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May 12

TAVIS: A Benchmark for Egocentric Active Vision and Anticipatory Gaze in Imitation Learning

Active vision -- where a policy controls its own gaze during manipulation -- has emerged as a key capability for imitation learning, with multiple independent systems demonstrating its benefits in the past year. Yet there is no shared benchmark to compare approaches or quantify what active vision contributes, on which task types, and under what conditions. We introduce TAVIS, evaluation infrastructure for active-vision imitation learning, with two complementary task suites -- TAVIS-Head (5 tasks, global search via pan/tilt necks) and TAVIS-Hands (3 tasks, local occlusion via wrist cameras) -- on two humanoid torso embodiments (GR1T2, Reachy2), built on IsaacLab. TAVIS provides three evaluation primitives: a paired headcam-vs-fixedcam protocol on identical demonstrations; GALT (Gaze-Action Lead Time), a novel metric grounded in cognitive science and HRI that quantifies anticipatory gaze in learned policies; and procedural ID/OOD splits. Baseline experiments with Diffusion Policy and π_0 reveal that (i) active-vision generally helps, but benefits are task-conditional rather than uniform; (ii) multi-task policies degrade sharply under controlled distribution shifts on both suites; and (iii) imitation alone yields anticipatory gaze, with median lead times comparable to the human teleoperator reference. Code, evaluation scripts, demonstrations (LeRobot v3.0; ~2200 episodes) and trained baselines are released at https://github.com/spiglerg/tavis and https://huggingface.co/tavis-benchmark.

  • 1 authors
·
May 7

AntGPT: Can Large Language Models Help Long-term Action Anticipation from Videos?

Can we better anticipate an actor's future actions (e.g. mix eggs) by knowing what commonly happens after his/her current action (e.g. crack eggs)? What if we also know the longer-term goal of the actor (e.g. making egg fried rice)? The long-term action anticipation (LTA) task aims to predict an actor's future behavior from video observations in the form of verb and noun sequences, and it is crucial for human-machine interaction. We propose to formulate the LTA task from two perspectives: a bottom-up approach that predicts the next actions autoregressively by modeling temporal dynamics; and a top-down approach that infers the goal of the actor and plans the needed procedure to accomplish the goal. We hypothesize that large language models (LLMs), which have been pretrained on procedure text data (e.g. recipes, how-tos), have the potential to help LTA from both perspectives. It can help provide the prior knowledge on the possible next actions, and infer the goal given the observed part of a procedure, respectively. To leverage the LLMs, we propose a two-stage framework, AntGPT. It first recognizes the actions already performed in the observed videos and then asks an LLM to predict the future actions via conditioned generation, or to infer the goal and plan the whole procedure by chain-of-thought prompting. Empirical results on the Ego4D LTA v1 and v2 benchmarks, EPIC-Kitchens-55, as well as EGTEA GAZE+ demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. AntGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on all above benchmarks, and can successfully infer the goal and thus perform goal-conditioned "counterfactual" prediction via qualitative analysis. Code and model will be released at https://brown-palm.github.io/AntGPT

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 30, 2023

Merlin:Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Foresight Minds

Humans possess the remarkable ability to foresee the future to a certain extent based on present observations, a skill we term as foresight minds. However, this capability remains largely under explored within existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), hindering their capacity to learn the fundamental principles of how things operate and the intentions behind the observed subjects. To address this issue, we introduce the integration of future modeling into the existing learning frameworks of MLLMs. By utilizing the subject trajectory, a highly structured representation of a consecutive frame sequence, as a learning objective, we aim to bridge the gap between the past and the future. We propose two innovative methods to empower MLLMs with foresight minds, Foresight Pre-Training (FPT) and Foresight Instruction-Tuning (FIT), which are inspired by the modern learning paradigm of LLMs. Specifically, FPT jointly training various tasks centered on trajectories, enabling MLLMs to learn how to attend and predict entire trajectories from a given initial observation. Then, FIT requires MLLMs to first predict trajectories of related objects and then reason about potential future events based on them. Aided by FPT and FIT, we build a novel and unified MLLM named Merlin that supports multi-images input and analysis about potential actions of multiple objects for the future reasoning. Experimental results show Merlin powerful foresight minds with impressive performance on both future reasoning and visual comprehension tasks.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 30, 2023 1

ForeAct: Steering Your VLA with Efficient Visual Foresight Planning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models convert high-level language instructions into concrete, executable actions, a task that is especially challenging in open-world environments. We present Visual Foresight Planning (ForeAct), a general and efficient planner that guides a VLA step-by-step using imagined future observations and subtask descriptions. With an imagined future observation, the VLA can focus on visuo-motor inference rather than high-level semantic reasoning, leading to improved accuracy and generalization. Our planner comprises a highly efficient foresight image generation module that predicts a high-quality 640times480 future observation from the current visual input and language instruction within only 0.33s on an H100 GPU, together with a vision-language model that reasons over the task and produces subtask descriptions for both the generator and the VLA. Importantly, state-of-the-art VLAs can integrate our planner seamlessly by simply augmenting their visual inputs, without any architectural modification. The foresight generator is pretrained on over 1 million multi-task, cross-embodiment episodes, enabling it to learn robust embodied dynamics. We evaluate our framework on a benchmark that consists of 11 diverse, multi-step real-world tasks. It achieves an average success rate of 87.4%, demonstrating a +40.9% absolute improvement over the π_0 baseline (46.5%) and a +30.3% absolute improvement over π_0 augmented with textual subtask guidance (57.1%).

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 12

Towards Pixel-Level Prediction for Gaze Following: Benchmark and Approach

Following the gaze of other people and analyzing the target they are looking at can help us understand what they are thinking, and doing, and predict the actions that may follow. Existing methods for gaze following struggle to perform well in natural scenes with diverse objects, and focus on gaze points rather than objects, making it difficult to deliver clear semantics and accurate scope of the targets. To address this shortcoming, we propose a novel gaze target prediction solution named GazeSeg, that can fully utilize the spatial visual field of the person as guiding information and lead to a progressively coarse-to-fine gaze target segmentation and recognition process. Specifically, a prompt-based visual foundation model serves as the encoder, working in conjunction with three distinct decoding modules (e.g. FoV perception, heatmap generation, and segmentation) to form the framework for gaze target prediction. Then, with the head bounding box performed as an initial prompt, GazeSeg obtains the FoV map, heatmap, and segmentation map progressively, leading to a unified framework for multiple tasks (e.g. direction estimation, gaze target segmentation, and recognition). In particular, to facilitate this research, we construct and release a new dataset, comprising 72k images with pixel-level annotations and 270 categories of gaze targets, built upon the GazeFollow dataset. The quantitative evaluation shows that our approach achieves the Dice of 0.325 in gaze target segmentation and 71.7% top-5 recognition. Meanwhile, our approach also outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving 0.953 in AUC on the gaze-following task. The dataset and code will be released.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 29, 2024

Ego-centric Predictive Model Conditioned on Hand Trajectories

In egocentric scenarios, anticipating both the next action and its visual outcome is essential for understanding human-object interactions and for enabling robotic planning. However, existing paradigms fall short of jointly modeling these aspects. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models focus on action prediction but lack explicit modeling of how actions influence the visual scene, while video prediction models generate future frames without conditioning on specific actions, often resulting in implausible or contextually inconsistent outcomes. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified two-stage predictive framework that jointly models action and visual future in egocentric scenarios, conditioned on hand trajectories. In the first stage, we perform consecutive state modeling to process heterogeneous inputs (visual observations, language, and action history) and explicitly predict future hand trajectories. In the second stage, we introduce causal cross-attention to fuse multi-modal cues, leveraging inferred action signals to guide an image-based Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) for frame-by-frame future video generation. Our approach is the first unified model designed to handle both egocentric human activity understanding and robotic manipulation tasks, providing explicit predictions of both upcoming actions and their visual consequences. Extensive experiments on Ego4D, BridgeData, and RLBench demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both action prediction and future video synthesis.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 27, 2025

NavForesee: A Unified Vision-Language World Model for Hierarchical Planning and Dual-Horizon Navigation Prediction

Embodied navigation for long-horizon tasks, guided by complex natural language instructions, remains a formidable challenge in artificial intelligence. Existing agents often struggle with robust long-term planning about unseen environments, leading to high failure rates. To address these limitations, we introduce NavForesee, a novel Vision-Language Model (VLM) that unifies high-level language planning and predictive world model imagination within a single, unified framework. Our approach empowers a single VLM to concurrently perform planning and predictive foresight. Conditioned on the full instruction and historical observations, the model is trained to understand the navigation instructions by decomposing the task, tracking its progress, and formulating the subsequent sub-goal. Simultaneously, it functions as a generative world model, providing crucial foresight by predicting short-term environmental dynamics and long-term navigation milestones. The VLM's structured plan guides its targeted prediction, while the imagined future provides rich context to inform the navigation actions, creating a powerful internal feedback loop of perception-planning/prediction-action. We demonstrate through extensive experiments on the R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmark that NavForesee achieves highly competitive performance in complex scenarios. Our work highlights the immense potential of fusing explicit language planning with implicit spatiotemporal prediction, paving the way for more intelligent and capable embodied agents.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 1, 2025

Enhancing Next Active Object-based Egocentric Action Anticipation with Guided Attention

Short-term action anticipation (STA) in first-person videos is a challenging task that involves understanding the next active object interactions and predicting future actions. Existing action anticipation methods have primarily focused on utilizing features extracted from video clips, but often overlooked the importance of objects and their interactions. To this end, we propose a novel approach that applies a guided attention mechanism between the objects, and the spatiotemporal features extracted from video clips, enhancing the motion and contextual information, and further decoding the object-centric and motion-centric information to address the problem of STA in egocentric videos. Our method, GANO (Guided Attention for Next active Objects) is a multi-modal, end-to-end, single transformer-based network. The experimental results performed on the largest egocentric dataset demonstrate that GANO outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods for the prediction of the next active object label, its bounding box location, the corresponding future action, and the time to contact the object. The ablation study shows the positive contribution of the guided attention mechanism compared to other fusion methods. Moreover, it is possible to improve the next active object location and class label prediction results of GANO by just appending the learnable object tokens with the region of interest embeddings.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2023

AstraNav-World: World Model for Foresight Control and Consistency

Embodied navigation in open, dynamic environments demands accurate foresight of how the world will evolve and how actions will unfold over time. We propose AstraNav-World, an end-to-end world model that jointly reasons about future visual states and action sequences within a unified probabilistic framework. Our framework integrates a diffusion-based video generator with a vision-language policy, enabling synchronized rollouts where predicted scenes and planned actions are updated simultaneously. Training optimizes two complementary objectives: generating action-conditioned multi-step visual predictions and deriving trajectories conditioned on those predicted visuals. This bidirectional constraint makes visual predictions executable and keeps decisions grounded in physically consistent, task-relevant futures, mitigating cumulative errors common in decoupled "envision-then-plan" pipelines. Experiments across diverse embodied navigation benchmarks show improved trajectory accuracy and higher success rates. Ablations confirm the necessity of tight vision-action coupling and unified training, with either branch removal degrading both prediction quality and policy reliability. In real-world testing, AstraNav-World demonstrated exceptional zero-shot capabilities, adapting to previously unseen scenarios without any real-world fine-tuning. These results suggest that AstraNav-World captures transferable spatial understanding and planning-relevant navigation dynamics, rather than merely overfitting to simulation-specific data distribution. Overall, by unifying foresight vision and control within a single generative model, we move closer to reliable, interpretable, and general-purpose embodied agents that operate robustly in open-ended real-world settings.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 25, 2025

LALM: Long-Term Action Anticipation with Language Models

Understanding human activity is a crucial yet intricate task in egocentric vision, a field that focuses on capturing visual perspectives from the camera wearer's viewpoint. While traditional methods heavily rely on representation learning trained on extensive video data, there exists a significant limitation: obtaining effective video representations proves challenging due to the inherent complexity and variability in human activities.Furthermore, exclusive dependence on video-based learning may constrain a model's capability to generalize across long-tail classes and out-of-distribution scenarios. In this study, we introduce a novel approach for long-term action anticipation using language models (LALM), adept at addressing the complex challenges of long-term activity understanding without the need for extensive training. Our method incorporates an action recognition model to track previous action sequences and a vision-language model to articulate relevant environmental details. By leveraging the context provided by these past events, we devise a prompting strategy for action anticipation using large language models (LLMs). Moreover, we implement Maximal Marginal Relevance for example selection to facilitate in-context learning of the LLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate that LALM surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in the task of long-term action anticipation on the Ego4D benchmark. We further validate LALM on two additional benchmarks, affirming its capacity for generalization across intricate activities with different sets of taxonomies. These are achieved without specific fine-tuning.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 28, 2023

StreamGaze: Gaze-Guided Temporal Reasoning and Proactive Understanding in Streaming Videos

Streaming video understanding requires models not only to process temporally incoming frames, but also to anticipate user intention for realistic applications like AR glasses. While prior streaming benchmarks evaluate temporal reasoning, none measure whether MLLMs can interpret or leverage human gaze signals within a streaming setting. To fill this gap, we introduce StreamGaze, the first benchmark designed to evaluate how effectively MLLMs use gaze for temporal and proactive reasoning in streaming videos. StreamGaze introduces gaze-guided past, present, and proactive tasks that comprehensively evaluate streaming video understanding. These tasks assess whether models can use real-time gaze to follow shifting attention and infer user intentions from only past and currently observed frames. To build StreamGaze, we develop a gaze-video QA generation pipeline that aligns egocentric videos with raw gaze trajectories via fixation extraction, region-specific visual prompting, and scanpath construction. This pipeline produces spatio-temporally grounded QA pairs that closely reflect human perceptual dynamics. Across all StreamGaze tasks, we observe substantial performance gaps between state-of-the-art MLLMs and human performance, revealing fundamental limitations in gaze-based temporal reasoning, intention modeling, and proactive prediction. We further provide detailed analyses of gaze-prompting strategies, reasoning behaviors, and task-specific failure modes, offering deeper insight into why current MLLMs struggle and what capabilities future models must develop. All data and code will be publicly released to support continued research in gaze-guided streaming video understanding.

adobe-research Adobe Research
·
Dec 1, 2025 2

F1: A Vision-Language-Action Model Bridging Understanding and Generation to Actions

Executing language-conditioned tasks in dynamic visual environments remains a central challenge in embodied AI. Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly adopt reactive state-to-action mappings, often leading to short-sighted behaviors and poor robustness in dynamic scenes. In this paper, we introduce F1, a pretrained VLA framework which integrates the visual foresight generation into decision-making pipeline. F1 adopts a Mixture-of-Transformer architecture with dedicated modules for perception, foresight generation, and control, thereby bridging understanding, generation, and actions. At its core, F1 employs a next-scale prediction mechanism to synthesize goal-conditioned visual foresight as explicit planning targets. By forecasting plausible future visual states, F1 reformulates action generation as a foresight-guided inverse dynamics problem, enabling actions that implicitly achieve visual goals. To endow F1 with robust and generalizable capabilities, we propose a three-stage training recipe on an extensive dataset comprising over 330k trajectories across 136 diverse tasks. This training scheme enhances modular reasoning and equips the model with transferable visual foresight, which is critical for complex and dynamic environments. Extensive evaluations on real-world tasks and simulation benchmarks demonstrate F1 consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving substantial gains in both task success rate and generalization ability.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 8, 2025 2

Seer: Language Instructed Video Prediction with Latent Diffusion Models

Imagining the future trajectory is the key for robots to make sound planning and successfully reach their goals. Therefore, text-conditioned video prediction (TVP) is an essential task to facilitate general robot policy learning. To tackle this task and empower robots with the ability to foresee the future, we propose a sample and computation-efficient model, named Seer, by inflating the pretrained text-to-image (T2I) stable diffusion models along the temporal axis. We enhance the U-Net and language conditioning model by incorporating computation-efficient spatial-temporal attention. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Frame Sequential Text Decomposer module that dissects a sentence's global instruction into temporally aligned sub-instructions, ensuring precise integration into each frame of generation. Our framework allows us to effectively leverage the extensive prior knowledge embedded in pretrained T2I models across the frames. With the adaptable-designed architecture, Seer makes it possible to generate high-fidelity, coherent, and instruction-aligned video frames by fine-tuning a few layers on a small amount of data. The experimental results on Something Something V2 (SSv2), Bridgedata and EpicKitchens-100 datasets demonstrate our superior video prediction performance with around 480-GPU hours versus CogVideo with over 12,480-GPU hours: achieving the 31% FVD improvement compared to the current SOTA model on SSv2 and 83.7% average preference in the human evaluation.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 26, 2023

ViTGaze: Gaze Following with Interaction Features in Vision Transformers

Gaze following aims to interpret human-scene interactions by predicting the person's focal point of gaze. Prevailing approaches often adopt a two-stage framework, whereby multi-modality information is extracted in the initial stage for gaze target prediction. Consequently, the efficacy of these methods highly depends on the precision of the preceding modality extraction. Others use a single-modality approach with complex decoders, increasing network computational load. Inspired by the remarkable success of pre-trained plain vision transformers (ViTs), we introduce a novel single-modality gaze following framework called ViTGaze. In contrast to previous methods, it creates a novel gaze following framework based mainly on powerful encoders (relative decoder parameters less than 1%). Our principal insight is that the inter-token interactions within self-attention can be transferred to interactions between humans and scenes. Leveraging this presumption, we formulate a framework consisting of a 4D interaction encoder and a 2D spatial guidance module to extract human-scene interaction information from self-attention maps. Furthermore, our investigation reveals that ViT with self-supervised pre-training has an enhanced ability to extract correlation information. Many experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among all single-modality methods (3.4% improvement in the area under curve (AUC) score, 5.1% improvement in the average precision (AP)) and very comparable performance against multi-modality methods with 59% number of parameters less.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 19, 2024

Eye, Robot: Learning to Look to Act with a BC-RL Perception-Action Loop

Humans do not passively observe the visual world -- we actively look in order to act. Motivated by this principle, we introduce EyeRobot, a robotic system with gaze behavior that emerges from the need to complete real-world tasks. We develop a mechanical eyeball that can freely rotate to observe its surroundings and train a gaze policy to control it using reinforcement learning. We accomplish this by first collecting teleoperated demonstrations paired with a 360 camera. This data is imported into a simulation environment that supports rendering arbitrary eyeball viewpoints, allowing episode rollouts of eye gaze on top of robot demonstrations. We then introduce a BC-RL loop to train the hand and eye jointly: the hand (BC) agent is trained from rendered eye observations, and the eye (RL) agent is rewarded when the hand produces correct action predictions. In this way, hand-eye coordination emerges as the eye looks towards regions which allow the hand to complete the task. EyeRobot implements a foveal-inspired policy architecture allowing high resolution with a small compute budget, which we find also leads to the emergence of more stable fixation as well as improved ability to track objects and ignore distractors. We evaluate EyeRobot on five panoramic workspace manipulation tasks requiring manipulation in an arc surrounding the robot arm. Our experiments suggest EyeRobot exhibits hand-eye coordination behaviors which effectively facilitate manipulation over large workspaces with a single camera. See project site for videos: https://www.eyerobot.net/

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025

Cortical Policy: A Dual-Stream View Transformer for Robotic Manipulation

View transformers process multi-view observations to predict actions and have shown impressive performance in robotic manipulation. Existing methods typically extract static visual representations in a view-specific manner, leading to inadequate 3D spatial reasoning ability and a lack of dynamic adaptation. Taking inspiration from how the human brain integrates static and dynamic views to address these challenges, we propose Cortical Policy, a novel dual-stream view transformer for robotic manipulation that jointly reasons from static-view and dynamic-view streams. The static-view stream enhances spatial understanding by aligning features of geometrically consistent keypoints extracted from a pretrained 3D foundation model. The dynamic-view stream achieves adaptive adjustment through position-aware pretraining of an egocentric gaze estimation model, computationally replicating the human cortical dorsal pathway. Subsequently, the complementary view representations of both streams are integrated to determine the final actions, enabling the model to handle spatially-complex and dynamically-changing tasks under language conditions. Empirical evaluations on RLBench, the challenging COLOSSEUM benchmark, and real-world tasks demonstrate that Cortical Policy outperforms state-of-the-art baselines substantially, validating the superiority of dual-stream design for visuomotor control. Our cortex-inspired framework offers a fresh perspective for robotic manipulation and holds potential for broader application in vision-based robot control.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 21

DiffEye: Diffusion-Based Continuous Eye-Tracking Data Generation Conditioned on Natural Images

Numerous models have been developed for scanpath and saliency prediction, which are typically trained on scanpaths, which model eye movement as a sequence of discrete fixation points connected by saccades, while the rich information contained in the raw trajectories is often discarded. Moreover, most existing approaches fail to capture the variability observed among human subjects viewing the same image. They generally predict a single scanpath of fixed, pre-defined length, which conflicts with the inherent diversity and stochastic nature of real-world visual attention. To address these challenges, we propose DiffEye, a diffusion-based training framework designed to model continuous and diverse eye movement trajectories during free viewing of natural images. Our method builds on a diffusion model conditioned on visual stimuli and introduces a novel component, namely Corresponding Positional Embedding (CPE), which aligns spatial gaze information with the patch-based semantic features of the visual input. By leveraging raw eye-tracking trajectories rather than relying on scanpaths, DiffEye captures the inherent variability in human gaze behavior and generates high-quality, realistic eye movement patterns, despite being trained on a comparatively small dataset. The generated trajectories can also be converted into scanpaths and saliency maps, resulting in outputs that more accurately reflect the distribution of human visual attention. DiffEye is the first method to tackle this task on natural images using a diffusion model while fully leveraging the richness of raw eye-tracking data. Our extensive evaluation shows that DiffEye not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in scanpath generation but also enables, for the first time, the generation of continuous eye movement trajectories. Project webpage: https://diff-eye.github.io/

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 20, 2025

Learning Next Action Predictors from Human-Computer Interaction

Truly proactive AI systems must anticipate what we will do next. This foresight demands far richer information than the sparse signals we type into our prompts -- it demands reasoning over the entire context of what we see and do. We formalize this as next action prediction (NAP): given a sequence of a user's multimodal interactions with a computer (screenshots, clicks, sensor data), predict that user's next action. Progress on this task requires both new data and modeling approaches. To scale data, we annotate longitudinal, naturalistic computer use with vision-language models. We release an open-source pipeline for performing this labeling on private infrastructure, and label over 360K actions across one month of continuous phone usage from 20 users, amounting to 1,800 hours of screen time. We then introduce LongNAP, a user model that combines parametric and in-context learning to reason over long interaction histories. LongNAP is trained via policy gradient methods to generate user-specific reasoning traces given some context; retrieve relevant traces from a library of past traces; and then apply retrieved traces in-context to predict future actions. Using an LLM-as-judge evaluation metric (0-1 similarity to ground truth), LongNAP significantly outperforms supervised finetuning and prompted baselines on held-out data (by 79% and 39% respectively). Additionally, LongNAP generalizes to held out users when trained across individuals. The space of next actions a user might take at any moment is unbounded, spanning thousands of possible outcomes. Despite this, 17.1% of LongNAP's predicted trajectories are well-aligned with what a user does next (LLM-judge score geq 0.5). This rises to 26% when we filter to highly confident predictions. In sum, we argue that learning from the full context of user behavior to anticipate user needs is now a viable task with substantial opportunity.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 6

Glance-or-Gaze: Incentivizing LMMs to Adaptively Focus Search via Reinforcement Learning

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable success in visual understanding, yet they struggle with knowledge-intensive queries involving long-tail entities or evolving information due to static parametric knowledge. Recent search-augmented approaches attempt to address this limitation, but existing methods rely on indiscriminate whole-image retrieval that introduces substantial visual redundancy and noise, and lack deep iterative reflection, limiting their effectiveness on complex visual queries. To overcome these challenges, we propose Glance-or-Gaze (GoG), a fully autonomous framework that shifts from passive perception to active visual planning. GoG introduces a Selective Gaze mechanism that dynamically chooses whether to glance at global context or gaze into high-value regions, filtering irrelevant information before retrieval. We design a dual-stage training strategy: Reflective GoG Behavior Alignment via supervised fine-tuning instills the fundamental GoG paradigm, while Complexity-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning further enhances the model's capability to handle complex queries through iterative reasoning. Experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies confirm that both Selective Gaze and complexity-adaptive RL are essential for effective visual search. We will release our data and models for further exploration soon.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 20

WorldPrediction: A Benchmark for High-level World Modeling and Long-horizon Procedural Planning

Humans are known to have an internal "world model" that enables us to carry out action planning based on world states. AI agents need to have such a world model for action planning as well. It is not clear how current AI models, especially generative models, are able to learn such world models and carry out procedural planning in diverse environments. We introduce WorldPrediction, a video-based benchmark for evaluating world modeling and procedural planning capabilities of different AI models. In contrast to prior benchmarks that focus primarily on low-level world modeling and robotic motion planning, WorldPrediction is the first benchmark that emphasizes actions with temporal and semantic abstraction. Given initial and final world states, the task is to distinguish the proper action (WorldPrediction-WM) or the properly ordered sequence of actions (WorldPrediction-PP) from a set of counterfactual distractors. This discriminative task setup enable us to evaluate different types of world models and planners and realize a thorough comparison across different hypothesis. The benchmark represents states and actions using visual observations. In order to prevent models from exploiting low-level continuity cues in background scenes, we provide "action equivalents" - identical actions observed in different contexts - as candidates for selection. This benchmark is grounded in a formal framework of partially observable semi-MDP, ensuring better reliability and robustness of the evaluation. We conduct extensive human filtering and validation on our benchmark and show that current frontier models barely achieve 57% accuracy on WorldPrediction-WM and 38% on WorldPrediction-PP whereas humans are able to solve both tasks perfectly.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025

OAT: Object-Level Attention Transformer for Gaze Scanpath Prediction

Visual search is important in our daily life. The efficient allocation of visual attention is critical to effectively complete visual search tasks. Prior research has predominantly modelled the spatial allocation of visual attention in images at the pixel level, e.g. using a saliency map. However, emerging evidence shows that visual attention is guided by objects rather than pixel intensities. This paper introduces the Object-level Attention Transformer (OAT), which predicts human scanpaths as they search for a target object within a cluttered scene of distractors. OAT uses an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder captures information about the position and appearance of the objects within an image and about the target. The decoder predicts the gaze scanpath as a sequence of object fixations, by integrating output features from both the encoder and decoder. We also propose a new positional encoding that better reflects spatial relationships between objects. We evaluated OAT on the Amazon book cover dataset and a new dataset for visual search that we collected. OAT's predicted gaze scanpaths align more closely with human gaze patterns, compared to predictions by algorithms based on spatial attention on both established metrics and a novel behavioural-based metric. Our results demonstrate the generalization ability of OAT, as it accurately predicts human scanpaths for unseen layouts and target objects.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 18, 2024

DreamNav: A Trajectory-Based Imaginative Framework for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE), which links language instructions to perception and control in the real world, is a core capability of embodied robots. Recently, large-scale pretrained foundation models have been leveraged as shared priors for perception, reasoning, and action, enabling zero-shot VLN without task-specific training. However, existing zero-shot VLN methods depend on costly perception and passive scene understanding, collapsing control to point-level choices. As a result, they are expensive to deploy, misaligned in action semantics, and short-sighted in planning. To address these issues, we present DreamNav that focuses on the following three aspects: (1) for reducing sensory cost, our EgoView Corrector aligns viewpoints and stabilizes egocentric perception; (2) instead of point-level actions, our Trajectory Predictor favors global trajectory-level planning to better align with instruction semantics; and (3) to enable anticipatory and long-horizon planning, we propose an Imagination Predictor to endow the agent with proactive thinking capability. On VLN-CE and real-world tests, DreamNav sets a new zero-shot state-of-the-art (SOTA), outperforming the strongest egocentric baseline with extra information by up to 7.49\% and 18.15\% in terms of SR and SPL metrics. To our knowledge, this is the first zero-shot VLN method to unify trajectory-level planning and active imagination while using only egocentric inputs.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 14, 2025

Can't make an Omelette without Breaking some Eggs: Plausible Action Anticipation using Large Video-Language Models

We introduce PlausiVL, a large video-language model for anticipating action sequences that are plausible in the real-world. While significant efforts have been made towards anticipating future actions, prior approaches do not take into account the aspect of plausibility in an action sequence. To address this limitation, we explore the generative capability of a large video-language model in our work and further, develop the understanding of plausibility in an action sequence by introducing two objective functions, a counterfactual-based plausible action sequence learning loss and a long-horizon action repetition loss. We utilize temporal logical constraints as well as verb-noun action pair logical constraints to create implausible/counterfactual action sequences and use them to train the model with plausible action sequence learning loss. This loss helps the model to differentiate between plausible and not plausible action sequences and also helps the model to learn implicit temporal cues crucial for the task of action anticipation. The long-horizon action repetition loss puts a higher penalty on the actions that are more prone to repetition over a longer temporal window. With this penalization, the model is able to generate diverse, plausible action sequences. We evaluate our approach on two large-scale datasets, Ego4D and EPIC-Kitchens-100, and show improvements on the task of action anticipation.

  • 4 authors
·
May 30, 2024

Reasoning Path and Latent State Analysis for Multi-view Visual Spatial Reasoning: A Cognitive Science Perspective

Spatial reasoning is a core aspect of human intelligence that allows perception, inference and planning in 3D environments. However, current vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to maintain geometric coherence and cross-view consistency for spatial reasoning in multi-view settings. We attribute this gap to the lack of fine-grained benchmarks that isolate multi-view reasoning from single-view perception and temporal factors. To address this, we present ReMindView-Bench, a cognitively grounded benchmark for evaluating how VLMs construct, align and maintain spatial mental models across complementary viewpoints. ReMindView-Bench systematically varies viewpoint spatial pattern and query type to probe key factors of spatial cognition. Evaluations of 15 current VLMs reveals consistent failures in cross-view alignment and perspective-taking in multi-view spatial reasoning, motivating deeper analysis on the reasoning process. Explicit phase-wise analysis using LLM-as-a-judge and self-consistency prompting shows that VLMs perform well on in-frame perception but degrade sharply when integrating information across views. Implicit analysis, including linear probing and entropy dynamics, further show progressive loss of task-relevant information and uncertainty separation between correct and incorrect trajectories. These results provide a cognitively grounded diagnosis of VLM spatial reasoning and reveal how multi-view spatial mental models are formed, degraded and destabilized across reasoning phases. The ReMindView-Bench benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Xue0823/ReMindView-Bench, and the source codes of benchmark construction and VLM reasoning analysis are available at https://github.com/pittisl/ReMindView-Bench.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 1, 2025

Neural Foundations of Mental Simulation: Future Prediction of Latent Representations on Dynamic Scenes

Humans and animals have a rich and flexible understanding of the physical world, which enables them to infer the underlying dynamical trajectories of objects and events, plausible future states, and use that to plan and anticipate the consequences of actions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these computations are unclear. We combine a goal-driven modeling approach with dense neurophysiological data and high-throughput human behavioral readouts to directly impinge on this question. Specifically, we construct and evaluate several classes of sensory-cognitive networks to predict the future state of rich, ethologically-relevant environments, ranging from self-supervised end-to-end models with pixel-wise or object-centric objectives, to models that future predict in the latent space of purely static image-based or dynamic video-based pretrained foundation models. We find strong differentiation across these model classes in their ability to predict neural and behavioral data both within and across diverse environments. In particular, we find that neural responses are currently best predicted by models trained to predict the future state of their environment in the latent space of pretrained foundation models optimized for dynamic scenes in a self-supervised manner. Notably, models that future predict in the latent space of video foundation models that are optimized to support a diverse range of sensorimotor tasks, reasonably match both human behavioral error patterns and neural dynamics across all environmental scenarios that we were able to test. Overall, these findings suggest that the neural mechanisms and behaviors of primate mental simulation are thus far most consistent with being optimized to future predict on dynamic, reusable visual representations that are useful for embodied AI more generally.

  • 4 authors
·
May 19, 2023

SpecEyes: Accelerating Agentic Multimodal LLMs via Speculative Perception and Planning

Agentic multimodal large language models (MLLMs) (e.g., OpenAI o3 and Gemini Agentic Vision) achieve remarkable reasoning capabilities through iterative visual tool invocation. However, the cascaded perception, reasoning, and tool-calling loops introduce significant sequential overhead. This overhead, termed agentic depth, incurs prohibitive latency and seriously limits system-level concurrency. To this end, we propose SpecEyes, an agentic-level speculative acceleration framework that breaks this sequential bottleneck. Our key insight is that a lightweight, tool-free MLLM can serve as a speculative planner to predict the execution trajectory, enabling early termination of expensive tool chains without sacrificing accuracy. To regulate this speculative planning, we introduce a cognitive gating mechanism based on answer separability, which quantifies the model's confidence for self-verification without requiring oracle labels. Furthermore, we design a heterogeneous parallel funnel that exploits the stateless concurrency of the small model to mask the stateful serial execution of the large model, maximizing system throughput. Extensive experiments on V* Bench, HR-Bench, and POPE demonstrate that SpecEyes achieves 1.1-3.35x speedup over the agentic baseline while preserving or even improving accuracy (up to +6.7%), thereby boosting serving throughput under concurrent workloads.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 24 4

How FaR Are Large Language Models From Agents with Theory-of-Mind?

"Thinking is for Doing." Humans can infer other people's mental states from observations--an ability called Theory-of-Mind (ToM)--and subsequently act pragmatically on those inferences. Existing question answering benchmarks such as ToMi ask models questions to make inferences about beliefs of characters in a story, but do not test whether models can then use these inferences to guide their actions. We propose a new evaluation paradigm for large language models (LLMs): Thinking for Doing (T4D), which requires models to connect inferences about others' mental states to actions in social scenarios. Experiments on T4D demonstrate that LLMs such as GPT-4 and PaLM 2 seemingly excel at tracking characters' beliefs in stories, but they struggle to translate this capability into strategic action. Our analysis reveals the core challenge for LLMs lies in identifying the implicit inferences about mental states without being explicitly asked about as in ToMi, that lead to choosing the correct action in T4D. To bridge this gap, we introduce a zero-shot prompting framework, Foresee and Reflect (FaR), which provides a reasoning structure that encourages LLMs to anticipate future challenges and reason about potential actions. FaR boosts GPT-4's performance from 50% to 71% on T4D, outperforming other prompting methods such as Chain-of-Thought and Self-Ask. Moreover, FaR generalizes to diverse out-of-distribution story structures and scenarios that also require ToM inferences to choose an action, consistently outperforming other methods including few-shot in-context learning.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 4, 2023 3

GoViG: Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation Instruction Generation

We introduce Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation Instruction Generation (GoViG), a new task that aims to autonomously generate precise and contextually coherent navigation instructions solely from egocentric visual observations of initial and goal states. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on structured inputs such as semantic annotations or environmental maps, GoViG exclusively leverages raw egocentric visual data, substantially improving its adaptability to unseen and unstructured environments. Our method addresses this task by decomposing it into two interconnected subtasks: (1) visual forecasting, which predicts intermediate visual states bridging the initial and goal views; and (2) instruction generation, which synthesizes linguistically coherent instructions grounded in both observed and anticipated visuals. These subtasks are integrated within an autoregressive multimodal large language model trained with tailored objectives to ensure spatial accuracy and linguistic clarity. Furthermore, we introduce two complementary multimodal reasoning strategies, one-pass and interleaved reasoning, to mimic incremental human cognitive processes during navigation. To evaluate our method, we propose the R2R-Goal dataset, combining diverse synthetic and real-world trajectories. Empirical results demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior BLEU-4 and CIDEr scores along with robust cross-domain generalization.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 13, 2025

Why Reasoning Fails to Plan: A Planning-Centric Analysis of Long-Horizon Decision Making in LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM)-based agents exhibit strong step-by-step reasoning capabilities over short horizons, yet often fail to sustain coherent behavior over long planning horizons. We argue that this failure reflects a fundamental mismatch: step-wise reasoning induces a form of step-wise greedy policy that is adequate for short horizons but fails in long-horizon planning, where early actions must account for delayed consequences. From this planning-centric perspective, we study LLM-based agents in deterministic, fully structured environments with explicit state transitions and evaluation signals. Our analysis reveals a core failure mode of reasoning-based policies: locally optimal choices induced by step-wise scoring lead to early myopic commitments that are systematically amplified over time and difficult to recover from. We introduce FLARE (Future-aware Lookahead with Reward Estimation) as a minimal instantiation of future-aware planning to enforce explicit lookahead, value propagation, and limited commitment in a single model, allowing downstream outcomes to influence early decisions. Across multiple benchmarks, agent frameworks, and LLM backbones, FLARE consistently improves task performance and planning-level behavior, frequently allowing LLaMA-8B with FLARE to outperform GPT-4o with standard step-by-step reasoning. These results establish a clear distinction between reasoning and planning.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 28

HPNet: Dynamic Trajectory Forecasting with Historical Prediction Attention

Predicting the trajectories of road agents is essential for autonomous driving systems. The recent mainstream methods follow a static paradigm, which predicts the future trajectory by using a fixed duration of historical frames. These methods make the predictions independently even at adjacent time steps, which leads to potential instability and temporal inconsistency. As successive time steps have largely overlapping historical frames, their forecasting should have intrinsic correlation, such as overlapping predicted trajectories should be consistent, or be different but share the same motion goal depending on the road situation. Motivated by this, in this work, we introduce HPNet, a novel dynamic trajectory forecasting method. Aiming for stable and accurate trajectory forecasting, our method leverages not only historical frames including maps and agent states, but also historical predictions. Specifically, we newly design a Historical Prediction Attention module to automatically encode the dynamic relationship between successive predictions. Besides, it also extends the attention range beyond the currently visible window benefitting from the use of historical predictions. The proposed Historical Prediction Attention together with the Agent Attention and Mode Attention is further formulated as the Triple Factorized Attention module, serving as the core design of HPNet.Experiments on the Argoverse and INTERACTION datasets show that HPNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, and generates accurate and stable future trajectories. Our code are available at https://github.com/XiaolongTang23/HPNet.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 9, 2024

Modeling Eye Gaze Velocity Trajectories using GANs with Spectral Loss for Enhanced Fidelity

Accurate modeling of eye gaze dynamics is essential for advancement in human-computer interaction, neurological diagnostics, and cognitive research. Traditional generative models like Markov models often fail to capture the complex temporal dependencies and distributional nuance inherent in eye gaze trajectories data. This study introduces a GAN framework employing LSTM and CNN generators and discriminators to generate high-fidelity synthetic eye gaze velocity trajectories. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of four GAN architectures: CNN-CNN, LSTM-CNN, CNN-LSTM, and LSTM-LSTM trained under two conditions: using only adversarial loss and using a weighted combination of adversarial and spectral losses. Our findings reveal that the LSTM-CNN architecture trained with this new loss function exhibits the closest alignment to the real data distribution, effectively capturing both the distribution tails and the intricate temporal dependencies. The inclusion of spectral regularization significantly enhances the GANs ability to replicate the spectral characteristics of eye gaze movements, leading to a more stable learning process and improved data fidelity. Comparative analysis with an HMM optimized to four hidden states further highlights the advantages of the LSTM-CNN GAN. Statistical metrics show that the HMM-generated data significantly diverges from the real data in terms of mean, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis. In contrast, the LSTM-CNN model closely matches the real data across these statistics, affirming its capacity to model the complexity of eye gaze dynamics effectively. These results position the spectrally regularized LSTM-CNN GAN as a robust tool for generating synthetic eye gaze velocity data with high fidelity.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024

I-MPN: Inductive Message Passing Network for Efficient Human-in-the-Loop Annotation of Mobile Eye Tracking Data

Comprehending how humans process visual information in dynamic settings is crucial for psychology and designing user-centered interactions. While mobile eye-tracking systems combining egocentric video and gaze signals can offer valuable insights, manual analysis of these recordings is time-intensive. In this work, we present a novel human-centered learning algorithm designed for automated object recognition within mobile eye-tracking settings. Our approach seamlessly integrates an object detector with a spatial relation-aware inductive message-passing network (I-MPN), harnessing node profile information and capturing object correlations. Such mechanisms enable us to learn embedding functions capable of generalizing to new object angle views, facilitating rapid adaptation and efficient reasoning in dynamic contexts as users navigate their environment. Through experiments conducted on three distinct video sequences, our interactive-based method showcases significant performance improvements over fixed training/testing algorithms, even when trained on considerably smaller annotated samples collected through user feedback. Furthermore, we demonstrate exceptional efficiency in data annotation processes and surpass prior interactive methods that use complete object detectors, combine detectors with convolutional networks, or employ interactive video segmentation.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024

Addendum to Research MMMCV; A Man/Microbio/Megabio/Computer Vision

In October 2007, a Research Proposal for the University of Sydney, Australia, the author suggested that biovie-physical phenomenon as `electrodynamic dependant biological vision', is governed by relativistic quantum laws and biovision. The phenomenon on the basis of `biovielectroluminescence', satisfies man/microbio/megabio/computer vision (MMMCV), as a robust candidate for physical and visual sciences. The general aim of this addendum is to present a refined text of Sections 1-3 of that proposal and highlighting the contents of its Appendix in form of a `Mechanisms' Section. We then briefly remind in an article aimed for December 2007, by appending two more equations into Section 3, a theoretical II-time scenario as a time model well-proposed for the phenomenon. The time model within the core of the proposal, plays a significant role in emphasizing the principle points on Objectives no. 1-8, Sub-hypothesis 3.1.2, mentioned in Article [arXiv:0710.0410]. It also expresses the time concept in terms of causing quantized energy f(|E|) of time |t|, emit in regard to shortening the probability of particle loci as predictable patterns of particle's un-occurred motion, a solution to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (HUP) into a simplistic manner. We conclude that, practical frames via a time algorithm to this model, fixates such predictable patterns of motion of scenery bodies onto recordable observation points of a MMMCV system. It even suppresses/predicts superposition phenomena coming from a human subject and/or other bio-subjects for any decision making event, e.g., brainwave quantum patterns based on vision. Maintaining the existential probability of Riemann surfaces of II-time scenarios in the context of biovielectroluminescence, makes motion-prediction a possibility.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 6, 2007

Asking like Socrates: Socrates helps VLMs understand remote sensing images

Recent multimodal reasoning models, inspired by DeepSeek-R1, have significantly advanced vision-language systems. However, in remote sensing (RS) tasks, we observe widespread pseudo reasoning: models narrate the process of reasoning rather than genuinely reason toward the correct answer based on visual evidence. We attribute this to the Glance Effect, where a single, coarse perception of large-scale RS imagery results in incomplete understanding and reasoning based on linguistic self-consistency instead of visual evidence. To address this, we propose RS-EoT (Remote Sensing Evidence-of-Thought), a language-driven, iterative visual evidence-seeking paradigm. To instill this paradigm, we propose SocraticAgent, a self-play multi-agent system that synthesizes reasoning traces via alternating cycles of reasoning and visual inspection. To enhance and generalize these patterns, we propose a two-stage progressive RL strategy: first, RL on fine-grained Grounding tasks to enhance RS-EoT capabilities, followed by RL on RS VQA to generalize to broader understanding scenarios. Experiments show RS-EoT achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple RS VQA and grounding benchmarks. Analyses reveal clear iterative cycles of reasoning and evidence seeking, confirming RS-EoT mitigates the Glance Effect and enables genuine evidence-grounded reasoning. Our code, data, and models are available at https://geox-lab.github.io/Asking_like_Socrates

  • 12 authors
·
Nov 27, 2025 2

ProAct: Agentic Lookahead in Interactive Environments

Existing Large Language Model (LLM) agents struggle in interactive environments requiring long-horizon planning, primarily due to compounding errors when simulating future states. To address this, we propose ProAct, a framework that enables agents to internalize accurate lookahead reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm. First, we introduce Grounded LookAhead Distillation (GLAD), where the agent undergoes supervised fine-tuning on trajectories derived from environment-based search. By compressing complex search trees into concise, causal reasoning chains, the agent learns the logic of foresight without the computational overhead of inference-time search. Second, to further refine decision accuracy, we propose the Monte-Carlo Critic (MC-Critic), a plug-and-play auxiliary value estimator designed to enhance policy-gradient algorithms like PPO and GRPO. By leveraging lightweight environment rollouts to calibrate value estimates, MC-Critic provides a low-variance signal that facilitates stable policy optimization without relying on expensive model-based value approximation. Experiments on both stochastic (e.g., 2048) and deterministic (e.g., Sokoban) environments demonstrate that ProAct significantly improves planning accuracy. Notably, a 4B parameter model trained with ProAct outperforms all open-source baselines and rivals state-of-the-art closed-source models, while demonstrating robust generalization to unseen environments. The codes and models are available at https://github.com/GreatX3/ProAct

One Eye is All You Need: Lightweight Ensembles for Gaze Estimation with Single Encoders

Gaze estimation has grown rapidly in accuracy in recent years. However, these models often fail to take advantage of different computer vision (CV) algorithms and techniques (such as small ResNet and Inception networks and ensemble models) that have been shown to improve results for other CV problems. Additionally, most current gaze estimation models require the use of either both eyes or an entire face, whereas real-world data may not always have both eyes in high resolution. Thus, we propose a gaze estimation model that implements the ResNet and Inception model architectures and makes predictions using only one eye image. Furthermore, we propose an ensemble calibration network that uses the predictions from several individual architectures for subject-specific predictions. With the use of lightweight architectures, we achieve high performance on the GazeCapture dataset with very low model parameter counts. When using two eyes as input, we achieve a prediction error of 1.591 cm on the test set without calibration and 1.439 cm with an ensemble calibration model. With just one eye as input, we still achieve an average prediction error of 2.312 cm on the test set without calibration and 1.951 cm with an ensemble calibration model. We also notice significantly lower errors on the right eye images in the test set, which could be important in the design of future gaze estimation-based tools.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 21, 2022

GazeGen: Gaze-Driven User Interaction for Visual Content Generation

We present GazeGen, a user interaction system that generates visual content (images and videos) for locations indicated by the user's eye gaze. GazeGen allows intuitive manipulation of visual content by targeting regions of interest with gaze. Using advanced techniques in object detection and generative AI, GazeGen performs gaze-controlled image adding/deleting, repositioning, and surface material changes of image objects, and converts static images into videos. Central to GazeGen is the DFT Gaze (Distilled and Fine-Tuned Gaze) agent, an ultra-lightweight model with only 281K parameters, performing accurate real-time gaze predictions tailored to individual users' eyes on small edge devices. GazeGen is the first system to combine visual content generation with real-time gaze estimation, made possible exclusively by DFT Gaze. This real-time gaze estimation enables various visual content generation tasks, all controlled by the user's gaze. The input for DFT Gaze is the user's eye images, while the inputs for visual content generation are the user's view and the predicted gaze point from DFT Gaze. To achieve efficient gaze predictions, we derive the small model from a large model (10x larger) via novel knowledge distillation and personal adaptation techniques. We integrate knowledge distillation with a masked autoencoder, developing a compact yet powerful gaze estimation model. This model is further fine-tuned with Adapters, enabling highly accurate and personalized gaze predictions with minimal user input. DFT Gaze ensures low-latency and precise gaze tracking, supporting a wide range of gaze-driven tasks. We validate the performance of DFT Gaze on AEA and OpenEDS2020 benchmarks, demonstrating low angular gaze error and low latency on the edge device (Raspberry Pi 4). Furthermore, we describe applications of GazeGen, illustrating its versatility and effectiveness in various usage scenarios.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 6, 2024 2

VFMF: World Modeling by Forecasting Vision Foundation Model Features

Forecasting from partial observations is central to world modeling. Many recent methods represent the world through images, and reduce forecasting to stochastic video generation. Although such methods excel at realism and visual fidelity, predicting pixels is computationally intensive and not directly useful in many applications, as it requires translating RGB into signals useful for decision making. An alternative approach uses features from vision foundation models (VFMs) as world representations, performing deterministic regression to predict future world states. These features can be directly translated into actionable signals such as semantic segmentation and depth, while remaining computationally efficient. However, deterministic regression averages over multiple plausible futures, undermining forecast accuracy by failing to capture uncertainty. To address this crucial limitation, we introduce a generative forecaster that performs autoregressive flow matching in VFM feature space. Our key insight is that generative modeling in this space requires encoding VFM features into a compact latent space suitable for diffusion. We show that this latent space preserves information more effectively than previously used PCA-based alternatives, both for forecasting and other applications, such as image generation. Our latent predictions can be easily decoded into multiple useful and interpretable output modalities: semantic segmentation, depth, surface normals, and even RGB. With matched architecture and compute, our method produces sharper and more accurate predictions than regression across all modalities. Our results suggest that stochastic conditional generation of VFM features offers a promising and scalable foundation for future world models.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 11, 2025

Capturing Gaze Shifts for Guidance: Cross-Modal Fusion Enhancement for VLM Hallucination Mitigation

Vision language models (VLMs) often generate hallucination, i.e., content that cannot be substantiated by either textual or visual inputs. Prior work primarily attributes this to over-reliance on linguistic prior knowledge rather than visual inputs. Some methods attempt to mitigate hallucination by amplifying visual token attention proportionally to their attention scores. However, these methods overlook the visual attention sink problem, where attention is frequently misallocated to task-irrelevant visual regions, and neglect cross-modal fusion balance by enhancing only visual attention without adjusting attention to the user query. This can result in amplifying incorrect areas while failing to properly interpret the user query. To address these challenges, we propose a simple yet effective method called Gaze Shift-Guided Cross-modal Fusion Enhancement (GIFT). GIFT pre-computes a holistic visual saliency map by tracking positive changes in visual attention, or "gaze shifts", during user query comprehension, and leverages this map to amplify attention to both salient visual information and the user query at each decoding step. This reduces the impact of visual attention sink, as irrelevant tokens exhibit minimal shifts, while ensuring balanced cross-modal fusion for well-integrated representation. Extensive experiments show that GIFT effectively mitigates hallucination in VLMs across both generative and classification tasks, achieving up to 20.7% improvement over greedy decoding, while maintaining general vision-language performance with low computational overhead.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 24, 2025

Predicting upcoming visual features during eye movements yields scene representations aligned with human visual cortex

Scenes are complex, yet structured collections of parts, including objects and surfaces, that exhibit spatial and semantic relations to one another. An effective visual system therefore needs unified scene representations that relate scene parts to their location and their co-occurrence. We hypothesize that this structure can be learned self-supervised from natural experience by exploiting the temporal regularities of active vision: each fixation reveals a locally-detailed glimpse that is statistically related to the previous one via co-occurrence and saccade-conditioned spatial regularities. We instantiate this idea with Glimpse Prediction Networks (GPNs) -- recurrent models trained to predict the feature embedding of the next glimpse along human-like scanpaths over natural scenes. GPNs successfully learn co-occurrence structure and, when given relative saccade location vectors, show sensitivity to spatial arrangement. Furthermore, recurrent variants of GPNs were able to integrate information across glimpses into a unified scene representation. Notably, these scene representations align strongly with human fMRI responses during natural-scene viewing across mid/high-level visual cortex. Critically, GPNs outperform architecture- and dataset-matched controls trained with explicit semantic objectives, and match or exceed strong modern vision baselines, leaving little unique variance for those alternatives. These results establish next-glimpse prediction during active vision as a biologically plausible, self-supervised route to brain-aligned scene representations learned from natural visual experience.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 16, 2025

Thinking with Images for Multimodal Reasoning: Foundations, Methods, and Future Frontiers

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has been significantly advanced by textual Chain-of-Thought (CoT), a paradigm where models conduct reasoning within language. This text-centric approach, however, treats vision as a static, initial context, creating a fundamental "semantic gap" between rich perceptual data and discrete symbolic thought. Human cognition often transcends language, utilizing vision as a dynamic mental sketchpad. A similar evolution is now unfolding in AI, marking a fundamental paradigm shift from models that merely think about images to those that can truly think with images. This emerging paradigm is characterized by models leveraging visual information as intermediate steps in their thought process, transforming vision from a passive input into a dynamic, manipulable cognitive workspace. In this survey, we chart this evolution of intelligence along a trajectory of increasing cognitive autonomy, which unfolds across three key stages: from external tool exploration, through programmatic manipulation, to intrinsic imagination. To structure this rapidly evolving field, our survey makes four key contributions. (1) We establish the foundational principles of the think with image paradigm and its three-stage framework. (2) We provide a comprehensive review of the core methods that characterize each stage of this roadmap. (3) We analyze the critical landscape of evaluation benchmarks and transformative applications. (4) We identify significant challenges and outline promising future directions. By providing this structured overview, we aim to offer a clear roadmap for future research towards more powerful and human-aligned multimodal AI.

  • 15 authors
·
Jun 30, 2025 3

Envisioning the Future, One Step at a Time

Accurately anticipating how complex, diverse scenes will evolve requires models that represent uncertainty, simulate along extended interaction chains, and efficiently explore many plausible futures. Yet most existing approaches rely on dense video or latent-space prediction, expending substantial capacity on dense appearance rather than on the underlying sparse trajectories of points in the scene. This makes large-scale exploration of future hypotheses costly and limits performance when long-horizon, multi-modal motion is essential. We address this by formulating the prediction of open-set future scene dynamics as step-wise inference over sparse point trajectories. Our autoregressive diffusion model advances these trajectories through short, locally predictable transitions, explicitly modeling the growth of uncertainty over time. This dynamics-centric representation enables fast rollout of thousands of diverse futures from a single image, optionally guided by initial constraints on motion, while maintaining physical plausibility and long-range coherence. We further introduce OWM, a benchmark for open-set motion prediction based on diverse in-the-wild videos, to evaluate accuracy and variability of predicted trajectory distributions under real-world uncertainty. Our method matches or surpasses dense simulators in predictive accuracy while achieving orders-of-magnitude higher sampling speed, making open-set future prediction both scalable and practical. Project page: http://compvis.github.io/myriad.

CompVis CompVis
·
Apr 9 2

Enhancing Visual Planning with Auxiliary Tasks and Multi-token Prediction

Visual Planning for Assistance (VPA) aims to predict a sequence of user actions required to achieve a specified goal based on a video showing the user's progress. Although recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising results in video understanding, long-horizon visual planning remains a challenging problem. We identify two challenges in training large MLLMs for video-based planning tasks: (1) scarcity of procedural annotations, limiting the model's ability to learn procedural task dynamics effectively, and (2) inefficiency of next-token prediction objective to explicitly capture the structured action space for visual planning when compared to free-form, natural language. To tackle data scarcity, we introduce Auxiliary Task Augmentation. We design and train our model on auxiliary tasks relevant to long-horizon video-based planning (e.g., goal prediction) to augment the model's planning ability. To more explicitly model the structured action space unique to visual planning tasks, we leverage Multi-token Prediction, extending traditional next-token prediction by using multiple heads to predict multiple future tokens during training. Our approach, VideoPlan, achieves state-of-the-art VPA performance on the COIN and CrossTask datasets, surpassing prior methods by 7.3% and 3.4%, respectively, when predicting 3 future actions. We further extend our method to the challenging Ego4D Long-term Action Anticipation task, and show that it is on par with the state-of-the-art approaches despite not using specialized egocentric features. Code will be made available.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 20, 2025

Thinking in 360°: Humanoid Visual Search in the Wild

Humans rely on the synergistic control of head (cephalomotor) and eye (oculomotor) to efficiently search for visual information in 360°. However, prior approaches to visual search are limited to a static image, neglecting the physical embodiment and its interaction with the 3D world. How can we develop embodied visual search agents as efficient as humans while bypassing the constraints imposed by real-world hardware? To this end, we propose humanoid visual search where a humanoid agent actively rotates its head to search for objects or paths in an immersive world represented by a 360° panoramic image. To study visual search in visually-crowded real-world scenarios, we build H* Bench, a new benchmark that moves beyond household scenes to challenging in-the-wild scenes that necessitate advanced visual-spatial reasoning capabilities, such as transportation hubs, large-scale retail spaces, urban streets, and public institutions. Our experiments first reveal that even top-tier proprietary models falter, achieving only ~30% success in object and path search. We then use post-training techniques to enhance the open-source Qwen2.5-VL, increasing its success rate by over threefold for both object search (14.83% to 47.38%) and path search (6.44% to 24.94%). Notably, the lower ceiling of path search reveals its inherent difficulty, which we attribute to the demand for sophisticated spatial commonsense. Our results not only show a promising path forward but also quantify the immense challenge that remains in building MLLM agents that can be seamlessly integrated into everyday human life.

  • 12 authors
·
Nov 25, 2025