News & Research

arXiv:2510.16335v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates the recently emerged problem of Language-assisted Image Clustering (LaIC), where textual semantics are leveraged to improve the discriminability of visual representations to facilitate image clustering. Due to the unavailability of true class names, one of core challenges of LaIC lies in how to filter positive nouns, i.e., those semantically close to the images of interest, from unlabeled wild corpus data. Existing filtering strategies are predominantly based on the off-the-shelf feature space learned by CLIP; however, despite being intuitive, these strategies lack a rigorous theoretical foundation. To fill this gap, we propose a novel gradient-based framework, termed as GradNorm, which is theoretically guaranteed and shows strong empirical performance. In particular, we measure the positiveness of each noun based on the magnitude of gradients back-propagated from the cross-entropy between the predicted target

arXiv:2511.11051v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fusion enables the composition of subject and style representations for controllable generation without retraining. However, existing approaches primarily operate through weight-level merging, without explicitly modeling how independently trained LoRAs interact in the shared parameter space. We adopt a geometric perspective on LoRA fusion, interpreting content and style LoRAs as occupying overlapping, non-orthogonal low-rank subspaces, where such overlap can lead to conflicting parameter updates that affect generation quality. This observation motivates us to reformulate LoRA fusion not merely as parameter combination, but as a problem of controlling how updates from overlapping subspaces are combined. Based on this insight, we propose Null Space Projection LoRA (NP-LoRA), a training-free framework that employs projection as a fusion operator to explicitly modulate cross-LoRA interactions. Specifically, NP-L

arXiv:2512.07078v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Small object detection in complex scenes exposes a fundamental tension in neural network design: backbone attention distributes computation uniformly regardless of content, pyramid necks inflate activation magnitudes during upsampling without norm compensation, and bottleneck convolutions progressively smooth high-frequency edge components through accumulated spatial filtering. In response, we develop DFIR-DETR by tracing each proposed module back to a specific, measurable deficiency in the RT-DETR baseline: uniform attention that ignores spatial complexity, norm drift that destabilises upsampled features, and spatial convolutions that progressively suppress the high-frequency components small objects depend on. On NEU-DET and VisDrone, DFIR-DETR achieves 92.9% and 51.6% mAP50 with only 11.7M parameters and 47.2 GFLOPs, demonstrating consistent gains across two qualitatively different detection domains.

arXiv:2512.20901v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the rapid development of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the growing demand for their applications, efficient compression of the image inputs has become increasingly important. Existing VLMs predominantly digest and understand high-bitrate compressed images, while their ability to interpret low-bitrate compressed images has yet to be explored by far. In this paper, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the ability of VLM against compressed images, varying existing widely used image codecs and diverse set of tasks, encompassing over one million compressed images in our benchmark. Next, we analyse the source of performance gap, by categorising the gap from a) the information loss during compression and b) generalisation failure of VLM. We visualize these gaps with concrete examples and identify that for compressed images, only the generalization gap can be mitigated. Finally, we propose a universal VLM adapto

arXiv:2601.14180v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Self-supervised learning has been increasingly investigated for low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) image denoising, as it alleviates the dependence on paired normal-dose CT (NDCT) data, which are often difficult to collect. However, many existing self-supervised blind-spot denoising methods suffer from training inefficiencies and suboptimal performance due to restricted receptive fields. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel Progressive $\mathcal{J}$-invariant Learning that maximizes the use of $\mathcal{J}$-invariant to enhance LDCT denoising performance. We introduce a step-wise blind-spot denoising mechanism that enforces conditional independence in a progressive manner, enabling more fine-grained learning for denoising. Furthermore, we explicitly inject a combination of controlled Gaussian and Poisson noise during training to regularize the denoising process and mitigate overfitting. Extensive experiments on the Mayo LDCT da

arXiv:2601.15224v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating task progress requires reasoning over long-horizon dynamics rather than recognizing static visual content. While modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at describing what is visible, it remains unclear whether they can infer how far a task has progressed from partial observations. To this end, we introduce Progress-Bench, a benchmark for systematically evaluating progress reasoning in VLMs. Beyond benchmarking, we further explore a human-inspired two-stage progress reasoning paradigm through both training-free prompting and training-based approach based on curated dataset ProgressLM-45K. Experiments on 14 VLMs show that most models are not yet ready for task progress estimation, exhibiting sensitivity to demonstration modality and viewpoint changes, as well as poor handling of unanswerable cases. While training-free prompting that enforces structured progress reasoning yields limited and model-dependent gains, the train

arXiv:2603.02897v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in generative image compression (GIC) have delivered remarkable improvements in perceptual quality. However, many GICs rely on large-scale and rigid models, which severely constrain their utility for flexible transmission and practical deployment in low-bitrate scenarios. To address these issues, we propose Progressive Generative Image Compression (ProGIC), a compact codec built on residual vector quantization (RVQ). In RVQ, a sequence of vector quantizers encodes the residuals stage by stage, each with its own codebook. The resulting codewords sum to a coarse-to-fine reconstruction and a progressive bitstream, enabling previews from partial data. We pair this with a lightweight backbone based on depthwise-separable convolutions and small attention blocks, enabling practical deployment on both GPUs and CPU-only devices. Experimental results show that ProGIC attains comparable compression performance compared with previ

arXiv:2603.24985v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Segmenting the left atrial (LA) wall from late gadolinium enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) is challenging because of its thin geometry, low contrast, and limited expert annotations. We propose a model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) framework with a 3D residual U-Net backbone for K-shot (K = 5, 10, 20) LA wall segmentation. The framework is meta-trained on LA wall tasks together with auxiliary LA and right atrial (RA) cavity tasks and uses a boundary-aware composite loss to improve thin-structure delineation. We evaluated MAML on a held-out clean test set and assessed its robustness under an unseen synthetic domain shift and on a local cohort. On the held-out clean test set, MAML outperformed the K-shot fine-tuning baseline at 5-shot, achieving Dice coefficient (DSC) = 0.54 versus 0.48 and Hausdorff distance (HD95) = 4.60 versus 6.40 mm. At 20-shot, MAML approached the fully supervised model trained from scratch, with DS

arXiv:2603.28767v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent image generation models have shown strong capabilities in generating high-fidelity and photorealistic images. However, they are fundamentally constrained by frozen internal knowledge, thus often failing on real-world scenarios that are knowledge-intensive or require up-to-date information. In this paper, we present Gen-Searcher, as the first attempt to train a search-augmented image generation agent, which performs multi-hop reasoning and search to collect the textual knowledge and reference images needed for grounded generation. To achieve this, we construct a tailored data pipeline and curate two high-quality datasets, Gen-Searcher-SFT-10k and Gen-Searcher-RL-6k, containing diverse search-intensive prompts and corresponding ground-truth synthesis images. We further introduce KnowGen, a comprehensive benchmark that explicitly requires search-grounded external knowledge for image generation and evaluates models from multiple di

arXiv:2604.10077v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In Document Understanding, the challenge of reconstructing damaged, occluded, or incomplete text remains a critical yet unexplored problem. Subsequent document understanding tasks can benefit from a document reconstruction process. In response, this paper presents a novel unified pipeline combining state-of-the-art Optical Character Recognition (OCR), advanced image analysis, masked language modeling, and diffusion-based models to restore and reconstruct text while preserving visual integrity. We create a synthetic dataset of 30{,}078 degraded document images that simulates diverse document degradation scenarios, setting a benchmark for restoration tasks. Our pipeline detects and recognizes text, identifies degradation with an occlusion detector, and uses an inpainting model for semantically coherent reconstruction. A diffusion-based module seamlessly reintegrates text, matching font, size, and alignment. To evaluate restoration quali

arXiv:2604.27247v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Hedges and other linear woody features provide valuable ecosystem services, particularly within intensively managed agricultural landscapes. They are key elements for climate adaptation and biodiversity amongst others not only due to a largely varying flora, but also as a feeding-, resting-, and nesting place for many animals and insects including valuable pollinators. Therefore, they require dedicated management, preservation, and attention. Thus, systematic and large-scale mapping of these features from Earth observation data is of high importance. However, transferable and reusable workflows for linear woody feature mapping remain a key methodological challenge, given the diversity of sensor types, spatial resolutions, data acquisition conditions, and complex landscape variability encountered across study areas. We introduce a modular workflow built around two independently optimizable components. Firstly, a flexible input data int

arXiv:2605.05997v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dynamic spatial reasoning from monocular video is essential for bridging visual intelligence and the physical world, yet remains challenging for vision-language models (VLMs). Prior approaches either verbalize spatial-temporal reasoning entirely as text, which is inherently verbose and imprecise for complex dynamics, or rely on external geometric modules that increase inference complexity without fostering intrinsic model capability. In this paper, we present 4DThinker, the first framework that enables VLMs to "think with 4D" through dynamic latent mental imagery, i.e., internally simulating how scenes evolve within the continuous hidden space. Specifically, we first introduce a scalable, annotation-free data generation pipeline that synthesizes 4D reasoning data from raw videos. We then propose Dynamic-Imagery Fine-Tuning (DIFT), which jointly supervises textual tokens and 4D latents to ground the model in dynamic visual semantics. B

arXiv:2605.15828v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Feed-forward 3D reconstruction models, represented by Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT), jointly predict multiple visual geometry tasks such as depth estimation, camera pose prediction, and point cloud reconstruction in a single forward pass. They have been widely adopted in 3D vision applications, but their billion-scale parameters bring substantial memory and computation overhead, posing challenges for on-device deployment. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is an effective technique to reduce this overhead. Existing PTQ methods for feed-forward 3D models mainly focus on handling heavy-tailed activation distributions and constructing diverse calibration datasets. However, we observe that feed-forward 3D models predict multiple geometric attributes through a shared backbone, where different transformer blocks and hidden channels contribute distinctly to each task, resulting in substantially different sensitivities to quantiza

arXiv:2605.18214v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collecting large-scale egocentric video datasets with dense spatial and temporal annotations is costly, slow, and often constrained by environmental biases, privacy constraints, and limited coverage of interaction patterns. While synthetic data has shown strong potential in several vision domains, its use for egocentric perception remains relatively underexplored, especially for tasks requiring temporally coherent human-object interactions. In this work, we introduce EgoInteract, a controllable simulator for egocentric video generation designed to model fine-grained egocentric interactions and their temporal dynamics. The simulator enables precise control over camera, human body and hand motion, object manipulation, and scene composition across diverse environments. Building on this framework, we generate a synthetic egocentric video dataset with dense spatial and temporal annotations for temporal action segmentation, next-active obje

arXiv:2605.21487v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Currently, enhancing Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) with image understanding, generation, and editing capabilities mainly relies on mixed multi-task training. Due to inherent task conflicts, such strategy requires complex multi-stage pipelines, massive data mixing, and balancing tricks, merely resulting in a performance trade-off rather than true mutual reinforcement. To break this paradigm, we propose Uni-Edit, an intelligent image editing task that serves as the first general task for UMM tuning. Unlike complex mixed pipelines, Uni-Edit improves performance across all three abilities at once using only one task, one training stage, and one dataset. Specifically, we first identify image editing as an inherently ideal general task, as it naturally demands both visual understanding and generation. However, existing editing data relies on simplistic instructions that severely underutilize a model's understanding capacity. To address t