Curia-MAE: Multi-Modal Multi-Anatomy MAE Pre-Training for 3D Medical Image Segmentation

Radiology foundation models learn transferable representations that can be adapted to new tasks by training only small layers on top of a frozen encoder. Dense prediction tasks such as 3D segmentation are, however, underrepresented in their evaluation, and, with the encoder kept frozen, pre-trained models still fall short of nnU-Net, the state-of-the-art reference trained from scratch. To close this gap we extend convolutional MAE pre-training with a robust reconstruction objective, a feature regularizer, and a local-global similarity objective. Using this method, we propose Curia-MAE, a multi-modal, multi-anatomy MAE model pre-trained on 300,000 CT and MRI images covering a large number of anatomical sites. On eight anatomy- and lesion-focused segmentation benchmarks, Curia-MAE improves frozen-encoder performance over a strong MAE baseline, while remaining competitive under full finetuning and superior on lesion tasks, where labeled data is scarce. These results indicate that a single frozen encoder can be reused across diverse segmentation tasks, reducing the cost of adapting and deploying such models in clinical workflows. We will make our pre-trained model weights publicly available.

Cortex: Compact Behavior Cloning for Quake with Frozen Visual Features

We study how far a deliberately simple behavioral-cloning policy can progress in a visually rich first-person game before adding reinforcement learning or explicit memory. Cortex is a compact Quake policy with 10.98 million trainable parameters in a six-layer transformer over a frozen DINOv3 encoder. It is trained on the Quake subset of the public Pixels2Play corpus: 6,849 recordings (about 474.7 hours), represented as 17.09 million cached decision frames with keyboard and mouse actions. One sampled training epoch uses 517,048 four-frame windows and takes 3.3 minutes of policy-head optimization on one RTX 5080, excluding one-time feature extraction. We evaluate two independent batches of 20 stochastic, 120-second episodes on Quake E1M1. Cortex does not complete the level, but every episode reaches the opening door, button room, and gate descent; 19 of 20 episodes in each batch record at least one kill. Under the same time-controlled harness, released P2P-150M and NitroGen checkpoints remain shallower in five matched-duration episodes each. These comparisons are limited by small reference samples and different native interfaces. Ablations show that denser visual tokens improve combat and survival, while longer optimization and naive action history improve offline metrics without consistently improving play. The remaining failures are consistent with covariate shift and motivate targeted corrective data. We release the policy implementation, checkpoint, and a representative rollout.

Gen4U: Unifying Video Generation and Understanding via Diffusion

Prior work suggests that diffusion representations capture low-level geometry but struggle with high-level semantics. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art video diffusion models overcome this limitation. By systematically probing their intermediate activations using recent mutual-kNN alignment metrics, we reveal a highly structured latent space where visual representations evolve across both network depth and noise levels. We show that while moderate noise levels yield linearly separable global semantics, fine-grained details persist at lower noise levels but become spatially scattered, requiring attention mechanisms to decode. Building on these insights, we introduce Gen4U (Generation for Understanding), a framework that repurposes these generative representations with a single forward pass. Our experiments establish that frozen, large-scale video diffusion models function as highly competitive video encoders across a wide spectrum of tasks, spanning semantic and non-semantic objectives (video classification, depth estimation, camera pose estimation, image and video captioning). Bypassing fine-tuning, Gen4U unifies the generation and understanding paradigms, achieving strong perception performance while fully preserving the model's ability to generate high-quality video.

Global-Local Feature Decoding with Adapter-Guided SAMv2 for Salient Object Detection

Salient Object Detection (SOD) remains an essential yet underexplored task in the era of large-scale vision models. Although foundation models like SAM exhibit strong generalization, their potential for SOD is not fully realized, and training or fully fine-tuning them is computationally expensive and prone to overfitting under limited data. To overcome these challenges, we introduce GLASSNet, a Global-Local feature decoding framework that uses SAMv2 as a frozen encoder paired with a lightweight, spatially aware convolutional adapter-reducing learnable encoder parameters by over 97%. To enhance saliency quality, GLASSNet employs a dual-decoder architecture: one decoder captures global, long-range semantics with an expanded receptive field, while the other captures fine local details such as edges and textures. Fusing these complementary cues yields saliency maps that combine global coherence with local precision, producing accurate final masks. Extensive experiments on standard SOD and camouflaged object detection benchmarks show that GLASSNet surpasses state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the power of frozen foundation models combined with targeted adaptation and global-local decoding.