Customized Fusion: A Closed-Loop Dynamic Network for Adaptive Multi-Task-Aware Infrared-Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible (IR-VIS) image fusion integrates complementary multimodal information into a single fused image to support downstream vision tasks. However, existing methods are typically tailored to seen tasks within a fixed task set and struggle to generalize to unseen tasks, which restricts their applicability in real-world open-task scenarios. To address this issue, this paper proposes CRT-HMAR, a Causal Requirement Tracing-Guided Hierarchical Multi-Agent Regulation Framework for open-task-aware IR-VIS image fusion. CRT-HMAR introduces a Causal Requirement Tracing Task Localization mechanism, which actively intervenes in key image information and observes task-network response variations to map task-specific semantic preferences into image-level causal requirement maps. Based on these maps, a requirement analysis agent aggregates task-specific requirement knowledge to adaptively guide requirement-customized image fusion. Moreover, CRT-HMAR incorporates History-Analysis Multi-Objective Balancing and Task-Level-Correction Conflict Mitigation mechanisms, jointly constructing a hierarchical regulation chain of "requirement interpretation - task balancing - conflict mitigation". Through multiple collaborative agents, CRT-HMAR dynamically regulates key processes including open-task requirement modeling, multi-task balanced optimization, and gradient conflict mitigation. Extensive experiments on open-task scenarios involving five downstream tasks demonstrate that CRT-HMAR significantly improves generalization to unseen tasks while maintaining the performance and balance of seen tasks. Overall, CRT-HMAR shifts IR-VIS image fusion from task-oriented modeling toward requirement-oriented modeling, promoting its extension from closed-task settings to real-world open-task scenarios.

As a key technique in multi-modal processing, infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) plays a crucial role in integrating complementary spectral information for visual enhancement and downstream vision tasks. Despite remarkable progress, existing methods struggle to flexibly accommodate heterogeneous demands. Achieving adaptive fusion that aligns with various preferences from both human and machine vision remains an open and challenging problem. To address this challenge, we propose DPOFusion, a direct preference optimization (DPO) framework integrating the property-aligned latent diffusion model (PALDM) and the preference-controllable latent diffusion model (PCLDM), enabling task-guided, preference-adaptive IVIF for both human and machine vision. The PALDM leverages a latent fusion prior and a joint conditional loss to generate diverse candidate fusion results with various properties. PCLDM is subsequently fine-tuned via instance direct preference optimization (IDPO), enabling direct control of the final fusion results with heterogeneous preference signals. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework not only attains precise preference alignment among humans, vision-language models, and task-driven networks, but also sets a new benchmark for adaptive fusion quality and task-oriented transferability.

Infrared-visible image fusion (IVIF) is pivotal for multimodal perception, yet reconciling the inherent information disparity between thermal and textural features remains a fundamental challenge. Existing prior-guided methods often rely on static constraints that induce optimization conflicts or utilize extrinsic semantic priors from large-scale foundation models (e.g., CLIP/DINO), which frequently fail to exploit the intrinsic modality characteristics essential for high-fidelity fusion. To address these issues, we propose P2Fusion, a prior-guided distillation-based framework that reformulates IVIF via dual intrinsic prompts. Instead of imposing hard-coded penalties, we distill image-intrinsic priors, thermal saliency and spatial quality, into learnable dynamic regulators. Specifically, a Teach-to-Fuse mechanism provides dual-granularity progressive guidance, coupled with a Gated Dynamic Expert Recalibration (GDER) module for decoupled feature refinement. This design enables the network to adaptively mediate modal competition through expert specialization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that P2Fusion achieves state-of-the-art performance across five mainstream datasets. Notably, our framework demonstrates consistent performance advantages in fusion quality, achieving state-of-the-art results in 14 out of 20 key evaluation metrics across 5 benchmarks. Furthermore, it effectively contributes to the robustness of downstream perception, such as +3.2% mAP on MSRS, +0.5% mAP on M3FD and +0.9% mAP on DroneVehicle for object detection. Our code will be available at https://github.com/YiShi99/P2Fusion