Recent advances in dense 3D reconstruction enable the accurate capture of local geometry; however, integrating them into SLAM is challenging due to drift and redundant point maps, which limit efficiency and downstream tasks, such as novel view synthesis. T o address these issues, we propose SING3R-SLAM, a globally consistent and compact Gaussian-based dense RGB SLAM framework. The key idea is to combine locally consistent 3D reconstructions with a unified global Gaussian representation that jointly refines scene geometry and camera poses, enabling efficient and versatile 3D mapping for multiple downstream applications. SING3R-SLAM first builds locally consistent submaps through our lightweight tracking and reconstruction module, and then progressively aligns and fuses them into a global Gaussian map that enforces cross-view geometric consistency. This global map, in turn, provides feedback to correct local drift and enhance the robustness of tracking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SING3R-SLAM achieves state-of-the-art tracking, 3D reconstruction, and novel view rendering, resulting in over 12% improvement in tracking and producing finer, more detailed geometry, all while maintaining a compact and memory-efficient global representation on real-world datasets.

After years of growth, drone-based delivery is transforming logistics. At its core, real-time 6-DoF drone pose tracking enables precise flight control and accurate drone landing. With the widespread availability of urban 3D maps, the Visual Positioning Service (VPS), a mobile pose estimation system, has been adapted to enhance drone pose tracking during the landing phase, as conventional systems like GPS are unreliable in urban environments due to signal attenuation and multi-path propagation. However, deploying the current VPS on drones faces limitations in both estimation accuracy and efficiency. In this work, we redesign drone-oriented VPS with the event camera and introduce EV-Pose to enable accurate, high-frequency 6-DoF pose tracking for accurate drone landing. EV-Pose introduces a spatio-temporal feature-instructed pose estimation module that extracts a temporal distance field to enable 3D point map matching for pose estimation; and a motion-aware hierarchical fusion and optimization scheme to enhance the above estimation in accuracy and efficiency, by utilizing drone motion in the \textit{early stage} of event filtering and the \textit{later stage} of pose optimization. Evaluation shows that EV-Pose achieves a rotation accuracy of 1.34$\degree$ and a translation accuracy of 6.9$mm$ with a tracking latency of 10.08$ms$, outperforming baselines by $>$50\%, \tmcrevise{thus enabling accurate drone landings.} Demo: https://ev-pose.github.io/

We introduce GeoSAM2, a prompt-controllable framework for 3D part segmentation that casts the task as multi-view 2D mask prediction. Given a textureless object, we render normal and point maps from predefined viewpoints and accept simple 2D prompts - clicks or boxes - to guide part selection. These prompts are processed by a shared SAM2 backbone augmented with LoRA and residual geometry fusion, enabling view-specific reasoning while preserving pretrained priors. The predicted masks are back-projected to the object and aggregated across views. Our method enables fine-grained, part-specific control without requiring text prompts, per-shape optimization, or full 3D labels. In contrast to global clustering or scale-based methods, prompts are explicit, spatially grounded, and interpretable. We achieve state-of-the-art class-agnostic performance on PartObjaverse-Tiny and PartNetE, outperforming both slow optimization-based pipelines and fast but coarse feedforward approaches. Our results highlight a new paradigm: aligning the paradigm of 3D segmentation with SAM2, leveraging interactive 2D inputs to unlock controllability and precision in object-level part understanding.

Despite remarkable advancements in video depth estimation, existing methods exhibit inherent limitations in achieving geometric fidelity through the affine-invariant predictions, limiting their applicability in reconstruction and other metrically grounded downstream tasks. We propose GeometryCrafter, a novel framework that recovers high-fidelity point map sequences with temporal coherence from open-world videos, enabling accurate 3D/4D reconstruction, camera parameter estimation, and other depth-based applications. At the core of our approach lies a point map Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that learns a latent space agnostic to video latent distributions for effective point map encoding and decoding. Leveraging the VAE, we train a video diffusion model to model the distribution of point map sequences conditioned on the input videos. Extensive evaluations on diverse datasets demonstrate that GeometryCrafter achieves state-of-the-art 3D accuracy, temporal consistency, and generalization capability.

However, due to the high-dimensional nature of the problem space and scarcity of high-quality 3D data, these pre-trained models still struggle to generalize to many challenging circumstances, such as limited view overlap or low lighting. To address this, we propose LoRA3D, an efficient self-calibration pipeline to specialize the pre-trained models to target scenes using their own multi-view predictions. Taking sparse RGB images as input, we leverage robust optimization techniques to refine multiview predictions and align them into a global coordinate frame. In particular, we incorporate prediction confidence into the geometric optimization process, automatically re-weighting the confidence to better reflect point estimation accuracy. We use the calibrated confidence to generate high-quality pseudo labels for the calibrating views and use low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the models on the pseudo-labeled data. Our method does not require any external priors or manual labels. It completes the self-calibration process on a single standard GPU within just 5 minutes. Each low-rank adapter requires only 18MB of storage. We evaluated our method on more than 160 scenes from the Replica, TUM and Waymo Open datasets, achieving up to 88% performance improvement on 3D reconstruction, multi-view pose estimation and novel-view rendering. Figure 1: Given sparse RGB images, our self-calibration pipeline efficiently specializes a pre-trained 3D foundation model to a target scene to improve its performance for a variety of 3D vision tasks. 1 These models, typically enabled by large scale Transformer pre-training, can quickly establish crossview correspondences and directly regress 3D scene geometry from sparse RGB images. They generalize to a broad range of data and exhibit a strong zero-shot performance on novel tasks.

Realtime 4D reconstruction for dynamic scenes remains a crucial challenge for autonomous driving perception. Most existing methods rely on depth estimation through self-supervision or multi-modality sensor fusion. In this paper, we propose Driv3R, a DUSt3R-based framework that directly regresses per-frame point maps from multi-view image sequences. To achieve streaming dense reconstruction, we maintain a memory pool to reason both spatial relationships across sensors and dynamic temporal contexts to enhance multi-view 3D consistency and temporal integration. Furthermore, we employ a 4D flow predictor to identify moving objects within the scene to direct our network focus more on reconstructing these dynamic regions. Finally, we align all per-frame pointmaps consistently to the world coordinate system in an optimization-free manner. We conduct extensive experiments on the large-scale nuScenes dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. Driv3R outperforms previous frameworks in 4D dynamic scene reconstruction, achieving 15x faster inference speed compared to methods requiring global alignment. Code: https://github.com/Barrybarry-Smith/Driv3R.

Modern language models often exhibit powerful but brittle behavior, leading to the development of larger and more diverse benchmarks to reliably assess their behavior. Here, we suggest that model performance can be benchmarked and elucidated with much smaller evaluation sets. We first show that in six popular language classification benchmarks, model confidence in the correct class on many pairs of points is strongly correlated across models. We build upon this phenomenon to propose Anchor Point Selection, a technique to select small subsets of datasets that capture model behavior across the entire dataset. Anchor points reliably rank models: across 87 diverse language model-prompt pairs, evaluating models using 1-30 anchor points outperforms uniform sampling and other baselines at accurately ranking models. Moreover, just several anchor points can be used to estimate model per-class predictions on all other points in a dataset with low mean absolute error, sufficient for gauging where the model is likely to fail. Lastly, we present Anchor Point Maps for visualizing these insights and facilitating comparisons of the performance of different models on various regions within the dataset distribution.

Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron (previously Deep Science), aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers -- particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence -- and explain why they matter. This week in AI, researchers discovered a method that could allow adversaries to track the movements of remotely-controlled robots even when the robots' communications are encrypted end-to-end. The coauthors, who hail from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, said that their study shows adopting the best cybersecurity practices isn't enough to stop attacks on autonomous systems. Remote control, or teleoperation, promises to enable operators to guide one or several robots from afar in a range of environments.

Memorization of data in deep neural networks has become a subject of significant research interest. In this paper, we link memorization of images in deep convolutional autoencoders to downsampling through strided convolution. To analyze this mechanism in a simpler setting, we train linear convolutional autoencoders and show that linear combinations of training data are stored as eigenvectors in the linear operator corresponding to the network when downsampling is used. On the other hand, networks without downsampling do not memorize training data. We provide further evidence that the same effect happens in nonlinear networks. Moreover, downsampling in nonlinear networks causes the model to not only memorize linear combinations of images, but individual training images. Since convolutional autoencoder components are building blocks of deep convolutional networks, we envision that our findings will shed light on the important phenomenon of memorization in over-parameterized deep networks.