arXiv subjects

Shao-Yuan Lo

Publications and source records attributed to Shao-Yuan Lo.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

When Demonstrations Fail: Diagnosing the Limits of In-Context Learning in Large Audio-Language Models with Progressive Cue Removal

While Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have been shown to exhibit degraded instruction-following capabilities, their ability to infer task patterns from in-context examples with audio remains understudied. To address this gap, we design a three-stage evaluation pipeline that progressively reduces textual guidance to systematically evaluate LALMs' in-context learning ability in the audio modality. Evaluating six LALMs across four audio understanding tasks under two output constraint categories, we uncover a consistent asymmetry across LALMs: in-context demonstrations reliably improve format compliance but fail to improve the core task performance. This suggests that LALMs can glean surface-level formatting patterns from demonstrations but may struggle to leverage cross-modal semantic grounding to reliably infer task objectives from examples with audio, highlighting potential limitations in current cross-modal integration. We further probe how demonstrations are used through two complementary analyses, demonstration label shuffling and attention knockout on demonstration spans, both showing that LALMs leverage in-context examples primarily to establish the output label space and format rather than to learn a meaningful input-output correspondence.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

AEGIS: Audio Endogenous Guarding via Internal Signals Against Large Audio-Language Model Jailbreaks

Large audio-language models (LALMs) expand language models to process and interpret audio, but also expose them to heterogeneous audio jailbreaks. We ask whether successful jailbreaks reflect failures to recognize harmful intent or failures occurring after such recognition. Layer-wise probing reveals the latter: risk-related information remains decodable from intermediate representations, yet the internal risk signal fails to translate into refusal in later-layer processing. We identify this discrepancy as the risk-to-refusal gap. Building on this finding, we propose AEGIS, a detect-then-intervene defense whose mid-layer risk gate selectively activates downstream safety adapters. Across six LALMs and three heterogeneous audio jailbreak benchmarks, AEGIS reduces the average unsafe rate from 17.9% to 0.4%, while causing only a marginal increase in over-refusal on benign inputs. These results establish selective internal intervention as an effective path toward more robust refusal in LALMs. The code is available at https://github.com/azzzzliao/aegis-audio-defense.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

Industrial Anomaly Detection via Defect-Grounded Reasoning in Visual Latent Space

Industrial anomaly detection (IAD) is evolving beyond conventional detection and localization toward multimodal inspection systems that can describe, explain, and reason about fine-grained defects. Although recent multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based methods improve anomaly understanding through textual reasoning and visual guidance, they face two limitations in fine-grained inspection. First, their visual refinement often requires iteratively revisiting local image regions or augmenting with additional tools. Second, the resulting local defect evidence may not be reliably preserved throughout subsequent reasoning. To address these, we propose Anomaly-LR, a defect-grounded latent reasoning framework that first forms a global understanding of the input and then progressively refines anomaly-relevant representations directly in the visual latent space. We further construct IAD-LR-22K, the first IAD instruction dataset designed for latent reasoning, containing 22,228 image-question instances from 4,523 industrial images, with global textual reasoning traces and region-level visual annotations. Extensive experiments show that Anomaly-LR achieves state-of-the-art performance among comparable-scale methods across multiple IAD benchmarks, without requiring external references or tools. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/Yen666/Anomaly-LR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ProSGNeRF: Progressive Dynamic Neural Scene Graph with Frequency Modulated Foundation Model in Urban Scenes

Implicit neural representation has demonstrated promising results in 3D reconstruction on various scenes. However, existing approaches either struggle to model fast-moving objects or are incapable of handling large-scale camera ego-motions in urban environments. This leads to low-quality synthesized views of the large-scale urban scenes. In this paper, we aim to jointly solve the problems caused by large-scale scenes and fast-moving vehicles, which are more practical and challenging. To this end, we propose a progressive scene graph network architecture to learn the local scene representations of dynamic objects and global urban scenes. The progressive learning architecture dynamically allocates a new local scene graph trained on frames within a temporal window, with the window size automatically determined, allowing us to scale up the representation to arbitrarily large scenes. Besides, according to our observations, the training views of dynamic objects are relatively sparse according to rapid movements, which leads to a significant decline in reconstruction accuracy for dynamic objects. Therefore, we utilize a foundation model network to encode the latent code. Specifically, we leverage the generalization capability of the visual foundation model DINOv2 to extract appearance and shape codes, and train the network on a large-scale urban scene object dataset to enhance its prior modeling ability for handling sparse-view dynamic inputs. In parallel, we introduce a frequency-modulated module that regularizes the frequency spectrum of objects, thereby addressing the challenge of modeling sparse image inputs from a frequency-domain perspective. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art view synthesis accuracy, object manipulation, and scene roaming ability in various scenes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Agentic Context Learning with Self-Discovered Specification

Context learning is an emerging inference-time task where LLMs must learn and apply novel, task-specific knowledge from intricate contexts absent from pre-training; even frontier models score under 24% task success. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study to understand why this setting remains difficult. A natural hypothesis is that failures stem from content access; yet across twelve retrieval, reflection, and verification baselines on CL-Bench, an extensive context learning benchmark, we find limited gains over direct full-context prompting. Further failure analysis reveals a key finding: unlike typical long-context tasks such as long document understanding, context learning requires not only recovering local content but also acquiring local specifications that are often unspecified in the query but distributed across the context: domain-specific formats, local rules, and completeness conditions. Across all 31,592 rubric items, we find that 55.4% clearly evaluate specification acquisition, while only 22.6% evaluate content acquisition. Moreover, despite 76.7% of specifications being unspecified in the user query, 95.5% are traceable to the context, indicating these are learnable obligations rather than hidden requirements. To validate this diagnosis, we design a deliberately simple intervention PSCI (private specification-contract induction) which extracts local specifications and enforces them through adversarial checking and repair; PSCI achieves state-of-the-art 28.14% with GPT-5.1 (+5.59 pp absolute and +24.8% relative) on CL-Bench, replicated on Qwen3.5-27B (+5.28 pp) and Gemini 3 Pro (+6.17 pp). Seventeen ablations further isolate the role of task-specific specifications. Overall, our results suggest context learning hinges on not only content acquisition but also specification acquisition.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Reroute, Don't Remove: Recoverable Visual Token Routing for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) project images into hundreds to thousands of visual tokens, making decoder inference expensive in both attention computation and KV-cache memory. Existing visual-token reduction methods largely follow a rank-and-remove paradigm: they score visual tokens, keep a compact subset, and permanently discard the rest. We show that this irreversible action is fragile because visual-token importance changes across decoder depth; tokens ranked low at one stage may become relevant in later layers, especially for grounding-sensitive queries. We propose Reroute, a training-free plug-in that replaces removal with recoverable routing. At each routing stage, selected vision tokens pass through decoder blocks, while deferred tokens bypass the stage and re-enter the candidate pool at the next routing decision. Reroute reuses existing attention-score ranking rules and stage-wise schedules, preserving the theoretical TFLOPs and KV-cache budget class of the pruning method it augments. Across FastV, PDrop, and Nüwa variants on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen backbones, reroute improves grounding under aggressive token reduction while maintaining general VQA performance. These results suggest that VLM token reduction should not be viewed only as irreversible pruning, but also as recoverable routing. The code can be found here: https://github.com/elmma/mllm-reroute/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

From Shortcuts to Reasoning: Robust Post-Training of Theory of Mind with Reinforcement Learning

Theory of Mind (ToM) is a must-acquire skill for modern foundation model systems to operate effectively and safely in the real world. Recent works have explored honing ToM via post-training; however, we show that such progress is confounded by a pervasive "shortcut" issue: tasks can reach up to 99% accuracy by simply exploiting spurious causal correlations, leading to a false sense of ToM. Motivated by this, we first develop a framework to systematically examine ToM datasets for shortcuts and provide guidance for future development. We find that questions reducible to pure state tracking, such as "belief," are especially shortcut-prone compared to mind questions, such as "intention," where reasoning beyond tracking is required. Using four shortcut-free datasets across three ToM contexts, we then comprehensively study whether Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with verifiable rewards and explicit reasoning chains, called Thinking-RFT, elevates ToM beyond Supervised Fine-Tuning, or SFT. Our key findings are as follows. First, Thinking-RFT effectively improves ToM in all scenarios, with a 6% improvement over SFT, particularly in complex higher-order reasoning, with a 10% improvement over SFT, and multimodal cases, with a 7% improvement over SFT. It also generalizes notably better to unseen domains and higher-order queries while being more robust to counterfactuals. Second, ToM benefits specifically from the joint effect of reasoning and RL: Thinking-RFT outperforms Non-Thinking-RFT by 7% on average. Third, RFT works by learning to ground its reasoning on anchor cues, such as keywords and state changes, that correspond to causal factors. We believe our study is useful for developing effective and robust ToM post-training datasets and advancing critical ToM capabilities.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Overcoming Multi-step Complexity in Multimodal Theory-of-Mind Reasoning: A Scalable Bayesian Planner

Theory-of-Mind (ToM) enables humans to infer mental states-such as beliefs, desires, and intentions-forming the foundation of social cognition. However, existing computational ToM methods rely on structured workflows with ToM-specific priors or deep model fine-tuning, which struggle with scalability in multimodal environments and fail to generalize as task complexity increases. To address these limitations, we propose a scalable Bayesian ToM planner that decomposes ToM reasoning into stepwise Bayesian updates. Our framework introduces weak-to-strong control, allowing smaller language models (LMs) to specialize in ToM-specific likelihood estimation and transfer their reasoning behaviors to larger LMs (7B to 405B) for integration with social and world knowledge. This synergistic approach aligns large-model inference of human mental states with Bayesian principles. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves a 4.6% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art techniques on multimodal ToM benchmarks, including challenging unseen scenarios, thereby establishing a new standard for modeling human mental states in complex environments.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

CSGaussian: Progressive Rate-Distortion Compression and Segmentation for 3D Gaussian Splatting

We present the first unified framework for rate-distortion-optimized compression and segmentation of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). While 3DGS has proven effective for both real-time rendering and semantic scene understanding, prior works have largely treated these tasks independently, leaving their joint consideration unexplored. Inspired by recent advances in rate-distortion-optimized 3DGS compression, this work integrates semantic learning into the compression pipeline to support decoder-side applications--such as scene editing and manipulation--that extend beyond traditional scene reconstruction and view synthesis. Our scheme features a lightweight implicit neural representation-based hyperprior, enabling efficient entropy coding of both color and semantic attributes while avoiding costly grid-based hyperprior as seen in many prior works. To facilitate compression and segmentation, we further develop compression-guided segmentation learning, consisting of quantization-aware training to enhance feature separability and a quality-aware weighting mechanism to suppress unreliable Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments on the LERF and 3D-OVS datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces transmission cost while preserving high rendering quality and strong segmentation performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

2COOOL: 2nd Workshop on the Challenge Of Out-Of-Label Hazards in Autonomous Driving

As the computer vision community advances autonomous driving algorithms, integrating vision-based insights with sensor data remains essential for improving perception, decision making, planning, prediction, simulation, and control. Yet we must ask: Why don't we have entirely safe self-driving cars yet? A key part of the answer lies in addressing novel scenarios, one of the most critical barriers to real-world deployment. Our 2COOOL workshop provides a dedicated forum for researchers and industry experts to push the state of the art in novelty handling, including out-of-distribution hazard detection, vision-language models for hazard understanding, new benchmarking and methodologies, and safe autonomous driving practices. The 2nd Workshop on the Challenge of Out-of-Label Hazards in Autonomous Driving (2COOOL) will be held at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2025 in Honolulu, Hawaii, on October 19, 2025. We aim to inspire the development of new algorithms and systems for hazard avoidance, drawing on ideas from anomaly detection, open-set recognition, open-vocabulary modeling, domain adaptation, and related fields. Building on the success of its inaugural edition at the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2025, the workshop will feature a mix of academic and industry participation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

StimuVAR: Spatiotemporal Stimuli-aware Video Affective Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models

Predicting and reasoning how a video would make a human feel is crucial for developing socially intelligent systems. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive video understanding capabilities, they tend to focus more on the semantic content of videos, often overlooking emotional stimuli. Hence, most existing MLLMs fall short in estimating viewers' emotional reactions and providing plausible explanations. To address this issue, we propose StimuVAR, a spatiotemporal Stimuli-aware framework for Video Affective Reasoning (VAR) with MLLMs. StimuVAR incorporates a two-level stimuli-aware mechanism: frame-level awareness and token-level awareness. Frame-level awareness involves sampling video frames with events that are most likely to evoke viewers' emotions. Token-level awareness performs tube selection in the token space to make the MLLM concentrate on emotion-triggered spatiotemporal regions. Furthermore, we create VAR instruction data to perform affective training, steering MLLMs' reasoning strengths towards emotional focus and thereby enhancing their affective reasoning ability. To thoroughly assess the effectiveness of VAR, we provide a comprehensive evaluation protocol with extensive metrics. StimuVAR is the first MLLM-based method for viewer-centered VAR. Experiments demonstrate its superiority in understanding viewers' emotional responses to videos and providing coherent and insightful explanations. Our code is available at https://github.com/EthanG97/StimuVAR

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Egocentric and Exocentric Methods: A Short Survey

Egocentric vision captures the scene from the point of view of the camera wearer, while exocentric vision captures the overall scene context. Jointly modeling ego and exo views is crucial to developing next-generation AI agents. The community has regained interest in the field of egocentric vision. While the third-person view and first-person have been thoroughly investigated, very few works aim to study both synchronously. Exocentric videos contain many relevant signals that are transferrable to egocentric videos. This paper provides a timely overview of works combining egocentric and exocentric visions, a very new but promising research topic. We describe in detail the datasets and present a survey of the key applications of ego-exo joint learning, where we identify the most recent advances. With the presentation of the current status of the progress, we believe this short but timely survey will be valuable to the broad video-understanding community, particularly when multi-view modeling is critical.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Filter Images First, Generate Instructions Later: Pre-Instruction Data Selection for Visual Instruction Tuning

Visual instruction tuning (VIT) for large vision-language models (LVLMs) requires training on expansive datasets of image-instruction pairs, which can be costly. Recent efforts in VIT data selection aim to select a small subset of high-quality image-instruction pairs, reducing VIT runtime while maintaining performance comparable to full-scale training. However, a major challenge often overlooked is that generating instructions from unlabeled images for VIT is highly expensive. Most existing VIT datasets rely heavily on human annotations or paid services like the GPT API, which limits users with constrained resources from creating VIT datasets for custom applications. To address this, we introduce Pre-Instruction Data Selection (PreSel), a more practical data selection paradigm that directly selects the most beneficial unlabeled images and generates instructions only for the selected images. PreSel first estimates the relative importance of each vision task within VIT datasets to derive task-wise sampling budgets. It then clusters image features within each task, selecting the most representative images with the budget. This approach reduces computational overhead for both instruction generation during VIT data formation and LVLM fine-tuning. By generating instructions for only 15% of the images, PreSel achieves performance comparable to full-data VIT on the LLaVA-1.5 and Vision-Flan datasets. The link to our project page: https://bardisafa.github.io/PreSel

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Towards Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection and Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models

Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) is an emerging AD paradigm. Unlike the traditional unsupervised AD setting that requires a large number of normal samples to train a model, ZSAD is more practical for handling data-restricted real-world scenarios. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown revolutionary reasoning capabilities in various vision tasks. However, the reasoning of image abnormalities remains underexplored due to the lack of corresponding datasets and benchmarks. To facilitate research in AD & reasoning, we establish the first visual instruction tuning dataset, Anomaly-Instruct-125k, and the evaluation benchmark, VisA-D&R. Through investigation with our benchmark, we reveal that current MLLMs like GPT-4o cannot accurately detect and describe fine-grained anomalous details in images. To address this, we propose Anomaly-OneVision (Anomaly-OV), the first specialist visual assistant for ZSAD and reasoning. Inspired by human behavior in visual inspection, Anomaly-OV leverages a Look-Twice Feature Matching (LTFM) mechanism to adaptively select and emphasize abnormal visual tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Anomaly-OV achieves significant improvements over advanced generalist models in both detection and reasoning. Extensions to medical and 3D AD are provided for future study. The link to our project page: https://xujiacong.github.io/Anomaly-OV/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Bridging Compressed Image Latents and Multimodal Large Language Models

This paper presents the first-ever study of adapting compressed image latents to suit the needs of downstream vision tasks that adopt Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). MLLMs have extended the success of large language models to modalities (e.g. images) beyond text, but their billion scale hinders deployment on resource-constrained end devices. While cloud-hosted MLLMs could be available, transmitting raw, uncompressed images captured by end devices to the cloud requires an efficient image compression system. To address this, we focus on emerging neural image compression and propose a novel framework with a lightweight transform-neck and a surrogate loss to adapt compressed image latents for MLLM-based vision tasks. Given the huge scale of MLLMs, our framework excludes the entire downstream MLLM except part of its visual encoder from training our system. This stands out from most existing coding for machine approaches that involve downstream networks in training and thus could be impractical when the networks are MLLMs. The proposed framework is general in that it is applicable to various MLLMs, neural image codecs, and multiple application scenarios, where the neural image codec can be (1) pre-trained for human perception without updating, (2) fully updated for joint human and machine perception, or (3) fully updated for only machine perception. Extensive experiments on different neural image codecs and various MLLMs show that our method achieves great rate-accuracy performance with much less complexity.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Follow the Rules: Reasoning for Video Anomaly Detection with Large Language Models

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) is crucial for applications such as security surveillance and autonomous driving. However, existing VAD methods provide little rationale behind detection, hindering public trust in real-world deployments. In this paper, we approach VAD with a reasoning framework. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown revolutionary reasoning ability, we find that their direct use falls short of VAD. Specifically, the implicit knowledge pre-trained in LLMs focuses on general context and thus may not apply to every specific real-world VAD scenario, leading to inflexibility and inaccuracy. To address this, we propose AnomalyRuler, a novel rule-based reasoning framework for VAD with LLMs. AnomalyRuler comprises two main stages: induction and deduction. In the induction stage, the LLM is fed with few-shot normal reference samples and then summarizes these normal patterns to induce a set of rules for detecting anomalies. The deduction stage follows the induced rules to spot anomalous frames in test videos. Additionally, we design rule aggregation, perception smoothing, and robust reasoning strategies to further enhance AnomalyRuler's robustness. AnomalyRuler is the first reasoning approach for the one-class VAD task, which requires only few-normal-shot prompting without the need for full-shot training, thereby enabling fast adaption to various VAD scenarios. Comprehensive experiments across four VAD benchmarks demonstrate AnomalyRuler's state-of-the-art detection performance and reasoning ability. AnomalyRuler is open-source and available at: https://github.com/Yuchen413/AnomalyRuler

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

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.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Adaptive Batch Normalization Networks for Adversarial Robustness

Deep networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Adversarial Training (AT) has been a standard foundation of modern adversarial defense approaches due to its remarkable effectiveness. However, AT is extremely time-consuming, refraining it from wide deployment in practical applications. In this paper, we aim at a non-AT defense: How to design a defense method that gets rid of AT but is still robust against strong adversarial attacks? To answer this question, we resort to adaptive Batch Normalization (BN), inspired by the recent advances in test-time domain adaptation. We propose a novel defense accordingly, referred to as the Adaptive Batch Normalization Network (ABNN). ABNN employs a pre-trained substitute model to generate clean BN statistics and sends them to the target model. The target model is exclusively trained on clean data and learns to align the substitute model's BN statistics. Experimental results show that ABNN consistently improves adversarial robustness against both digital and physically realizable attacks on both image and video datasets. Furthermore, ABNN can achieve higher clean data performance and significantly lower training time complexity compared to AT-based approaches.

cs.LG↗