arXiv:2606. 16996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) provides a strong frozen backbone for concept-prompted segmentation, but applying it directly to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) is inefficient: full-resolution decoding is typically run over the entire dataset vocabulary, whereas each image contains only a small active subset of classes.
arXiv:2608. 04720v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-time object detectors achieve remarkable accuracy under controlled conditions, yet degrade sharply on non-ideal inputs-fisheye distortion, game-rendered content, aerial views, and 360{\deg}panoramas.
arXiv:2510. 09608v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) could power real-time assistants and autonomous agents, but they face a critical challenge: understanding near-infinite video streams without escalating latency and memory usage.
FAVE (Foveated Adaptive Visual Encoding) is a lightweight, variable‑resolution Vision Transformer that encodes user‑selected image regions at high acuity while maintaining the image’s native geometry. In controlled experiments on small‑object ImageNet crops, FAVE outperforms a fixed‑resolution ViT by 9.4 top‑1 points while using 12.7× fewer FLOPs. When added as a local branch to FastVLM, FAVE improves TextVQA by 1.60 points and GQA attribute accuracy by 1.31 points, achieving a 3.3× speedup over SmolVLM2-2.2B with only 16 extra local tokens.
arXiv:2604. 15622v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Always-on contextual AI runs language-aligned vision foundation models (VFMs) on edge devices, where the on-device model is the dominant continuous compute cost under strict latency and power limits.
arXiv:2603. 26551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision backbone networks play a central role in modern computer vision.
The paper introduces the Wide-area Spatio-temporal Scene Understanding (WSTU) problem, which demands simultaneous wide-area coverage, per-target resolution, and temporal continuity—capabilities lacking in existing datasets. To address this, the authors present HARD, an ultra‑high‑resolution (12768×9564) UAV dataset annotated for object detection, multi‑object tracking, and scene‑level visual question answering. They also propose a latency‑aware metric, streaming‑HOTA (s‑HOTA), and show through baseline experiments that high resolution and processing latency significantly impact detection, tracking, and VQA performance, revealing gaps in current methods for WSTU.
arXiv:2607. 02612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Transformers achieve strong image classification accuracy but process all image regions with nearly the same computation, even when many regions are redundant or uninformative.
arXiv:2607. 06915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling down the resolution of input images can greatly reduce the computational overhead of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which is promising for edge AI.
The paper proposes a method called Restrict, Don't Retrain that enhances zero-shot aerial segmentation by using inference-time guidance from a vision‑language model (VLM). It combines a frozen foundation model that labels every pixel with two VLM queries: one to select relevant classes and another to locate small objects missed by the base model. Experiments on four aerial datasets show consistent performance gains at each stage where the base model is competent.
HGSQ is a real‑time aerial small‑object detector that uses a heatmap‑guided sparse query strategy to focus computation on foreground regions. It introduces a lightweight Heatmap Budget Predictor to generate a foreground budget map, and then employs Heatmap‑Guided Sparse Query Selection, Heatmap‑Gated Lite Snake Convolution, and Adaptive Query‑Decoder Budgeting to efficiently process only small‑object areas. On NWPU VHR‑10 and VisDrone2019, HGSQ achieves 95.10 mAP50 and 54.8 mAP50 respectively while running at 96 FPS with only 48.6 GFLOPs on an RTX 4070.
The paper proposes a modular training pipeline for zero‑shot cross‑city object detection that combines a multi‑dataset pre‑training strategy with class‑agnostic objectness distillation and a domain‑resilient augmentation stream featuring a Grayworld transformation. Applied to the RF‑DETR detector, the approach reduces cross‑city distribution gaps while using only 16 GB GPU memory, achieving a 24.29‑point mAP improvement and 1st place on the AI City Challenge Track 6 leaderboard. The authors provide code and data at the referenced GitHub repository.