Audio-visual speech enhancement (AVSE) uses visual-speech cues from a target speaker to recover that speaker's speech from noisy or overlapping speech. Many widely used protocols construct mixed signals from separately recorded audio sources and assume reliable video, leaving their performance under natural overlap and visual failure insufficiently characterized. The Real-World AVSE Challenge evaluates two related settings. Track~1 comprises two scenarios: real-world mixtures recorded with two speakers speaking simultaneously, without a corresponding clean reference signal, and synthetic remixes obtained by manually mixing the separately recorded speech of two speakers, with a clean reference signal available; Track~2 reuses audio but pairs it with a degraded target video and contains additional 3-m far-field recordings. The speakers in the development and test sets are disjoint. Evaluation metrics include clean-waveform fidelity, learned quality estimates, transcription accuracy, and speaker identification. In the remix task on the development set, the baseline model achieved an SI-SDR of $-4.069$~dB and an STOI of $0.388$ on Track~1, and an SI-SDR of $-2.851$~dB and an STOI of $0.470$ on Track~2. We release the AV-ConvTasNet checkpoints, the offline evaluator, and the official baseline results on the development and test sets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23759
Poor illumination obscures small, low-contrast defects in UAV bridge imagery, reducing the reliability and operational flexibility of automated inspection. This paper investigates whether degradation-aware image restoration can improve bridge damage detection under low-light conditions and transfer from synthetic degradations to real inspection scenes. We propose DaL- MoE, a detector-agnostic restoration front end trained with an ISP-aware low-light synthesis pipeline and equipped with degradation-aware guidance estimation and complementary experts for noise suppression, color adjustment, and structural-detail recovery. On paired synthetic data, DaL-MoE achieves 23.12 dB PSNR and 0.8482 SSIM, increasing YOLOv11m box mAP50 from 0.3097 to 0.4923 and mask mAP50 from 0.2281 to 0.3529. On real low-light UAV imagery without paired normal-light references, sim-to-real evaluation shows improved defect visibility and more complete detections than direct inference on raw low-light inputs. Future work will develop low-light-aware bridge damage detectors with stronger cross-scene generalization across bridge sites, imaging conditions, and illumination levels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23136
Many image processing methods such as corner detection, optical flow and iterative enhancement make use of image tensors. Generally, these tensors are estimated using the structure tensor. In this work we show that the gradient energy tensor can be used as an alternative to the structure tensor in several cases. We apply the gradient energy tensor to common image problem applications such as corner detection, optical flow and image enhancement. Our experimental results suggest that the gradient energy tensor enables real-time tensor-based image enhancement using the graphical processing unit (GPU) and we obtain 40% increase of frame rate without loss of image quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22314
Vision-language models can be personalized in a training-free manner by directly providing user profiles, preferences, or visual references at inference time, without updating model parameters. However, direct personalized prompting does not guarantee that the model will reliably exploit such evidence. The predictive distribution under the positive user profile often mixes two sources: personalized signals genuinely supported by the current profile, and the model's generic visual or linguistic priors. As a result, from the positive-profile response alone, it is difficult to determine whether a high-confidence answer is supported by the user profile or merely reflects the model's default preference. To address this problem, we propose a training-free calibrated residual decoding framework. Given the same image and question, we construct three evidence conditions: a positive profile , a counterfactual profile , and an empty profile . Our method keeps the prediction under as the anchored base, and explicitly estimates the marginal contribution of personalization from score differences across the three conditions. We further introduce normalized-entropy-based uncertainty calibration, allowing the strength of personalized enhancement to adapt to the reliability of the residual signal. Experiments on MMPB, YoLLaVA, and MyVLM show that the proposed method improves personalized multimodal understanding without fine-tuning, with consistent gains on identity-sensitive visual personalization tasks. Additional analysis shows that entropy calibration stabilizes residual decoding when the contrastive personalization signal is uncertain.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22263
Pathologic complete response (pCR) is a strong neoadjuvant endpoint, yet 5-15% of complete responders recur and clinical/genomic variables do not reliably identify them. We tested whether pretreatment dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI entropy - intratumoral enhancement heterogeneity - resolves response quality hidden within pCR and residual cancer burden (RCB). Across four cohorts (1,200 patients), a prespecified entropy threshold defined favorable and adverse structural states. Crossing structure with pathology yielded a four-tier framework spanning 4.1-fold recurrence in I-SPY1 and 7.7-fold at response extremes. In I-SPY2, 55 of 219 complete responders (25.1%) were structurally adverse, pretreatment. In an external HER2-positive responder synthesis (I-SPY1 pathology-confirmed pCR plus UCSF best-response proxy; n = 33, 10 events), adverse structure was associated with higher recurrence risk (HR = 2.87, 95% CI 1.38-5.96) capturing 7 of 10 recurrences, enriching rather than determining risk. In a HER2-positive RCB-0 subset, recurrence was 12.5% with favorable and 80.0% with adverse structure; Firth Cox regression preserved the association (HR = 8.13, 95% CI 1.71-49.21; n = 21, 6 events). In Duke (n = 908; 76 events), favorable structure remained independently associated with lower distant-recurrence risk (adjusted HR = 0.61, 95% CI 0.41-0.91). RNA linked favorable structure to a directionally reproduced immune-architecture program among non-overlapping patients within ISPY2; EMT-pathway enrichment was favorable-side, while the adverse tier contained a broadly immune-depleted substate. Yet full-cohort RNA models weakly discriminated structural state and did not recover continuous entropy. Pretreatment MRI therefore does not replace pCR or RCB; it reveals response-quality differences that these endpoints compress and identifies a recurrence-enriched group for prospective validation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22097
Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) must correct ambiguous exposure without overwriting structure already supported by the input. Generative transport can model exposure ambiguity; however, its flexibility may also alter observable geometry and chromatic content. Moreover, fixed invertible color coordinates are usually treated only as representations, although their inverse mappings reshape the RGB-domain gradients received by the enhancement network. To address these issues, we propose Structure-Anchored Rectified Flow (SA-RF), which maintains correspondence through separate chromaticity/intensity stems, a scale-matched condition pyramid, and HybridAda. HybridAda assigns location-specific retrieval to spatial cross-attention and global exposure modulation to pooled AdaLN. We further introduce BC-IHV, a learnable Box--Cox polar color space whose analytically invertible intensity mapping controls the inverse-gradient dynamic range through a single exponent. This allows the representation to balance dark-range expansion and gradient conditioning instead of adopting a fixed linear or logarithmic law. Experiments on three LOL benchmarks, blind image-quality evaluation, and cross-dataset tests demonstrate consistent reconstruction and perceptual advantages over the sota. Controlled studies further support the effectiveness of both the proposed framework and color representation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21847
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated significant gains in image captioning, yet it is still limited in encouraging Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to explore novel reasoning strategies. This limitation leads to a performance gap between RL and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this paper, we argue that multi-modal retrieval can serve as an effective reasoning signal for caption refinement. Based on this insight, we present the Retrieval-Guided Refinement for Image Captioning (Re$^3$Cap), a retrieval-guided reasoning strategy that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Instantiated by Caption Refinement Suggester (CRS) and Caption Quality Assessor (CQA), this strategy identifies hallucinations and omissions in image captions, leading to more accurate and detailed descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in image captioning, even compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Especially, Re$^3$Cap outperforms GRPO with an average improvement of 8.64% in relation reasoning on the COCO-LN500 benchmark.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21305
The latest video coding standard, H.266/VVC, has demonstrated significant improvements in compression efficiency compared to H.265/HEVC. Despite its advanced coding techniques, H.266/VVC still faces challenges in meeting the increasing demand for higher perceptual quality and enhanced compression performance. To address these limitations, we propose MDFI (Multi-Domain Features Integration), a compressed video quality enhancement approach that features a novel Frame-Prediction Feature Transform (FPFT) module to process prediction information. Moreover, MDFI integrates a multi-domain feature fusion strategy that effectively combines spatiotemporal characteristics, cross-frequency representations, and compressed-domain prediction information to enhance decoded video quality. Additionally, we introduce a comprehensive dataset that encompasses uncompressed video sequences, corresponding reconstructed versions at multiple QP levels, and predicted frames generated from H.266/VVC compressed bitstreams, providing essential resources for developing and benchmarking video enhancement approaches. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MDFI approach achieves superior performance to state-of-the-art methods in both objective metrics and visual quality, effectively mitigating video compression artifacts. The code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21495
Automatic speech quality assessment aims to predict Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) consistent with human subjective perception and is essential for evaluating speech generation, enhancement, and communication systems. For speech signals, especially synthetic speech, distortions often occur locally, and overall perceptual quality is usually dominated by a small number of perceptually salient distortion regions. However, most existing methods are primarily optimized with utterance-level MOS, which provides only coarse-grained supervision and offer no explicit indication of where perceptually important distortions occur. To address this limitation, we introduce explicit distortion localization as auxiliary knowledge for speech quality assessment. We construct the first partially distorted speech dataset with frame-level distortion annotations and train a localization model to generate distortion cues. Building on these cues, we propose DAMOS, a distortion-aware speech quality assessment framework that integrates localization information into the MOS prediction pipeline. Experiments on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that DAMOS consistently outperforms existing methods and exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization, validating the effectiveness of explicit distortion localization for speech quality assessment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21176
Large language model (LLM)-based autoregressive speech enhancement (SE) produces natural speech using learned clean-speech priors, but may hallucinate content unsupported by the input. Deterministic SE better preserves observation-coupled evidence, yet often retains residual noise or local distortion. We propose an evidence-grounded generative SE framework that uses a deterministic estimate as imperfect evidence. A Whisper-guided DPRNN produces an enhanced waveform, which is blended with the observation and tokenized into a discrete evidence sequence. The evidence conditions an autoregressive clean-speech token generator and is reused during decoding through Code-Space Grounding (CSG), which penalizes candidates according to their Hamming distance in the factorized finite-scalar-quantized (FSQ) space. Because the appropriate grounding strength depends on acoustic difficulty, we introduce SNR-Conditioned CSG (SNR-CSG), which maps a calibrated residual-SNR estimate to an utterance-level strength and constructs an adaptive grounded anchor. Although grounding improves content fidelity, the anchor may retain local acoustic defects inherited from the evidence. Since such defects are predominantly local in the FSQ space, nearby tokens may provide better acoustic realizations without large departures from the observation-supported trajectory. We therefore propose Grounded Neighborhood Refinement with LLM ranking (GNR-LLM). It performs one additional teacher-forced pass conditioned on the grounded-anchor history, intersects the LLM top-$K$ candidates with a local FSQ Hamming neighborhood. Experiments on in-domain, controlled-SNR, and DNS no-reverb conditions show that SNR-CSG provides robust automatic grounding, while GNR-LLM substantially improves low-SNR perceptual quality without sacrificing content fidelity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04245
Identity-preserving video generation aims to synthesize videos that follow natural-language instructions while maintaining the visual identity of a given subject. Recent commercial video generation models have achieved strong visual quality and motion realism, but they still suffer from identity drift, incomplete instruction following, and missing visual details under complex prompts. Since these models are usually closed-source black boxes, directly improving them through parameter optimization is often infeasible. We therefore propose Agentic Enhancement and Semantic Repair (AESR), a lightweight enhancement framework for identity-preserving video generation. To improve prompt construction before generation and mitigate the above failures, AESR introduces a global agentic prompt enhancement module. This module learns model-specific prompting formats from official documentation, acquires human-centered video generation priors from human-interaction data, and accumulates test-domain identity-preserving generation experience into a reusable playbook through an agentic loop. To further repair errors in videos generated with enhanced prompts, AESR introduces a sample-level visual semantic repair module, which uses a VLM to locate erroneous video segments and design repair instructions, edits selected frames into explicit visual references, and guides a video editing model to fix local semantic or identity-related errors. We also adopt a lightweight Mixture-of-Experts selection strategy to choose reliable outputs from different generation and refinement paths. Under the official evaluation protocol of the ACM MM 2026 Identity-Preserving Video Generation Challenge, our system MIPL\_Video ranked first in Track 1, demonstrating the effectiveness of AESR for practical identity-preserving video generation. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20749
Panoramic image generation is increasingly important for immersive applications such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and 3D content creation. Unlike perspective images, panoramic images represent a viewer-centered $360^\circ$ surrounding space, where directional expressions such as left, right, front, and behind play a central role in spatial understanding. However, existing text-to-panorama methods largely rely on implicit spatial reasoning and often fail to faithfully ground object-level directional descriptions in spherical panoramic scenes. A straightforward alternative is to introduce explicit layouts, but requiring manually specified spatial conditions reduces the flexibility of language-based interaction and does not directly resolve the misalignment between egocentric directional language and panoramic image space. To address this issue, we propose PanoCtrl, an object-centric framework for controllable text-to-panorama generation. Our method explicitly bridges natural language and spherical panoramic space by converting textual descriptions into structured object-level spherical conditions and integrating them into the diffusion process. Specifically, we introduce PanoParse, a text-conditioned parser that predicts object semantics and spherical bounding field-of-view (BFoV) parameters, and \textbf{PanoControl}, which injects object-level semantic and spatial guidance into the diffusion transformer through object-aware attention and spatial residual enhancement. To support this task, we construct PanoGround, a dataset with object-level spherical annotations and diverse directional descriptions for controllable panoramic generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PanoCtrl achieves state-of-the-art performance in both spatial alignment and image quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20691
Generative video compression can recover rich visual details at low bitrates, but simultaneously achieving high temporal consistency and low inference cost remains challenging. To address this issue, we propose DiffVC-ONE, a diffusion-based generative video compression framework built on a one-step Video Diffusion Transformer. First, we introduce a Unified Unidirectional Latent Compressor that uses a shared model to efficiently and uniformly compress compact latent slices. We then develop a Video DiT-based One-Step Diffusion Enhancer that uses the reconstructed latent slices as content anchors and performs single-step spatio-temporal perceptual enhancement over an entire group of pictures. Finally, a Hybrid Condition Generator extracts structural, strength, and semantic conditions from the reconstructed content and quantization information. These conditions preserve faithful regions, control the degree of generative enhancement, and supplement content-aware perceptual details during one-step diffusion enhancement. Extensive experiments on multiple standard benchmarks demonstrate that DiffVC-ONE achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality and temporal consistency with low inference cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20515
We present Swift-Image, a compact unified model for text-to-image generation, single-image editing, and multi-image editing. Our goal is to explore how far a relatively small visual generator can be pushed through systematic training engineering under a constrained computational budget. Swift-Image adopts an efficient 6B single-stream DiT and a progressive training pipeline that evolves from broad semantic coverage to higher resolution, stronger visual quality, and unified generation-editing supervision. For post-training, we employ parallel expert reinforcement learning followed by multi-teacher on-policy distillation to alleviate interference among heterogeneous objectives. We further decouple high-level reasoning from pixel-level rendering with a Prompt Enhancer that translates user requests into generator-aligned visual specifications. For efficient deployment, structural pruning and few-step distillation produce 3B and accelerated variants. Swift-Image achieves leading aggregate performance among evaluated open-source models with only 6B parameters and 243K GPU training hours; the compressed 3B model incurs nearly no loss, while few-step distillation further improves aggregate editing performance with substantially fewer sampling steps. Our study also summarizes practical lessons for architecture, data curriculum, post-training, prompt enhancement, and model compression.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20334
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for the safe deployment of large language models (LLMs). Existing methods, from verbalized confidence to ones requiring multiple generations, are often zero-shot and produce scores quantifying uncertainty without the need for labelled data. Nonetheless, in practice one must always evaluate their performance on a dataset of interest before deployment. In this work we show that, by leveraging this dataset, we consistently outperform these existing scores. Specifically, we build simple classifiers that predict LLM response correctness by using these scores and the correctness of similar queries as features. Our method produces minimal computational overhead, making it a cheap and straightforward enhancement for UQ in LLMs for real-world applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19323
Underwater images suffer from color distortion, haze, and poor visibility due to light refraction and absorption in water. These challenges significantly impact the utilization of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) or marine robots. Typically, color and brightness distortions manifest at lower frequencies, while edge and texture distortions are prevalent at higher frequencies. Traditional methods struggle to concurrently rectify these mixed distortions as they primarily concentrate on the spatial domain. To address these issues, we introduce the Dynamic SpectraFormer, which enhances underwater images through a frequency domain transformer. The Dynamic SpectraFormer introduces an ultra-high-resolution sparse spectrum attention module, which could capture the long-term dependency without losing the universal approximating power. Additionally, we have developed a dynamic spectrum weight generation layer that serves as an adaptive spectrum band selector, accentuating critical frequency bands and suppressing less relevant ones. Consequently, this method significantly improves underwater image quality by addressing both high- and low-frequency distortions. Our extensive ablation studies and comparative evaluations consolidate the Dynamic SpectraFormer's efficacy across multiple underwater image enhancement benchmarks. The source code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18662
Long-term video object segmentation (VOS) remains challenging due to error accumulation under extended occlusions, re-appearance, and scene changes. Although SAM2 provides strong zero-shot performance, its streaming memory can amplify drift over long horizons when recent, unreliable predictions dominate the memory state. We propose SAM2Dual, a training-free, plug-and-play inference-time enhancement that improves long-video robustness without updating model weights. SAM2Dual introduces a Dual Memory design that explicitly separates (i) short-term memory for rapid local adaptation and (ii) long-term memory built via interval-based sampling to preserve global identity cues, combined through a gated fusion strategy. In addition, we present Text-Aware Memory (TAM), which extracts a compact word-level cue from early frames and uses text embeddings to reweight memory contributions based on semantic compatibility, supporting identity preservation when visual evidence becomes weak or ambiguous. Across long-term benchmarks, SAM2Dual consistently improves stability on long videos, raising J&F from 49.33 to 50.65 on MOSEv2 and achieving consistent gains on LVOSv2.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18640
Universal multimodal retrieval aims to support diverse instruction-aware retrieval tasks, demanding both efficient corpus-scale matching and fine-grained semantic reasoning. Recent MLLM-based embedding methods typically derive representations from hidden states, while Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is emerging as a promising strategy for embedding enhancement by encoding intermediate semantic evidence into the representation space. However, existing CoT methods typically use item-wise reasoning over queries and candidates in isolation, providing no explicit evidence to distinguish a positive from a semantically confusable hard negative. Moreover, contrastive embeddings capture global similarity but struggle with meta-tasks requiring answer verification, category judgment or fine-grained reasoning. In this paper, we propose UMER, a Unified Multimodal Embedding and Ranking framework for universal multimodal retrieval. UMER replaces item-wise reflection with Pair-Aware Discriminative Reasoning, which compares query--candidate pairs to identify instruction-relevant matching and discrepancy evidence. UMER jointly learns contrastive embeddings for efficient global matching and discriminative ranking for explicit pairwise relevance judgment within a single MLLM. A complementary mutual distillation strategy further transfers reliable pairwise preferences between the embedding and ranking functions. On the MMEB-V2 benchmark, UMER achieves state-of-the-art performance under comparable experimental settings while supporting budget-adjustable inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18504
We propose UHDformer++, a general Transformer-based framework to solve numerous Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) image restoration tasks. UHDformer++ operates across $4$ coordinated learning spaces: 1) a high-resolution space (HR) for multi-level feature extraction, 2) a low-resolution space (LR) for learning compact, representative features, 3) a super-resolution space (SR) for upsampling low-resolution features from SR, and 4) a low-high fusion and reconstruction space (LHFR) for final image restoration. Specifically, HR extracts multi-scale high-resolution features and fuses them with low-resolution cues to produce residual images, while LR distills complementary representations from HR to improve restoration quality. To supply LHFR with richer features, SR super-resolves LR outputs before fusion. We further introduce two modules to bridge the high- and low-resolution spaces. The Feature-Refined Correlation Matching Transformation (FR-CMT) module selects the top $C/r~(C~\text{denotes the number of channels;~}r\geq1~\text{controls the squeezing level})$, from the fusion between max- and mean-pooled high-resolution features to replace less informative channels in the low-resolution Transformer. The Adaptive Channel Modulator (ACM) adaptively recalibrates multi-scale high-resolution features, ensuring that only task-relevant information propagates to LR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UHDformer++ reduces model parameters by at least 86\% compared with recent state-of-the-art methods while achieving substantial performance gains across $5$ UHD restoration tasks, including low-light image enhancement, dehazing, deblurring, deraining, and desnowing. Code will be released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20263
Reliable quantitative analysis of dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI requires high-quality spatiotemporal reconstructions at high undersampling rates. Scan-specific reconstructions using Gaussian and Gabor primitives have shown promising results without the need for large training datasets, but have not addressed the additional dimension of dynamic contrast. We propose a multi-dimensional, primitive based framework for dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI reconstruction that disentangles the underlying anatomy, the dynamic contrast enhancement, and residual motion into separate temporal basis functions, thereby enabling a geometrical interpretation of the representation. We show that this architecture achieves performance competitive with conventional reconstruction methods, both in reconstruction quality and in the accuracy of extracted aorta and kidney enhancement curves. The modular tier design extends naturally to additional dynamic factors and higher acceleration rates. Code available at this https URL 2026-GaborDCE-spieker.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18055