Papers

Translating text embedded in Web images is crucial for improving content accessibility and cross-lingual information retrieval, particularly within social media and e-commerce domains. Although Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced multimodal understanding, applying them to Web image translation remains challenging due to the visual representation gap: standard encoders often prioritize high-level semantics over the fine-grained visual details required for recognizing diverse character morphologies. To address this challenge, we propose VaaWIT, an end-to-end framework that adapts Large Language Models for multilingual Web image translation. The framework introduces two key technical contributions: (1) a Dual-Stream Attention Module (DSAM), which facilitates bidirectional interaction between multilingual semantic features and detailed visual representations, thereby synthesizing unified features robust to textual variations; and (2) a Visual-Aware Adapter (VAA), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy that dynamically injects these fused visual cues into the frozen LLM backbone. This design enables the model to align the visual context with linguistic reasoning effectively while minimizing computational costs. Extensive experiments on eight tasks on three public benchmarks demonstrate that VaaWIT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source baselines and achieves competitive performance against proprietary models. These results validate the efficacy of integrating fine-grained visual perception into LLMs for complex Web content analysis.

Instruction-based video editing requires transforming a source video according to a natural-language instruction while preserving irrelevant content and remaining temporally coherent. We argue that existing Diffusion Transformer (DiT) editors struggle with this task for two structural reasons. First, conditioning signals are fed undifferentiated into all transformer blocks, forcing a single token stream to encode both global editing intent and fine-grained visual evidence. Second, the cross-attention patterns that govern the edit are supervised only indirectly through pixel-level reconstruction, leaving the model's internal reasoning process under-constrained. To address both limitations, we propose RVEDiT, an implicit Reasoning Video Editing DiT framework built around two complementary components. The first, Granularity-Routed Token Conditioning, introduces learnable editing tokens distilled from a multimodal LLM and routes them to shallow blocks, while reserving native visual and textual tokens for deeper blocks, thereby inducing a coarse-to-fine editing process inside the backbone. The second, Reference-Anchored Attention Alignment, employs a parameter-sharing reference branch during training and maximizes the mutual information between the attention features of the editing and reference branches, regularizing the model's internal reasoning without incurring any additional inference cost. Experiments on standard instruction-based video editing benchmarks show that RVEDiT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with particularly strong gains on localized and compositional edits.

Rapid advances in audio-video (AV) generation have enabled high-fidelity synthesis with synchronized sound, particularly for human-related scenarios involving speech and interactions. Yet evaluation for AV generation remains at an early stage, with only a few coarse-grained benchmarks for human-related scenarios and relying on limited preset evaluations with generic multimodal LLMs, leading to inaccurate assessments of model capabilities. To address these issues, we introduce AVBench, a fully automated benchmark tailored for human-centric AV generation. AVBench is built on two key designs for comprehensive and accurate evaluation: (i) Human-centric and fine-grained metrics. AVBench integrates ten evaluation dimensions designed for human-centered real-world scenarios, covering visual quality, audio quality, and multi-level consistency across modalities. These practical metrics capture human-related details that existing benchmarks often overlook. (ii) Specialized evaluators via preference learning. To address the lack of specialized training data, we construct large-scale supervision by transforming real-world videos into diverse training pairs with controlled perturbations. After fine-tuning on this high-quality dataset, the evaluators learn to reliably detect subtle cross-modal inconsistencies. Crucially, instead of producing discrete textual judgment, AVBench derives continuous evaluation scores from the model's prediction confidence on binary decisions. This probabilistic scoring mechanism enables a more reliable assessment than traditional VQA-style evaluation and aligns closely with human judgment. Taken together, AVBench offers automated evaluation for AV generation, demonstrates strong potential for data filtering, and serves as a differentiable reward signal for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

Recent work explores new opportunities at the intersection of vision-language-action models (VLAs) and geometric foundation models (GFMs) for 3D reconstruction, such as VGGT. While the resulting geometric VLAs often show improved performance, it remains unclear (i) if modern VLAs already have sufficient geometric understanding to start with, (ii) what is the best architecture to inject geometric understanding into a VLA, and (iii) what is the effect of other design choices that affect geometric VLAs. In this paper we provide a rigorous experimental analysis to shed light on these questions, for a specific choice of VLA (GR00T-N1.5) and GFM (VGGT). Our first contribution is to formalize prior work's intuition that current VLAs lack geometric understanding, by providing a rigorous analysis based on linear probing. The analysis quantifies, for the first time, the "geometric gap" between VLAs and GFMs. Our second contribution is to identify and compare different strategies to bridge GFMs with VLAs. We implement three different architectures, which differ in the way they inject geometry in the VLA, while keeping low-level implementation details as similar as possible, to ensure a fair comparison. Finally, we analyze the impact of non-architectural choices (e.g., training data, number of cameras, reconstruction quality) on the performance of the geometric VLAs.

With the widespread application of drones in recent years, object detection of aerial images has attracted increasing attention, especially open-vocabulary aerial detection which is not restricted to predefined categories. Due to the scarcity of drone's viewpoint images and their significant differences from natural images, it is difficult to achieve satisfying results by directly applying vanilla open-vocabulary detection methods designed for natural scenarios. Some studies propose to transfer knowledge from pre-trained models by using lightweight networks or generating pseudo labels, but they tend to rely on models trained on natural images, neglecting the potential of foundation models specifically tailored for remote sensing and aerial imagery. To address this limitation, we propose DisDop, a unified framework that systematically distills multi-level domain priors from remote sensing foundation models (e.g., RemoteCLIP and DINOv3) into a lightweight detector. Specifically, we first distill visual priors through a teacher fusion strategy that combines RemoteCLIP's cross-modal alignment capability with DINOv3's fine-grained local feature extraction ability, transferring their complementary strengths to the detector's backbone. Second, we distill textual priors embedded in RemoteCLIP's text encoder by explicitly modeling inter-category semantic relationships, while incorporating global contextual priors to enhance local feature representation for small objects. Through this multi-level prior distillation framework, our DisDop achieves new state-of-the-art performance on open-vocabulary aerial detection benchmarks. Extensive ablation analysis also demonstrates the rationality and effectiveness of our proposed modules.

Composed image retrieval (CIR) searches a corpus with a reference image and a text describing how to modify it. Despite rapid progress from triplet-trained compositors to zero-shot and generative methods, essentially all systems share one assumption: that a query maps to a single target, scored by Recall@K against one annotation. We argue this is fundamentally at odds with the task. A query such as make it more formal does not name an image but a region of the corpus, and which member the user intends is genuinely underdetermined. This underspecification is the root of the well-known false-negative problem and leaves current models unable to tell a precise query from an ambiguous one. We reframe CIR as calibrated intent resolution under uncertainty: a retriever is wrapped in a conformal prediction layer that returns a candidate set with a coverage guarantee and whose size is a principled measure of ambiguity; when the set is large, an expected-information-gain policy asks the single most useful clarifying question, drawn from interpretable ambiguity axes, and the set contracts. We introduce AmbiCIR, a benchmark and human-validated user simulator that revive the dormant auxiliary and dialogue annotations of CIRR and extend the multiple-positive setting of CIRCO. Across open-domain and fashion benchmarks our method matches single-turn state of the art, confirming calibrated resolution is cost-free on precise queries, while reaching the intended target in a fraction of the interaction budget required by naive conversational baselines, and it is the first to report valid coverage and calibration for the task.

Minority sampling aims to generate low-density instances on a data manifold and is of central importance in applications such as medical diagnosis, anomaly detection, and creative AI. Existing approaches, however, define minority samples relative to generative priors learned from training data, confining rarity to model-specific notions that may poorly reflect real-world semantics. In this work, we propose a world-centric perspective on minority sampling, which defines rarity with respect to real-world priors rather than generator-induced densities. To this end, we introduce JEPA guidance, a diffusion sampling framework guided by a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) – a class of world models that encode broad, semantically rich representations. JEPA guidance steers diffusion trajectories toward low-density regions under the implicit density induced by the JEPA, thereby aligning generated minorities with real-world semantic rarity. To make JEPA guidance computationally practical, we develop principled approximation strategies accompanied by theoretical error bounds, significantly reducing the overhead of guidance computation. Extensive experiments across unconditional, class-conditional, and text-to-image generation demonstrate that JEPA guidance consistently improves the fidelity and semantic validity of minority samples, outperforming generator-centric baselines in capturing real-world notions of rarity. Code is available at https://github.com/soobin-um/jepa-guidance.

Recent progress of video diffusion models have enabled extensive simulation of the physical world. While simulation with hand object interaction has been less explored. We propose DexSIM, a dexterous simulation framework for simulating dexterous manipulation in real-time. While previous works utilizing video diffusion and 3D reconstruction focus on navigation, dexterous manipulation has been limited while it has extensive applications for creating interactive experiences with the simulated world and for generating synthetic data for robotics. Existing methods lack real-time interactivity and long-term spatial consistency and memory. We propose a 2-stage training framework for DexSIM. First we train a bi-directional video diffusion model by jointly embedding the hand action trajectory and video in a unified feature space. We utilize gaussian heatmap hand encoding for more accurate hand representation. Then we conduct a roll-out based autoregressive training with updated spatial cache as attention sink for spatial memory, which improves long-term consistency and 3D aware dexterous manipulation simulation. DexSIM outperforms the baseline on pixel and semantic similarity, motion fidelity, and hand projection accuracy. It also allows new applications such as hand motion transfer and runs at 15.24 FPS real-time interactivity.

Ultra-low-field (ULF) MRI offers portable and accessible neuroimaging but suffers from reduced signal-to-noise ratio and limited spatial resolution compared to high-field (HF) systems. Acquiring paired ULF-HF data for supervised enhancement is often difficult, particularly in resource-limited settings. We introduce ULF-Synth, a framework that combines: (i) acquisition-based synthesis of realistic ULF images from HF volumes to create large-scale paired training data, (ii) a spatial-frequency domain objective that prioritizes recovery of high-frequency anatomical detail. This formulation is architecture-agnostic, consistently improving structural similarity and perceptual fidelity across encoder-decoder, adversarial, and diffusion-based translation models. When trained exclusively on synthetic data, the resulting models generalize effectively to real 64mT ULF acquisitions, improving downstream multiclass brain segmentation and achieving higher radiologist preference and diagnostic acceptability in a blinded reader study. These findings demonstrate that synthetic paired supervision provides a practical and scalable pathway for enhancing ULF MRI without requiring real paired acquisitions. Code, Models and Dataset: https://github.com/toufiqmusah/ULF-Synth

In-context image generation models such as FLUX.2 take a text prompt and an optional reference image as visual conditioning for the output. Internally, all three inputs – text, reference image, and the noise tokens – are concatenated and processed through a single attention stream, where all tokens can attend to one another. This leaves open how reference information flows through the model to produce the output image. We show that an implicit cross-modal binding emerges between the text tokens and the reference image: the text tokens absorb visual reference content during the forward pass, and that absorbed content causally influences the generated output. We surface this binding with three causal interventions on FLUX.2: T2I Lens, which decodes intermediate text-token activations through a text-to-image path; Attention Knockout, which severs specific attention edges; and I2I-to-I2I Patching, which copies text token activations between editing runs. Across 2,875 editing tasks on various images, including SUN397 and DreamBench++ datasets and images collected online, we observe a consistent division of labor: properties of the reference image, like color, style, and scene setting, are first written into the text tokens, which carry them to the generated image; pixel-exact properties like a specific face or instance identity bypass the text tokens and flow directly from reference to image through image-to-image attention. We further localize the reference-text binding to the padding tokens of the text sequence. These results show that text tokens in a multimodal DiT are not just prompt holders, but a structured channel for reference image content. More broadly, they suggest that even in unified-attention multimodal generative models, token modality structures how conditioning information is represented and routed across the network.

A robot resolving “put the cup on that one” must fuse gesture, language, and scene geometry, yet 3D grounding benchmarks only partially capture this regime: descriptions are written post-hoc, gestures are templated, or pointing is staged for the camera. MM-Conv captures natural co-speech gesture from dyadic VR interaction alongside full-body motion capture and 3D scene graphs. We use it to evaluate pose-language fusion with a decoupled late-fusion architecture in which pose and text pathways share no learned parameters. The two choices together make category, pose, and text contributions easier to isolate through controlled ablations. Fusion with frozen MiniLM category embeddings exceeds pose alone and the best text-only pathway on every reference type, reaching 31.9% top-1. The learned scalar gate flips between opposing policies depending on whether the text pathway has category access. This is a reliability diagnostic: fusion-accuracy claims for semantic grounding systems are indistinguishable from category-representation artifacts unless pathways are architecturally decoupled.

Scattering transforms achieve Lipschitz stability and translation invariance, but dense prediction tasks require preserving spatial structure lost in global averaging. We propose Phase-Aware Scattering Encoder-Decoder, which restores this information by explicitly preserving phase in skip connections. On image denoising (BSD68), breaking translation invariance improves PSNR by $+2.17$~dB; phase preservation adds $+1.03$~dB. A novel spatial shuffling ablation ($-1.26$~dB penalty) demonstrates phase encodes location-dependent structure. We conduct a preliminary extensibility study on a second dense prediction task (ISIC skin lesion segmentation), with full cross-validation as ongoing work. This work advances principled wavelet-deep learning integration, showing how phase information complements scattering's stability-expressiveness trade-off in pixel-level prediction.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly integrated into radiotherapy workflows, yet it remains vulnerable to out-of-distribution image data that can introduce unexpected behavior in clinical tasks. Deep learning (DL)-based anomaly detection for pelvic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains limited and transparent evaluation for full automation is lacking. This study aimed to develop two self-supervised anomaly-detection framework variations in radiotherapy for pelvic and brain MRI.A two-stage self-supervised DL-framework was trained separately for pelvic and brain MRI utilizing three public datasets. The first stage compressed normal image data into discrete representations, and a second stage modeled the representation distribution. Anomaly-evidence was obtained by combining perceptual image differences with token-surprisal scores via negative log-likelihood estimation. Automated detection was evaluated for two anatomical cohorts: pelvis, encompassing both synthetic global anomalies and real clinical anomalies, and brain, comprising clinically annotated anomalies. Performance was assessed using sensitivity, specificity, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). For each cohort, a subset of normal images was reserved for analysis. Promising exploratory performance across evaluation cohorts was obtained. AUCs were 0.97 (95% CI 0.96-0.99) for synthetic pelvic anomalies, 0.95 (95% CI 0.90-1.00) for clinical pelvic anomalies, and 0.81 (95% CI 0.74-0.87) for brain anomalies. Qualitative heatmap analysis showed spatial agreement between detected anomalies and reference annotations. The framework variations showed promising anomaly detection performance across pelvic and brain MRI, supporting its potential for automated MRI quality control in radiotherapy. Heatmap-based visualization further improved interpretability by spatially localizing detected anomalies.

We develop a rigorous algebraic framework for deep convolutional architectures, CNNs, ResNets, and encoder–decoder networks such as UNet, grounded in lattice theory and mathematical morphology. The central tool is the Matheron–Maragos–Banon–Barrera (MMBB) universal representation theory for translation-invariant operators, which we apply systematically to every layer of a standard deep network. The principal finding is that the standard CNN pipeline (linear convolution~$+$ ReLU~$+$ flat max-pooling) is a cross-lattice operator: the convolution is an erosion in the Fourier inf-semilattice while ReLU is a lattice-join closing and max-pooling is a dilation in the pointwise max-plus lattice, and their composition is a morphological opening in neither. A second finding is that the upper adjoint of ReLU in the pointwise lattice is a global (non-local) operator, the identity on globally non-negative functions and $-\infty$ otherwise, so no local morphological erosion can form an adjunction pair with ReLU. These two results together provide the precise algebraic reason why depth in standard CNNs introduces genuine representational power: the composed layer is not idempotent. Three layer designs that are genuine idempotent openings are identified and fully characterised: the pure max-plus morphological layer (pointwise lattice), the spectral Wiener layer (Fourier lattice), and the self-dual morphological layer. We establish a complete fixed-point and convergence theory. The framework also unifies max-pooling, strided convolution, and the Laplacian pyramid under the Goutsias–Heijmans adjoint pyramid theory, and gives the Activation–Pooling Dilation (APD) factorisation with its correct adjoint.

Event cameras capture brightness changes asynchronously with microsecond resolution, yet existing optical flow methods fail to fully exploit this temporal continuity. Frame-based approaches impose artificial accumulation latency and suffer from domain overfitting, while model-based local methods operate statelessly, discarding temporal history between predictions and yielding inaccurate flows. We propose LC-Flow, the first temporally continuous, learning-based optical flow estimator that operates purely from local events. At its core, a Continuous Local Recurrent Network maintains persistent hidden states per spatial grid, incrementally accumulating temporal context as events arrive. Unlike frame-based methods constrained to fixed accumulation windows, and unlike stateless model-based methods that recompute motion from scratch at each step, LC-Flow produces sparse local flow estimates at arbitrary timestamps with full motion history. To address the inherent ambiguity of local observations, we jointly learn a confidence score that quantifies the reliability of each prediction, explicitly handling event sparsity and the aperture problem. This confidence serves a dual role: filtering unreliable estimates for downstream tasks such as visual odometry, and providing principled weights for a multi-scale confidence-guided aggregation that reconstructs globally consistent flow from the sparse local outputs. LC-Flow achieves state-of-the-art performance among local methods on both MVSEC and DSEC, while the confidence-guided aggregation establishes a new overall state-of-the-art on the MVSEC benchmark, surpassing heavy frame-based networks that rely on global spatial priors.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently suffer from object hallucinations, yet the visual perceptual mechanism underlying this failure remains poorly understood. In this work, we reveal that hallucinations are strongly associated with a human-like attention distraction phenomenon, where humans under divided focus experience degraded visual clarity and produce inaccurate descriptions, while in models the same mechanism manifests as spatial inconsistency in multi-head attention and temporal fading of attention to image tokens during decoding. We further provide theoretical insights that attention dispersion increases model complexity and degrades classification generalization. Motivated by these findings, we propose an Attention-Focused Approach for Improved Image Perception (AFIP), which corrects attention distraction via cross-head attention enrichment and reinforces visual grounding through dynamic historical attention enhancement. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and models validate the effectiveness of AFIP without additional training. Code is available at: https://github.com/MIKUZ12/AFIP.

Zero-shot image restoration provides a flexible way to handle diverse degradations without task-specific training. However, existing methods typically rely on stacked layers or pre-trained features to enhance degradation expression, while overlooking physically consistent priors. The insufficient degradation prompts impose the heavy training burden and high sampling costs during zero-shot diffusion. Moreover, the fixed inference trajectory often collapses to suboptimal solutions under complex corruptions. We observe that heterogeneous degradations can be reparameterized into a minimal set of physically coherent parameters for compact representation. Based on this insight, we first propose a unified physical zero-shot image restoration (UP-ZeroIR) framework that explicitly models heterogeneous degradations into a homogeneous all-in-one distribution. The distribution can be optimized directly in the latent space, enabling principled solution exploration and effective prompt adaptation. Besides, we introduce a dynamic quality-refinement strategy that adaptively adjusts the diffusion trajectory for robust globally optimal convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across both single and mixed degradations. Our code is available at https://github.com/yangjinglyy/UP-ZeroIR

Low-light, long-exposure defocus deblurring remains a challenging problem due to the simultaneous presence of severe blur and complex biased noise. Existing methods typically rely on simplified noise assumptions, which limits their effectiveness under realistic imaging conditions. In this work, we propose Physen-Noise2Noise, a self-supervised deblurring framework guided by the physical model of defocus imaging, which leverages noisy multi-frame observations without requiring clean reference images. Unlike conventional Noise2Noise-based approaches that assume zero-mean noise, we derive a frequency-domain constraint inherent to the defocus imaging process and incorporate it into the learning framework via a learnable noise bias parameter. In addition, a multi-frame noisy initialization strategy is introduced to suppress complex biased noise prior to deblurring, providing a more stable starting point for reconstruction. This formulation explicitly models biased noise and enables joint bias correction and high-frequency detail recovery during training. Furthermore, we develop a pretrain-finetune variant to enhance robustness and generalization under challenging noise conditions. Extensive experiments on both simulation and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised approaches for defocus deblurring in the presence of complex biased noise.

Video world models have achieved strong visual realism, but this does not ensure that their dynamics are truly governed by actions. In this work, we argue that action faithfulness should be understood through the compositional structure of actions, which in many embodied settings follows a group structure (e.g., SE(2) for navigation). Based on this insight, we formalize action-conditioned world modeling as realizing a group action on the state space, providing a principled criterion for evaluating dynamics beyond visual quality. To operationalize this framework, we propose a unified approach that enforces identity, inverse, and composition consistency via latent-space regularization with synthesized supervision, avoiding additional data collection. We further introduce two metrics: Group-Action Consistency (GAC) and Group-Action Robustness (GAR), to evaluate structural correctness and rollout stability. Extensive experimental results show that our method consistently improves both GAC and GAR in state-of-the-art video world models without degrading perceptual quality.

Despite the central role of optimization in deep learning, most optimizers rely on update structures whose functional form is fixed before training begins. This static design can limit their ability to respond to changing gradient behavior across the loss landscape, where training may shift between stable, noisy, and inconsistent regimes. This study proposes PILOT (Policy-Informed Learned OpTimizer), an online optimizer that adapts its update behavior during training. Rather than using a fixed balance between momentum, normalization, and sign-based updates, PILOT uses gradient-direction agreement as a signal of local training stability. Conditioning the update rule on this agreement signal allows the optimizer to adjust its behavior when gradients become stable, noisy, or inconsistent. Experiments on FashionMNIST and CIFAR-10 show that PILOT consistently achieves the highest accuracy among the evaluated optimizers across convolutional settings. On the CNN architecture, PILOT reaches 94.13% on FashionMNIST and 81.94% on CIFAR-10. On ResNet-18, it further improves performance, reaching 95.71% on FashionMNIST and 93.42% on CIFAR-10. These results suggest that learning how to adapt the update structure during training can improve performance across both compact and deeper convolutional models while preserving a simple first-order optimization framework. The implementation of PILOT is publicly available at https://github.com/SattamAltwaim/PILOT.git

Human motion diffusion models can synthesize action sequences from text, but controlling motion intensity remains challenging. Existing approaches rely on effort-related adverbs, which are ambiguous and fail to capture quantitative aspects such as pacing, often resulting in flat and monotonous dynamics. We propose an intensity-control framework based on Effort Metric Attention (EMA), a cross-attention module that conditions diffusion on numerical effort signals. Inspired by Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), the framework focuses on the Time and Weight effort factors. We approximate these factors using two kinematic metrics: peak joint positional change for pacing and collective joint positional change for motion amount. EMA enables fine-grained, region-wise control without costly post-hoc optimization. We introduce two evaluation tasks, metric-to-motion consistency and body-part-level effort modulation, to assess numerical fidelity and localized control. Experiments and a user study show near-monotonic alignment between specified effort levels, generated motion dynamics, and established LMA descriptors. These results indicate effective and interpretable control of effort dynamics in practice.

Pedestrian intention and trajectory prediction are critical for the safe deployment of autonomous driving systems, directly influencing navigation decisions in complex traffic environments. Recent advances in large vision-language models offer a powerful new paradigm for these tasks by combining high-capacity visual understanding with flexible natural language reasoning. In this work, we introduce PedestrianQA, a large-scale video-based dataset that formulates pedestrian intention and trajectory prediction as question-answering tasks augmented with structured rationales. PedestrianQA expresses richly annotated pedestrian sequences, in natural language, enabling VLMs to learn from visual dynamics, contextual cues, and interactions among traffic agents while generating concise explanations of their predictions without needing specialized architectures tailored for each task. Empirical evaluations across PIE, JAAD, TITAN, and IDD-PeD show that finetuning state-of-the-art VLMs on PedestrianQA significantly improves intention classification, trajectory forecasting accuracy, and the quality of explanatory rationales, demonstrating the strong potential of VLMs as a unified and explainable framework for safety-critical pedestrian behavior modeling.

We present IQA-Spider, the first image quality assessment (IQA) framework that unifies reasoning, grounding, and referring into a single LMM-based framework for multi-granularity quality understanding. Existing LMM-based IQA methods typically support only partial perception dimensions, such as quality description and question answering~(i.e., reasoning) or pixel-level grounding. This limitation largely stems from the absence of (i) a unified task and data formulation and (ii) effective optimization paradigms for multi-granularity learning. To address these limitations, we formulate a rigorous four-task paradigm covering global and local quality description, pixel-level grounding, and region-level referring. Based on this formulation, we construct a corresponding IQA dataset with a scalable and automatic annotation pipeline, thereby providing a solid foundation for unified multi-granularity learning. To further enable unified perception, we adopt a conflict-free two-stage design that progressively extends text-level multi-granularity understanding to pixel-level grounding: (i) the first stage equips the model with fine-grained text-level reasoning across multiple IQA tasks, and (ii) the second stage introduces a training-free text-to-point grounding paradigm, which bridges textual semantics and pixel-level perception by mapping token logits to spatial coordinates. Based on these efforts, we achieve IQA-Spider with unified multi-granularity explainable image quality assessment. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate strong performance, validating the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed formulation and framework.

Amodal instance segmentation aims to predict the complete object mask including occluded regions that lack pixel-level observations and must be inferred with the aid of shape priors. Existing methods acquire shape priors through fixed-capacity encoding spaces or expensive generative models, and inject them uniformly across all spatial positions without adapting to the varying prior demand between visible and occluded regions. In this paper, we propose a gated reliability-adaptive shape prior framework, which introduces a shape prior memory module that combines learnable prototypes via cross-attention to produce instance-adaptive shape priors through weighted prototype combination rather than generation. A spatial adaptive reliability gate then employs the signed distance field of the visible mask to modulate injection intensity at each position according to its occlusion depth, preserving reliable features in visible regions while directing shape compensation toward occluded areas. Experiments on two mainstream amodal instance segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches under multiple evaluation settings, improving the mean intersection-over-union over occluded regions by over 11 percentage points on one of the two benchmarks under the standard setting, while using approximately one-third of the total parameters. Linear probing analysis further reveals that the visible-mask cross-attention module implicitly encodes occlusion geometry into visual token representations, explaining the effectiveness of the proposed module decomposition.

Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation (RRSIS) is a situated, task-driven cross-modal task related to the embodied perception paradigm, requiring models to align visual-spatial features with linguistic intentions for precise target perception. Recent research has focused on refining the granularity of textual features and optimizing image-text feature fusion to better guide target feature representations. However, insufficient descriptive granularity and sensitivity to semantic shifts can cause bottlenecks in cross-modal feature fusion. To address these issues, we propose the Image-Conditioned Instance Prompt Network (ICIPNet) with Bilateral Information Fusion, which is designed to alleviate bottlenecks in cross-modal feature fusion. ICIPNet introduces an Image-Conditioned Instance Prompt (ICIP) module to generate self-adaptive visual and semantic representations without external knowledge. The Bilateral Information Fusion (BIF) module enhances feature fusion along the token and channel dimensions. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed ICIPNet outperforms existing RRSIS models.

Natural-language instructions promise controllable end-to-end driving, but their benefit can be hidden when planners already receive reliable high-level commands. We propose NudgeVAD, a frozen-planner residual framework that uses language as a calibrated nudge to a VAD trajectory. With identity-initialized FiLM and a zero-initialized residual head, NudgeVAD is equivalent to the frozen planner at initialization, so learned deviations arise only from language-conditioned residuals. We evaluate NudgeVAD along a command-reliability axis. With reliable commands, language improves the initial planner but becomes nearly redundant once compared against VAD-FT (UNCOND), a compute-matched VAD model fine-tuned without language. With random commands, however, language becomes essential: detaching text degrades ADE6s to 3.166 m, while NudgeVAD with text recovers 2.806 m and outperforms VAD-FT (UNCOND) by 0.312 m. These results show that language is not universally additive; it is most valuable when the categorical command channel is unreliable.

Document retrieval in real-world scenarios faces significant challenges due to diverse document formats and modalities. Traditional text-based approaches rely on tailored parsing techniques that disregard layout information and are prone to errors, while recent parsing-free visual methods often struggle to capture fine-grained textual semantics in text-rich scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose Unveil, a novel visual-textual embedding framework that effectively integrates textual and visual features for robust document representation. Through knowledge distillation, we transfer the semantic understanding capabilities from the visual-textual embedding model to a purely visual model, enabling efficient parsing-free retrieval while preserving semantic fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that our visual-textual embedding method surpasses existing approaches, while knowledge distillation successfully bridges the performance gap between visual-textual and visual-only methods, improving both retrieval accuracy and efficiency.

Latent video diffusion models generate videos by progressively transforming Gaussian noise into realistic samples conditioned on text or visual inputs. However, existing conditioning methods often require additional training and computational overhead. Motivated by recent findings on the importance of frequency components in generative models, we propose a simple, training-free approach for motion-conditioned video generation by injecting low-frequency phase information from a reference video directly into the diffusion noise latents. Our method transfers motion cues without modifying the model architecture or inference pipeline. Using several applications, we demonstrate effective control over both appearance and dynamics in generated videos, while achieving competitive or superior results compared to more complex conditioning approaches.

Food defect detection is critical for automated quality control, yet existing studies lack unified benchmarks and suffer from data scarcity. We introduce FDD-48, a comprehensive dataset with fine-grained annotations across 13 food types and 48 defect categories under diverse real-world conditions. To improve detection with limited labeled data, we propose FDDet, a semi-supervised framework featuring two key components: (1) BBoxMixUp, a data augmentation technique that mixes same-category defect regions to reduce spurious feature associations, and (2) CGPC (Consistency-Guided Pseudo-Label Calibration), which filters pseudo-labels based on intra-sample consistency. Experiments show FDDet significantly outperforms mainstream detectors on FDD-48, demonstrating its effectiveness for food defect detection under data-limited scenarios.

As AI-powered compliance monitoring becomes increasingly important in public governance and industrial safety, the ability to provide verifiable evidence and traceable accountability signals is essential. However, existing video anomaly detection datasets focus on event-level binary classification, lacking the rule-driven, explainable analysis required for real-world compliance scenarios. We introduce FoodMonitor, a benchmark for explainable compliance analysis in commercial kitchen surveillance. FoodMonitor comprises 477 video clips with 3,307 violation annotations across a dual-channel design covering both person-level and environment-level violations. Each annotation specifies which rule was violated, what non-compliant behavior occurred, and who committed it with frame-level bounding boxes. We establish a unified evaluation protocol with a two-stage matching mechanism that separately assesses spatial localization and semantic understanding, along with a composite metric ($C_{\text{score}}$) that balances environment and person detection performance. Systematic evaluation of several state-of-the-art multimodal large language models reveals that the best-performing model achieves only 0.360 $C_{\text{score}}$, with spatial localization and fine-grained rule understanding emerging as the primary bottlenecks. Our analysis identifies two distinct failure modes: localization-dominated errors and semantics-dominated errors, providing diagnostic insights for future model development.