Yuhang Ming

Weichen Dai, Wenhan Su, Da Kong et al.

The emergence of visual foundation models has revolutionized visual odometry~(VO) and SLAM, enabling pose estimation and dense reconstruction within a single feed-forward network. However, unlike traditional pipelines that leverage keyframe methods to enhance efficiency and accuracy, current foundation model based methods, such as VGGT-Long, typically process raw image sequences indiscriminately. This leads to computational redundancy and degraded performance caused by low inter-frame parallax, which provides limited contextual stereo information. Integrating traditional geometric heuristics into these methods is non-trivial, as their performance depends on high-dimensional latent representations rather than explicit geometric metrics. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel keyframe-based feed-forward VO. Instead of relying on hand-crafted rules, our approach employs reinforcement learning to derive an adaptive keyframe policy in a data-driven manner, aligning selection with the intrinsic characteristics of the underlying foundation model. We train our agent on TartanAir dataset and conduct extensive evaluations across several real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves consistent and substantial improvements over state-of-the-art feed-forward VO methods.

Hanyu Zhu, Zhihao Zhan, Yuhang Ming et al.

One of the central challenges in visual place recognition (VPR) is learning a robust global representation that remains discriminative under large viewpoint changes, illumination variations, and severe domain shifts. While visual foundation models (VFMs) provide strong local features, most existing methods rely on a single model, overlooking the complementary cues offered by different VFMs. However, exploiting such complementary information inevitably alters token distributions, which challenges the stability of existing query-based global aggregation schemes. To address these challenges, we propose DC-VLAQ, a representation-centric framework that integrates the fusion of complementary VFMs and robust global aggregation. Specifically, we first introduce a lightweight residual-guided complementary fusion that anchors representations in the DINOv2 feature space while injecting complementary semantics from CLIP through a learned residual correction. In addition, we propose the Vector of Local Aggregated Queries (VLAQ), a query--residual global aggregation scheme that encodes local tokens by their residual responses to learnable queries, resulting in improved stability and the preservation of fine-grained discriminative cues. Extensive experiments on standard VPR benchmarks, including Pitts30k, Tokyo24/7, MSLS, Nordland, SPED, and AmsterTime, demonstrate that DC-VLAQ consistently outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly under challenging domain shifts and long-term appearance changes.

Yuhang Ming, Tingkang Xi, Xingrui Yang et al.

Scene-level neural volumetric reconstruction from monocular videos remains challenging, especially under severe domain shifts. Although recent advances in vision foundation models (VFMs) provide transferable generalized priors learned from large-scale data, their scaleambiguous predictions are incompatible with the scale consistency required by volumetric fusion. To address this gap, we present VFMRecon, the first attempt to bridge transferable VFM priors with scaleconsistent requirements in scene-level neural reconstruction. Specifically, we first introduce a lightweight scale alignment stage that restores multiview scale coherence. We then integrate pretrained VFM features into the neural volumetric reconstruction pipeline via lightweight task-specific adapters, which are trained for reconstruction while preserving the crossdomain robustness of pretrained representations. We train our model on ScanNet train split and evaluate on both in-distribution ScanNet test split and out-of-distribution TUM RGB-D and Tanks and Temples datasets. The results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-theart performance across all datasets domains. In particular, on the challenging outdoor Tanks and Temples dataset, our model achieves an F1 score of 70.1 in reconstructed mesh evaluation, substantially outperforming the closest competitor, VGGT, which only attains 51.8.