High-Resolution

Semantic watermarks for diffusion models embed ownership information into the generative process while preserving perceptual quality, but Gaussian-Shading extraction conventionally requires multi-step diffusion inversion to recover the initial noise. Recent one-step methods show that this cost can be reduced substantially. We study this problem through extended flow matching and conditional regression. The key observation is that, near the high-SNR image endpoint, recovering a useful noise statistic given by the first-step output of the extended flow matching in the high-SNR regime is much simpler than reconstructing the full inverse trajectory, and Gaussian Shading only requires the recovered latent to remain in the correct watermark decision region. Based on this observation, we propose a lightweight, prompt-free extractor that decomposes endpoint recovery into an image-like anchor and a noise-oriented residual, which increases the capability of the model to utilize GPU parallel computation. The resulting method avoids iterative inversion and repeated evaluation of a diffusion-scale U-Net, providing an efficient one-step extraction pipeline with a concise theoretical interpretation. The computational cost of extracting noise is lower than that of both OSI and FARI. The github repo is there: https://github.com/TheLovesOfLadyPurple/RAIN-lightweight-NN-for-one-step-semantic-watermark-extraction

SceneHI is a framework that lifts high-resolution, illumination-aware priors from 2D diffusion models to perform 3D texture synthesis. It is the first to demonstrate that high-resolution textures, previously limited to 2D synthesis, can be generated directly on 3D objects without model fine-tuning or optimization. Designed for complex, multi-object environments, SceneHI uniquely combines 3D-consistency, high-resolution fidelity, and physically plausible baked shadows within a single generative pipeline. To enforce strict geometric coherence, we introduce an exact analytical pixel-to-texel mapping that aligns diffusion trajectories across multiple viewpoints. We utilize High-Resolution Latent Textures (HRLTs) as a persistent canvas for gradually denoised textures, while camera views perform the denoising steps in latent pixel space. This ensures a shared base texture that can be subsequently refined to high resolution without compromising multi-view consistency. Finally, a light-aware generative pass embeds realistic geometry-consistent shadows directly into the atlases, bridging the gap to production workflows. SceneHI achieves high visual fidelity while reducing generation time by 80% compared to existing scene-level methods.

State-of-the-art vision models process images in their entirety, lacking the ability to selectively zoom in on relevant regions. This limitation is particularly acute in scenarios where processing must be conditioned on a specific task - such as instance detection, which requires localizing a specific object in a high-resolution, cluttered scene. In such settings, critical details are easily lost as images are often resized to match the model dimensions and computational constraints. We introduce Coarse-to-Fine Glimpse-based Active Perception (CF-GAP), a task-driven front-end that enhances high-resolution processing of existing instance detectors. CF-GAP selectively directs a sequence of limited view glimpses across the scene, utilizing task information to iteratively refine focus on the most relevant regions. These localized regions are then processed at high resolution by a downstream instance detector. By avoiding full-image processing and eliminating irrelevant confounding information, CF-GAP improves Average Precision (AP) by up to 20% across various state-of-the-art instance detectors on the HR-InsDet and Robotools benchmarks, while further enabling lightweight detectors to outperform their larger counterparts.

Semantic segmentation on very-high-resolution images remains challenging due to the high computational cost and the difficulty of capturing fine-grained details. We propose CoordFormer, a novel coordinate-based architecture for semantic segmentation that predicts labels at arbitrary spatial locations through a Coordinate Decoder equipped with a Localized Cross-Attention mechanism. The decoder combines coordinate embeddings with high-resolution local patch features and interacts with global tokens extracted from a downsampled image processed by a ViT foundation encoder, enabling rich semantic context while preserving pixel-level precision. This design enables flexible inference at arbitrary resolutions while keeping memory low on very-high-resolution inputs, and supports an efficient semantic-edge-focused strategy that concentrates computation along boundaries, maintaining fine-grained accuracy while reducing latency and computational cost. CoordFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on MaSS13K and outperforms comparably sized and higher-parameter methods on DIS5K and KPIs, demonstrating its effectiveness for high-quality, very-high-resolution semantic segmentation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a powerful approach to solving complex problems in critical domains. Many concerns arise regarding the decision-making process of its models, mainly due to deep neural networks outperforming their peers at the cost of ambiguity in feature extraction and prediction. Consequently, in critical domains such as remote sensing, where high-resolution imagery must be analyzed using black-box models, the lack of transparency limits trust in these models and, thus, their adoption. In light of this reality, explaining and understanding the complex decision-making process of AI models has become essential. Explainable AI (XAI) aims to bridge this gap by providing insights into how and why certain decisions are made. While significant progress has been achieved in explaining image classification tasks, image segmentation still offers considerable room for improvement. In this context, this paper proposes an entropy-centric XAI method for semantic segmentation. Moreover, a new XAI evaluation methodology is proposed to efficiently measure the relevance of the regions highlighted by the proposed XAI method. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed XAI method compared with recently adapted XAI methods for semantic segmentation.

Deep learning-based building footprint extraction from high-resolution imagery often produces topologically inconsistent vectors unfit for direct GIS database ingestion. To address this, we present a multidomain GeoAI quality control framework that automates error detection to systematically purify vector footprint databases. Candidate footprints were generated across five UAV survey sites in Bangladesh using U-Net (ResNet-34) and SAM-LoRA (ViT-B). The extracted raster masks were vectorized, geometrically regularized, and consolidated under a spatial-exclusivity constraint to eliminate duplicate representations. We used twenty-four predictors capturing geometric, spatial-contextual, and raster-derived spectral and texture properties. Machine Learning (ML) classifiers were trained on a development partition (Sites B-D) and rigorously validated on a spatially independent test set (Site E) excluded from hyperparameter tuning and class balancing. The experimental results demonstrate that geometric and spatial-contextual predictors using Decision Tree (DT) provide the most effective discriminatory evidence for identifying object-level boundary deformations. DT achieved an accuracy of 95.31%, an F1-score of 91.06%, and a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.880 on the unseen testing site. At the database level, this framework successfully identified 87.34% of erroneous footprints while maintaining 98.31% of acceptable structures, reducing the residual error proportion from 27.32% to 4.62% and improving final database purity to 95.38%. This translates into a relative error reduction of 83.09%. The findings indicate that post-segmentation object-level ML provides a highly transferable, robust mechanism for automated quality assurance in production-ready geographic information system (GIS) workflows.

Vision-language models offer a promising path toward automating radiology report generation, but applying them to full 3D CT volumes poses substantial computational challenges. Modern foundation vision encoders (VEs) can produce tens of thousands of vision tokens per scan, making the visual sequence passed to the large language model (LLM) a primary computational bottleneck. Vision-to-language projectors can compress this sequence to reduce computation, but may discard clinically relevant detail; conversely, effective compression can accommodate higher-resolution inputs while keeping the downstream token count fixed. How this vision-token budget should be allocated across input field of view, spatial resolution, and vision-to-language projection therefore remains an open design question. We systematically evaluate four heterogeneous VEs (CNN- and ViT-based), five token-reducing projectors at up to 64x compression alongside a non-reducing MLP projector baseline, and five instruction-tuned LLMs (1.7B--4B) on two large-scale CT report datasets (CT-RATE and Merlin). At matched LLM token budgets, anatomy-guided region of interest cropping is the most consistent strategy, improving clinical macro F1 in 19 of 20 settings by +3.7 points on average for the 3D ViT Primus encoder and +1.1 for the slice-based 2D ViT Curia encoder. Increasing input resolution further is strongly projector-dependent: the PerceiverResampler, paired with higher-resolution Curia features, yields the strongest configuration in the resolution study on both datasets. Our best configurations achieve state-of-the-art clinical macro F1 on the test sets, reaching 49.5 on CT-RATE and 49.0 on Merlin. Code and models will be published upon publication.

Driven by advances in diffusion models and autoregressive models, the fidelity and resolution of AI-generated images now rival those of real images. However, existing AI-generated image detection methods often downsample the images, inevitably overlooking critical low-level texture details in high-resolution AI-generated images, therefore limiting their detection performance. In addition, the ceaseless emergence of unknown generative models makes large-scale pre-training datasets inaccessible. To address these challenges, we propose a novel high-resolution AI-generated image detector, termed LHSDet. Specifically, we formulate the AI-generated image detection task as a Visual Question Answering problem, leveraging a fine-tuned vision-language framework to fully exploit the complementary information between visual and textual modalities. Recognizing that the default visual encoder of existing vision-language models is not tailored for AI-generated image detection, we redesign a visual encoder to better capture both the low-level and high-level artifacts inherent in AI-generated images. Furthermore, we incorporate a semantic-level textual branch to enable multi-modal feature fusion and detection. Consequently, LHSDet employs a triple-branch architecture to extract complementary multi-modal features: a low-level visual branch that aggregates non-overlapping patches for local texture cues, a high-level visual branch based on SigLIP2 for global perception feature extraction, and a semantic-level textual branch that generates captions using BLIP-2. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LHSDet achieves high detection accuracy and robust performance across diverse generative models, including both diffusion and autoregressive models.

360-degree video telepresence offers strong immersive potential but remains constrained by the limited resolution of current capture and display hardware. Many telepresence installations feature fixed viewpoints and largely static scenes, yet optimization strategies tailored to such setups have received limited attention. We present a multi-layer, ultra-high-resolution system for static 360-degree telepresence that combines an 8K panoramic camera with a rotatable 4K pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera. Our approach builds a three-layer representation: (1) a tile-based ultra-high-resolution panoramic background, generated by offline stitching high-detail 4K PTZ scans onto the base 8K panorama to achieve effective resolution beyond native capture, and represented as a set of spatial tiles; (2) a dynamic update layer that composites foreground motions from the 8K stream via real-time high-resolution background matting; and (3) a region-of-interest 4K layer that streams a real-time PTZ view of the selected region and additionally updates the corresponding background tiles over time. We evaluate the proposed system through comparisons with representative video super-resolution approaches and a user study assessing perceived detail and immersive experience. Our results indicate that tile-based background refinement, together with user-guided updates, provides a practical way to balance panoramic fidelity and interactivity in static 360-degree telepresence.

Curvilinear structure analysis is an important and fundamental task in multimedia. However, the controllable generation of images with precise curvilinear structure objects remains an open challenge. To address this, we propose CSGen, a hierarchical multimodal diffusion model that synthesizes high-fidelity images precisely aligned with multiple control conditions. The CSGen is built upon three key innovations: 1) We construct a multi-domain and multimodal dataset, including over 24K samples from 5 domains and 7 different types of annotations, to train the unified generation model. 2) We propose a novel hierarchical progressive control strategy that decouples topology clues from visual context by a phased signal injection, mitigating semantic drift while ensuring the topological integrity of sparse structures. 3) We design a sparsity-aware loss re-weighting mechanism to address the extreme sparsity of curvilinear structures, significantly enhancing the attention on thin and fragile structures during optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CSGen generates images with superior structure accuracy and visual realism, significantly improving downstream segmentation performance while maintaining robustness across diverse prompts. Our results confirm CSGen as a scalable, data-centric paradigm for the analysis of complex curvilinear structures in diverse multimedia applications. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ShanZard/CSGen.

Mapping paddy rice from very-high-resolution imagery in mountainous and hilly regions is difficult because terrain alters optical appearance and increases confusion with visually similar vegetation. We present TRNet for 0.5-m GaoJing-1 red--green--blue (RGB) imagery, a 5-m TanDEM-X digital elevation model (DEM), and derived slope. Separate visual and terrain encoders preserve modality-specific features. At an early encoder stage, Topographic Energy-Spectral Rectification applies terrain-conditioned low-frequency modulation and asymmetric high-frequency regulation to suppress steep-slope clutter and conditionally enhance compatible low-slope rice cues. The Topography-guided Paddy Structure Decoder combines semantic, rice--background boundary, and interior cues, using coarse terrain as context. Experiments used an Area A internal test set and held-out Area B, which had steeper terrain and lower rice prevalence. TRNet achieved rice intersection-over-union (IoU) values of 85.10% and 80.68%, exceeding the original Dual-Encoder U-Net by 9.15 and 18.83 percentage points, respectively. Ablation and slope-stratified results linked these gains to frequency rectification, structure learning, and fewer steep-terrain false positives. The results support coarse topography as a contextual prior for very-high-resolution paddy rice mapping.

Much of the recent progress in image and video recognition has come at the cost of memory: larger models, increased resolution, and longer temporal contexts. An inevitable component is the quadratic (or larger) growth of memory and compute based on image resolution, which is a property of the grid sampling used in convolutional networks and vision transformers. In this work we study residual networks whose convolutional blocks have logarithmic-square growth instead, enabling them to process very high-resolution video quickly. The key insight is to use a residual architecture's residual stream as a high-resolution buffer, to which convolutional blocks only read and write via log-polar image warp operations. Layers adaptively focus on different parts of each frame, with very high resolution only near the focus point. A complete high-resolution representation is built up in the residual stream, analogous to eye saccades creating a complete picture in biological vision, and a theoretical construction is presented that eliminates the quadratic dependency of the residual stream resolution. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed HiResNets learn to foveate around scenes similarly to human vision, and have superior performance in difficult egocentric video recognition tasks, especially egocentric video with small objects and fine-grained recognition.

High-definition (HD) maps are essential for autonomous driving systems. In constructing such maps, onboard multi-view camera images, standard-definition maps and satellite images provide crucial information. However, due to the modality and perspective differences among these data sources, existing methods often struggle to effectively align and fuse them, making online HD map construction still challenging. To address these issues, we propose Driver2Map, an online HD map construction model inspired by human drivers. Unlike existing HD map construction models that utilize only two modalities, our Driver2Map can simultaneously exploit three modalities. Specifically, we propose a "two-stage alignment" strategy to reduce spatial misalignment across different modalities. Additionally, we introduce "Pose-Guided BEV Fusion", a BEV (bird's-eye-view) generation module that leverages camera pose information to adaptively weight multi-view features, thereby effectively suppressing cross-view feature overlap during BEV generation. Also, we design a "Pretrained Prior for Map Refinement" module to refine the initial prediction by learning map structure priors, thus improving the HD map prediction under dynamic occlusions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Driver2Map outperforms existing methods on both IoU and AP metrics.

Screen content images are generally composed of texts and graphics. Compared to natural images, these man-made images contain a large quantity of sharp but repetitive structures. However, existing works in screen content super-resolution underutilize the special characteristics of screen content, leaving a large room to improve model performance and speed up. In this paper, we propose PixelSR, a simple yet effective method to improve super-resolution performance but with faster inference speed. To improve model performance, we classify pixels via pixel binning to compute content attention in the training phase. Specifically, after binning pixels into content-dependent groups, content attention is aggregated from pixel features within each group to introduce a content-dependent and non-local receptive field for every pixel. In the testing phase, we utilize the properties of self-repetitiveness and redundancy in screen content to speed up inference without the loss of model performance. We divide targeted high-resolution pixels into three types, which are unique pixels, repeated pixels, and background pixels for each test image. We conduct conventional network processing on unique pixels and cache their predictions in the on-the-fly lookup table. For repeated pixels which have appeared in unique pixels, we directly retrieve prediction results from the lookup table without network processing. For background pixels, we use the nearest neighbor algorithm to generate high-resolution pixels. The on-the-fly lookup table is cleaned and repeats the procedure above for the next test image. Experiments show our PixelSR achieves state-of-the-art performance with shorter inference time in screen content super-resolution.

Ultra-high-definition (UHD) image restoration must balance the aggregation of spatially recurring degradation cues with the preservation of localized image structures. Compact aggregation can reduce redundant processing but may attenuate edges, textures, and other fine structures. Existing approaches manage UHD restoration cost through downsampling, window partitioning, or cluster-based token reduction; yet many of them do not explicitly retain information that is poorly represented by shared aggregation. In this study, we propose a Context-Detail Decoupled State Space Model (CoDe-SSM) for UHD restoration, which processes aggregated context and clustering residuals in separate pathways. The context modeling pathway, implemented by the Global Cluster Scan Module (GCSM), aggregates features into $K$ input-dependent cluster centers and applies selective SSM reasoning over the resulting fixed-order sequence, enabling cross-region context sharing while decoupling computational cost from spatial resolution. The detail recovery pathway, implemented by the Local High-Frequency Module (LHFM), processes the clustering residual with an input-derived high-frequency mask and a sparse mixture of convolutional experts. Extensive experiments on five UHD benchmarks and five degradation types demonstrate that our explicit context-detail decoupling strategy yields substantial gains in restoration quality while maintaining desirable efficiency.

High-resolution visual question answering (HR-VQA) is often treated as a problem of insufficient evidence acquisition, where failing multimodal large language models must inspect images again through cropping, re-encoding, or multi-round search. We show that this view is incomplete: in many cases, fine-grained evidence has already survived visual encoding and become identifiable and influential within an intermediate-layer routing window, but is later diluted before answer generation. We propose Thinking-Once, a \textbf{training-free, single-visual-pass} evidence-routing method that reconstructs question-conditioned attention at this window, preserves core entity tokens and compact background context, and routes this evidence to later layers without extra visual encoding. Across five base models, Thinking-Once consistently improves or matches the corresponding base setting, increasing the average scores on V$^*$Bench, HRBench-4K, and HRBench-8K by \textit{+3.1}, \textit{+3.0}, and \textit{+2.7} points while reducing the average peak memory by about 4,GB. On Qwen2.5-VL-7B, it improves the three benchmarks by \textit{+9.9}, \textit{+4.6}, and \textit{+5.5} points, raising the cross-benchmark mean from 72.5 to 79.1. With the ZwZ-8B base model, Thinking-Once reaches a mean score of 82.7. Against 11 open-source HR-VQA baselines, it obtains the best or tied-best score on all three benchmark averages and the best overall mean; for example, compared with DeepScan, it reduces V$^*$Bench inference time by \textbf{97.2%} while improving the cross-benchmark mean from 77.8 to 79.1. These results show that HR-VQA can be improved by routing already encoded evidence rather than repeatedly acquiring new visual inputs. Code is available in the appendix.

Many high-resolution imaging systems face the same fundamental question: when have enough measurements been collected to reconstruct an image accurately? We develop Conformalized Rate-Adaptive Sensing (CoRAS), a method that adaptively chooses an acquisition or compression rate for each image while keeping the reconstruction error below a target level with high probability. As measurements are collected, an image reconstruction model gradually recovers the true image, producing a reconstruction path over acquisition rates. CoRAS uses this path up to an early decision time to estimate the target stopping time, defined as the first time at which the reconstruction error falls below the target level. It then calibrates this estimate using images with similar early reconstruction behavior, producing an upper bound on the stopping time with marginal and approximate conditional coverage guarantees. Experiments on image datasets show that CoRAS attains the target stopping-time coverage, uses fewer measurements on average than fixed-rate stopping rules, and assigns more measurements to images that are harder to reconstruct.

Neural spectral PDE solvers often learn an entire unresolved vector field even when an inexpensive approximate model can already capture most of the trajectory. Here we introduce Perturbative-NeuSA, a residual formulation that decomposes the target solution into a low-fidelity background and a high-resolution perturbation, so that only the unresolved dynamics is learned. Starting from the exact perturbation equation, the method combines a fixed spectral operator, a background-dependent correction, the background defect in the target PDE, and an optional neural closure. This construction makes the roles of physical structure and neural closure separately measurable. Across 2D Burgers, Klein-Gordon, and heterogeneous 2D wave equations, the deterministic structured solver outperforms the trained NeuSA baseline while requiring no neural-network training. The largest gains occur on Burgers, where the deterministic correction reduces training and extrapolation errors by factors of 24 and 44, respectively. In addition, a Klein-Gordon sweep over seven background resolutions shows that the effect of the closure is conditional: it improves a poor background by 3.6 times, becomes neutral at intermediate resolutions, and degrades a well-resolved background. For the wave equation, however, the closure provides an additional 18% reduction when the remaining residual is interface-localized. Multi-initial-condition diagnostics further show that the useful closure regime depends on the initial-condition spectrum and can disappear in extrapolation when structured correction already captures the dominant Burgers dynamics. Perturbative-NeuSA therefore reframes neural closure as a conditional, diagnosable correction governed by background fidelity, residual organization, and compatibility with the closure model.

Electron microscopy enables nanoscale cellular visualization but faces a trade-off between imaging resolution and acquisition speed. Existing learning-based methods rely on single-stream architectures that struggle to balance perceptual realism and quantitative fidelity, either over-smoothing details or generating unrealistic hallucinations. This work introduces a frequency-adaptive dual-stream architecture to resolve this conflict. Using discrete wavelet transform, we decompose images into low-frequency structures and high-frequency details, then employ a conditional diffusion model for realistic global synthesis and a transformer network for precise detail recovery. Experiments on the EMDiffuse dataset show the method achieves superior LPIPS and resolution ratio, substantially outperforming existing approaches. The method also shows strong generalization across diverse biological samples, supporting fast and reliable electron microscopy imaging for structural biology and nanotechnology applications. The source code and associated dataset are publicly available to facilitate further research.

Pixel-aligned Gaussian splatting enables efficient and generalizable novel-view synthesis. However, high-resolution rendering faces a critical trade-off where increasing input resolution improves detail at the expense of quadratically rising network computational cost. Conversely, maintaining low-resolution inputs stabilizes this cost but results in insufficient Gaussian density and artifacts. To address this, we propose SubSplat, which introduces Sub-pixel Gaussian Reparameterizer(SPGR) to subdivide primary Gaussians into fine-grained primitives, restoring structural density directly from low-resolution features. We further enhance the reparameterization quality through feature aggregation, which effectively captures high-frequency details across multiple views. Experiments on RealEstate10K and ACID demonstrate that SubSplat achieves high-fidelity rendering with superior efficiency. Our results validate that the proposed framework successfully resolves the trade-off between reparameterization fidelity and network computational cost inherent in pixel-aligned Gaussian Splatting.

Vision-centric 3D occupancy prediction provides dense scene representations essential for autonomous driving and robotic navigation, yet existing methods struggle to scale to high voxel resolutions due to prohibitive computational costs. To address this, we introduce GaussianSeed, a progressive multi-scale Gaussian occupancy prediction framework that organizes primitives into a coarse-to-fine hierarchy. Benefiting from this hierarchical design, GaussianSeed effectively circumvents the memory bottlenecks inherent in dense representations, successfully scaling to a $0.1\text{m}$ spatial resolution while maintaining real-time inference capabilities. To comprehensively evaluate high-resolution geometric perception, we further construct TJScenes, a panoramic six-camera occupancy dataset with highly detailed $0.1\text{m}$ annotations. Extensive experiments on Occ3D-nuScenes and TJScenes demonstrate that GaussianSeed delivers the lowest latency among all evaluated methods while maintaining highly competitive accuracy, advancing the efficiency-quality frontier of high-resolution 3D occupancy prediction. Codes are available at https://github.com/Athameral/GUSD

Most existing watermarking techniques are primarily designed for low-resolution images, with few methods tailored for high-resolution images. Moreover, the embedding capacity is often limited to fixed lengths (e.g., 30, 100, 256 bits, etc.), which struggles to meet practical demands. To address these issues, this paper proposes a high-capacity robust watermarking method for high-resolution images, capable of embedding a watermark of 4 KB (32,768 bits) into images with a resolution of 1024*1024, achieving an embedding rate of 0.0313 bpp. Specifically, this paper adopts a block-wise strategy to effectively embed the watermark into local regions, enabling the network to train and learn normally even under low-resource conditions. The encoder and decoder structures respectively employ a reversible symmetric architecture with three convolutional and three deconvolutional layers, ensuring consistency in the coupling and decoupling of the watermark and image features. Additionally, the loss function combines global and local losses with weighted contributions. By incorporating constraints on the visual quality and robustness of local block regions, the overall imperceptibility and robustness of the image are further enhanced. Extensive experimental results verify that the proposed method is effective and feasible in high-resolution image scenarios with high-capacity watermarking, while demonstrating strong robustness against various noise attacks.

Precipitation nowcasting over the immediate 10-90 min period is important for flood management and real-time decision-making in urban regions. Conventional short-range forecasting with high-resolution numerical weather prediction requires frequent data assimilation, model initialization, and spin-up, introducing computational latency. Machine learning provides an alternative by learning storm evolution directly from high-frequency observations and producing forecasts quickly after training. This is particularly relevant for Mumbai, India, where monsoon convection, land-sea interactions, and localized intense rainfall make short-term prediction difficult. Here, we develop a compact radar-only nowcasting framework that combines multi-elevation reflectivity, Doppler radial velocity, and radial-velocity-gradient proxy features within an encoder-decoder U-Net. Using the most recent radar volume scan, the model predicts 12 future composite reflectivity fields at 7.5-min intervals up to 90 min lead time. The derived velocity magnitude, divergence-like, directional-shear, and vorticity-like channels represent kinematic signatures associated with convergence and boundary interactions without requiring full wind-field retrieval. A high-reflectivity attention module improves sensitivity to convective cores, and physics-guided attribution examines whether the learned sensitivities are meteorologically meaningful. The model is trained using Mumbai Doppler radar observations from May to August 2023 and evaluated on temporally independent events. At 90 min lead time, Critical Success Index values are 0.437, 0.332, and 0.193 for $\geq$10, $\geq$20, and $\geq$30 dBZ thresholds, respectively. Compared with persistence, the model gives lower RMSE and higher spatial correlation at longer lead times. Once trained, it runs on a standard computer, generating nowcasts within seconds for real-time use.

Face super-resolution is the task of increasing the resolution of an image containing a face thereby adding finer detail. It is a ubiquitous task in many computer vision applications and quite often the user isn't even aware that it is being performed. However, doing it with high fidelity is challenging as it is an ill-posed problem. In this paper we present a reference-based solution for face super-resolution that uses higher resolution reference images to aid in the task. We show an alignment module based on the spatial transformer that is considerably more stable than the popular deformable convolutions. We also show an aggregation function that can take good quality information from the reference images when available or suppress the function when such information is unavailable. Finally, we show that our relatively smaller model can achieve state of the art results on multiple datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/varun-jois/FSRST.

Ultra-High-Resolution (UHR) remote sensing image understanding requires Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to capture both the global scene layout and sparse yet task-critical local details under limited computational budgets. Existing methods mainly follow two paradigms. One is passive perception, which relies on resolution expansion or token compression and may therefore discard fine-grained details. The other is active perception, which depends on multi-round zooming and search, but suffers from high latency, contextual fragmentation, and error accumulation. We argue that a more effective path toward UHR understanding lies not in accessing more, but in organizing better. To this end, we propose WeaveEarth, a training-free framework that reformulates UHR understanding as a problem of structured evidence construction and reasoning under global context constraints. Specifically, WeaveEarth first employs Global-Aware Evidence Construction to select a compact, low-redundancy, and spatially complementary Minimal Support Evidence Set. It then introduces Structured Evidence Reasoning, which weaves local evidence, spatial metadata, and relative topology into a unified reasoning interface, thereby enhancing the VLM's ability to perform global-local joint reasoning. Extensive experiments show that WeaveEarth consistently outperforms strong baselines and existing UHR methods across multiple UHR remote sensing benchmarks and multiple frozen VLM backbones. Code is available at https://github.com/XianZhi-Ma/WeaveEarth.

High-quality visual representation is a long-standing pursuit in computer vision. In the context of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), feeding higher-resolution images can produce more fine-grained visual tokens. However, it introduces additional computational and design complexity, due to multiple forward passes and post-processing of increased tokens. Before simply adopting a higher resolution, have we truly unlocked the model's full perception capability at a standard resolution? Therefore, we study an interesting problem: how to achieve fine visual perception under lower cost without larger images. We present SigLIP-HD in this work. The core is a highly simple fine-to-coarse supervision design. We enforce the coarse feature of a mid-resolution image to mimic the fine-grained feature of its high-resolution version. We build this framework on the advanced SigLIP 2 model. Our final model produces better visual tokens at exactly the same inference budget. It is validated on extensive MLLM benchmarks and consistently delivers stronger results than our baseline model, especially on OCR-related tasks.

Accurate cocoa mapping is increasingly important for deforestation monitoring, supply-chain transparency, and regulatory applications. Spatial aggregation in conventional medium-resolution Earth observation (EO) imagery may limit cocoa detection in heterogeneous smallholder landscapes. In Cote d'Ivoire, we therefore evaluated how mapping performance varies across landscape conditions, whether very high resolution (VHR) imagery provides a meaningful advantage, and whether foundation-model embeddings improve decametric cocoa mapping. We developed models using 0.5 m Pleiades VHR imagery, a 10 m Sentinel-2 annual composite, and embeddings from TESSERA and AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF), and additionally assessed four publicly available cocoa mapping products. Performance was evaluated through a landscape-stratified accuracy assessment using 2,821 independently interpreted reference points distributed across gradients of tree cover density and landscape fragmentation. The VHR model achieved the highest performance (F1 = 0.92) and maintained F1-scores above 0.90 across all strata. Among the decametric inputs, TESSERA performed best (F1 = 0.86), followed by AEF (F1 = 0.82) and Sentinel-2 (F1 = 0.76). Of the existing cocoa products, the Kalischek product performed best (F1 = 0.83), comparable to the internally trained AEF model. Performance differences between VHR and decametric approaches increased with fragmentation and under low and high tree cover density conditions. Targeted VHR acquisition may therefore be particularly beneficial in complex cocoa landscapes, while foundation-model embeddings offer a scalable alternative for large-area mapping.

Despite rapid advances in chest X-ray (CXR) foundation models, most radiology report generation (RRG) systems still rely on heavily downsampled inputs (e.g., 256x256) due to the fixed visual token budgets of pretrained vision encoders, suppressing subtle yet clinically important cues present in native-resolution images. However, enabling high-resolution (high-res) perception remains challenging: naive tiling causes prohibitive token inflation, while global compression suppresses subtle lesions and degrades diagnostic fidelity. Inspired by radiologists' workflow, localizing suspicious regions before detailed high-res assessment. We propose Lesion-Aware High-Resolution Patch Discovery and Fusion for Chest X-ray Reporting (LePaX), the first RRG framework that enables efficient high-res CXR perception (up to 1920x1920) without increasing the vision-token count. LePaX formulates high-res perception as a constrained spatial resolution allocation problem under a fixed token budget and introduces two key components: Learnable Spatial Resolution Allocation (LSRA), which learns a spatial utility map that adaptively allocates limited high-res capacity to diagnostically relevant regions, enabling targeted extraction of high-res patches from native CXRs; and Global-Regional Fusion (GRF), which performs token-preserving region-to-global refinement by projecting high-resolution regional evidence back onto the global feature grid through spatially aligned resolution write-back, avoiding token inflation. Experiments on multiple CXR benchmarks demonstrate that LePaX consistently improves both clinical and linguistic metrics while enabling native-resolution CXR perception with over 10x fewer visual tokens than naive high-res tiling.

Image outpainting extends an image beyond its original borders, requiring seamless style integration and globally coherent scene completion. Building on the success of diffusion models, recent methods have achieved substantial improvements in visual quality. In practice, however, high-resolution outpainting is commonly performed via progressive expansion around a fixed source image, particularly in artwork scenarios. Despite this progress, existing approaches still suffer from three key limitations: (i) the absence of a reliable global planning mechanism, which leads to structural instability and error accumulation at high resolutions; (ii) limited spatial controllability beyond text prompts, making it difficult to place objects at user-specified locations; and (iii) high inference latency caused by inherently sequential patch generation. To address these issues, we propose a global blueprint-guided two-stage diffusion framework for layout-controllable high-resolution outpainting with efficient parallel synthesis. In Stage 1, we generate a low-resolution global blueprint using a layout adapter that injects bounding-box conditions into a Stable Diffusion inpainting backbone, producing a globally consistent structural plan while extracting global guidance features. In Stage 2, we synthesize high-resolution local patches in parallel by injecting the blueprint-derived global guidance and initializing each patch from the blueprint using the low-frequency preservation property of forward diffusion. This design eliminates sequential dependency while maintaining global coherence. Extensive experiments on large-scale artwork datasets demonstrate improved visual fidelity, stronger semantic consistency, and substantially reduced inference time compared to prior baselines, while uniquely supporting explicit layout control for artwork outpainting.

Multi-Pool Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) MRI provides valuable metabolic information but is clinically limited by long acquisition times. Although sparse sampling reduces scanning time, reconstructing high-resolution Z-spectra from limited data remains an ill-posed inverse problem. Conventional interpolation and generic Implicit Neural Rep-resentations (INRs) often lack physical constraints, leading to spectral artifacts and physically invalid signals. To address this, we propose Lorentz Encoding (LE), a physics-informed framework that formulates CEST reconstruction as a self-supervised reconstruction task via implicit continuous coordinate learning. Unlike generic positional encodings, LE regularizes the continuous spectral mapping by projecting sparse coordinates into a physically constrained space governed by a combination of parametric Lorentzian profiles with learnable basis functions. This mechanism effectively reduces noise and enforces consistency with physical models. Experiments on in vivo human brain data demonstrate that LE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, under a 39-point sampling strategy, LE achieves a PSNR of 57.58 dB and an SSIM of 0.9994. Furthermore, the learned physics-informed encodings form a continuous, geometrically ordered trajectory in the latent space, ensuring accurate quantitative metabo-lite mapping (APT, NOE, MT).

High-resolution satellite imagery is critical for observing fine-scale cloud structures that inform weather modification strategies like cloud seeding for rain-enhancement. However, the spatial resolution of current geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites is often insufficient for capturing small cloud features. Current super-resolution methodologies are suited for natural images and, therefore, struggle to generalize to satellite-captured spectral images of cloud cover. To address this, we propose a two-stage diffusion-based super-resolution framework to enhance the resolution of multi-spectral cloud microstructures by a factor of $4\times$. Specifically, we use inverse diffusion to recover the high resolution properties from low resolution. Stage 1 utilizes real-world paired data to learn robust degradation handling and inter-sensor alignment, while Stage 2 employs a self-supervised internal downgrading of high resolution data to refine structural learning and texture synthesis. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art transformer and diffusion-based baselines in both reconstruction accuracy and visual quality. We demonstrate that the two-stage method better captures fine cloud microstructures (e.g. convective turrets and cloud gaps) that are crucial for effective cloud seeding decisions. Ablation studies confirm the complementary benefits of the two stages: Stage 1 excels in coarse structural fidelity, while Stage 2 contributes enhanced detail and realism. These results highlight a practical path toward improving cloud microphysics analysis and as a step towards utilizing AI for climate and sustainability. Our code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/hananshafi/superresolution-cloud-microphysics.

We present Wan-Streamer v0.2, a latency-preserving upgrade of the native-streaming, end-to-end audio-visual interaction model. v0.2 keeps the v0.1 modeling formulation, but raises the interactive output stream from 192x336 to 640x368 while preserving approximately 200 ms model-side signal-to-signal latency at 25 FPS. The higher-resolution stream supports scene-grounded mid-shot agents whose posture, gaze, hands, nearby objects, and local scene layout remain legible during real-time conversation. To support the larger visual stream without adding user-visible delay, v0.2 keeps the thinker as a single-GPU low-latency path for streaming perception, the short language/state Transformer pass that builds the generation cache, and final decoding. The performer becomes a multi-GPU Ulysses-style context-parallel group for the expensive next-unit latent generation. Each performer rank writes incoming K/V into a pre-sharded local cache. The long high-resolution latent video sequence is split across ranks for denoising and gathered through Ulysses communication, while the much shorter audio latent sequence is generated without sequence sharding. In this split, the thinker's language/state computation reaches the performer only as K/V conditioning, so no separate language sequence has to be communicated inside the performer group. This concentrates additional hardware on visual generation while preserving the compact thinker-performer boundary, keeping total remote interaction latency at approximately 550 ms when a 350 ms bidirectional network budget is included.

High-resolution (HR) image perception remains a key challenge in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as fine-grained details are often lost when the image is processed as a whole. Existing methods either require training to teach models where to look or heuristically divide the image into fixed regions, both of which struggle to generalize in complex HR scenes. In this work, we propose Hierarchical Entity Exploration (HEE), a training-free and model-agnostic framework that transforms static image understanding into dynamic, query-guided entity exploration. HEE first evaluates each region using a dual scoring mechanism to determine whether it already contains sufficient evidence to answer the question. If not, it applies object detection within the most promising region to extract fine-grained entities, clusters them into coherent subregions, and organizes them into a multi-level semantic hierarchy for deeper exploration. When deeper regions still fail to yield confident answers, a confidence-guided backtracking mechanism revisits alternative paths to ensure adaptive perception. Extensive results show that HEE outperforms training-free methods like ZoomEye and RAP in both accuracy and efficiency on two complex HR benchmarks (Visual Probe and HR-Bench), across different MLLMs such as Qwen2.5-VL and LLaVA-OneVision. Moreover, HEE demonstrates generalization on the MME-RealWorld benchmark.

With the advancement of imaging technology, ultra-high-definition images have become increasingly essential in modern visual applications. However, existing multi-focus image fusion remains largely confined to low-resolution images and faces three major barriers in UHD scenarios, namely data availability, model adaptability, and deployment feasibility, which severely hinder its practical application. To shatter these barriers, first, we propose the UHD-MFF dataset, the first large-scale ultra-high-resolution multi-focus fusion dataset. Second, we propose a scale-specialized lookup-table framework tailored for ultra-high-resolution images, termed as UMF-LUT. It consists of Coarse-Region Lookup Table (C-LUT) and Detail-Edge Lookup Table (D-LUT). Specifically, C-LUT performs joint queries of multiple gradient cues and semantic cues at low-resolution scales to enable region-level decision-making. Also, D-LUT operates at high-resolution scales, leveraging efficient Laplacian cues to provide complementary edge-level decision information. Such a design makes the model particularly well-suited for ultra-high-resolution multi-focus image fusion. Finally, it offers strong deployability with minimal computational overhead, enabling real-time 4K multi-focus fusion and showing promising potential for smartphone. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it outperforms SOTA methods in both visual fidelity and quantitative metrics. It effectively advances the development of multi-focus image fusion toward ultra-high-resolution imaging scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/zyb5/UHD-MFF.

Autonomous driving systems benefit from high-definition (HD) maps that provide critical information about road infrastructure. The online construction of HD maps offers a scalable approach to generate local vectorized maps from onboard sensor observations. Existing methods commonly adopt bird's-eye-view (BEV) features as the intermediate scene representation, encoding the surrounding space with fixed-resolution dense grids. However, map elements are spatially sparse yet require fine-grained geometric localization, making uniformly allocated BEV representations redundant and less effective for vectorized map prediction. In this work, we propose GaussianMap, an online HD map construction framework that learns an adaptive Gaussian representation of the surrounding scene. This representation consists of a set of Gaussian primitives on the BEV plane, each encoding a flexible local region with geometric properties and a feature vector, allowing the model to allocate representational capacity to map-relevant regions. To generate such a representation from sensor observations, we introduce a feed-forward Gaussian encoder that progressively refines these primitives through Gaussian interaction modeling and multi-sensor feature aggregation. The refined Gaussian representation is then splatted into a BEV feature map and decoded into vectorized map predictions. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets demonstrate that GaussianMap achieves state-of-the-art performance in both camera-only and camera-LiDAR fusion settings. Our code will be made publicly available.

RGB-T detectors leverage the complementary strengths of visible and thermal infrared modalities, achieving robust performance under challenging conditions. Many of them resort to heavy dual backbones and exhaustive cross-modality fusion across the entire image, leading to impractically high computational costs. We observe that most image regions are smooth backgrounds (e.g., sky, ground) that can be easily handled by lightweight single-modality models. In light of this observation, we propose a sparse fusion mechanism for efficient RGB-T detection: first rapidly scanning the image to identify the proposals and then carefully examining the remaining sparse proposals via feature fusion. We propose a two-stage framework to instantiate this mechanism, which performs detection in two stages: 1) a lightweight and modality-specific detection stage that produces high-recall RoIs, and 2) a fusion-driven examination and refinement stage that filters out the false positives and refines the bounding boxes. This design enables the detector to adaptively allocate more computational resources to the potential foregrounds, improving the efficiency while ensuring detection accuracy. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves competitive performance with substantially fewer parameters and lower cost, while maintaining strong scalability to high-resolution images.

Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to locate specific objects in high-resolution RS imagery using free-form natural language descriptions. While recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show great potential for such open-vocabulary RSVG, their training-free adaptation is hindered by the modality gap between abstract linguistic semantics and fine-grained visual cues. In cluttered RS scenes, this gap inevitably causes severe localization drift. To bridge this gap, we propose Exemplar-driven Calibrated Refinement (ExACT), a novel training-free framework driven by a one-shot visual prompting mechanism to explicitly provide discriminative structural guidance for precise pixel-level localization. Specifically, we propose a Vision Exemplar-based Calibrator (VEC) that extracts fine-grained visual correspondences from the given exemplar to rectify the rough cross-modal priors from frozen MLLMs, effectively suppressing background artifacts and accurately outlining target boundaries. Subsequently, a Structure-Aware Refiner (SAR) employs an iterative merge-and-select clustering strategy to consolidate the calibrated priors into high-quality positive and negative geometric prompts. These prompts then guide the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to achieve precise pixel-level predictions. Extensive experiments confirm the superiority of ExACT over existing training-free and weakly-supervised methods.

High-resolution aerial imagery has recently emerged as a complementary modality for automated driving perception and has shown potential to improve birds-eye-view (BEV) scene understanding when fused with onboard sensors. Prior work demonstrated performance gains for online high-definition (HD) map construction through aerial-onboard fusion; however, conventional end-to-end fusion does not fully exploit the structural information contained in aerial representations. In this work, we introduce AerialFusionMapNet, a fusion-based mapping framework with a structured two-stage training strategy that explicitly enhances the contribution of aerial features within a unified pipeline. The proposed training scheme enables more effective integration of structural aerial priors. On the nuScenes geographic split, AerialFusionMapNet achieves up to 54.7 mAP, improving over prior aerial-onboard fusion baselines from 48.8 mAP by +5.9 absolute and +12.1% relative. The results suggest that structured training design, rather than increased architectural complexity, plays a more decisive role in unlocking the full potential of aerial imagery for online HD map construction. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/DriverlessMobility/AerialFusionMapNet.

Arbitrary-scale image super-resolution (ASISR) aims to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution inputs over a continuous range of upscaling factors. While traditional pixel-regression approaches often produce overly smooth results that lack realistic details, recent diffusion methods can produce sharper and more realistic textures. However, these diffusion techniques frequently introduce the risk of structural hallucinations. To address these issues, we propose Fidelity- and Perception-Aware Local Implicit Attention (FPLIA), a framework that effectively integrates fidelity-oriented features into a diffusion pipeline to produce realistic and faithful reconstructions for ASISR. We introduce a Fidelity and Perception Attention Module (FPAM), which applies both self-attention and cross-attention to fidelity-oriented and perceptual features to enhance representational capacity. To further exploit their complements, we design a Fidelity and Perception Select Module (FPSM) that adaptively selects the most representative features for RGB values prediction. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of these components. Both qualitative and quantitative results show that FPLIA delivers superior perceptual realism while maintaining reconstruction accuracy on standard ASISR benchmarks. The source code is accessible at the following repository: https://github.com/XUSean0118/FPLIA.

Forecast errors in high-resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems are often linked to unresolved planetary boundary layer (PBL) processes, convection, terrain-induced circulations, and other vertically structured atmospheric phenomena. Previous work demonstrated that Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks can successfully predict forecast errors in the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model using mesonet observations, but we believe performance degradation is linked to periods of complex vertical atmospheric evolution. To address this limitation, we develop a hybrid LSTM-Vision Transformer (LSTM-ViT) framework that combines temporal sequence learning from surface observations with atmospheric profiles from the New York State Mesonet profiler network. The LSTM-ViT framework is trained to predict HRRR hourly precipitation, 10 m wind speed, and 2 m temperature forecast errors at individual mesonet stations. Across all three predictors, incorporation of profiler-derived atmospheric structure improves forecast error prediction skill relative to the baseline LSTM architecture, with the largest gains occurring at shorter forecast lead times and during periods of enhanced PBL activity. Improvements are particularly pronounced for precipitation forecast error, where the LSTM-ViT framework achieves approximately a twofold increase in predictive skill relative to the baseline LSTM while better capturing convectively driven error evolution and reducing degradation associated with PBL processes. These results demonstrate that combining temporal sequence learning with vertically informed attention mechanisms provides a physically meaningful pathway for improving forecast error prediction in operational NWP systems. Our research offers forecasters enhanced guidance regarding model bias and forecast confidence.

We introduce SMART, a framework for learning a flexible, interpretable, and scalable spatio-temporal brain atlas from longitudinal high-resolution 3D medical images. Existing approaches to spatio-temporal atlas construction rely on black-box generative models that lack flexibility, limit interpretability, and struggle to scale to high-dimensional data. SMART addresses these challenges by learning a continuous disease-time atlas that decouples global group-wise disease dynamics from their patient-specific anatomical manifestation. Guided by anatomically inspired priors, SMART models interpretable global trajectories of regional progression along a shared disease timeline through region-specific differential equations. Global trajectories are further personalized to individual anatomies via dense diffeomorphic displacements parameterized by a flexible and scalable multi-scale Neural Cellular Automata. Evaluated on five longitudinal MRI datasets in Alzheimer's disease (ADNI-1/GO/2, OASIS-3, AIBL; > 1,300 subjects), SMART produces anatomically meaningful predictions of disease progression and achieves state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy and improved temporal consistency over adversarial and diffusion baselines. Our approach establishes a new paradigm for flexible, interpretable, and scalable modeling of spatio-temporal change in high-dimensional medical image time-series.

Accurate, up-to-date representations of road structures are critical for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. Existing systems rely either on costly, maintenance-heavy high-definition (HD) maps which compromise safety when outdated, or purely sensor-based online mapping which struggles with long-range reliability and occlusion. Systems incorporating map prior information into online mapping seek to overcome drawbacks of both approaches by combining them in some way. We propose 'Driveline To HD Map' (D2HDMap), an online mapping system that injects a lightweight, non-visible driveline prior to guide the estimation of visible road structures such as lane dividers, road boundaries and crosswalks. This prior incurs less effort to create and update compared to full HD map priors used in other approaches. We also show that training with such a prior can improve generalization at inference time when no prior is available. Ablation studies conducted on the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 dataset demonstrate that models trained using a driveline prior largely retain performance even when priors are not available. On a geographically disjoint split, D2HDMap achieves 44.8 mAP, surpassing recent state-of-the-art. Additionally, noise-aware training substantially increases robustness to realistic localization error.

Space-based monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO$_2$) constrains the global carbon budget. NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) estimates column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of CO$_2$ (XCO$_2$) from high-resolution spectra, but operational retrievals are computationally expensive and impose stringent Gaussianity assumptions on the retrieved posterior. We present a deep learning framework that addresses both through amortized probabilistic inference. Lacking ground truth for real observations, we train and evaluate on a high-fidelity OCO-2 simulation ensemble with calibrated forward-model errors, comparing against the version-10 ACOS full-physics retrieval on the same radiances. Our architecture encodes each spectral band separately and estimates posteriors of the full CO$_2$ column, or summaries thereof, with Laplace approximations and conditional normalizing flows. Once trained, inference costs milliseconds per sounding rather than minutes, and calibrated posteriors are attainable at that cost. Trained on simulations that explicitly include forward-model discrepancy, our retrievals are more accurate than the operational one for XCO$_2$ on both data partitions we consider, and competitive on profiles. The flow represents asymmetric posteriors that a Gaussian cannot, a gain attributable to shape rather than scale, and its advantage in predictive density persists where its accuracy advantage does not. These results are established on a land-only ensemble against one configuration of the operational algorithm. On reference soundings withheld from training and on two unseen months the XCO$_2$ and density advantages persist while calibration degrades under sparsely sampled observing conditions, pointing to the diversity of the simulated scene population rather than the method as the main obstacle.

Reference-guided generation (e.g., object compositing, customization) has progressed rapidly, yet current pipelines share a fundamental limitation: the object-centric high-resolution reference image (HRRI) provided by users is downsampled to a fixed low-resolution (LR) before being fed into the model, so the fine-grained details are discarded before the output is even produced. In addition, the generation step then introduces its own artifacts (e.g., identity distortion) on top of this loss. Existing reference-guided generated content refinement (RefGCR) methods can correct some of these artifacts but still operate in the LR domain; reference-guided super-resolution (RefSR) methods recover resolution but assume natural-image degradations and ignore the artifact distribution of generative pipelines. To address both gaps in a single formulation, we introduce a new task: reference-guided generated content super-resolution-refinement (RefGC-SR$^2$), where the original HRRI is reused at the post-processing stage to recover lost details, refine generative artifacts, and upscale the output simultaneously. We construct the first real-world triplet data generation pipeline for this RefGC-SR$^2$ task, training a diptych-conditioned generator to synthesize paired low-quality anchors that public pretrained models cannot provide. We further present a frequency-aware diffusion transformer model for RefGC-SR$^2$ that selectively injects fine details from the HRRI while removing generative artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RefGC-SR$^2$ model successfully (i) refines the object identity faithfully with respect to the reference, and (ii) recovers high-resolution details, so that the final result is significantly higher quality and practically more usable compared to existing RefGCR and RefSR baselines.

Visualization-based malware detection maps raw binary bytes to grayscale images and applies learned visual classifiers, providing an evasion-resistant and disassembly-free alternative to conventional analysis pipelines. However, executable packing remains a critical failure mode: packed binaries produce high-entropy images that obscure the structural patterns these models rely on. Because packing is also prevalent in benign software (e.g., for compression or copy protection), packing state alone is not a reliable indicator of maliciousness, and existing approaches do not address this challenge within a unified supervised framework. We present ViPER, a Vision-based Packing-Aware Encoder for Robust malware detection. ViPER builds on a LoRA-adapted ViT-B/14 backbone with a dual-head architecture that jointly learns malware classification and packing detection. A packing-aware gating mechanism conditions malware predictions on the inferred packing state, enabling distinct decision boundaries for packed and unpacked inputs. To address packing label skew during training, we employ frequency-weighted losses with stratified sampling over joint class-packing strata. Evaluated on 200,000 Windows PE byteplot images, ViPER achieves a balanced accuracy of 0.8521, ROC-AUC of 0.9260, and AUPR of 0.9279, outperforming representative state-of-the-art baselines across all primary metrics, while attaining a packing detection AUC of 0.9949.

Uncertainty in the terrestrial carbon cycle remains a major constraint in climate projections, partly driven by the uncertainties affecting the land surface representation and variability in Earth system models. To address this limitation, we present a data-driven framework AI4Land, for generating high-resolution historical reconstructions and future projections of key land surface variables. The framework follows a two-phase approach using a U-Net architecture. In the first phase, which is the focus of this work, it reconstructs annual land use and land cover by integrating coarse-resolution scenario data with static geophysical features. In a planned second phase, the resulting high-resolution maps will be used to predict dynamic biophysical variables, particularly leaf area index, at finer temporal scales. Trained on Earth observation data, the models learn to reproduce spatially explicit and physically consistent land surface patterns, extending temporal coverage to periods lacking direct observations. AI4Land was developed and trained on MareNostrum5, demonstrating how GPU-accelerated HPC infrastructure enables global-scale climate AI pipelines. The final product is a suite of open-source emulators designed for real-time coupling with digital twin platforms, such as those developed under the Destination Earth initiative. By delivering realistic and evolving land surface conditions on demand, this work aims to reduce critical uncertainties and improve the predictive power of next-generation climate simulations.

Integral field unit (IFU) spectroscopy provides spatially resolved spectra across galaxies, offering crucial insights into their evolution. However, its high observational cost limits current IFU datasets to $\sim 10^4$ objects. We present a multi-modal, probabilistic foundation model that predicts high-resolution spectra with calibrated uncertainties at arbitrary spatial locations within a galaxy directly from broadband images. Built on a masked autoencoder framework, our architecture injects fiber positional encodings and redshift aware wavelength encodings, enabling spatially conditioned predictions. Trained on 4.7 million images and single fiber spectroscopic observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey, our model exploits the natural variance of fiber placements and the morphological self-similarity of galaxies to achieve IFU-like capabilities without any IFU training data. Predicted emission line flux maps match independent IFU observations from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey, with performance comparable to a supervised baseline trained directly on IFU data.

While recent autoregressive video diffusion models achieve remarkable streaming quality, they remain confined to low resolutions (e.g., 480P), leaving efficient, scalable, real-time high-resolution video generation a fundamental open challenge. To bridge this gap, we present Ultra Flash, a cascaded streaming framework capable of real-time high-resolution video generation. Ultra Flash achieves ~30 FPS at 1K resolution and ~18 FPS at 2K resolution on a single GPU through three key contributions: (1) an architecture-preserving T2V-to-TV2V super-resolution training paradigm coupled with an AIGC-oriented data degradation pipeline that effectively preserves the generative capability of the base model, enabling enhanced high-resolution detail when cascaded after mainstream low-resolution generative models; (2) a causal streaming latent upsampler paired with a high-resolution decoder, which enhances spatiotemporal coherence while enabling efficient latent spatial scaling and precise high-resolution decoding with negligible computational overhead; and (3) a cascade high-resolution streaming video generation optimization scheme that first performs hybrid-reward-enhanced sparse causalization and single-step distillation of the super-resolution model, then introduces cascaded streaming self-forcing preference optimization with dynamic cache management, jointly enhancing overall coherence, improving quality, and enabling real-time high-resolution streaming video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ultra Flash reliably produces ultra-high-resolution streaming video while maintaining state-of-the-art visual quality and superior efficiency. Project Page: https://xin1u.github.io/UltraFlash/

Urban green-space extraction from ultra-high-resolution (UHR) imagery is commonly performed patch by patch, which limits semantic reuse among spatially separated but visually similar vegetation patterns. Directly injecting the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) into red-green-blue (RGB) backbones can also blur the roles of visual appearance learning and physical vegetation confidence. We propose GMBFormer, a SegFormer-based framework that replaces adjacency-driven feature propagation with selective, similarity-driven prototype retrieval. Only RGB channels enter the backbone and decoder, while NDVI is decoupled as a physics-informed gate that admits high-confidence vegetation descriptors into a compact global memory bank through momentum updates. During training and inference, the current patch queries stored prototypes through memory-mediated cross-attention, and the retrieved response is integrated with bounded overhead. Experiments use a self-constructed Chengdu UHR dataset with 7,700 labeled 512 x 512 patches and two reduced-label settings derived from the public International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Potsdam dataset. Under the same training and evaluation protocol, GMBFormer obtains mean intersection over union (mIoU)/mean Dice (mDice) scores of 89.25%/94.31%, 92.17%/95.92%, and 83.72%/90.86%, respectively, improving the controlled SegFormer-B4 baseline in each setting. Ablation studies indicate that decoupled NDVI admission, memory retrieval, capacity, and momentum jointly shape the final performance.

Reconstructing a photorealistic 3D face avatar from a single unconstrained photograph is challenging: feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models degrade on out-of-distribution inputs, while pretrained diffusion models produce high-fidelity images but lack multi-view consistency. We observe that these paradigms are fundamentally complementary: explicit 3D representations guarantee geometric consistency, whereas 2D diffusion priors ensure photorealism. Building on this, we propose SplatShot, a training-free framework that couples these representations directly within the denoising process. Given a base 3DGS face model and a single reference image, we jointly denoise all target views using a per-step 3D feedback loop. At each timestep, we predict clean images from the noisy latents, refit the 3DGS to these multi-view predictions, and back-propagate the photometric discrepancy between the 3DGS re-renderings and 2D predictions into the noise estimate. This steers the sampling trajectory toward strictly 3D-coherent, identity-faithful outputs. Experiments on diverse in-the-wild images demonstrate that SplatShot produces 3D avatars with superior identity preservation, photorealism, and multi-view consistency.

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) play an important role in agricultural production but are also associated with environmental, public health, and disease surveillance concerns. Large-scale mapping of CAFOs from remote sensing imagery remains challenging due to heterogeneous infrastructure layouts, noisy location records, inconsistent annotations, and incomplete inventories. We introduce CAFOSat, a strongly annotated, infrastructure-aware dataset for CAFO mapping across the United States. CAFOSat integrates high-resolution National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery with multi-source CAFO inventories collected across multiple states and transforms weak geolocation records into refined annotations through a human-in-the-loop pipeline combining AI-assisted annotation, GradCAM-based localization, and geometric clustering. To improve dataset quality, we curate challenging negative samples using land-cover-guided sampling with spatial exclusion constraints and provide infrastructure-level annotations, including barns, manure ponds, and grazing-related features, through manual verification. The resulting dataset contains more than 45,000 image patches spanning 20 states and four major CAFO categories. We benchmark a diverse set of convolutional, transformer-based, and vision-language models, demonstrating the value of refined annotations and curated negative samples for CAFO classification and generalization. In addition, we introduce a synthetic augmentation pipeline that generates infrastructure-aware variations to increase training diversity and improve robustness under distribution shifts. CAFOSat provides a large-scale benchmark for advancing infrastructure-aware agricultural monitoring and CAFO mapping from high-resolution remote sensing imagery.

This study introduces a novel Arctic-focused remote sensing foundation model (RSFM) by combining diversity-aware regional-scale image curation with masked autoencoder (MAE) self-supervised pretraining of a Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder for very-high-spatial-resolution (VHSR) satellite image analysis. Spectral and acquisition-metadata descriptors were used in a scalable affinity-propagation clustering workflow to select approximately 3 million chips from 267 TB of Vantor VHSR imagery This curation strategy was designed to reduce oversampling of visually repetitive or low-information areas while preserving broad scene diversity across the study domain. We pretrained a ViT-Large encoder on the curated corpus using a domain-adapted MAE reconstruction objective, producing Arctic-specific transformer weights for downstream feature mapping. The pretrained encoder was integrated into an existing location-aware detection and segmentation framework and evaluated across four hand-labeled Arctic datasets. Compared to ImageNet-initialized ViT-Large baseline, Arctic MAE pretraining produced consistent improvements in foreground mean F1 scores of 0.87, 0.72, 0.93, and 0.87, for infrastructure, IWP, RTS, and TCNs, with approximately 5-8 percentage increase. The proposed model also outperformed Prithvi-EO-2.0 in all downstream comparisons, with the smallest gain corresponding to at least a 15 percentage improvement mean F1, suggesting that domain-specific self-supervised pretraining on curated Arctic VHSR imagery provides more transferable representations for fine-scale Arctic mapping than a general-purpose Earth observation foundation model. These results demonstrate that optimizing the pretraining data distribution at regional scale, while keeping the architecture and MAE objective fixed, can produce a reusable Arctic-domain encoder for multiple VHSR remote sensing applications.

Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been reported to achieve over 90% accuracy on fine-grained perception benchmarks. However, such scores do not necessarily imply faithful use of visual evidence. Prior studies have identified three shortcuts that inflate benchmark performance. First, linguistic priors and lexical cues in questions often enable models to infer plausible answers without seeing the image. Second, coarse global semantics from the visual encoder can bypass fine-grained local details. Third, in some ``think-with-images'' benchmarks, corrupting the intermediate images returned by visual tools barely affects the final answer. These findings suggest that higher input resolution or larger question pools alone do not elicit genuine active visual search. To address this, we introduce VisualNeedle, a challenging, information-dense, and fine-grained benchmark for scenes where critical evidence is spatially constrained to minute regions and not discernible at a glance. We further propose a counterfactual crop-black setting, which replaces crops returned by tools with black images of the same size, to test whether tool-enabled performance truly relies on intermediate visual evidence. We evaluate 9 promninent MLLMs across three settings: no-tool, standard tool-enabled, and crop-black. No-tool accuracy stays below 20%, and the best tool-enabled model reaches only 56.01%, still trailing the 63.00% human majority-vote accuracy. These results reveal persistent limitations in fine-grained visual search, while the crop-black ablation confirms that success on VisualNeedle hinges on genuine intermediate visual evidence.

High-resolution video generation faces a coupled bottleneck of optimization instability and prohibitive computational costs. The massive expansion of the token sequence not only biases optimization toward local textures at the expense of global coherence, leading to structural collapse, but also imposes prohibitive training costs and severe inference latency. To address this, we propose PixelWizard, a framework that hierarchically decouples global structure modeling from fine-grained detail synthesis. PixelWizard first establishes a compact spatiotemporal anchor to concentrate dense structural priors, which then guides fine-grained generation at high resolution. This mitigates the local optimization bias to ensure structural stability without compromising high-frequency details. Leveraging this structural stability, we introduce Noise-Span Aligned Shortcut Training to break the inference bottleneck. By explicitly modeling the step size, this mechanism allows the model to traverse the generation trajectory with large steps. Crucially, we incorporate Exponential Index-Biased Sampling and Adaptive Noise-Span Calibration to align optimization with the shifted noise schedules of high-resolution grids, ensuring robust few-step inference without incurring the heavy overhead of distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PixelWizard achieves superior visual quality while accelerating the generative sampling of native 2K/4K videos by over 10x.

High-resolution (HR) image perception presents a key bottleneck for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While visual search offers a promising solution, existing methods struggle with the trade-off between coverage and efficiency. Visual expert-assisted search is efficient but prone to blind spots when proposals fail, whereas scan-based search guarantees coverage at the cost of computational redundancy and semantic fragmentation. To address this dilemma, we introduce CVSearch, a training-free adaptive framework that dynamically schedules search strategies via an Assess-then-Search workflow. Specifically, CVSearch first invokes expert-assisted search when global information is insufficient, and only triggers a novel semantic-aware scanning mechanism upon failure. Distinct from rigid grid partitioning, this efficient scanning paradigm incorporates Semantic Guided Adaptive Patching to decompose images into semantically consistent regions, effectively mitigating object fragmentation. Furthermore, we devise a Dynamic Bottom-Up Search strategy driven by a Visual Complexity prior to enable efficient and precise iterative exploration of local details. Extensive experiments on HR benchmarks demonstrate that CVSearch achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while substantially improving search efficiency. Code is released at https://github.com/liliupeng28/ICML26-CVSearch.

Directly editing ultra-high-resolution (UHR) images is valuable but underexplored, primarily due to the lack of high-quality data and the challenge in modeling high-frequency texture details. We introduce VINS-120K, the first large-scale dataset for instruction-based UHR image editing, comprising 120K carefully curated triplets of instruction, input image, and edited image. Each image exceeds 4K resolution ($\geq$4096 $\times$ 4096) and is filtered through a rigorous multi-stage pipeline to ensure visual quality, instruction alignment, and aesthetic fidelity. Built on VINS-120K, we further develop a high-frequency-aware post-adaptation strategy to extend pretrained non-high-resolution models to the UHR regime. We also present VINS-4KEval, a benchmark covering diverse editing types, to facilitate consistent evaluation in UHR settings. Experiments confirm that our work improves fine-grained detail synthesis and texture realism in UHR image editing.

While 3D generation is progressing rapidly, recent work has often focused on obtaining high-resolution assets, leaving user experience and deployability as afterthoughts. We present AssetGen, a 3D generator that focuses instead on these two aspects. Given one reference image, in 30 seconds it produces a high-quality mesh with baked normals, a color texture, and a controlled polygon budget suitable for real-time rendering, including mobile use cases. The AssetGen Flash variant further reduces latency to 14 seconds for interactive and agentic creation loops. Our model generates the object geometry with a coarse-to-refine VecSet framework, which implements mesh simplification, cleaning, and normal baking on the GPU, and a fast parallel UV unwrapping. It then generates textures in a multi-view fashion, followed by backprojection and 3D inpainting. Model distillation, kernel optimization, and pipeline parallelization are co-designed to accelerate the system end-to-end. We introduce numerous automated and blind human evaluations and demonstrate competitive visual quality against leading commercial solutions in 30 seconds and preview-quality results in less than 15 seconds. The final result is a system that supports AI-assisted, deployable 3D content creation in interactive workflows.

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) for ultrahighdefinition (UHD) images remains challenging because native-resolution inference is computationally expensive, whereas aggressive resizing or isolated cropping may suppress scale-sensitive distortions and weaken the relationship between local artifacts and global scene context. This paper aims to improve UHD-BIQA by explicitly modeling the structural dependencies among sampled image regions rather than treating them as independent views, and a graph representation learning framework UHD-GCN-BIQA is proposed. The framework samples aspect-ratio-aligned patches from each UHD image, encodes them as graph nodes, and constructs a hybrid k-nearest-neighbor graph using spatial proximity and feature similarity. Residual graph convolution is used to propagate contextual information across regions, and gated attention pooling aggregates patchlevel evidence into an imagelevel quality prediction. An exponential moving average normalized multiobjective loss function is adopted to stabilize the joint optimization of regression, correlation, and ranking objectives. Experiments on the UHD-IQA benchmark show that UHD-GCN-BIQA achieves PLCC = 0.7784, SRCC = 0.8019, and RMSE = 0.0519, obtaining competitive correlation performance and the lowest RMSE among the compared methods. These results indicate that graph-based region relation modeling is effective for UHD image quality assessment, particularly for improving absolute quality score estimation under high-resolution visual content.

Event-based low-light image enhancement (LIE) methods mainly focus on incorporating high dynamic range (HDR) information from events while overlooking the essential global illumination in images and the inherent noise sensitivity of event signals in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose EIC-LIE, an event-illumination collaborative LIE framework. Concretely, we first design an Event-Illumination Collaborative Interaction (EICI) module, which contains two key processes: forward gathering, which gathers HDR features across varying lighting conditions, and backward injection, which provides complementary content for illumination and event representations. Next, we introduce an Illumination-aware Event Filter (IAEF) that dynamically reduces event noise based on brightness statistics derived from images. Additionally, we build a beam-splitter-based hybrid imaging system to collect high-quality event-image pairs with temporal synchronization from dynamic scenes, providing the first high-resolution, real-world event-based LIE dataset. Extensive experiments show that our EIC-LIE outperforms state-of-the-art methods on five real-world and synthetic datasets, significantly surpassing previous methods with improvements of up to 1.24dB in PSNR and 0.069 in SSIM. The code and dataset are released at https://github.com/QUEAHREN/EIC-LIE.

The rapid evolution of generative AI, from GANs to modern diffusion models, has resulted in increasingly subtle discriminative clues. These fine-grained signals are often overshadowed by dominant, high-fidelity image content (e.g., the main subject), limiting the reliability of existing detectors that predominantly rely on global representations. To address this challenge, we propose the Peak-Guided Calibration (PGC) framework. PGC introduces a novel strategy that aggregates salient features via a peak-focusing mechanism. Specifically, by employing a peak-sensitive aggregation that accentuates the most discriminative local clues, PGC leverages these critical signals to calibrate the global decision. This approach recovers subtle patterns that would otherwise be submerged in the global context. Furthermore, to better simulate real-world threats, we introduce the CommGen15 dataset, a challenging benchmark comprising samples from 15 commercial models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PGC achieves state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, it improves mean accuracy by +12.3% on our CommGen15 dataset, and sets new records on standard benchmarks, including GenImage (+2.1%), AIGI (+3.5%), and UniversalFakeDetect (+1.7%). Code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyu6868/PGC.