Single Images

Label-free clustering of frozen pretrained visual embeddings offers a scalable route to biodiversity monitoring, but image-only fine-grained taxonomy exhibits a consistent coarse-to-fine failure mode: clusters recover broad taxonomic structure yet plateau at species level. We study this behaviour on BIOSCAN-5M through an information-calibrated clustering analysis. BioCLIP~2 features with UMAP and HDBSCAN reach $0.79$ AMI at family and $0.67$ at genus, substantially improving over the prior image baseline and remaining competitive with oracle-$K$, graph-based, and learned clustering heads on the same frozen features. To diagnose whether the remaining plateau is method-limited or information-limited, we introduce InfoTaxa, which combines clustering efficiency---the fraction of probe-estimated image information recovered by an unsupervised partition---with paired DNA as an audit signal only, not an inference input. The density pipeline recovers approximately $0.90$ and $0.81$ of the image-available information at order and family, respectively. Held-out late-fusion probes show that adding DNA to the image embedding reduces species-level prediction error by approximately two bits. Robustness analyses cover multiple image encoders, described-species and rare-class subsets, probe diagnostics, and held-out-species coarse-rank generalisation and same-species retrieval. Thus, in the tested setting, species-level label-free clustering is both clustering-limited and representation-limited: improved clustering may recover additional image-exposed structure, but cannot close the DNA-audited information gap alone.

An image tool can change its underlying generator while retaining its public name, making version attribution from online posts ambiguous. We study this problem after the ChatGPT Images 2.5 launch. Our frozen collection contains 3,478 images from 2,440 posts across 8 sources. Recorded posting times fall within the first 51.1 hours after the announcement. It records three attribution tiers and retains standalone images after image-form filtering and targeted review. Caption claims and host records provide admission evidence, not independently verified generator identity. The observed content profile depends on the source mixture: NightCafe supplies 39.0% of images but 77.0% of CLIP-assigned fantasy scenes. We then evaluate six frozen detectors at thresholds calibrated to a 5% flag rate on reference photographs. Collection flag rates range from 3.7 to 56.4%, falling 42-81 percentage points below GenImage recall. Held-out artwork false-positive rates range from 1.5 to 96.5%, so a higher collection flag rate does not by itself establish better detection. An exploratory X-only comparison with our April collection finds a higher September flag rate for Effort, and a suggestive difference for DoU, under fixed-threshold post-clustered bootstrap intervals. Attribution, content and processing differences prevent a causal interpretation of these contrasts. The collection supports analysis of reported model use during a product transition, with source and attribution evidence retained for interpretation. The collection is released at https://scam.ai/research.

Part-aware 3D asset generation enables applications such as editing, articulation, simulation, and fabrication, yet existing methods can generate visually complete individual parts without ensuring that they form a valid physical assembly. Consequently, generated neighboring parts may interpenetrate, lack valid connections, or collapse under gravity. We propose a physics-guided framework for improving single-image part-aware 3D generation with physically compatible geometry and stable connections. Our method resolves inter-part penetration, recovers a contact graph between neighboring parts, and introduces parameterized connectors at their contact surfaces. Using feedback from physical simulation, we refine connector placement, orientation, and dimensions to improve assembly stability while preserving the generated geometry. We further introduce a physics-based evaluation protocol that complements conventional geometric metrics by directly testing assembly validity and stability under gravity. Experiments comparing against multiple part-aware 3D generators show substantial improvements in physical realizability and stability while maintaining geometric quality. We additionally validate the resulting parts through 3D printing and real-world assembly.

This paper presents a marker-free eye-gaze estimation approach using a single 2D camera, such as an integrated laptop webcam. The gaze-related features are estimated from iris localization and head pose estimated by using depth from defocus. A variational Bayesian multinomial logistic regression framework is used as mapping from the estimated features to the position of regard, based on an 8-dimensional feature vector of head-pose and iris-displacement parameters. No external marker is needed. Experiments were conducted by estimating the gaze of people watching a computer screen at different distances and compared against five existing methods. The obtained scores demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

We address the problem of discovering repeated elements from a single image. In contrast to existing approaches that depend on large annotated datasets, curated multi-image collections, or object segmentation masks, we show that a single image can suffice to learn a meaningful object model in a completely bottom-up fashion, without any prior knowledge beyond a coarse scale prior. Our method learns a tunable image-space prototype of the repeated elements through a reconstruction objective, enabling the model to identify and synthesize consistent object instances within the same image. Experiments on 116 real images from the FSC-147 dataset demonstrate that our method successfully learns coherent element models and captures intra-category variation on challenging images. Qualitative results reveal superior reconstructions and interpretable decompositions compared to classical decomposition, joint alignment, and 3D object modeling methods, while maintaining a simple 2D formulation. These results suggest that meaningful object discovery can emerge from single image learning alone.

Radiance field representations such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enable high-quality novel view synthesis but can introduce complex, view-dependent artifacts from reconstruction, rendering, and compression. Reliable perceptual quality assessment (QA) is thus essential for evaluating rendered views and guiding the design of perceptually faithful scene representations. Existing full-reference QA metrics require an aligned reference image, while recent cross-reference metrics relax this requirement by comparing a test view with non-aligned references. However, under wide-baseline radiance field settings, selecting a reliable nearby reference can be difficult, particularly when evaluating views along arbitrary trajectories and poses. We propose SCODA, a lightweight scene-conditioned objective QA method that shifts QA from explicit image-to-image comparison to scene-manifold modeling. High-quality observations of each scene are represented as a multivariate Gaussian distribution in deep feature space, producing a semantic fidelity score that measures deviation from the scene distribution. A weakly-supervised distortion-aware patch discriminator provides a complementary realism signal, and both cues are combined through an unsupervised bounded fusion strategy. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show strong agreement with human judgments and robust generalization across GS- and NeRF-generated views and trajectories. Code is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/saeedmp/scoda.

We introduce LLaDA-Image, a unified framework that pairs a 6B Diffusion Transformer (DiT) trained from scratch with a frozen vision-language understanding module built on the LLaDA2.0-Mini diffusion language model backbone. Instead of relying heavily on paired image-text data from the beginning, we first build a strong visual generative prior through image-only pre-training and mid-training. The generation pipeline comprises 220M samples, 98 of which are real images. For efficient and scalable optimization, we use parameter-free RMSNorm throughout the DiT together with the Muon optimizer. The resulting unified model produces highly photorealistic images while accurately following fine-grained editing instructions. We further distill LLaDA-Image into LLaDA-Image-Turbo, enabling fast inference in 2-4 sampling steps. On Qwen-Image-Bench, LLaDA-Image achieves overall scores of 53.53 and 53.38 on the English and Chinese tracks, respectively, setting a new state-of-the-art among open-source models on both tracks. To support further research on capable and efficient generative models, we release our model weights, training code, and detailed recipes.

Understanding the composition of large-scale autonomous driving datasets is essential for safety, robustness, and reliable operation across domains. For example, domain shift between locations could lead to the operating environment being misaligned with the training data, resulting in potentially dangerous performance degradation. Yet, existing data analysis pipelines largely rely on metadata, predefined labels, or manual inspection, which provide limited semantic insight or do not scale. This paper studies set difference captioning: given two subsets of images, the goal is to produce a natural-language hypothesis describing differences between the target and reference set. Building on a two-stage formulation, we adapt the method to autonomous driving by focusing on object-centric patches derived from object detection, which simplifies aggregation and enables attribution of differences to specific object instances or categories. To evaluate this setting in-domain, we introduce a new benchmark, AD-Diff Bench. Low-concentration experiments assess the suitability of set-difference-captioning approaches to sparse, real-world differences. We restrict our experiments to open-weight models to support reproducibility and ease of deployment. The proposed benchmark and analysis provide a step towards practical, human-interpretable dataset introspection for autonomous driving datasets. Our implementation and benchmark dataset are available at https://github.com/KIT-MRT/AD-Diff

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to make decisions from visual inputs. We introduce FAIRLENS, a benchmark and evaluation framework for measuring both the fairness and the validity of VLM responses in three high-stakes domains: hiring, legal, and healthcare. FAIRLENS pairs real face images spanning gender, race, and age groups with closed- and open-ended questions, giving more than 100K image-question pairs per model, and evaluates responses from four complementary views: demographic parity over adverse outcome rates, soundness, demographic association over unsupported roles and statuses, and bias in free-text generation. Soundness is the central validity criterion: a response is sound when it follows the evidence stated in the question and abstains when the image cannot support an answer. Evaluating eight VLMs, we find that the primary failure is unwarranted inference rather than unequal treatment. Models routinely infer qualifications, threat, illness, or professional role from a face instead of abstaining, and the weakest model does so on 99% of the questions its input cannot answer. These failures are most severe in legal and healthcare, where recognizing insufficient evidence matters most, and disparity metrics alone would miss them: parity gaps are small in absolute terms, yet when baseline adverse rates are low the same gap means one demographic group receives adverse labels several times as often as another, and a small gap can equally reflect a model that treats every group unsafely. Bias in free-text responses is only loosely coupled to multiple-choice accuracy, so correct structured answers do not imply safe generation. FAIRLENS shows that fair high-stakes VLM behavior requires similar treatment across groups and refusal to infer high-stakes attributes from appearance, and its question suite transfers to any face corpus with demographic annotations.

Composed image retrieval (CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a text modification. This paper studies metadata-available CIR reranking, where a fixed CIR model first returns a candidate pool and gallery metadata is then used for second-stage concept-guided scoring. We introduce AutoConcept, a training-free reranker that converts concept evidence into an interpretable memory. AutoConcept filters noisy concepts, activates query-relevant positive constraints with an auxiliary negative penalty, and combines base retrieval scores with metadata-based concept-candidate alignment through inference-time calibration. On FashionIQ, AutoConcept yields significant early-rank improvements over WeiMoCIR and consistent plug-in gains on LinCIR candidate pools. Metadata-aware controls show that structured concept memory adds signal beyond direct query-text and extracted-attribute matching, while a query-only variant further supports the effectiveness of concept-level reranking. A supplementary real-human concept-label study indicates that the same memory interface can consume participant-provided evidence. These results position AutoConcept as an interpretable concept-memory reranker for product-style CIR galleries with available metadata.

Image style is a highly abstract, human-constructed concept shaped by a range of visual factors and intrinsically entangled with content, yet a unified and explicit definition of image style remains lacking. In this work, we first discuss the fundamental question of what is style and then propose a hierarchical style definition that describes image style from an overall style identity to fine-grained visual attributes, providing a more structured, transferable, and interpretable style representation. Based on this definition, we refine the style annotation pipeline of MegaStyle and construct MegaStyle++-8M, a large-scale style dataset containing 150K overall style identities, 1M fine-grained style prompts, and 8M stylized images. Extensive analyses demonstrate that our hierarchical definition substantially expands the style space in both diversity and semantic breadth, while precisely capturing intrinsic visual style of reference images. The dataset and code will be updated at https://github.com/Tencent/MegaStyle, we hope MegaStyle++ provides a scalable foundation for studying and modeling diverse image styles.

Monocular depth estimation has long stood as a fundamental challenge in computer vision, enabling a wide range of applications including 3D reconstruction, robotics, autonomous driving, and augmented reality. This survey traces the field's evolution from early learning-based methods to the emergence of transformative foundation models. We begin by framing the problem, distinguishing between relative and metric depth estimation, and highlighting the key challenges that have shaped a decade of research. We then present common problem formulations and introduce the most widely used datasets, covering indoor, outdoor, and synthetic data. Following this, we review major advances prior to the foundation model era, distilling core insights from influential methods that contributed to improvements in accuracy, efficiency, and robustness. The survey then turns to the recent surge of foundation-model-based approaches, categorizing them into discriminative and generative paradigms and emphasizing the critical roles of large-scale pretraining (e.g., DINOv3) and synthetic data. We compare representative models using both quantitative benchmarks and qualitative examples, and discuss natural extensions to video-based depth estimation. Further, to illustrate real-world impact, we highlight the integration of depth estimation into applications such as visual SLAM, content generation, and robot perception. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising research directions as the field advances further into the era of foundation models.

Stain normalization reduces color variations caused by variations in staining protocols and imaging conditions, thereby enhancing computer-aided diagnostic system performance. Traditional methods derive mapping relationships from individual or limited reference images through pixel-wise transformation, offering style flexibility but suffering from inaccurate color mapping extraction. While existing deep-learning-based approaches achieve accurate dataset-wide color mapping through complex neural networks, they face challenges including computational inefficiency, artifact generation, and fixed normalization directions requiring model retraining for directional changes. To address these limitations, we propose StainPresetNet - a novel framework that combines structural preservation with dataset-level color mapping while maintaining computational efficiency. Our method implements pixel-wise normalization guided by preset reference images, enabling multi-directional adaptability without retraining. Evaluations on cytopathology and histopathology datasets demonstrate that StainPresetNet achieves superior color mapping accuracy compared to conventional methods, effectively improves classifier generalization in diagnostic tasks, and reduces computational overhead by 90% versus existing deep learning approaches. The proposed preset-guided mechanism facilitates flexible adjustment of normalization directions through simple reference image replacement, overcoming the directional rigidity of current deep-learning-based solutions.

Past literature on face recognition for monozygotic (("identical") twins points to facial marks and mirror asymmetry as possible directions for improved accuracy of twins recognition. The Celeb Twins Test Set (CTTS) contains web-scraped image pairs for 80 sets of celebrity twins. It is the only twins test set with meta-data for twins with distinguishing skin marks and possible mirror asymmetry. CTTS is organized in the manner of face verification test sets such as LFW, CALFW, CPLFW, CFP-FP, and AgeDB-30. Current deep CNN matchers can achieve over 76% accuracy in classifying CTTS same-person / different-person image pairs. We show that current matchers do not make use of skin marks, or asymmetry, and discuss reasons for this. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of using generative AI tools such as Grok, ChatGPT and Gemini to create images of imagined monozygotic twins as a means to increase representation of twins in face recognition training sets.

Recovering 3D digital humans from a single 2D image is an ill-posed computer vision problem due to the loss of depth information. Probabilistic 3D human pose estimation compensates for this by estimating a set of 3D hypotheses from a prior distribution via generative models. However, most prior work focuses only on 3D keypoints, which often leads to implausible poses that are difficult to apply to downstream tasks, e.g. animation or digital humans. SMPL-based methods are more scalable thanks to the explicit body priors, but it requires more complex modeling of the generation process due to the non-additive nature of the joint rotations. In this work, we propose a novel approach for probabilistic 3D humans using quaternion-constrained continuous normalizing flows conditioned on 2D pose estimations. Our proposed quaternion flows show significant advantages over approaches using other rotation representations. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results of our method on Human3.6M, particularly in ambiguous settings, and comparable pose estimation accuracy on challenging 3DPW and EMDB benchmarks.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance on image-grounded text generation and visual question answering. However, it remains difficult for them to comprehensively and accurately describe the factual relations among the entities and concepts associated with the objects depicted in an image. In this work, we propose a framework that efficiently exploits factual information from a knowledge graph via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), with the goal of enabling LVLMs to generate detailed and accurate image explanations. Specifically, our method alternates between answer generation and knowledge-graph retrieval, and controls the search using a correctness judgment, thereby acquiring the necessary and sufficient factual information efficiently. We also construct a knowledge graph for the artwork domain (ExpArt-KG), in which the correspondence between images and entities is unambiguous. Applying the proposed method to this knowledge graph, we show experimentally that it improves the level of detail of artwork explanations and reduces the retrieval cost of external knowledge while maintaining generation quality comparable to that of iterating a fixed number of times.

Existing monocular full-body 3D human-object interaction (HOI) methods do not combine explicit finger-level grasp optimization with category-agnostic object reconstruction. Despite plausible body-object configurations, their fingers may float from or penetrate objects instead of forming a grasp. We present GraspHOI, the first framework that reconstructs a full-body 3D HOI from a single image while explicitly optimizing finger articulation against the reconstructed object. GraspHOI recovers object geometry directly, without predefined meshes or a fixed category vocabulary. It reconstructs the body, hands, and object separately, aligning them in metric camera space via depth-based registration and image-space alignment. Occlusion-aware palmar correspondences seat the object against the grasping hand, and contact-aware optimization refines arm and finger articulation to form surface contact without excessive penetration. Across four benchmarks and six baselines, GraspHOI improves relative human-object placement, hand accuracy, and contact plausibility. Full pipeline code will be released.

Remote sensing image change captioning (RSICC) converts bitemporal imagery into a sentence describing semantic changes. Most RSICC methods condition caption decoders directly on fused visual features, leaving intermediate change structure and decoder-interface consistency less studied. We present HIMEC, combining Directional Change Representation (DCR) with fixed-interface decoding. DCR separates signed differences into appearance-oriented, disappearance-oriented, and shared-context streams before fusion. A learned-query encoder converts the fused representation into visually conditioned change-query tokens that form the scene decoder's only sample-dependent memory. A training-only auxiliary phrase decoder supplies caption-derived supervision. With a fixed zero input, the scene decoder maintains the same interface during training and inference. Separately, we evaluate a local-to-scene cascade conditioned on teacher-forced local states during training and autoregressive states at inference. On changed LEVIR-CC validation pairs, these states have a mean cosine distance of 0.69. Regime-matched conditioning recovers most of the associated deficit, whereas permuting state correspondence causes no detectable penalty. These findings are limited to the evaluated cascade. In a matched three-seed comparison, HIMEC reaches a Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation (CIDEr) score of $142.81\pm0.60$ on LEVIR-CC, versus $139.51\pm3.40$ for direct fused-feature memory. On SECOND-CC, fixed-zero and regime-matched diagnostic conditioning reach 75.67 and 76.99 CIDEr, respectively, versus 60.77 for the mismatched cascade. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ayshaashra/HIMEC upon publication.

Estimating human gaze targets from images in-the-wild is an important and formidable task. Existing approaches primarily employ brittle, multi-stage pipelines that require explicit inputs, like head bounding boxes and human pose, in order to identify the subject of gaze analysis. As a result, detection errors can cascade and lead to failure. Moreover, these prior works lack the flexibility of specifying the gaze analysis task via natural language prompting, an approach which has been shown to have significant benefits in convenience and scalability for other image analysis tasks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Promptable Gaze Target Estimation (PGE) task, a new end-to-end, concept-driven paradigm for gaze analysis. PGE conditions gaze prediction on flexible user text or visual prompts (e.g., "the boy in the red shirt" or "person in point [0.52, 0.48]") to identify a specific subject for gaze analysis. This approach integrates subject localization with gaze estimation, and eliminates the rigid dependency on intermediate analysis stages. We develop a scalable data engine to generate Gaze-Co (Gaze Estimation with Concepts), a dataset and benchmark of 120K high-quality, prompt-annotated image pairs. We also propose GazeAnywhere, the first model designed for PGE. GazeAnywhere uses a transformer-based detector to fuse features from frozen encoders and simultaneously solves subject localization, in/out-of-frame presence, and gaze target heatmap estimation. GazeAnywhere achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple PGE benchmarks, setting a strong baseline for this new problem even on a difficult out-of-domain, real-world clinical dataset. GazeAnywhere is open-sourced in github.com/IrohXu/GazeAnywhere.

Most learned image compression systems rely on a single latent representation combined with a hyperprior, which limits their ability to efficiently capture image structure across spatial scales. In this work, we propose a hierarchical latent representation to improve the efficiency of the entropy model. By using multiple latents at different scales, each with its own entropy model, we better capture the spatial structure of the latent representation. Our experiments show that this approach achieves a 17.9% BD-rate reduction over VVC on Kodak, demonstrating the effectiveness of multi-scale latent representations. Furthermore, the approach is orthogonal to other advances in learned image compression, making it a versatile addition to existing methods.

Recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved impressive performance in recipe generation from food images.However, cooking is a structured transformation process in which ingredients undergo state changes through ordered actions,while free-form recipe language leaves the corresponding entities, intermediate states, and dependencies largely implicit and entangled.A graph representation makes this procedural knowledge explicit and compositional, providing a structured basis for assessing whether model outputs encode process-level knowledge rather than merely presenting plausible textual descriptions. To address this limitation, we present ReGraph, a large-scale recipe graph dataset that represents ingredients, cooking actions, and tools as entities, uses entity attributes to describe ingredient state changes, and employs typed relations to encode manipulation targets, destinations, and procedural ordering. ReGraph further incorporates explicit Recipe Reasoning Chain-of-Thought (RR-CoT) traces, providing auxiliary supervision for procedural decomposition and structured graph generation. Building on ReGraph, we propose Recipe Graph Learning (RGL), a two-stage framework that enables LMMs to generate a plausible fine-grained cooking workflow from a food image in the form of a structured recipe graph. Under a deterministic, schema-aware matching protocol, our experiments reveal a substantial gap between text-generation quality and recoverable procedural structure: recipes produced by existing approaches achieve competitive text-generation scores yet yield limited reference-aligned entity and relation structure under the ReGraph schema. In contrast, across two representative LMM backbones, RGL consistently improves the generation of cooking entities and procedural relations, while our analysis further shows that fine-grained ingredient-state capture remains the most challenging dimension.

We present InsertFuse, a unified framework for multi-category reference-guided image insertion. Its key idea is to decouple category-specific expertise learning from cross-category capability consolidation. InsertFuse first trains specialized experts for different insertion categories and then introduces Insertion On-Policy Distillation (IOPD) to consolidate their capabilities into a single student. By querying the matched expert at states visited by the student, IOPD preserves category-specific insertion behavior while mitigating the cross-category interference caused by direct joint training. To improve spatial control, we propose Token-Aligned Geometry Conditioning (TAGC), which maps mask-derived geometric cues to the visual token grid, and Region-Balanced Flow Matching, which separately normalizes prediction errors inside and outside the insertion region to prevent background-dominated and scale-dependent supervision. We further introduce Reference CFG to isolate and strengthen the guidance induced by the visual reference under fixed scene and geometry conditions, with IOPD transferring this enhanced supervision into the unified student. Extensive experiments on the public AnyInsertion benchmark and our multi-category test set demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on most metrics, showing strong reference fidelity and generation quality across diverse insertion categories.

Interpretability methods for large language models (LLMs) describe internal state but do not directly test whether that state is causally sufficient to produce the observed behavior. In earlier work, we lesioned LLMs to produce error profiles in picture naming, a central task for assessing aphasia, and found that specific lesions produced errors resembling those of individual stroke survivors. Here we ask the inverse question: given an error profile, can the lesion parameters that produced it be recovered, and what does this inverse problem reveal about transformer computation? Lesions in LLaVA-Vicuna 13B were parameterized by layer index, modification percentage, and noise sigma across 4,840 configurations, and error profiles were characterized by a seven-category clinical taxonomy (correct, semantic, unrelated, formal, mixed, neologism, no-response). We trained a multi-task neural network to map error profiles back to perturbation parameters. The problem admitted a partial solution: across 10 independently trained inverse models, modification percentage and noise sigma were recoverable, whereas layer index was recoverable only within a neighborhood. In counterfactual validation, a fresh model instance perturbed with the recovered parameters reproduced the target behavior in 81.4% of cases. This dissociation between low layer recovery and high counterfactual fidelity is consistent with functional redundancy across transformer layers, a property not captured by standard interpretability methods. As an out-of-distribution test, we applied the trained model to picture-naming error profiles from 278 stroke survivors; recovered parameters were syndrome-discriminative, most strongly for perturbation intensity, indicating generalization beyond the training distribution. Counterfactual validation provides a general framework for LLM interpretability claims beyond inverse mapping.

Backdoor attacks in multimodal contrastive learning (MCL) have garnered growing attention in recent years, as many downstream tasks critically depend on pre-trained MCL models. Existing detection-based defenses predominantly rely on the CLIPScore metric, under the assumption that poisoned pairs exhibit lower semantic similarity between the image and the caption. However, we identify two critical flaws remaining in existing methods: (1) the substantial overlap between CLIPScore distributions of benign and poisoned pairs undermines the reliability of this metric, and (2) fixed-threshold detection cannot provide statistical guarantees for ambiguous samples within overlapping regions. To overcome these limitations, we propose integrating conformal prediction (CP), a statistical framework that quantifies uncertainty through nonconformity scores (NCSs), to establish provable confidence bounds for detecting poisoned image-caption pairs. Building on CP, we introduce CASCADE, a novel two-stage Coarse-to-Fine Conformal Backdoor Detection framework. The coarse-grained stage uses cross-modality consistency to identify high-confidence benign and poisoned pairs. In the fine-grained stage, a reference set is constructed from high-confidence poisoned pairs, and instance-level NCSs based on text-space similarity are computed for each sample in the unidentified subset. These NCSs measure conformity to the poisoning distribution and enable precise identification of latent poisoned pairs within the unidentified subset. Extensive experiments on the large-scale CC3M dataset demonstrate that CASCADE achieves an average FPR of 5.79% at 100% TPR and an average AUROC of 0.9867 across diverse attacks, while remaining effective against adaptive attacks.

Ask a commercial image editor to preview a cosmetic procedure and it will often change more of the face than the request names: a nose edit can also smooth skin or alter lighting. Existing methods for confining an edit to one region require access to the model's internals, which a public editing API does not expose. We ask how much control is possible from the client side alone. In a pilot benchmark, six commercial editing configurations and one mask-based inpainting model perform facelift-style jaw-neck and rhinoplasty edits at three levels of client-side control: the prompt alone; cutting the edited region out of the response and pasting it back onto the original photograph through a landmark-derived mask (a masked composite); and asking the model itself to inpaint inside the mask where supported. Of 210 attempted edits, 196 could be scored. ArcFace cosine measures identity preservation; a CIELAB pixel-change ratio measures how much change lands inside the requested region rather than a protected facial zone. On the 12 frontal faces the regional metric could score, the masked composite improved localization over the paired prompt-only output by a median of 0.446 (95% face-clustered bootstrap interval 0.421-0.457) while changing the requested region about as much. Editors differed in edit strength versus identity retention, and the one inpainting model we tested did not beat the simple composite. Against each face's input-to-postoperative baseline, no editor moved its outputs closer to the postoperative photograph in identity-embedding terms. This is a study of control, not clinical accuracy: no surgeons rated the outputs, and each condition was generated once. Within that scope, keeping a surgical preview inside its intended region needs no access to the model; a mask and composite on the client enforce it across every editor tested, at low provider cost.

Old photographs often suffer from multiple coupled degradations, including scratches, cracks, fading, blur, noise, and missing regions, severely degrading both visual quality and semantic content. We propose Loop-Mamba, a lightweight loop-based state-space framework that formulates old photo restoration as progressive state evolution, where a persis- tent restoration state is continuously propagated and refined through iterative computation. Specifically, we introduce a Semantic-Guided Degradation Estimator (SGDE) to explicitly model heterogeneous degradations by jointly predicting local degradation maps and global degradation scores, providing degradation-aware guidance for state evolution. We further develop a Shared Structural Memory Mamba (S$^2$M- Mamba), which maintains a persistent restoration state across iterations, enabling persistent state evolution through shared structural memory for robust long-range structural reconstruction. Benefiting from first-order state recursion, Loop-Mamba propagates latent restoration states through recurrent tran- sitions instead of repeatedly stacking deep feature transformations, thereby alleviating gradient dilution while avoiding the computational overhead inherent in iterative CNN- and Transformer-based restoration frameworks. A lightweight multi-directional scanning strategy further enhances direc- tional information aggregation and preserves structural continuity. To better evaluate restoration quality, we introduce the task-oriented Old Photo Damage Recovery Score (ODRS), which jointly measures degradation recovery and structural reconstruction fidelity. Experimental results on the public SynOld benchmark demonstrate that Loop-Mamba consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across both conventional restoration metrics and the proposed ODRS.

Interaction between users and LLM agents is increasingly multimodal: conversations interleave text with images, and a later question may target either. Yet most agent memories are designed around text, and even the few that support multimodal conversations still fail on vision-related questions. We trace this failure to an assumption behind the similarity search they rely on: in the index space, a query lies close to the relevant evidence that answers it. In multimodal settings, two gaps break it. By the modality gap, a query lies closer to memory content of its own modality than to evidence in another, even in a trained joint embedding space. By the similarity-relevance gap, the content most similar to a query is often not the evidence that answers it, most acutely when a query carries both text and image and its evidence resembles neither part alone. We present V-Mem, a multimodal agentic memory system that routes retrieval by the modality of the query and that of the target evidence, both recognized from the query alone. To cross the modality gap, V-Mem organizes the conversation into rounds and returns the target-modality content from the same round as the match, without comparing across modalities. To close the similarity-relevance gap, it searches with an LLM-generated anchor that sits closer to the relevant evidence than the query does: a hypothetical caption for a text-only query seeking an image, and an enriched search anchor, the query text plus relevant keywords extracted from the query image, when the evidence is reachable only by combining the two. On Mem-Gallery, V-Mem reaches an LLM-judge score of 0.82 versus 0.56 for the second best, with the largest margin on questions carrying an image (0.87, no baseline above 0.47); on LoCoMo it scores 0.69 versus 0.58.

Decoding visual experience from non-invasive brain activity is central to neuroscience and brain-computer interfaces. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) offers fine spatial detail, but its slow hemodynamics and burdensome acquisition limit temporally resolved decoding. Electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) provide millisecond resolution, making image retrieval compelling: identify the viewed image from one neural response and a fixed candidate bank. Contrastive alignment to pretrained visual representations enables zero-shot retrieval from EEG and MEG, but most systems collapse heterogeneous visual supervision into a single embedding before ranking. This early consolidation imposes one similarity geometry on every candidate order and removes encoder-specific disagreements from the final ranking. We propose CORTIVA, a candidate-score fusion framework that preserves this complementary evidence. Three decoding routes are aligned to heterogeneous visual targets, score the same indexed candidates independently, and combine only their temperature-scaled score vectors before ranking. On the 200-way THINGS-EEG2 benchmark, CORTIVA reaches 73.5% Top-1 and 95.3% Top-5 across ten participants, exceeding the strongest reported baseline by 10.3 and 5.4 percentage points. With a modality-specific neural encoder, the same fusion principle reaches 42.4% Top-1 on THINGS-MEG. Matched route-removal retraining and four weight controls demonstrate that CORTIVA's gain arises from integrating complementary route scores and persists with uniform weighting, without requiring a specialized weighting rule. Independent DINOv2 analyses further reproduce the local error neighborhoods and posterior neural-visual correspondence. These results establish candidate-score fusion as a simple and testable alternative to embedding-level consolidation for neural image retrieval.

Many open educational resources are lacking in accessibility, especially in-depth image descriptions. In subjects like Science and Mathematics, however, it can be particularly difficult to write image descriptions since there can be many complicated expressions and names depending upon the course level. To help fill that gap in a small way, we introduce Math Image Descriptions for Accessible Learning (MIDAL), a math image-description dataset of 2,020 mathematical images spanning multiple educational levels, to aid in training vision language models to create image descriptions following accessibility best practices. We hope MIDAL is a valuable resource in enhancing the conversation and innovation regarding accessibility of STEM content in higher education. This dataset is however not just limited in math description generation but can also be used to fine-tune language models that can have improved mathematical reasoning and answers.

Can image-editing models discover visual rules in image space and complete problem-solving end-to-end? We tackle this question in the spirit of a human worksheet test (e.g., an IQ test), using problems that require models to read image-based instructions, recognize the problem, infer the answer, bind it to the correct destination, control output count, suppress unnecessary edits, and preserve the input and format. We introduce WISRD, a Worksheet Image-Space Rule Discovery benchmark with 11 core tasks under eight information conditions, spanning localized marking, filling, copying, counting, and no-edit suppression, together with four supplementary reasoning-stress probes for multi-step spatial manipulation, abstract pattern reasoning, logical inference, and constraint-based problem solving. We identify three key findings as follows. (i) Among the frontier image-editing models evaluated, Nano Banana Pro achieves the highest score. On the shared V0--V3 no-reference subset, the Auto-Strict proxy pass rates are 48.7% for Nano Banana Pro, 13.4% for Qwen-Image-Edit, 11.5% for FLUX.2 Klein 4B API, 11.3% for FLUX.2 Klein 4B open-weight, and 0.0% for InstructPix2Pix. (ii) Analysis reveals that current image-editing models can partially rely on rendered in-image instructions even when the external prompt is absent or merely generic. (iii) In small supplementary diagnostics, Nano Banana Pro achieves 70.0% on 4-by-4 Sudoku and 22.9% on public RAVEN pattern-discovery items in image space.

A marketplace review photograph is a document: platforms approve refunds on it, and generative models drove the cost of forging one to zero. We study that detection problem, so we build a detector and attach an attribution map as its evidence, then measure what that pair delivers on 186,527 images under controls designed to change our conclusions when something is wrong. Compression history, not synthesis, drives naive evaluation: our strongest model reaches 0.9999 PR-AUC (area under the precision-recall curve) on a product-disjoint split, yet falls to 0.7254 once we re-encode synthetics into the real class's format, while five public detectors move by at most 0.07. Aligning one class relocates the cue rather than removing it, and the repaired model then assigns native files a median probability of synthesis of 0.0004. One identical final encode for both classes repairs that, and a three-seed factorial credits the encoding change with the whole gain (+0.176 +- 0.009 PR-AUC). That encode equalises the last stage only: forensic features alone still separate the classes at 0.7145 against a base rate of 0.254. For evidence we test maps causally, against controls that never consult the detector. Whether an attribution ranking exists at all depends on whether the detector reacts to the image. On our first-fix detector, which calls 96 of 100 edited frames real, no map beats a random one. On the detector we selected, twelve of seventeen maps clear that control on edited images and eight on generated ones; perturbation leads both axes and no gradient-CAM variant shows a positive advantage. The trivial controls never clear it, and on generated images the centre prior is worse than random. Our ensembled regional map clears both axes and takes the top pixel AP at 12.4 s per map against 44.9 for occlusion. Clearing a detector-blind control is not yet a faithful explanation, and we demonstrate none.

Reconstructing animatable 3D human avatars from a single image remains particularly challenging for loose garments, whose geometry and motion cannot be adequately represented by body-aligned topology and skinning. We present Forwardrobe, a feed-forward framework for reconstructing garment-aware Gaussian avatars from a single image. Forwardrobe explicitly separates clothing from the body in canonical Gaussian space and equips the garment layer with continuity-aware geometry and skinning initialization, pose-conditioned non-rigid deformation, and appearance adaptation. These designs improve garment reconstruction and visual quality during animation, particularly for skirts and dresses. The separated garment layer additionally forms an independently controllable 3D asset, enabling garment editing, transfer, and 3D virtual try-on. Experiments demonstrate improved garment reconstruction quality and greater flexibility in garment manipulation compared with existing single-image avatar reconstruction methods.

Operational Earth observation increasingly calls for answering queries such as find the image pairs where a new building appeared.'' This means searching an archive of before-and-after (bi-temporal) satellite image pairs and ranking each pair by how well it matches a natural-language description of the change. The component that performs this match, the fusion module that combines the before'' and ``after'' views, must be run at query time across many candidate pairs, so its speed largely sets the cost of every search. We present a controlled comparison of how to build that module. Using one fixed image encoder (a frozen CLIP model) and one training recipe for all variants, we evaluate eight designs drawn from three families: attention, state-space models (Mamba), and learned compression (our Temporal Bottleneck Fusion, TBF). Each design is tested on two benchmarks (LEVIR-CC and Dubai-CC) with ten random seeds, so the reported differences are statistically grounded. We outline three findings: first, a training-free two-stage search (a cheap difference model that shortlists candidates, followed by attention fusion that re-ranks them) matches or exceeds full-fusion recall on LEVIR-CC while cutting query cost $10$-$15\times$, with comparable R@1/R@5 on Dubai-CC; second, the linear-time scan of Mamba, attractive on paper, gives no speed benefit at the patch counts typical of vision transformers ($L{=}196$): the scan is limited by memory bandwidth, whereas attention maps cleanly onto parallel hardware; and third, compressing the fused representation (TBF) reduces parameters by $2.3\times$ and latency by $1.6\times$ for a change-only BLEU-1 cost of $0.007$, although more aggressive compression quietly discards change-relevant detail that aggregate metrics fail to reveal.

We propose S-Avatar, a novel method for generating photorealistic 3D head avatars from a single image using a diffusion-guided 3D model generation module and strategies for animating 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). While single-image head avatar reconstruction is crucial for lifelike Virtual Reality (VR) applications, existing approaches often struggle to preserve 3D consistency under unseen viewpoints. S-Avatar addresses this limitation through a three-stage pipeline. First, a high-resolution 3DGS is synthesized directly from a single image using a diffusion-based Gaussian splat generation module. Next, the parametric head model FLAME is aligned with the generated 3DGS by optimizing its parameters and spatial transformations. Finally, to adapt the 3DGS to FLAME variations, we construct a binding template that encodes the spatial relationship between the initial splats and FLAME. The dynamic 3D head avatar can then be rendered in real time by deforming the 3DGS with the binding template. By combining diffusion-guided canonical 3DGS generation with FLAME-based control, our method achieves efficient and accurate reconstruction with enhanced 3D consistency. Evaluations on public datasets demonstrate that S-Avatar outperforms state-of-the-art methods in novel-view and expression generation, achieving superior realism and consistency. Consequently, our approach represents a significant advance in accessible avatar creation, applicable to a wide range of VR/AR applications. The project page is available at https://github.com/hailsong/savatar.

Text-to-image and personalized editing models now synthesize high-fidelity single-subject images with ease. Yet placing multiple named people into shared contact actions such as embrace, carry, or grapple still exposes major failures: fused limbs, invented extremities, and interpenetrating bodies. Existing evaluations largely overlook these anatomical and geometric issues, and VLM-as-a-judge checklists often saturate on Interaction while the errors remain obvious to humans. We introduce MPIE-Bench, a 2,500-sample benchmark of video-mined editing triplets spanning 405 scenes, 14 interaction categories, and four contact densities (C0-C3). We also propose MPIE-Eval, whose two new axes score contact-time geometry from a frozen public multi-person mesh reconstruction. Anatomy asks whether every human-like mass is explained by a complete set of reconstructed bodies, and Interaction asks whether the penetration and surface distance between those bodies match the contact the instruction asked for. Across ten editors, mesh Anatomy tops out at 0.65 and mesh Interaction at 0.72 on two different models, so no single editor is strong on both, while VLM checklists rate the same images above 0.95. A five-rater study confirms that both axes track human judgement more closely than a zero-shot VLM judge, and the rankings hold under ablation of every weight and threshold.

A person's physical characteristics such as weight and height are important indicators of his physical and mental health, daily life routines and finances. Body Mass Index (BMI) is a well known measure that encodes the characteristics of both the weight and the height. BMI has been used as a self-monitoring tool, and it has long-term implications on one's life. For example, it may help predicting the risk of various diseases and estimating longevity. Automatic BMI estimation using a single person image in the wild is a challenging task due to wide variations in human pose, camera geometry, personal appearance and distracting backgrounds. In this paper, we explore the performance of deep neural networks using single and multi-task learning by employing different modalities including RGB, depth-maps, pose-affinity maps, and edge-maps to predict BMI, weight, and height from daily life images available on social networking websites. Currently, no full body image dataset for BMI estimation is publicly available, therefore we propose a new dataset consisting of 6105 images with ground truth labels of height, weight and BMI. Our proposed dataset is collected in the wild containing images from various ethnicity and distributed over varying age groups and gender. It consists of frontal, back, full and half body, side poses, mirror selfies with varying backgrounds and scale variations and may contain artifacts hiding partial or full face. Extensive experimentation is performed using full body, half body and face images only using different CNN backbones including VGG, Densenet and ResNet. Our experimental results demonstrate that full body images have produced better results than the other half body and facial images in the wild.

Single-image self-supervised denoising replaces unavailable clean targets with surrogate targets constructed from noisy observations. Its effectiveness therefore depends on how closely the surrogate objective remains aligned with supervised denoising, especially when noise is correlated, spatially nonstationary, or unknown. We express the discrepancy between a broad class of MSE-based self-supervised objectives and supervised MSE as a parameter-independent constant and a trace interaction between the surrogate-target residual and the prediction error. The corresponding gradient discrepancy is determined by the gradient of this interaction. This formulation provides a common view of paired-noise, blind-spot, weak-noise, re-corruption, and sub-image methods, while revealing that a small global interaction may conceal substantial positive and negative regional interactions through spatial cancellation. Building on these observations, we propose LoTA-N2N, a two-stage zero-shot adaptation framework. Stage 1 trains a denoiser on complementary sub-image pairs and freezes it to construct detached clean-sub-image proxies. Stage 2 estimates the residual--prediction interaction using these proxies and suppresses its patch-wise absolute magnitude. We show that the local construction prevents spatial cancellation and upper-bounds the magnitude of the corresponding global interaction. Experiments across natural, confocal, and X-ray images, complemented by iteration-matched controls, controlled noise shifts, and gradient diagnostics, show consistent gains over MSE-only adaptation under IID, spatially varying, and mixed noise. Overall, LoTA-N2N demonstrates that estimated local interaction and spatial cancellation control provide effective design principles for single-image self-supervised denoising without paired clean targets, repeated acquisitions, or a predefined re-corruption model.

Emotional image editing requires more than applying affective filters or modifying predefined visual factors: an effective edit must identify what a particular image can afford for a target emotion. Existing affective image manipulation methods, including recent agentic variants, largely operate within bounded strategy spaces based on predefined factor taxonomies, knowledge libraries, or conventional editing templates, and therefore often miss image-specific, context-grounded strategies. We introduce EmoScope, a multi-agent framework that reframes the task from "how should I edit?" to "what can I edit?" EmoScope first discovers an image-specific editable space through emotion-conditioned affordance reasoning, then uses a semantic hierarchy of anchors, variables, and context to balance content consistency and emotional expressiveness before executing and verifying the edit. Because its plans are expressed as image-specific affordances rather than retrieved templates, EmoScope also exposes the editing strategy as an interactive surface for user refinement at the plan level. In a large-scale human evaluation covering all eight Mikels emotion categories, with 4,693 valid responses across 1,824 pairwise questions, participants preferred EmoScope over two competitive baselines by 88.1% on average. Attribution analysis further shows that EmoScope selects target-emotion-adaptive strategies rather than applying a uniform template. The same affordance-level plan also supports lightweight user refinement in an interactive pilot. Finally, we show that classifier-based metrics exhibit emotion-conditional blind spots toward non-stereotypical, context-grounded edits, and present a relative content-emotion preference-affinity landscape showing that EmoScope's advantage varies systematically across image-emotion combinations.

Inferring physical properties such as mass, stiffness, and elasticity from a single image is essential for simulation and embodied AI, yet most existing approaches rely on multi-view reconstruction or physics-based supervision. We introduce SiPhy, a unified framework for single-image physical property reasoning that aligns 3D-aware visual cues, depth with language-based material knowledge. From one RGB image, SiPhy samples pseudo-voxel points, extracts CLIP features, and grounds them to material candidates proposed by a VLM. A part-based contrastive aggregator enforces region consistency, while a heaviness-aware refinement improves thickness and volume estimation for dense objects. Across ABO-500, MVImgNet-100, and PhysXNet-100, SiPhy achieves state-of-the-art single-image performance, surpassing multi-view reconstruction methods by improving mass MnRE by up to 93% (vs. PUGS), reducing density MAE by 35.5% (vs. NeRF2Physics), and lowering Young's modulus error by 23.5%. We further validate SiPhy on real hand-object interaction datasets, demonstrating its potential as a data annotation engine for physical understanding from single-view imagery.

One-to-many facial identification is commonly used to match a probe image from surveillance video against a gallery of driver's license and/or booking photos. The algorithm's rank-one image from the gallery, or a human examiner's selection from the algorithm's top-ranked images, may then be placed in a photo lineup shown to a witness. Witness selection of the gallery image in the photo lineup may then lead directly to the person in the gallery image being arrested. This facial identification process is involved in a number of wrongful arrests. This work specifically examines whether the probability of a witness making an incorrect identification increases with the size of the gallery searched. We compare photo lineup accuracy when the "suspect" image is drawn from galleries of 500, 5,000, and 24,000 images. We find that larger galleries increase both the likelihood of a witness making an incorrect identification and their confidence in that (incorrect) identification. These results raise questions of whether an image resulting from such a facial identification process should be used in photo lineups and of whether results of a photo lineup alone should constitute probable cause for arrest.

Rapid advances in image generation are eroding the evidentiary value of visual content in settings where authenticity can affect public safety and personal reputation. Yet existing detection benchmarks rarely examine synthetic images in public- and individual-safety contexts, where misleading visual content may carry substantial risks. Here we introduce SafeIMG, a safety-oriented benchmark spanning 12 public- and individual-safety scenarios generated using GPT Image 2. Unlike benchmarks centred on generic imagery and image-level labels, SafeIMG evaluates not only whether detectors recognise synthetic images, but also whether their decisions reflect human-identified anomalies. To this end, SafeIMG provides human annotations that localise suspicious regions and explain local artefacts and higher-level commonsense or physical inconsistencies. We evaluate specialized synthetic-image detectors and vision-language models (VLMs), and find that neither provides reliable detection. The strongest VLM identifies only 49.5% of generated images, whereas the best specialised detector identifies 33.1%, compared with 81.7% accuracy for human evaluators. Model explanations cover only 29.8% of human-annotated anomalies and predominantly capture local defects in text, faces and hands. Their coverage falls to 15.0% for commonsense conflicts and 12.0% for physical inconsistencies, while detection performance deteriorates further after dissemination-induced image degradation. These findings show that current detectors lack the accuracy, explanatory alignment and robustness needed to evaluate AI-generated images reliably across public- and individual-safety settings.

Automated individual animal re-identification is essential for large-scale biodiversity monitoring; however, field imagery complicates separating identity cues from nuisance variation in pose, illumination, background, resolution, and species-specific morphology. The DS@GT ARC submission to AnimalCLEF 2026 introduces a multi-species image-clustering system for re-identifying Eurasian lynx, fire salamanders, loggerhead sea turtles, and Texas horned lizards. Instead of relying on a single descriptor or nearest-neighbor retrieval, this approach formulates re-identification as species-aware graph construction over candidate image pairs. The pipeline integrates tailored preprocessing, global candidate retrieval, LightGlue-based local verification with multiple keypoint families, LightGBM pair scoring, conservative edge admission, and Leiden community detection. This design directly addresses a primary failure mode of clustering-based re-identification: high-scoring false pairs that act as bridge edges and merge distinct individuals through transitive closure. Across species, ablation studies demonstrate that local feature support, foreground-aware preprocessing, and species-specific backbone selection enhance pair evidence, while graph operating points determine the trade-off between fragmentation and over-merging. The selected submission achieved a public ARI of 0.733 and a private ARI of 0.674, ranking fifth among 230 teams. These results indicate that robust wildlife re-identification requires not only strong visual representations but also calibrated integration of global similarity, local identity markings, neighborhood context, and graph-level constraints. The code can be found at https://github.com/dsgt-arc/animalclef-2026.

With the increasing demand for reusing paper documents in educational and office settings, accurate segmentation of handwritten and printed text has become a crucial step in document digitization. Although numerous deep learning models have been developed for this task, their high computational cost limits deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this challenge, we present a lightweight framework optimized for efficient performance on devices with severely limited computational capacity. Our approach begins with the Sentence-level Connected Component Segmentation algorithm, aimed at extracting coherent sentence-level segments from document images. We then design a novel Region-aware Handwriting Descriptor (RHD) to capture the intrinsic variability of human handwriting at the sentence level. A simple conventional classifier can then be seamlessly integrated with our designed descriptor, demonstrating strong classification performance for distinguishing handwritten and printed sentence-level text images, highlighting that the proposed descriptor is agnostic to the choice of classifier. Extensive experiments are performed on our self-constructed Multilingual High-Quality Annotated Dataset for Handwritten and Printed Text Segmentation (MAD-HPTS) and a public benchmark PHD-AS, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and computational efficiency. On MAD-HPTS, our method sacrifices only 1.4% accuracy compared to the leading deep neural network baseline, yet achieves more than 8 times speedup in inference, making it well-suited for lightweight deployment.

Recent visual place recognition (VPR) studies have increasingly relied on large-scale datasets to train more robust and discriminative models. Although this trend significantly improves recognition performance, it also introduces substantial storage and training costs, especially when new architectures or training strategies need to be repeatedly developed and evaluated. Dataset pruning (DP) provides a promising way to improve data efficiency by retaining only informative training data. However, conventional DP methods mainly follow the sample-wise classification paradigm, which overlooks the relation-dependent training nature of VPR, where supervision is typically formed by image pairs rather than independent images. To address this issue, we propose a place-wise dataset pruning framework tailored for VPR. Instead of pruning individual images, our method treats each place as the basic pruning unit and introduces two complementary novel metrics, i.e., intra-place diversity (IPD) and inter-place similarity (IPS), to evaluate the training value of each place. By jointly considering these two metrics, our method ranks all places and constructs a compact yet informative coreset, thereby allowing the pruned dataset to still support the training of robust and discriminative VPR models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art DP baselines under different pruning ratios while reducing selection and training costs. Moreover, by pruning a merged dataset roughly 3.5$\times$ the size of GSV-Cities to a comparable scale, our coreset maintains highly competitive performance, achieving 94.5% R@1 on MSLS-val and 97.0% R@1 on Nordland with only NetVLAD. Codes will be made publicly available.

Image matting is highly ill-posed, especially when both the foreground and background are richly textured. While single-image matting methods learn strong priors from data, they often struggle on these challenging cases. Existing approaches improve results by requiring additional signals such as green screens, polarized lighting, or clean background images, but these typically rely on specialized capture setups. We present Parallax Portrait Matting, a practical two-frame matting method that uses a second image captured with slight viewpoint change. Such a setting arises naturally in burst photography, where small camera motion induces foreground-background parallax and provides complementary observations for matting. Our pipeline estimates trimaps and foreground/background motion, then constructs aligned views for prediction. To handle imperfect motion estimation, the network uses the background-aligned pair for direct fusion and the foreground-aligned cue through cross-attention for error compensation. Experiments show that our method recovers finer details and more accurate foreground colors than strong single-image matting baselines on challenging portrait cases.

Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is often evaluated with clean evidence, yet real retrieval can return topically relevant but unreliable content: false text and misleading images from corrupted metadata, entity swaps, typographic overlays, semantic edits, adversarial patches, blends, or style transfer. We introduce QIMG-7, a controlled benchmark for multimodal retrieval pollution in multi-sentence factual QA, spanning four datasets, seven image-attack families, and 16 paired clean/polluted regimes, for 1,760 evaluation rows per method. Across four generator/gate stacks, naive multimodal fusion is brittle: in the main gpt-4o-mini stack, Full-MM support drops from 0.908 with clean text to 0.490 with polluted text, often making Parametric fallback safer than retrieval. We propose source-aware trust resolution (SATR), a training-free approach that compares Parametric, Text-only, and Full-MM candidate answers and selects among candidate answers or falls back based on source reliability. The Field-Selector variant achieves the best balanced score, 0.816, improving over Full-MM by 11.7 points and over the Cascaded Router by 2.7 points. Ablations show that, in this text-first setting, explicit text-reliability modeling is the dominant driver of these gains. Overall, in text-first factual QA with multimodal retrieval conflict, our results support selective trust rather than unconditional fusion. Artifacts are available at https://github.com/SaadElDine/Trust_Before_Fusion.

Virtual try-on (VTO) has made significant progress in realistically transferring garments onto a target person. Yet most systems give the user little control over how a garment should be worn -- its size (loose or fitted), style (e.g., tucked in or untucked, open or closed), and spatial placement on the body. We address this gap with two complementary contributions. First, we define and solve Visual-Instance-Prompt Segmentation via VIP-SAM: given a flatlay image of a garment, segment that specific instance in a photograph of a person wearing it. This is an instance-level task, distinct from the typically studied category-level segmentation. Second, we introduce CtrlVTON, a controllable VTO framework that recasts try-on as an image editing problem and adds segmentation masks as pixel-level control over garment layout, including style, size, and spatial placement on the body. VIP-SAM and CtrlVTON each achieve state-of-the-art results on their respective tasks. In particular, CtrlVTON generates images that follow user-provided layouts far more faithfully than the strongest proprietary editing systems while matching them on garment fidelity.

Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires models to retrieve visual entities matching the query image from large-scale encyclopedic knowledge bases and answer related questions. Existing multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (mRAG) methods rely on global visual features to match candidate entities, yet when the knowledge base contains numerous visually similar entities, the retriever struggles to distinguish them, populating the candidate set with visually similar but factually mismatched distractors. Since subsequent processing steps such as noise filtering are also confined to this fixed candidate set, errors from failed retrieval inevitably propagate to the final answer. To address these challenges, we propose MMAgent-R$^2$, an agentic mRAG framework that integrates visual reranking and active rejection as its internal verification mechanism. Visual reranking directly compares query and candidate images, capturing discriminative details beyond textual descriptions to precisely identify the target entity among similar candidates; active rejection discards unreliable results and retrieves additional candidates when no confident match is found, moving beyond the fixed candidate pool. We design a composite reward function with step-level verification rewards and achieve joint optimization of external retrieval, internal verification, and answer generation via GRPO training. Experiments on InfoSeek, E-VQA, and MMhops demonstrate that \ours{} achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particularly notable advantages in challenging retrieval scenarios and complex multi-image multi-hop reasoning tasks.

Conversational image editing requires preserving not only visible content, but also content that temporarily disappears across turns. When newly added or modified content occludes a previously visible region, that region should reappear if it was never semantically changed. However, existing systems often fail to recover such occluded-but-unchanged content, producing inconsistent or hallucinated results. We introduce OCCUR-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for temporal preservation in conversational image editing. OCCUR-Bench provides diverse occlusion-and-revelation scenarios with historical restoration references, enabling evaluation of faithful restoration rather than plausible regeneration. We also propose ReSpec, a training-free framework that makes implicit preservation explicit by pairing restoration-aware instructions with historical visual references. Given an editing history, ReSpec identifies what should persist, selects the historical image state that provides missing visual evidence, and conditions an in-context editor on the resulting instruction and reference image. Experiments show that ReSpec improves restoration fidelity and temporal consistency on OCCUR-Bench, highlighting the need to ground preservation in editing history rather than only the current image.

Rendering time series as chart images for CNN-based classification has become increasingly common in time-series classification (TSC). However, it remains unclear whether models learn underlying temporal patterns or rely on encoding-specific visual cues introduced by chart design. We present VEIL: a systematic study examining how chart encodings influence learned representations through complementary analyses of similarity, transferability, and attribution. Attention-guided training appears to mitigate this effect when encoding sensitivity is consistently identified across diagnostics, but provides limited or negative benefit when such signals are absent. These findings position VEIL within the broader question of how machines perceive visualizations -- extending graphical perception from human readers to vision models -- and show that visualization design choices shape learned representations in ways that warrant treating chart-based TSC as a representation and measurement problem rather than a simple modeling decision.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can produce detailed answers to complex queries, but these answers are typically presented as dense linear text, which makes fine-grained inspection, navigation, and return visits difficult. We present ChatImage, a system that converts long-form LLM answers into interactive visual images. Given a textual answer, ChatImage first normalizes its content into structured visual modules, plans a visual layout, and renders a coherent image. It then applies a second grounding pass to the rendered image with vision grounding models such as LocateAnything and MiMo-Vision, with optional SAM-style mask refinement, to identify the visible regions that should support interaction. From these grounded regions, ChatImage overlays transparent clickable hotspots on the image. Each hotspot opens a detail panel and a region-scoped follow-up thread, allowing the user to inspect and query a specific part of the answer without re-reading the full response. Instead of treating planned coordinates as the final interaction geometry, ChatImage uses them as priors and grounds the interaction targets after rendering, which improves consistency between visual content and clickable regions. We release a reference implementation and introduce a 30-question benchmark covering infographic, map, and scene-based answer formats. Evaluation with configured external models reports interaction-loop completion, a strict visual-alignment gate, and a SAM-based mask-completeness diagnostic.

Charts and images appear together throughout scientific publications, yet most computational work does not characterize their coherence. We argue that a chart, its accompanying image, and the caption that links them form a multimodal unit, and that the inferential work required to read it varies systematically. To capture this variation, we develop a typology of reasoning gaps, R1 through R5, that characterizes how chart, image, and text jointly convey a scientific claim, and the interpretive work this demands of the reader. Some pairs restate the same data, while in other pairs, charts are used to quantify a structure the image localizes, project image content onto an external variable, audit an image-based claim, or jointly construct a frame that neither panel can establish alone. The typology is anchored in the grounding theory of communication and was derived bottom-up, with a neuroscience expert, from a corpus of 79 traumatic brain injury papers and 32 chart-image pairs. Crucially, the levels provide a systematic mechanism for identifying where grounding succeeds or breaks down, rather than leaving it to subjective inference. We show this in a study in which a domain expert and three non-experts judge vision-language model (VLM) descriptions of 25 pairs: the level predicts where their judgments align and where they diverge, isolating the points at which contextual knowledge, not the figure, carries coherence. This typology thus offers figure designers a systematic way to balance text against chart-image pairs, bridging the expert-to-non-expert divide in reading a scientific takeaway.

Applying deep learning to instance-aware reidentification of slate tiles and extraction site classification can improve production efficiency and quality control in the slate tile industry. These tasks are particularly important for handling natural materials where visual variability can make manual inspection costly and error-prone. We present a lightweight, hybrid deep learning approach that combines image matching and classification within a single framework. The system integrates a feature-matching branch based on XFeat with a MobileNetV3- based classification branch. The XFeat branch, combined with a LightGlue matching head, improves instance matching performance by +15.4% AUC. For classification, features from both backbones are shared and fused, resulting in a +10.9% accuracy improvement over a standard MobileNetV3 model. Our approach is evaluated on a newly created industrial dataset consisting of 2,610 slate tile images from six extraction sites. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for object re-identification and classification in an industrial setting.

Image-guided style transfer aims to apply the artistic characteristics of a style image to a content image while preserving its semantic structure and layout. Despite advances in diffusion-based methods, existing approaches often face challenges in disentangling content and style, particularly when independently optimized adapters are naively combined, causing conflicts between adapters and limiting controllability over the content-style balance in inference. We further demonstrate that training-free structural guidance directly derived from the content image through the internal attention of pre-trained model outperforms a dedicated content LoRA adapter in terms of structural fidelity and computational efficiency. Building on these observations, we propose AnyStyle, a streamlined framework for image-guided style transfer. The framework adopts a unified single-adapter paradigm for coherent style capture from the style image and incorporates training-free structural guidance from the content image, thus avoiding complex entanglement between multiple adapters and improving controllability and stability. Extensive experiments show that our method delivers competitive quantitative performance and significantly improved perceptual quality. Code is available at https://github.com/Yvan1001/AnyStyle.

Despite remarkable progress in machine translation, Vision Language Models (VLMs) struggle on historical manuscripts, a domain that stresses core Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities: low-resource transliteration, archaic vocabulary, and noisy input signals. We present a systematic framework for evaluating the full image-to-translation pipeline on medieval Latin manuscripts, a setting in which scribal shorthand, ligatures, and parchment degradation expose failure modes that are invisible in clean-text benchmarks. Benchmarking on the CATMuS Latin dataset reveals a specialization gap: domain-specific Optical Character Recognition (OCR) models reduce character error rate by up to 4.3$\times$ compared to general-purpose VLMs, despite operating at orders of magnitude fewer parameters. We introduce the Interpres-Parallel-Corpus (IPC), a novel dataset comprising 1,383 aligned manuscript image lines, transcriptions, and expert translations, the first of its kind for medieval Latin. Our experiments uncover a complexity paradox: the simplest pipeline, a specialized OCR model feeding directly into a VLM, outperforms all multi-component variants. Adding retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or post-OCR correction introduces prompt saturation and error propagation that degrade aggregate translation quality. These findings offer both a new benchmark and practical guidance for deploying translation systems in low-resource historical settings.

Image encoders trained with LeJEPA can deliver strong features for downstream tasks, but, like other image-level self-supervised methods, typically require large training datasets. Aligning representations at the level of objects rather than whole scenes promises greater data efficiency, but doing this in a completely self-supervised way, effectively jointly partitioning a scene and representing its objects, is unstable: the two are locked in a cyclic dependency, partitioning requires meaningful representations, while meaningful representations require consistent partitioning. We sidestep this instability by taking object masks as given during training, using cheap, off-the-shelf SAM proposals. We extend LeJEPA - whose distributional anti-collapse objective ports naturally from whole images to variable-sized sets of objects - to align object-centric representations rather than whole images. An additional instance-separating loss, which treats other objects in the same scene as negatives, further boosts downstream performance. Across two model scales and 10-100% of COCO, object-level LeJEPA outperforms image-level LeJEPA on tracking (DAVIS), classification (ImageNet-1k), segmentation (ADE20k), and re-identification (NAVI).

Vision-language models (VLMs) can follow complex textual instructions, yet they struggle to reason from purely visual context. In particular, current models fail to infer shared concepts from sets of example images and apply them to new inputs. We introduce Visual Concept Inference from Sets (VICIS), a task that evaluates this capability. Given a small context set of images sharing a concept and a query image, the model must generate new images that preserve the context-defined concept while remaining consistent with the query. We show that state-of-the-art VLMs perform poorly on this task, often ignoring the visual context or defaulting to biased generations. To address this gap, we propose a training framework and architecture that learn to infer visual concepts from image sets and extract concept-specific embeddings from queries. Experiments on synthetic data and large-scale ImageNet/WordNet data show that our model generates more accurate and diverse outputs and generalizes to unseen concepts and modalities such as sketches.

We study the challenging problem of novel view video synthesis from single images or monocular videos. Existing methods, which operate under the assumption that pre-trained video models lack native novel view synthesis capability and enforce view alignment via camera conditioning, task-specific fine-tuning, or stepwise hard denoising guidance, often suffer from artifacts and compromised global scene consistency. In this paper, we introduce NeoMap, a novel training-free framework designed to locate high-fidelity, view-consistent novel view solutions from general pre-trained video models. The key to our approach is the core insight that promising novel view solutions are inherently encoded within the natural video data manifold learned by pre-trained models, and the core challenge is simply to locate this optimal solution. We solve this via our core mechanism: convergent manifold alternating projection iterations that optimize the initial noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeoMap significantly outperforms all existing methods across 3 standard novel view synthesis benchmarks, including the challenging Tanks-and-Temples, LLFF and DAVIS datasets, achieving state-of-the-art generation fidelity and top-tier view consistency.

Colored sectors in a microbial range expansion encode more than lineage survival counts. We formulate a computer-vision inverse problem: from one endpoint image of an accretive multi-type expansion, recover the radius-indexed pairwise boundary-flow field and test whether the visual pattern is compatible with a transitive scalar fitness hierarchy. The observable is a geometric signal extracted from sector-boundary curves in log-polar coordinates. We prove endpoint observability and stability for frozen fronts, weighted transitive/cyclic decomposition, contact-complete circular design, physical-clock and mechanism non-identifiability, exact Gaussian cyclicity testing, and Bonferroni-valid interval scanning. The benchmark is deterministic: analytic endpoint images, blurred/noisy pixel round trips, scalar-null stress tests, public-image tracing, multi-resolution mechanistic endpoints, and a non-learning frozen-front simulator. The implementation recovers pairwise edge-flow histories from endpoint images, detects cyclic residuals in a mechanistic four-type expansion, and uses those residuals as forcing signals for a dimensionless active design-control layer covering reaction-diffusion control, phenotype-frontier optimization, protocol synthesis, Monte Carlo robustness, and a downstream population-state bridge.

Reconstructing high-fidelity 3D models of highly articulated animals, such as dogs, from a single in-the-wild image remains a formidable challenge. In this paper, we introduce CORGI, a novel framework for consistency-aware 3D dog reconstruction from a single unconstrained image that completely eliminates the need for 3D supervision. To overcome generative inconsistencies and the lack of multi-view capture, our pipeline introduces three core components. First, we propose a Canonical-Driven Orbital Generation (CDOG) strategy, utilizing specialized Canonical and Orbit LoRAs to normalize arbitrary input poses and synthesize reliable 360-degree video observations. Second, we design a Consistency-aware Deformable 3DGS (CA-3DGS) module that anchors on a D-SMAL prior, explicitly modeling per-view generative errors through dedicated neural deformation fields to learn accurate vertex-level displacements. Finally, to eliminate structural distortions and recover high-frequency details, we introduce a self-supervised Deformation-Conditioned Generative Repair (DCGR) module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CORGI achieves state-of-the-art performance, generalizing seamlessly across diverse dog breeds to produce geometrically accurate, visually coherent, and fully animatable 3D assets ready for downstream applications.