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Main Authors: Cheng, Jiajun, Yu, Xiaofan, Tripathi, Subarna, Liu, Sainan, Lin, Shan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06999
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author Cheng, Jiajun
Yu, Xiaofan
Tripathi, Subarna
Liu, Sainan
Lin, Shan
author_facet Cheng, Jiajun
Yu, Xiaofan
Tripathi, Subarna
Liu, Sainan
Lin, Shan
contents Recognizing instruments' interactions with tissues is essential for building context-aware AI assistants in robotic surgery. Vision-language models (VLMs) have opened a new avenue for surgical perception and achieved better generalization on a wide range of tasks compared to conventional task-specific deep learning approaches. However, their performance on instrument--tissue interaction recognition remains limited, largely due to two challenges: (1) many models do not effectively leverage temporal information, and (2) alignment between vision and text often misses fine-grained action details. To address these issues, we propose TrajPred, a framework that encodes instrument trajectories to incorporate temporal motion cues and, conditioned on these trajectories, introduces a predictor module to generate visual semantic embeddings that better capture fine-grained action details. We further incorporate prompt tuning and a verb-rephrasing technique to enable smooth adaptation to the instrument--tissue interaction recognition task. Extensive experiments on the public laparoscopic benchmark, CholecT50, show that our method improves both Average Precision and Top-K accuracy. We also investigate whether visual embeddings of instrument--tissue interaction regions align better with the corresponding text by visualizing the cosine similarity between visual and textual embeddings. The visualization results indicate that the proposed method improves alignment between relevant visual and textual representations.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_06999
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TrajPred: Trajectory-Conditioned Joint Embedding Prediction for Surgical Instrument-Tissue Interaction Recognition in Vision-Language Models
Cheng, Jiajun
Yu, Xiaofan
Tripathi, Subarna
Liu, Sainan
Lin, Shan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recognizing instruments' interactions with tissues is essential for building context-aware AI assistants in robotic surgery. Vision-language models (VLMs) have opened a new avenue for surgical perception and achieved better generalization on a wide range of tasks compared to conventional task-specific deep learning approaches. However, their performance on instrument--tissue interaction recognition remains limited, largely due to two challenges: (1) many models do not effectively leverage temporal information, and (2) alignment between vision and text often misses fine-grained action details. To address these issues, we propose TrajPred, a framework that encodes instrument trajectories to incorporate temporal motion cues and, conditioned on these trajectories, introduces a predictor module to generate visual semantic embeddings that better capture fine-grained action details. We further incorporate prompt tuning and a verb-rephrasing technique to enable smooth adaptation to the instrument--tissue interaction recognition task. Extensive experiments on the public laparoscopic benchmark, CholecT50, show that our method improves both Average Precision and Top-K accuracy. We also investigate whether visual embeddings of instrument--tissue interaction regions align better with the corresponding text by visualizing the cosine similarity between visual and textual embeddings. The visualization results indicate that the proposed method improves alignment between relevant visual and textual representations.
title TrajPred: Trajectory-Conditioned Joint Embedding Prediction for Surgical Instrument-Tissue Interaction Recognition in Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06999