Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have significantly advanced dense feature matching, yet severe in-plane rotation remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions face a fundamental dilemma: data-driven methods require inefficient parameter scaling to implicitly learn rotations, whereas strictly equivariant networks lack the semantic capacity of modern VFMs.
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.
By Amitangshu Mukherjee, Kaushik Roy
arXiv:2609.07937v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Structured visual reasoning, such as image puzzles, demands fine-grained visual perception, an ability current Vision Language Models (VLMs) lack. VL...
By Harsha Patnala, Debopriyo Banerjee, Ayush Sunil Munot, Somak Aditya
Geometry-Aligned Semantic Matching for Cross-Modal Planar Image Registration proposes CDPM, a method that first aligns semantic representations across modalities and then refines correspondences with fine-grained CNN features. CDPM adapts DINOv3 using geometrically consistent cross-modal patch pairs, builds a DINO-Centric Feature Pyramid for stable cross-modal matching, and adds a lightweight CNN branch for precise local refinement. Experiments on three cross-modal datasets show that CDPM outperforms existing dense matchers, improving AUC metrics and reducing mACE while using fewer FLOPs.
By Zhiwei Wang, Defeng He, Yuxing Li, Meilu Zhu, Edmund Y. Lam
arXiv:2606. 24716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence.
By Jonas Klotz, Cassio F. Dantas, Pallavi Jain, Diego Marcos, Beg\"um Demir
arXiv:2608. 11537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative semantic segmentation exposes structured predictions as images, but direct color decoding is susceptible to color drift and boundary mixing, whereas latent-feature decoders that predict a separate output distribution may relegate the rendered image to an intermediate visualization.
By Weize Cai, Yongqi Dong, Zhida Shao, Zixin Fu