SCOUT is a frozen‑encoder approach for sim‑to‑real text‑based person retrieval that predicts cross‑modal embeddings instead of fine‑tuning cross‑encoders. It uses a trainable predictor to map patch tokens from a frozen video encoder (V‑JEPA) into the embedding space of a frozen text encoder (EmbeddingGemma), guided by a bidirectional InfoNCE objective. The method achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on the AI City Challenge 2026 Track 4, with a full retrieve‑fuse‑rerank pipeline reaching 84.25 mAP@10 and a single frozen model alone scoring 60.63, while training costs are modest (≈95 GPU‑hours).
arXiv:2606. 00910v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Composed Video Retrieval (CoVR) seeks the target video that results from applying a free-form textual modification to a reference video.
arXiv:2607. 22771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Picking the frozen image encoder for a 3D~CT vision--language model (VLM), together with the token-compression scheme on top of it, is a search over many candidates.
arXiv:2606. 15134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched.
arXiv:2605. 11374v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-time compute is widely believed to benefit only large reasoning models, leaving small models with nothing to gain.
arXiv:2607. 28986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot image captioning (ZIC) describes images without paired image-caption supervision during captioner training, relying on text-only corpora and frozen pretrained image-text scorers.
arXiv:2606. 03879v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As foundation models scale toward fusing more heterogeneous visual streams, understanding how diverse encoders interact under joint training becomes a prerequisite for principled design.
The paper introduces TFA, a training‑free aggregation technique that calibrates frozen visual foundation models for visual place recognition. TFA uses cross‑codebook agreement, retrieval coverage, and spectral statistics to adjust residual assignment, spectral shaping, and global‑feature fusion without requiring place labels or task‑specific weights. Experiments with a DINOv2‑B backbone show significant Recall@1 gains over existing training‑free methods across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that reliability‑guided aggregation can unlock additional retrieval performance from frozen representations.
We introduce Predictive State Retrieval (PSR), a task in which a model observes a short video prefix and a temporal question about an object's future state, then retrieves instances from other videos or images that depict that state. Unlike action anticipation, which predicts a label, moment retrieval, which localizes an observed event within a video, or video generation, which synthesizes pixels, PSR combines anticipation with cross-instance retrieval across multiple temporal horizons.
FLAT (Flexible‑Length Aligned Transmodal representations) is a joint multimodal pre‑training framework that learns a shared encoder for images and text, producing 1‑D continuous embeddings that can be directly used by downstream generative decoders. By combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross‑modal generative objectives, FLAT yields representations that are both discriminative and generative, enabling cross‑modal retrieval and generation with a single pre‑training stage. The model achieves strong performance on T2I generation (GenEval 71.1), image captioning (BLEU‑4 40.5, CIDEr 138.6), and retrieval tasks (Recall@5 86.8/75.8 on MS‑COCO, 98.3/93.6 on Flickr30K), and supports linear interpolation, latent space arithmetic, and zero‑shot composed retrieval.
Traditional multimodal representation learning and generation are two stages: a contrastive or self-supervised visual encoder is trained first, followed by a separate downstream generative model. This...
LeVJEPA is a video encoder that eliminates the need for architectural asymmetries, exponential-moving-average target encoders, stop-gradients, and capacity-limited predictors used in prior self‑supervised methods. It trains a single encoder with an invariance loss over global and local views, regularized by SIGReg to prevent collapse, and achieves strong performance with far less pretraining compute. The approach also allows block‑causal attention, making temporal ordering a property of the encoder itself, and matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art baselines on both appearance‑centric and motion‑centric benchmarks.
arXiv:2609.10008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Composed video retrieval (CoVR) searches a gallery for the target video that realizes a natural-language modification of a source clip. However, at gal...