The paper introduces SurgFUTR, a state‑change learning framework for predicting future events in endoscopic videos. Instead of forecasting raw observations, it classifies transitions between current and future states using a teacher‑student architecture and an Action Dynamics module. The authors also present SFPBench, a benchmark with five short‑ and long‑term prediction tasks, and demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple datasets and procedures, including cross‑procedure transfer.
By Saurav Sharma, Chinedu Innocent Nwoye, Didier Mutter, Nicolas Padoy
arXiv:2608. 11204v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning reliable surgical manipulation policies is bottlenecked by the scarcity of action-labeled demonstrations: teleoperated surgical robot (e.
By Wenrui Bao, Tianyun Jiang, Zhiben Chen, Ser-Nam Lim, Peter D. Peng, Yuzhang Shang
SurgMotion is a video-native foundation model that replaces pixel-level reconstruction with latent motion prediction for surgical video analysis. It introduces motion-guided masked prediction, spatiotemporal affinity self-distillation, and spatiotemporal feature diversity regularization to focus on semantically meaningful regions and avoid representation collapse. Trained on SurgMotion-15M, the largest surgical video dataset, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods across 17 benchmarks, improving workflow recognition, action triplet recognition, skill assessment, polyp segmentation, and depth estimation.
By Jinlin Wu, Felix Holm, Chuxi Chen, An Wang, Yaxin Hu, Xiaofan Ye, Zelin Zang, Miao Xu, Lihua Zhou, Huai Liao, Danny T. M. Chan, Ming Feng, Wai S. Poon, Hongliang Ren, Dong Yi, Nassir Navab, Gaofeng Meng, Jiebo Luo, Hongbin Liu, Zhen Lei
This survey reviews recent advances in surgical video generation, categorizing methods into unconditional, conditional, and world modeling generation. It highlights a shift from creating visually plausible frames to modeling the causal dynamics of surgical scenes, and discusses challenges such as pixel-level fidelity versus clinical plausibility, generalization, physical realism, controllability, and interpretability. The paper also compiles experimental results from public datasets to serve as a quantitative benchmark for the field.
By Fuxiang Huang, Chenxu Zhang, Liang Han, Lei Zhang
arXiv:2603. 26720v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting surgical needle trajectories from endoscopic video is critical for robot-assisted suturing, enabling anticipatory planning, real-time guidance, and safer motion execution.
By Huanrong Liu, Chunlin Tian, Tongyu Jia, Tailai Zhou, Qin Liu, Yu Gao, Yutong Ban, Yun Gu, Guy Rosman, Xin Ma, Qingbiao Li
Effective multi-task learning for surgical scene understanding is fundamentally hindered by annotation granularity mismatch; temporal workflow tasks such as phase recognition, step recognition and anticipation benefit from dense frame-level supervision, whereas pixel-level spatial tasks including instrument segmentation and action recognition are only sparsely annotated on selected keyframes due to prohibitive labeling costs. This supervision imbalance undermines shared representation learning and limits joint optimization across heterogeneous surgical tasks.
arXiv:2608. 03244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Image-goal visual navigation is a fundamental capability for embodied agents.
By Changqing Zhou, Yueru Luo, Zeyu Jiang, Changhao Chen
arXiv:2607.19889v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recognizing instrument-tissue interactions is essential for context-aware surgical AI. Vision-language models offer a natural way to inject semanti...
By Jiajun Cheng, Sainan Liu, Subarna Tripathi, Xiaofan Yu, Shan Lin
Image-goal visual navigation is a fundamental capability for embodied agents. Existing navigation policies efficiently predict waypoint trajectories but lack visual foresight, while navigation world models can anticipate future observations but often require costly planning rollouts.
arXiv:2609.27227v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Objective assessment of robotic surgery uses instrument kinematics, which must be reconstructed when only video is available. We introduce a kinematic...
By Mehmet Kerem Turkcan, Soham Samal, Zoran Kostic
PACT‑WAM is a world‑action model that simultaneously predicts a 16‑step action trajectory and its corresponding visual forecast for robot manipulation. It uses a hierarchical history encoder that compresses past observations into fewer tokens, reducing processing cost by 75% compared to dense encoding. The model’s shared flow module updates action and visual states jointly, and a TiTok‑VAE decoder reconstructs multi‑view future images, which are then used by a vision‑language component (Proposal Review) to improve execution‑prefix selection and proposal rejection, boosting success rates on several benchmarks.
By Yushan Liu, Jingjing Fan, Shoujie Li, Yifan Xie, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Wenbo Ding
arXiv:2605.08712v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Action-conditioned surgical video generation is a critical yet highly challenging problem for robotic surgery. The core difficulty is that low-dime...
By Bohan Li, Shuojue Yang, Baorui Peng, Xianda Guo, Erli Zhang, Youqi Tao, Junfeng Duan, Daguang Xu, Qi Dou, Xin Jin, Wenjun Zeng, Hao Zhao, Yueming Jin