Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), while powerful, often struggle in Remote Sensing (RS) segmentation tasks when combined with existing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods. We observe that this limitation primarily arises from their inability to effectively handle the pervasive artifacts in RS imagery. To address this, we introduce Earth-Adapter, the first PEFT method specifically designed for RS artifact mitigation. Earth-Adapter introduces a novel Frequency-Guided Mixture of Adapters (MoA) approach, structured around a ''divide and conquer" strategy. It first utilizes Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT) to "divide" features into distinct frequency components, thereby effectively isolating artifact-related information from semantic signals. Subsequently, to ''conquer" these artifact, MoA independently optimizes features within different subspaces and dynamically assigns weights via a router to aggregate the refined representations. This enables adaptive refinement of the VFM’s representation space to mitigate the impact of artifacts. This simple yet highly effective PEFT method demonstrably mitigates artifacts and significantly enhances VFMs performance on RS segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate Earth-Adapter's effectiveness on in-domain semantic segmentation (SS), as well as Domain Adaptive (DA) and Domain Generalized (DG) semantic segmentation tasks. Compared with the baseline Rein, Earth-Adapter significantly improves mIoU by 1.2% in SS, 9.0% in DA, and 3.1% in DG benchmarks. Our code and weights will be released soon.

Due to the substantial domain gaps in Remote Sensing (RS) images that are characterized by variabilities such as location, wavelength, and sensor type, Remote Sensing Domain Generalization (RSDG) has emerged as a critical and valuable research frontier, focusing on developing models that generalize effectively across diverse scenarios. However, research in this area remains underexplored: (1) Current cross-domain methods primarily focus on Domain Adaptation (DA), which adapts models to predefined domains rather than to unseen ones; (2) Few studies target the RSDG issue, especially for semantic segmentation tasks. Existing related models are developed for specific unknown domains, struggling with issues of underfitting on other unseen scenarios; (3) Existing RS foundation models tend to prioritize in-domain performance over cross-domain generalization. To this end, we introduce the first vision foundation model for RSDG semantic segmentation, CrossEarth. CrossEarth demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization through a specially designed data-level Earth-Style Injection pipeline and a model-level Multi-Task Training pipeline. In addition, for the semantic segmentation task, we have curated an RSDG benchmark comprising 32 semantic segmentation scenarios across various regions, spectral bands, platforms, and climates, providing comprehensive evaluations of the generalizability of future RSDG models. Extensive experiments on this collection demonstrate the superiority of CrossEarth over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is an emerging information extraction (IE) task, aiming to simultaneously extract entity spans, types, and corresponding visual regions of entities from given sentence-image pairs data. Recent unified methods employing machine reading comprehension or sequence generation-based frameworks show limitations in this difficult task. The former, utilizing human-designed type queries, struggles to differentiate ambiguous entities, such as Jordan (Person) and off-White x Jordan (Shoes). The latter, following the one-by-one decoding order, suffers from exposure bias issues. We maintain that these works misunderstand the relationships of multimodal entities. To tackle these, we propose a novel unified framework named Multi-grained Query-guided Set Prediction Network (MQSPN) to learn appropriate relationships at intra-entity and inter-entity levels. Specifically, MQSPN explicitly aligns textual entities with visual regions by employing a set of learnable queries to strengthen intra-entity connections. Based on distinct intra-entity modeling, MQSPN reformulates GMNER as a set prediction, guiding models to establish appropriate inter-entity relationships from a optimal global matching perspective. Additionally, we incorporate a query-guided Fusion Net (QFNet) as a glue network to boost better alignment of two-level relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances in widely used benchmarks.

Recently, natural language has been the primary medium for human-robot interaction. However, its inherent lack of spatial precision for robotic control introduces challenges such as ambiguity and verbosity. To address these limitations, we introduce the Robotic Visual Instruction (RoVI), a novel paradigm to guide robotic tasks through an object-centric, hand-drawn symbolic representation. RoVI effectively encodes spatial-temporal information into human-interpretable visual instructions through 2D sketches, utilizing arrows, circles, colors, and numbers to direct 3D robotic manipulation. To enable robots to understand RoVI better and generate precise actions based on RoVI, we present Visual Instruction Embodied Workflow (VIEW), a pipeline formulated for RoVI-conditioned policies. This approach leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to interpret RoVI inputs, decode spatial and temporal constraints from 2D pixel space via keypoint extraction, and then transform them into executable 3D action sequences. We additionally curate a specialized dataset of 15K instances to fine-tune small VLMs for edge deployment, enabling them to effectively learn RoVI capabilities. Our approach is rigorously validated across 11 novel tasks in both real and simulated environments, demonstrating significant generalization capability. Notably, VIEW achieves an 87.5% success rate in real-world scenarios involving unseen tasks that feature multi-step actions, with disturbances, and trajectory-following requirements. Code and Datasets in this paper will be released soon.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has revolutionized representation learning in Remote Sensing (RS), advancing Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) to leverage vast unlabeled satellite imagery for diverse downstream tasks. Currently, GFMs primarily employ objectives like contrastive learning or masked image modeling, owing to their proven success in learning transferable representations. However, generative diffusion models, which demonstrate the potential to capture multi-grained semantics essential for RS tasks during image generation, remain underexplored for discriminative applications. This prompts the question: can generative diffusion models also excel and serve as GFMs with sufficient discriminative power? In this work, we answer this question with SatDiFuser, a framework that transforms a diffusion-based generative geospatial foundation model into a powerful pretraining tool for discriminative RS. By systematically analyzing multi-stage, noise-dependent diffusion features, we develop three fusion strategies to effectively leverage these diverse representations. Extensive experiments on remote sensing benchmarks show that SatDiFuser outperforms state-of-the-art GFMs, achieving gains of up to +5.7% mIoU in semantic segmentation and +7.9% F1-score in classification, demonstrating the capacity of diffusion-based generative foundation models to rival or exceed discriminative GFMs. The source code is available at: https://github.com/yurujaja/SatDiFuser.

Reducing the key-value (KV) cache burden in Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly accelerates inference. Dynamically selecting critical KV caches during decoding helps maintain performance. Existing methods use random linear hashing to identify important tokens, but this approach is inefficient due to the orthogonal distribution of queries and keys within two narrow cones in LLMs. We introduce Spotlight Attention, a novel method that employs non-linear hashing functions to optimize the embedding distribution of queries and keys, enhancing coding efficiency and robustness. We also developed a lightweight, stable training framework using a Bradley-Terry ranking-based loss, enabling optimization of the non-linear hashing module on GPUs with 16GB memory in 8 hours. Experimental results show that Spotlight Attention drastically improves retrieval precision while shortening the length of the hash code at least 5$\times$ compared to traditional linear hashing. Finally, we exploit the computational advantages of bitwise operations by implementing specialized CUDA kernels, achieving hashing retrieval for 512K tokens in under 100$\mu$s on a single A100 GPU, with end-to-end throughput up to 3$\times$ higher than vanilla decoding.

• Voice-based (vs. text-based) CAs do not boost charitable behavioral intentions. • Voice-based CAs increase such intentions more if they speak formally. • Text-based CAs increase such intentions more if their messages are informal. • Mindless (vs. mindful) anthropomorphism is more likely to explain users' charitable responses to computers. Conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly utilized by organizations for fundraising and volunteer recruitment. Yet, little is understood about how voice-based CAs could serve these purposes optimally. This experimental study therefore compares voice-based CAs against text-based ones in terms of their ability to foster users’ intentions to make charitable contributions, and investigates the potential mediation of such effects by two dimensions of user-perceived anthropomorphism. Additionally, it examines how a CA’s communication style moderates these effects. It found that, when a voice-based CA employed a formal communication style, mindless anthropomorphism was a significant mediator of its positive association with charitable behavioral intentions. Conversely, when employing an informal communication style, a text-based CA elicited significantly higher levels of mindful anthropomorphism, and also was positively linked to charitable behavioral intentions. These findings expand our theoretical understanding of how CA modalities influence people’s moral responses toward computers; how this effect could be impaired, or strengthened, by different communication styles; and the underlying mechanisms of two dimensions of anthropomorphism. Practical implications are also discussed.

Although recent methods in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) have achieved success in segmenting rainy or snowy scenes by improving consistency, they face limitations when dealing with more challenging scenarios like foggy and night scenes. We argue that these prior methods excessively focus on weather-specific features in adverse scenes, which exacerbates the existing domain gaps. To address this issue, we propose a new metric to evaluate the severity of all adverse scenes and offer a novel perspective that enables task unification across all adverse scenarios. Our method focuses on Severity, allowing our model to learn more consistent features and facilitate domain distribution alignment, thereby alleviating domain gaps. Unlike the vague descriptions of consistency in previous methods, we introduce Cross-domain Consistency, which is quantified using the Structure Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) to measure the distance between the source and target domains. Specifically, our unified model consists of two key modules: the Merging Style Augmentation Module (MSA) and the Severity Perception Mask Module (SPM). The MSA module transforms all adverse scenes into augmented scenes, effectively eliminating weather-specific features and enhancing Cross-domain Consistency. The SPM module incorporates a Severity Perception mechanism, guiding a Mask operation that enables our model to learn highly consistent features from the augmented scenes. Our unified framework, named PASS (Parsing All adverSe Scenes), achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods on widely-used benchmarks for all adverse scenes. Notably, the performance of PASS is superior to Semi-Unified models and even surpasses weather-specific models.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation has received widespread attention for its ability to transfer knowledge from the source to target domains without a high demand for annotations. However, semantic segmentation under adverse conditions still poses significant challenges for autonomous driving, as bad weather observation data may introduce unforeseeable problems. Although previous UDA works are devoted to adverse scene tasks, their adaptation process is redundant. For instance, unlabeled snow scene training data is a must for the model to achieve fair segmentation performance in snowy scenarios. We propose calling this type of adaptation process the Single to Single (STS) strategy. Clearly, STS is time-consuming and may show weaknesses in some comprehensive scenes, such as a night scene of sleet. Motivated by the concept of Domain Generalization (DG), we propose the Single to All (STA) model. Unlike DG, which trains models on one or multiple source domains without target domains, the STA model is based on UDA and employs one source domain, one target domain, and one introduced domain to achieve generalization to all adverse conditions by training on a single-scene dataset. Specifically, the STA model is advantageous as it learns from the source domain, reserves the style factors via a Reservation domain, and adapts the unified factors by the Randomization module. An Output Space Refusion module is also further incorporated to strengthen STA. Our STA achieves state-of-the-art performance in the Foggy Driving benchmark and demonstrates great domain generalizability in all conditions of the ACDC and Foggy Zurich benchmarks.