Read our publications from our Media Analytics team who are overcoming fundamental challenges in computer vision and are addressing critical needs in mobility, security, safety and socially relevant AI. Our team solves fundamental challenges in computer vision, with a focus on understanding and interaction in 3D scenes, representation learning in visual and multimodal data, learning across domains and tasks, as well as responsible AI. Our technological breakthroughs contribute to socially-relevant solutions that address key enterprise needs in mobility, safety and smart spaces.
NEC Labs America is heading to Denver for CVPR 2026, one of the most prestigious gatherings in computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition. The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition brings innovators from around the world to share breakthroughs.
Modern video diffusion models excel at appearance synthesis but still struggle with physical consistency: objects drift, collisions lack realistic rebound, and material responses seldom match their underlying properties. We present PhyCo, a framework that introduces continuous, interpretable, and physically grounded control into video generation. Our approach integrates three key components: (i) a large-scale dataset of over 100K photorealistic simulation videos where friction, restitution, deformation, and force are systematically varied across diverse scenarios; (ii) physics-supervised fine-tuning of a pretrained diffusion model using a ControlNet conditioned on pixel-aligned physical property maps; and (iii) VLM-guided reward optimization, where a fine-tuned vision-language model evaluates generated videos with targeted physics queries and provides differentiable feedback. This combination enables a generative model to produce physically consistent and controllable outputs through variations in physical attributes-without any simulator or geometry reconstruction at inference. On the Physics-IQ benchmark, PhyCo significantly improves physical realism over strong baselines, and human studies confirm clearer and more faithful control over physical attributes. Our results demonstrate a scalable path toward physically consistent, controllable generative video models that generalize beyond synthetic training environments.
Ensuring safety in autonomous driving requires scalable generation of realistic, controllable driving scenes beyond what real-world testing provides. Yet existing instruction guided image editors, trained on object-centric or artistic data, struggle with dense, safety-critical driving layouts. We propose HorizonWeaver, which tackles three fundamental challenges in driving scene editing: (1) multi-level granularity, requiring coherent object- and scene-level edits in dense environments; (2) rich high-level semantics, preserving diverse objects while following detailed instructions; and (3) ubiquitous domain shifts, handling changes in climate, layout, and traffic across unseen environments. The core of HorizonWeaver is a set of complementary contributions across data, model, and training: (1) Data: Large-scale dataset generation, where we build a paired real/synthetic dataset from Boreas, nuScenes, and Argoverse2 to improve generalization; (2) Model: Language-Guided Masks for fine-grained editing, where semantics-enriched masks and prompts enable precise, language-guided edits; and (3) Training: Content preservation and instruction alignment, where joint losses enforce scene consistency and instruction fidelity. Together, HorizonWeaver provides a scalable framework for photorealistic, instruction-driven editing of complex driving scenes, collecting 255K images across 13 editing categories and outperforming prior methods in L1, CLIP, and DINO metrics, achieving +46.4% user preference and improving BEV segmentation IoU by +33%. Project page: https://msoroco.github.io/horizonweaver/
Vision transformer-based models bring significant improvements for image segmentation tasks. Although these architectures offer powerful capabilities irrespective of specific segmentation tasks, their use of computational resources can be taxing on deployed devices. One way to overcome this challenge is by adapting the computation level to the specific needs of the input image rather than the current one-size-fits-all approach. To this end, we introduce ECO-M2F or EffiCient TransfOrmer Encoders for Mask2Former-style models. Noting that the encoder module of M2F-style models incurs high resource-intensive computations, ECO-M2F provides a strategy to self-select the number of hidden layers in the encoder, conditioned on the input image. To enable this self-selection ability for providing a balance between performance and computational efficiency, we present a three-step recipe. The first step is to train the parent architecture to enable early exiting from the encoder. The second step is to create a derived dataset of the ideal number of encoder layers required for each training example. The third step is to use the aforementioned derived dataset to train a gating network that predicts the number of encoder layers to be used, conditioned on the input image. Additionally, to change the computational-accuracy tradeoff, only steps two and three need to be repeated, which significantly reduces retraining time. Experiments on the public datasets show that the proposed approach reduces expected encoder computational cost while maintaining performance, adapts to various user compute resources, is flexible in architecture configurations, and can be extended beyond the segmentation task to object detection.
Controllable driving scene generation is critical for realistic and scalable autonomous driving simulation, yet existing approaches struggle to jointly achieve photorealism and precise control. We introduce HorizonForge, a unified framework that reconstructs scenes as editable Gaussian Splats and Meshes, enabling fine-grained 3D manipulation and language-driven vehicle insertion. Edits are rendered through a noise-aware video diffusion process that enforces spatial and temporal consistency, producing diverse scene variations in a single feed-forward pass without per-trajectory optimization. To standardize evaluation, we further propose HorizonSuite, a comprehensive benchmark spanning ego- and agent-level editing tasks such as trajectory modifications and object manipulation. Extensive experiments show that Gaussian-Mesh representation delivers substantially higher fidelity than alternative 3D representations, and that temporal priors from video diffusion are essential for coherent synthesis. Combining these findings, HorizonForge establishes a simple yet powerful paradigm for photorealistic, controllable driving simulation, achieving an 83.4% user-preference gain and a 25.19% FID improvement over the second-best state-of-the-art method. Project page: https://horizonforge.github.io/.
Grounding large language models (LLMs) in domain-specific tasks like post-hoc dash-cam driving video analysis is challenging due to their general-purpose training and lack of structured inductive biases. As vision is often the sole modality available for such analysis (i.e. no LiDAR, GPS, etc.), existing video-basedvision-language models (V-VLMs) struggle with spatial reasoning, causal inference, and explainability of events in the input video. To this end, we introduce iFinder, a structured semantic grounding framework that decouples perception from reasoning by translating dash-cam videos into a hierarchical, interpretable data structure for LLMs. iFinder operates as a modular, training-free pipeline that employs pretrained vision models to extract critical cuesobject pose, lane positions, and object trajectorieswhich are hierarchically organized into frame and video-level structures. Combined with a three-block prompting strategy, it enables step-wise, grounded reasoning for the LLM to refine a peer V-VLMs outputs and provide accurate reasoning. Evaluations on four public dash-cam video benchmarks show that iFinders proposed grounding with domain-specific cuesespecially object orientation and global contextsignificantly outperforms end-to-end V-VLMs on four zero-shot driving benchmarks, with up to 39% gains in accident reasoning accuracy. By grounding LLMs with driving domain-specific representations, iFinder offers a zero-shot, interpretable, and reliable alternativeto end-to-end V-VLMs for post-hoc driving video understanding
This paper proposes AutoScape, a long-horizon driving scene generation framework. At its core is a novel RGB-D diffusion model that iteratively generates sparse, geometrically consistent keyframes, serving as reliable anchors for the scenes appearance and geometry. To maintain long-range geometric consistency, the model 1) jointly handles image and depth in a shared latent space, 2) explicitly conditions on the existing scene geometry (i.e., rendered point clouds) from previously generated keyframes, and 3) steers the sampling process with a warp-consistent guidance. Given high-quality RGB-D keyframes, a video diffusion model then interpolates between them to produce dense nd coherent video frames. AutoScape generates realistic and geometrically consistent driving videos of over 20 seconds, improving the long-horizon FID and FVD scores over the prior state-of-the-art by 48.6% and 43.0%, respectively.
Visual reasoning (VR), which is crucial in many fields for enabling human-like visual understanding, remains highly challenging. Recently, compositional visual reasoning approaches, which leverage the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) with integrated tools to solve problems, have shown promise as more effective strategies than end-to-end VR methods. However, these approaches face limitations, as frozen LLMs lack tool awareness in VR, leading to performance bottlenecks. While leveraging LLMs for reasoning is widely used in other domains, they are not directly applicable to VR due to limited training data, imperfect tools that introduce errors and reduce data collection efficiency in VR, and challenges in fine-tuning on noisy workflows. To address these challenges, we propose DWIM: i) Discrepancy-aware training Workflow generation, which assesses tool usage and extracts more viable workflows for training; and ii) Instruct-Masking fine-tuning, which guides the model to only clone effective actions, enabling the generation of more practical solutions. Our experiments demonstrate that DWIM achieves state-of-the-art performance across various VR tasks, exhibiting strong generalization on multiple widely used datasets.
Evaluating autonomous vehicles with controllability enables scalable testing in counterfactual or structured settings, enhancing both efficiency and safety. We introduce LangTraj, a language-conditioned scene-diffusion model that simulates the joint behavior of all agents in traffic scenarios. By conditioning on natural language inputs, LangTraj provides flexible and intuitive control over interactive behaviors, generating nuanced and realistic scenarios. Unlike prior approaches that depend on domain-specific guidance functions, LangTraj incorporates language conditioning during training, facilitating more intuitive traffic simulation control. We propose a novel closed-loop training strategy for diffusion models, explicitly tailored to enhance stability and realism during closed-loop simulation. To support language-conditioned simulation, we develop Inter-Drive, a large-scale dataset with diverse and interactive labels for training language-conditioned diffusion models. Our dataset is built upon a scalable pipeline for annotating agent-agent interactions and single-agent behaviors, ensuring rich and varied supervision. Validated on the Waymo Motion Dataset, LangTraj demonstrates strong performance in realism, language controllability, and language-conditioned safety-critical simulation, establishing a new paradigm for flexible and scalable autonomous vehicle testing. Project website: https://langtraj.github.io/.
Obtaining high-quality fine-grained annotations for traffic signs is critical for accurate and safe decision-making in autonomous driving. Widely used datasets, such as Mapillary, often provide only coarse-grained labels without distinguishing semantically important types such as stop signs or speed limit signs. To this end, we present a new validation set for traffic signs derived from the Mapillary dataset called Mapillary Vistas Validation for Traffic Signs (MVV), where we decompose composite traffic signs into granular, semantically meaningful categories. The dataset includes pixel-level instance masks and has been manually annotated by expert annotators to ensure label fidelity. Further, we benchmark several state-of-the-art VLMs against the self-supervised DINOv2 model on this dataset and show that DINOv2 consistently outperforms all VLM baselines not only on traffic sign recognition, but also on heavily represented categories like vehicles and humans. Our analysis reveals significant limitations in current vision-language models for fine-grained visual understanding and establishes DINOv2 as a strong baseline for dense semantic matching in autonomous driving scenarios. This dataset and evaluation framework pave the way for more reliable, interpretable, and scalable perception systems. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/nec-labs-ma/relabeling
