions where environmental conditions may change significantly over time. Although recent advances in Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) have improved open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, these models can still suffer from domain shift, which can significantly degrade performance if they are not adapted to the current environment. Training-free domain adaptation is a relevant paradigm for adaptation, consisting of adjusting the model online using lightweight adapters. Recent approaches apply this on a per-frame basis, which is impractical for deployments on resource-constrained robotic hardware. To tackle this, we propose a multi-signal domain shift detection method for training-free continual test-time adaptation (TF-CTTA) in open-vocabulary segmentation. Our method leverages temporal coherence across consecutive frames by monitoring and combining complementary aspects of domain shift (visual change, adapter mismatch, and semantic drift) to trigger adaptation only when needed. We validate our approach on a benchmark including indoor and outdoor environments and using real robotic data. We demonstrate that our approach maintains segmentation accuracy while substantially reducing adaptations, making training-free adaptation practical and feasible for long-term, real-world robotic deployments.

Michele Antonazzi, Alejandra C. Hernandez, José Araujo +2

EECS and Digital Futures, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden · Ericsson Research, Ericsson AB, Stockholm, Sweden

Distribution Shift Continual Test-Time Adaptation Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Distribution Shift Detection Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation Robotic Perception

Sep 29, 2026cs.CV

HyperSAM: A Promptable Foundation Model for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing

Hyperspectral remote sensing provides dense spectral measurements that are indispensable for material-level Earth observation, yet the construction of a general-purpose hyperspectral foundation model remains difficult. Two bottlenecks are especially limiting. First, large hyperspectral corpora rarely provide high spatial resolution together with reliable dense annotations. Second, many hyperspectral models are still trained almost from scratch, so the geometric and interactive priors learned by modern vision foundation models are not fully reused. To alleviate these issues, we \highlight{present} \textbf{HyperSAM}, a promptable hyperspectral foundation model that couples a data-centric hyperspectral synthesis pipeline with a spectral adaptation architecture based on Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3). On the data side, HyperSAM synthesizes full-spectrum hyperspectral cubes from high-resolution SpaceNet multispectral imagery through a physics-informed abundance-transfer generator, while SAM3-derived pseudo-masks provide object-centric supervision. On the model side, the latest implementation uses a frozen SAM3 RGB image branch, a trainable hyperspectral side encoder initialized from the RGB vision transformer (ViT), ControlNet-style zero-initialized feature injection, and a lightweight mixture-of-experts mask refiner. To enhance training robustness against noisy pseudo-labels, Cross-modal Sample Selection (CromSS)-style confidence selection is incorporated for noisy-label weighting. Extensive experiments show that HyperSAM obtains strong generalization on diverse hyperspectral tasks (e.g., classification, anomaly detection, change detection, target detection, and airborne oil-spill mapping) and that high-quality synthetic hyperspectral data can be more effective than simply scaling noisy hyperspectral supervision.

Li Pang, Xinqiao Wu, Jing Yao +5

School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China · Faculty of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China · State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China +4

Synthetic Data Augmentation Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Hyperspectral Imaging

Sep 29, 2026cs.CR

Forensic-Aware Continual Adaptation for Image Forgery Localization

The rapid evolution of image manipulation techniques has raised growing public security concerns. Existing Image Forgery Localization (IFL) methods can accurately localize manipulated regions but are often unable to adapt to newly emerging forgeries. In real-world forensic scenarios, data typically arrive sequentially, yet continual model adaptation remains largely unexplored in IFL. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first continual learning framework for IFL and establish a comprehensive benchmark under two realistic data-evolution protocols: cross-dataset and cross-content continual learning. Evaluations of representative state-of-the-art IFL and continual learning methods reveal substantial performance degradation, highlighting two key challenges: (1) adaptively capturing intrinsic forensic traces from incoming data across unseen domains, and (2) preserving previously acquired forensic knowledge during sequential adaptation. To address these challenges, we propose a forensic-aware continual adaptation framework. First, a forensic trace mining module employs Spatial Mixture-of-Forensic-Experts (SMoFE) to dynamically route complementary forensic cues across spatial locations, together with Forensic Evidence-Guided Dense Prompting (FEGDP) to transform low-level forensic traces into structured localization evidence for SAM. Second, Fisher-weighted LoRA Gradient (FLAG) surgery identifies old-task-sensitive adaptation directions and suppresses conflicting updates, mitigating catastrophic forgetting while preserving plasticity for emerging forgery domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in both pixel-level forgery localization and image-level forgery detection across diverse continual learning scenarios.

Chenqi Kong, Song Xia, Anwei Luo +3

School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore. · ROSE Lab, School of EEE, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. · School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang, China. +1

Image Forgery Detection Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Image Forgery Localization

Sep 29, 2026cs.CV

You Only Reprogram Once: Rethinking Prolonged Training for Visual Reprogramming

Visual reprogramming is a parameter-efficient method for adapting pretrained models, yet its training can remain computationally expensive: even with a frozen backbone, visual prompts are often optimized through the full model for hundreds of epochs. Before changing what the pretrained model sees, we ask whether we are fully using what it already tells us. We find that modeling the full source response can already yield strong downstream predictions without prompt optimization. Motivated by this observation, we introduce You Only Reprogram Once (YORO), which constructs a downstream predictor from the frozen response space in a single forward-only traversal. Its Bayesian Discriminant Mapping (BDM) derives a covariance-aware affine mapping from streaming class statistics, requiring no backpropagation, optimizer updates, or repeated visits to the training set. When further input adaptation helps, YORO-FP optionally refines the visual prompt for 20 epochs. BDM also extends naturally to CLIP by treating attribute-prompt similarities as source responses. Across three full-data settings, YORO improves average accuracy over the strongest prior gradient-free mapping by 18.4--24.4%. On 16-shot CLIP, it raises the four-backbone average from 71.4% to 77.2%. YORO-FP provides further gains on selected tasks, while validation often retains the one-pass predictor. These results suggest a different default for visual reprogramming: read out the frozen response first, and optimize the input only when needed.

Zizhao Li, Mohammed Yaqoob Ansari, Xinyu Su +3

The University of Melbourne · Fudan University

VLM Adaptation Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Visual Prompt Learning

Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

Boosting Metric Depth Completion via Training-Free Adaptive Response Geometry

Depth completion aims to recover dense metric depth from sparse sensor measurements, increasingly leveraging visual foundation models as geometric priors. However, aligning these priors to true metric scale typically relies on rigid affine assumptions in predefined coordinate systems, leaving systematic calibration errors. Linearity in depth calibration depends on the response coordinate. We introduce adaptive response geometry, which makes the fixed choice of depth, log depth, or disparity an image-level unknown. A continuous response family unifies these coordinates and defines an explicit depth-dependent gain. We derive the response-gradient relation and estimate the response parameters in metric space. Hard-Dirichlet residual reconstruction completes the calibrated prior. Under deliberately incomplete metric observations, the training-free pipeline achieves macro AbsRel 0.0301 and macro NMed 14.04°, improving both aggregate measures over PriorDA, LDCM, and Any2Full. Linearity diagnostics examine how the selected response changes the depth relation and its metric error.

Mia Zhang, Jizong Peng

dConstruct Robotics · University of Waterloo

Post-Hoc Calibration Depth Completion Vision Foundation Model Adaptation

Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

DBCF: Dual-Branch Complementary Fusion of Foundation Models for Generalized Deepfake Detection

As image generation and editing technologies have progressed substantially, facial forgeries pose significant challenges to privacy and public safety. Due to limited ability to capture forgery cues, existing small-scale forgery detection models often struggle to generalize across various domains and unseen manipulations. To address this limitation, researchers have turned to large-scale foundation models, which can provide richer representations and better generalization. Nevertheless, relying on a single foundation model alone remains insufficient for effective forgery detection. While models like CLIP offer robust global semantic cues, they lack the capacity to capture detailed local facial features. In contrast, DINO excels at capturing local structural features of faces, but provides weaker global semantic context. To fully utilize the synergies among multiple foundation models, we propose a hierarchical multi-granular framework that integrates complementary pretrained representations. Specifically, a Global Context Branch (GCB) based on CLIP captures holistic semantic cues, while a Fine-grained Cue Branch (FCB) built on DINOv3 captures localized structural irregularities. In addition, we design a feature fusion module that enables parameter-efficient adaptation of the frozen foundation backbones by adaptively extracting and integrating complementary features from the two models. By jointly leveraging global context and fine-grained cues, our method learns more comprehensive forgery representations and achieves strong cross-manipulation performance. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the benefit of the proposed design, particularly under cross-dataset and cross-manipulation settings.

Fengming Gu, Mingjie He, Zonghui Guo +2

School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China · State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China +1

Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Deepfake Detection Feature Fusion

Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

The Devil is in the Spectrum Bias: Spectrum-Balanced Feature Matching for Robust Representation Distillation

Large visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable transferability across a wide range of downstream tasks. To deploy such models efficiently, feature matching has become a popular knowledge distillation approach that transfers teacher representations to smaller student models without requiring labeled data. However, we show that the conventional feature matching objective with L2-distance is inherently biased toward reconstructing dominant spectral directions of the teacher representation, while under-optimizing low-variance directions that often contain task-relevant information. To address this, we propose Spectrum-Balanced Feature Matching, SpecMatch, a simple objective that adaptively emphasizes under-optimized spectral directions while preserving the relative importance of dominant directions. SpecMatch is easy to implement and introduces negligible computational overhead. Extensive experiments on image recognition demonstrate that SpecMatch consistently improves downstream adaptation across diverse tasks, including image classification, anomaly detection, medical image analysis, and domain generalization. In particular, SpecMatch outperforms conventional feature matching in 40 of 42 teacher--student and training-setting combinations, while consistently improving over the original student model in all settings. We further demonstrate that the proposed objective generalizes beyond vision, improving downstream performance across six protein understanding tasks.

Kuniaki Saito, Yoshitaka Ushiku

OMRON SINIC X Corporation

Representation Learning Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Feature-Based Knowledge Distillation Knowledge Distillation

Sep 24, 2026cs.CV

WildHSR: Metric Feed-Forward 4D People-Scene Reconstruction from a 3D Foundation Model

3D foundation models recover video cameras and geometry in one forward pass, but some of the strongest are up to scale. Joint people-scene reconstruction then requires two missing outputs: metric scale and persistent person identity. We ask whether one up-to-scale foundation representation can support both through lightweight adaptation. Exact metric labels are scarce, but unlabeled in-the-wild video is abundant. We use people in curated web video to initialise the solution: a posed metric body and 2D keypoints give an approximate, closed-form scale pseudo-label. These pseudo-labels pretrain a Scale Readout, which is then fine-tuned together with a lightweight adapter using exact metric supervision from standard real-video training splits. At inference the head predicts metric scale from foundation-model tokens, without the ruler or its teachers. For person identity, we probe the pretrained foundation model alone and find evidence that its intermediate query-key features encode person correspondence across frames. In most evaluated moving-person clips, a mid-layer token prefers that person over the vacated location and other people. A tiny projection reads this correspondence; together with metric pelvis motion and proposal confidence, it drives dustbin-aware Sinkhorn association of per-frame bodies. WildHSR combines both readouts to reconstruct metric cameras, scene and people from monocular video. Each window is predicted feed-forward; analytic association and Sim(3) composition connect windows. On EMDB-2, WildHSR is the first feed-forward method in the published comparison to beat the best optimization-based WA-MPJPE and RTE while leading feed-forward methods on all three world-frame metrics. On RICH, it leads feed-forward people-and-scene methods on WA-MPJPE and W-MPJPE. The complete pipeline runs at 10.1 fps on one GPU.

Jerrin Bright, John Zelek

Vision and Image Processing Lab, University of Waterloo, Canada

Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Dynamic Scene Reconstruction 3D Human Reconstruction Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction 3D MOT

Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

Geometry-Conditioned Visual Place Recognition in Natural Environments

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) in natural environments remains challenging due to repetitive vegetation, sparse distinctive landmarks, and substantial appearance and viewpoint variation across traversals. While visual observations of the same place can change considerably, their underlying spatial structure is often more persistent. We exploit this complementary geometric consistency through Depth-Aware Distillation (DAD), which conditions the token representations of a pretrained Vision Foundation Model (VFM) on geometry inferred by a Geometric Foundation Model (GFM), without any depth sensor. Rather than treating geometry as an additional input modality, DAD projects image-aligned depth into the VFM token space and selectively modulates visual representations through channel-wise geometric conditioning. A two-stage teacher-guided learning strategy first anchors the geometry-conditioned representation to the pretrained appearance space, before refining it for place discrimination. Evaluated on the WildCross benchmark, DAD improves average inter-sequence Recall@1 from 61.41% to 66.37% and Recall@5 from 65.86% to 72.49% over a matched appearance-only baseline, with the largest gains under reverse traversal and long-term appearance variation. These results show that GFM-derived geometry can provide a persistent structural prior for VPR when visual appearance becomes unreliable.

Walter Nedov, Saimunur Rahman, Kavindie Katuwandeniya +3

CSIRO Robotics, CSIRO, Australia · Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Visual Representation Learning Visual Place Recognition Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Geometric Representation Learning

Sep 22, 2026cs.CV

nnFoundation: 3D Foundation Models for Radiology

Radiological artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly, yet most systems remain narrowly task-specific, data-intensive, and fragile under domain shift. Foundation models promise more transferable and data-efficient solutions, but existing approaches are limited in scale, evaluated narrowly, and often assume that a single pretrained model can support diverse downstream tasks. Here we present nnFoundation, complementary convolutional and transformer-based 3D radiological foundation models. Developed within the Human Radiome Project (THRP), nnFoundation is trained on 2.1 million CT, MRI, and PET image volumes from 125 institutional and public datasets. We evaluate them across 108 tasks spanning segmentation, detection, classification, report generation, and image retrieval, including evaluations under domain shift, by external partners and in low-data and low-compute regimes. Across all task types, our convolution- and transformer-based nnFoundation models consistently outperform both prior 3D foundation models and training from scratch, establishing state-of-the-art performance for radiological imaging. However, performance follows a consistent task-dependent structure: the convolutional nnFoundation model dominates spatially localized tasks, whereas the transformer-based nnFoundation model excels in tasks requiring global semantic reasoning and in frozen-feature settings. Dynamically aligning the foundation model topology with the dataset characteristics post-hoc further improves transfer across heterogeneous 3D settings. These results show that transferable 3D radiological performance is governed not by a single universal model, but by the interplay of scalable pretraining, complementary architectures, and dataset-aware adaptation. We release nnFoundation models integrated into nnU-Net and nnDetection, enabling immediate application across established radiology workflows.

Constantin Ulrich Harsy, Tassilo Wald, Karol Gotkowski +80

3D Foundation Models Medical Imaging Foundation Models Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Medical Image Representation Learning

Sep 22, 2026cs.CV

Vision Foundation Models with Synthetic-Only Training for Monocular Spacecraft Pose Estimation

We present an improvement on previous spacecraft pose estimation architectures that results in the lowest published mean rotation errors we know of on the SPEED+ lightbox and sunlamp test sets for a known, non-cooperative spacecraft. By using a previously established heatmap-based pose estimation architecture and adapting a large self-supervised ViT foundation model (DINOv3) in place of the smaller convolutional and ViT encoders of previous work, we show that pose estimation accuracy improves from 300M to 840M parameters with no saturation yet observed. We also evaluate our 840M model on a Jetson Orin NX 16GB, measuring single-pass network inference at 133.8 ms per crop with a board draw of 32.0 W. These measurements demonstrate embedded inference feasibility on a processor family with orbital flight heritage. Our resulting model outperforms previous models across lightbox and sunlamp domains while training only on synthetic data. Our best model, using DINOv3 840M adapted with LoRA as the encoder (rank 64, three-seed ensemble with four-rotation test-time augmentation), results in

1.56^\circ

mean rotation error on sunlamp and

1.17^\circ

on lightbox, compared to the previous best mean rotation errors we know of on these test sets,

2.66^\circ

and

1.75^\circ

by EagerNet.

John Church, Vazghen Nikolian

Both authors contributed equally to this work; author order is alphabetical.

Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Object Pose Estimation Spacecraft Pose Estimation

Sep 22, 2026cs.CV

RootQuantV2: Adapting a Vision Foundation Model for Root-Trait Regression from Minirhizotron Imagery

A lack of high-throughput phenotyping solutions for root traits in field-grown crops has severely constrained understanding and improvement of below-ground traits and processes. Minirhizotrons are the standard non-destructive root-phenotyping method in field environments. Computer vision solutions are needed to allow automated trait estimation at scale, but training data is scarce and human annotations are often inaccessible because they reside in proprietary software that only exports per-image scalar totals of root length and surface area. Nevertheless, large numeric archives of these root traits already exist. RootQuant showed that the traits can be predicted directly from the whole image by regression, thus removing manually traced masks from the pipeline; RootQuantV2 takes that idea further by replacing RootQuant's CNN backbone with a self-supervised ViT. We adapt a frozen DINOv3 ViT-L/16 with a hybrid parameter-efficient scheme. Training only 11.9M parameters (3.78% of the model), RootQuantV2 achieves length and area

R^2

of 0.950 and 0.930, respectively, while lowering length/area RMSE by 24.3%/20.7% over RootQuant. RootQuantV2 thus repurposes legacy numeric archives for high-throughput, automated root trait estimation.

Kinjalk Parth, Sebastian Varela, Andrew D. B. Leakey

Department of Plant Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA · Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, Urbana, IL 61801, USA

Plant Phenotyping Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Microscopy Image Analysis

Sep 21, 2026cs.CV

0.5%>100%: Bidirectional Reciprocal Learning for Referring Image Segmentation

Recent advances in vision foundation models (VFMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse unimodal visual tasks. However, adapting VFMs to referring image segmentation (RIS) typically necessitates precise vision-language alignment via full fine-tuning, incurring substantial computational overhead and risking catastrophic forgetting. While existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods enable safe knowledge transfer with minimal training costs, they predominantly operate independently within individual modalities or focus exclusively on unidirectional guidance from language to vision, overlooking progressive cross-modal interaction and visual feedback for textual refinement. To address these limitations, we propose

\textbf{B}

idirectional

\textbf{R}

eciprocal

\textbf{L}

earning (

\textbf{BRL}

), a novel adapter-based PEFT framework that facilitates hierarchical, bidirectional information flow within both token-mixing and channel-mixing layers of frozen foundation models. Specifically, BRL introduces two complementary lightweight modules. The Reciprocal Attention Adapter (RAA) performs cross-modal query-key exchanges at the token level, enabling visual and linguistic tokens to mutually attend to each other for fine-grained spatial grounding. The Reciprocal Gate Adapter (RGA) generates cross-modal gating signals at the channel level, allowing global semantic context from one modality to adaptively recalibrate channel activations of the other. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of BRL over prior RIS methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance while requiring less than 0.5% backbone parameter updates. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/xiaoqiang-lu/BRL.

Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Lingling Li +5

Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education, International Research Center for Intelligent Perception and Computation, School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, 710071, China

VLM Adaptation Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Referring Image Segmentation Vision-Language Alignment Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Sep 21, 2026cs.LG

MUSE: Dependency-Aware Adaptation of a Frozen Vision Backbone for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time-series forecasting is essential to many real-world applications. Recent large vision models (LVMs) offer a promising paradigm by transferring cross-domain visual priors to time-series forecasting. However, existing LVM-based methods face two key challenges: balancing independent visual representation spaces with cross-variable dependency modeling, and adapting vision backbones pretrained on natural images to the distinct temporal semantics of time-series images. To address these challenges, we propose MUSE, a dependency-aware adaptation framework built on a fully frozen pretrained MAE. First, the Variable Context Refinement Module (VCR) aggregates shared temporal information within each variable and models cross-variable contextual dependencies while preserving independent visual spaces. Second, the Temporal-Periodic Refinement Module (TPR) performs lightweight refinement at different encoder depths and explicitly models across-period temporal dependencies and within-period periodic dependencies. The two modules independently produce forecasts, which are fused through a learnable prediction-level gate. Experiments on 10 real-world datasets demonstrate that MUSE achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Xinying Cai, Junkai Lu, Yuhan Zhu +3

East China Normal University

Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Time Series Forecasting Vision Foundation Model Adaptation

Sep 21, 2026cs.CV

AnalogDepth: Multi-view Geometry from FPV drones under Analog Video Transmission

Analog video transmission (VTX) remains widespread in FPV drones due to low latency, weight and low cost. However analog VTX suffers from complex spatially structured image degradation which differ fundamentally from digital image corruption (e.g. AWGN) used in standard training augmentation. This work shows that this type of noise severely degrades the accuracy of Depth Anything 3 (DA3), a state-of-the-art feed forward visual geometry foundation model. To address this gap, we present AnalogDepth, a parameter-efficient training pipeline that adapts DA3 to analog FPV imagery using student-teacher knowledge distillation with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) injected into the DINOv2 backbone. Rather than synthesizing noise analytically, we build a noise bank from static FPV recordings under diverse conditions and compare real-noise injection against PSD-matched Gaussian synthesis and AWGN as baselines. Experiments on six real FPV flight sequences across three indoor scenes show that training with our noise bank consistently reduces per-frame depth RMSE and 3D reconstruction Chamfer distance compared to the pretrained DA3 baseline and both Gaussian noise variants. These results demonstrate that replicating the spatial structure of real analog transmission noise is critical for effective adaptation.

André Amorim, Pedro F. Proença

NOVA School of Science and Technology, NOVA University Lisbon, Caparica, Portugal.

Depth Estimation Multi-View 3D Reconstruction Vision Foundation Model Adaptation

Sep 20, 2026cs.CV

Comparative Performance and Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of DINOv2 for Active Trachoma Classification

Automated grading of conjunctival photographs could reduce the cost and variability of trachoma prevalence surveys, but the relative value of modern pretrained visual representations, lightweight feature adaptation, and training-objective design has not been established under a common protocol. This study presents a controlled evaluation for binary classification of Trachomatous Inflammation-Follicular (TF) versus Normal using 1,546 images from the public UCSF/Lietman collection. Images are processed using the OPTED pipeline for zero-shot tarsal-conjunctiva segmentation, alignment, cropping, and standardization. We first compare six pretrained backbones using a common classification pipeline and then evaluate four lightweight adaptation mechanisms on DINOv2 ViT-B/14. Under stratified five-fold cross-validation, DINOv2 with Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) and focal-plus-center loss achieved 91.66 +/- 0.97% accuracy, 90.69 +/- 1.10% macro-F1, and 96.06 +/- 0.71% AUC. ECA introduces only five learnable parameters while matching the performance of substantially larger alternatives. Objective ablation further showed that ECA did not consistently improve plain DINOv2 across loss functions; the lowest-variance 91.66% accuracy was obtained with cross-entropy plus center loss. Overall, the fine-tuned DINOv2 representation provided most of the predictive performance, while ECA offered a highly parameter-efficient refinement whose effect depended on the training objective. The resulting workflow provides a reproducible benchmark for active trachoma image classification.

Kibrom Gebremedhin, Hadush Hailu, Bruk Gebregziabher +1

Department of Computer Science Mekelle University Mekelle, Ethiopia · Department of Computer Science Maharishi International University Fairfield, IA, USA · Signal Technologies Germany +1

Channel Attention Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Medical Image Classification Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Sep 17, 2026cs.CV

GAPrompt++: Multi-Granular Geometry-Aware Point Cloud Prompt for 3D Vision Model

Pre-trained 3D vision models have substantially advanced point cloud analysis, yet adapting them to downstream tasks via full fine-tuning is computationally expensive and storage-intensive. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers a promising alternative by reducing both adaptation cost and storage burden. However, existing prompting-based approaches ignore the intrinsic geometric structures of point clouds, thereby limiting their adaptation capability. This limitation stems from their inability to encode both fine-grained geometric cues and coarse-grained structural semantics, as well as failing to propagate such information effectively through the model hierarchy. To address these challenges, we propose GAPrompt++, a multi-granular geometry-aware prompting method that provides richer geometric guidance for efficient 3D task adaptation. Specifically, we introduce a Point Shift Prompter that extracts multi-granular geometric features across different scales, enabling instance-specific geometric adjustments during adaptation. Next, a Keypoint Prompter adaptively generates point-level prompts to highlight local geometric saliency and fine-grained structural details. Furthermore, a Prompt Propagation mechanism injects these multi-granular geometric cues throughout the feature extraction hierarchy, strengthening the ability to capture essential geometric characteristics. Extensive experiments show that GAPrompt++ achieves state-of-the-art performance among prompting-based PEFT methods and even surpasses full fine-tuning across diverse benchmarks, while requiring less than 2% trainable parameters. In addition, to address the saturation of existing evaluation datasets, we construct two more challenging benchmarks derived from 3D Gaussian Splatting and Multi-View Stereo reconstruction, offering diverse and realistic point cloud scenarios to promote future research.

Zixiang Ai, Zhenyu Cui, Yufei Guo +4

Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China · Intelligent Science and Technology Academy of CASIC, Beijing 100041, China · Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China +1

Point Cloud Learning Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Point Cloud Understanding Visual Prompt Learning Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

Bridging Vision Foundation Model Priors with CLIP for Spatial-aware Few-shot Anomaly Detection in Medical Images

Vision-Language Models such as CLIP enable effective few-shot medical anomaly detection (AD) via strong image-text semantic alignment. However, their globally contrastive pretraining lacks explicit spatial supervision, limiting precise lesion localization. In contrast, Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) such as DINO learn spatially coherent patch representations via self-distillation and local-to-global consistency, better capturing fine-grained anatomical structures. Leveraging this complementarity, we propose Spatial-FAD, a spatial-aware few-shot medical AD framework that improves lesion localization by combining VFM spatial priors with CLIP semantics. Specifically, we introduce a VFM-enhanced adapter that injects a structural affinity prior derived from DINO into CLIP features. This structure-guided refinement encourages visual embeddings to better adhere to lesion boundaries while maintaining semantic alignment. To address the loss of spatial detail from patchification and the limited input resolution of CLIP, we adopt a sliding-window aggregation strategy. This generates high-resolution, spatially dense embeddings to further enhance localization granularity. Moreover, we introduce a prototype-enhanced support memory scheme to efficiently exploit the few-shot support set. This module stores compact prototypes for normal and abnormal patterns, reducing memory costs while boosting performance by fusing patch-to-prototype and image-text similarities. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, including Liver CT, Retinal OCT, and Brain MRI, demonstrate that Spatial-FAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in lesion segmentation. Notably, in the 4-shot scenario, our method achieves an average improvement of over 11.4% in Dice score and 1.8% in AUC. Code is available at: https://github.com/JuzhengMiao/Spatial-FAD.

Juzheng Miao, Yuchen Yuan, Cheng Chen +1

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · School of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China +1

Few-Shot Anomaly Detection Medical Image Anomaly Detection Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Medical VLMs Medical Image Localization

Sep 11, 2026cs.CV

Spectral Adapters for Segment Anything Model-based Segmentation of Colorectal Liver Metastases in Computed Tomography

Accurate segmentation of colorectal liver metastases (CRLM) in contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) is important for response assessment, surgical planning, and follow-up. We propose two parameter-efficient spectral adapters for the Segment Anything Model (SAM): the Directional Spectral Adapter (DiSECT) and Spectral Instance-Guided Adapter (SiGA). DiSECT uses singular value decomposition of frozen weights to constrain residual updates to leading spectral directions, while SiGA adds global and input-conditioned gating through a multilayer perceptron. We evaluate these methods on 446 contrast-enhanced CT volumes (355 training, 91 testing) and compare them with LoRA, QLoRA, convolutional adapters (CAD), and a 3D nnU-Net baseline. Experiments consider single-point, three-point, bounding-box, and no-prompt regimes. SiGA achieves the best single-point performance with a Dice score of 0.77, IoU of 0.69, and HD95 of 35.39 mm. Under no-prompt inference, SiGA reaches 0.76 Dice, 0.68 IoU, and 46.76 mm HD95, comparable to the nnU-Net baseline (0.758 Dice). DiSECT uses only 0.14 million trainable parameters. These results show that spectral adapters can efficiently adapt SAM for CRLM segmentation while retaining strong accuracy with limited trainable parameters.

Ramtin Mojtahedi, Mohammad Hamghalam, Jacob J. Peoples +6

School of Computing, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada · Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, University Health Network, 200 Elizabeth Street, Toronto, ON M5G 2C4, Canada · Department of Electrical Engineering, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran +6

Promptable Image Segmentation Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Medical Image Segmentation