Generative speech enhancement faces three gaps: spectral models capture harmonic structure but often disrupt phase, waveform models preserve phase but miss harmonics, and Schrödinger Bridges (SB) shorten transport from noise to clean speech but leave inference cost only loosely tied to training. We propose HybridSB-MoE, a dual-domain framework that fills these gaps through three contributions unified by a single asymmetric design principle. (i) Asymmetric uncertainty fusion: The spectral path captures epistemic uncertainty via expert disagreement, while the waveform bridge models aleatoric variance through stochastic dynamics. We fuse them asymmetrically, allowing the mixing weight to adapt to distinct error regimes rather than average predictions. (ii) Heterogeneous MoE with top-k=2 routing across five distinct architectural archetypes, where architectural diversity makes the epistemic signal indicate which inductive bias fails rather than small perturbations among similar experts. (iii) Discretization bound (Theorem 1): path-consistency and trajectory regularizers together bound the K-step bridge sampling error in 2-Wasserstein distance at rate K-alpha, making small-K inference an objective-level guarantee rather than an empirical claim. On VoiceBank+DEMAND, HybridSB-MoE outperforms diffusion- and SB-based baselines at their step budgets while remaining competitive with consistency-distilled few-step methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12715
Motivation: LinkML is a suitable language for the representation of the structural and content constraints of different kinds of biomedical data. Even if it is a quite recent proposal, it has been applied in several biomedical contexts. Developing and maintaining LinkML schemas presents several challenges, particularly for novice curators. Non-expert bio-curators may struggle with LinkML syntax and best practices, requiring significant time and effort to develop well-structured schemas. Results: In this paper we propose SchemaLink, a web-based environment for the graphical construction and enhancement of LinkML schemas that address the following requirements: $(i)$ introduce a graphical language for the specification of LinkML schemas, $(ii)$ make uniform the specification of schemas in similar contexts, $(iii)$ simplify the design and curation processes by exploiting a RAG-based approach to assist curators in creating new schemas from scratch and editing already developed ones. Several experimental analyses show the quality of the produced LinkML schemas through the AI-based editing facilities. Availability and Implementation: SchemaLink is available online at: this https URL. SchemaLink code and testing data are available as open-source on GitHub at: this https URL{schemalink-webapp,schemalink-api}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12529
We present RT-SEMamba, a fully causal speech enhancement (SE) model built upon causal time-frequency Mamba blocks. Unlike Transformer-based architectures that rely on a growing key-value cache, Mamba propagates a fixed-size recurrent state per layer, enabling memory- and bandwidth-efficient long-form inference. We further introduce a progressive knowledge distillation (KD) strategy that compresses an 8-layer teacher into a shallow 1-layer student by jointly distilling complex spectral outputs and intermediate representations. On Voicebank-DEMAND, the 8-layer RT-SEMamba achieves 3.32 PESQ with a 25 ms algorithmic latency constraint, and the distilled 1-layer student improves over a naive 1-layer baseline from 3.06 to 3.18 PESQ while preserving the same steady-state RTF, delivering a 2.75x speedup over the teacher. These results demonstrate that state-space models with progressive KD provide a competitive quality-latency trade-off for real-time SE.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12099
Hyperspectral pansharpening aims to reconstruct a high resolution hyperspectral (HRHS) image from a panchromatic (PAN) image and a low resolution hyperspectral (LRHS) image while preserving both spatial details and spectral fidelity. Recent diffusion based methods exploit pretrained image priors by generating a low dimensional representation and subsequently mapping it to the hyperspectral domain. However, the observed panchromatic and hyperspectral images are typically imposed only through external reconstruction objectives, limiting their direct interaction with the diffusion prior. To address this issue, we propose dual-modality image-prompted diffusion model (DIDM) for zero shot hyperspectral pansharpening. DIDM encodes the low resolution hyperspectral and panchromatic observations into spectral and spatial prompt tokens, respectively, and injects them into intermediate features of a frozen remote sensing diffusion model through cross attention, allowing complementary spectral and spatial information to directly guide diffusion feature evolution. In addition, we introduce a panchromatic guided weighted pixel aware total variation regularizer that combines low resolution hyperspectral degradation fidelity and panchromatic response fidelity with gradient adaptive structural regularization, thereby preserving structural discontinuities while suppressing spurious variations in homogeneous regions. Extensive experiments on Pavia, Chikusei, and Houston under reduced resolution protocols show that DIDM achieves the best performance across all evaluated metrics, while full resolution evaluation on FR1 yields the highest HQNR among the compared methods. These results demonstrate that internal dual modality prompting and panchromatic guided structural regularization provide an effective balance between spatial detail enhancement and spectral preservation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11748
The Relative Transfer Matrix (ReTM), recently introduced as a generalization of the relative transfer function for multiple receivers and sources, shows promising performance when applied to speech enhancement in noisy environments. Estimating the ReTM of sound sources by exploiting the covariance matrices of multichannel recordings is highly beneficial for practical applications and, to date, remains the only proposed approach. This paper investigates deep learning-based ReTM estimation. We propose three novel supervised learning frameworks using time and short-time frequency transform domain convolutional networks, and a Long Short-Term Memory-based recurrent neural network. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed models achieve more accurate estimation of the ReTM using five objective metrics compared to the covariance-based method. We also show the effectiveness of the proposed frameworks for speech enhancement, achieving performance on par with the baseline method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11627
Robots operating in dark or poorly lit environments rely on onboard lights, which often produce uneven illumination that degrades downstream perception tasks. Prior approaches based on 2D image enhancement lack reliable supervision and fail to preserve multi-view geometric consistency. To address these limitations, we extend Dark Gaussian Splatting (DarkGS) toward a more accurate and flexible relightable 3D reconstruction framework. First, we eliminate the need for explicit light parameter calibration by jointly optimizing lighting parameters within the Gaussian Splatting framework. Second, we introduce a low-frequency illumination model based on spherical harmonics (SH) to capture spatially varying residual and ambient lighting effects. Third, we incorporate an MLP-based Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) to model non-Lambertian reflectance. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates illumination artifacts while improving rendering quality and quantitative performance over prior approaches. We further validate its benefits for robotic perception through a downstream task.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14713
Continuous and reliable localization is essential for autonomous driving. Cross-view visual localization matches ground images with satellite maps, providing complementary localization cues for pipelines that depend on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals and high-definition (HD) maps. Most existing cross-view visual localization methods process each frame independently, leaving temporal information underused and limiting accuracy under dynamic occlusion, illumination variation, and repetitive textures. This study proposes a temporal-context-enhanced framework for cross-view sequence visual localization. The proposed recurrent cross-frame module aggregates historical context from the previous state to enhance the coarse ground feature of each current frame. These enhanced features facilitate satellite candidate-region classification, while hierarchical fine-grained features enable precise local offset estimation. On the CVIS dataset, the proposed method reduces mean localization error from 3.80 m to 1.57 m and increases R@1 m from 8.14% to 40.22%. Direct transfer to KITTI-CVL achieves a mean error of 2.61 m, with target-domain fine-tuning further reducing the mean error to 2.27 m. Zero-shot field experiments on a real-world vehicle achieve a mean error of 2.84 m and R@5 m of 96.86%. These results demonstrate that temporal context enhancement significantly improves cross-view localization accuracy and supports robust deployment on public benchmarks and real-world roads.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10660
This paper presents $\pi$-SUB, a physics-informed framework for generating synthetic underwater benchmark datasets that bridges the synthetic-to-real gap for Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE). The proposed framework extends the classical underwater image formation model by incorporating depth-dependent downwelling irradiance, biologically resolved absorption, and environmental scattering across all ten Jerlov water types, together with independently controllable residual phenomena. Using this framework, the $\pi$-SUB dataset consists of paired synthetic underwater-reference images spanning shallow-to-deep and coastal-to-oceanic environments. Extensive simulation studies have been carried out to evaluate $\pi$-SUB along two criteria namely hyper-realism and generalizability. For hyper-realism, $\pi$-SUB attains a global Frechet Inception Distance (FID) that is 46% lower than Syrea. For generalizability, four state-of-the-art UIE architectures (FUnIE-GAN, Pix2Pix, PUIE-Net, and Phaseformer) are used for comparative evaluation of $\pi$-SUB. These models were independently trained on six datasets including one real and five synthetic datasets and tested on six real-world benchmarks datasets. Across four UIE architectures and six real benchmark datasets, $\pi$-SUB improves UIQM by 4.18% over PHISWID (next best) and 9.46% over Syrea (next best), while reducing NIQE by 48.78% and 23.98%, respectively. These results establish $\pi$-SUB as a hyper-realistic and generalizable benchmark for developing the next generation of underwater image enhancement methods. The code and dataset are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10589
Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution. However, because strong closed-source models entail high inference costs, current popular agent harnesses, such as Codex and OpenClaw, remain prohibitively expensive when deploying these skills to accomplish real-world tasks. The rapid capability enhancement of open-source models deployable on consumer-grade GPUs presents a compelling opportunity to drastically reduce these costs by leveraging skill-based behavioral constraints. Nevertheless, automatically generating effective skills tailored specifically for such compact models remains a significant practical challenge. To address this, we propose SKILLER, a natural-language-driven reinforcement learning framework designed to automatically generate executor-specific skills for small models, which employs a strong model as the actor and critic, treats the small-model agent system as the environment, and propagates all reinforcement learning signals entirely via natural language. Extensive experimental evaluations across five relevant benchmarks using Qwen3.5-9B and Qwen3.5-4B demonstrate that SKILLER outperforms three open-source and one closed-source skill generation or evolution methods, achieving absolute gains ranging from 4.3 to 20.4 percentage points for the 9B model and 1.8 to 13.3 points for the 4B model, while remarkably matching the performance of strong closed-source models on single-skill tasks in SkillsBench. The project is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10538
Low-light imaging often introduces color bias caused by the low signal-to-noise ratio and the image formation process. Although recent low-light image enhancement methods have achieved strong brightness recovery, faithful color restoration remains challenging, manifesting as overall color bias together with local under- and over-saturation. To address this issue, we propose CAGE, a cylindrical color correction framework with adaptive color debiasing and gamut-harmonized saturation rectification for color-faithful low-light image enhancement. We first introduce AdaLAB, a cylindrical adaptive LAB color space that provides a decoupled and image-specific basis for uniform color correction. Building on this color space, we further develop AdaCCT, an adaptive cylindrical color transform with forward and inverse transforms for the conversion between RGB and AdaLAB color space, as well as necessary color debiasing and saturation rectification. The forward transform suppresses embedded color bias before backbone enhancement by reorganizing the chromatic distribution through chromatic-plane shifting and scaling, while the inverse transform achieves faithful saturation rectification through out-of-gamut lightness compensation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that CAGE achieves more faithful color restoration, specifically reduces color bias and saturation abnormality, and delivers better overall visual quality across different low-light enhancement backbones. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10512
A slew of recent works develop agents for solving research problems end-to-end, a paradigm increasingly referred to as autoresearch. Such agents have inspired large industry investment, motivated by their potential to automate time-consuming human labor and customize machine learning solutions for specialized applications. In this paper, we study the modeling pipeline at the core of these autoresearch systems and identify common failure modes when they are applied to tabular datasets: (1) they waste compute resolving the same bugs over and over again; (2) they often fail to tune hyperparameters even when they have a large remaining compute budget; (3) the tree-search algorithms that power them do not explore; and (4) they perform data analysis, mimicking the humans whose data they are trained on, but do not use that analysis to make downstream decisions. We explore targeted interventions and find that a global debug consultant that shares discovered runtime constraints across all branches of the search tree, prompt- and control-level enhancements, and refined tree-search algorithms successfully recover wasted compute. Our results show that large gains in autoresearch agent performance are achievable through agentic design alone, holding the underlying language model fixed.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10424
Film emulation reproduces the look of an analog film stock on a new digital photograph. We target its open-set form -- matching any reference film frame from a single example -- with a 3D lookup table (LUT) predicted from that reference. Real-time image enhancement predicts per-image weights over a fixed bank of 3D LUTs and blends them. We show this is a gated mixture of experts and inherits its failure: trained end-to-end against reconstruction, the gate collapses onto a single expert, so a bank of K LUTs delivers the capacity of one. An entropy term, the enhancement-setting analogue of mixture-of-experts load balancing, restores utilization and recovers about 1 dB PSNR. The deeper constraint survives: a fixed LUT basis is closed-set, freezing the achievable looks at training time. We therefore discard the basis and predict a single 3D LUT as a residual from a reference image (StyleLUTNet), trained by self-supervision on procedurally generated color transforms. The conditional design removes the gate and generalizes open-set to unseen film stocks without paired data or retraining. Around this color backbone we build Deep Analog, a film-emulation pipeline that adds histogram-based tone matching and a physics-informed optical renderer -- multi-scale grain and per-channel halation driven by parameters an inverse network regresses from the reference. On 350 self-supervised pairs the color stage reaches 22.05 dB PSNR / 0.925 SSIM and the full pipeline 21.72 dB / 0.923; the color path runs in 5.2 ms at 1080p (192 FPS) and exports a portable .cube LUT for standard editing tools. A second degeneracy in conditional LUT training -- residual-scale collapse -- shares the root cause and yields a general principle: auxiliary regularization must stay subordinate to reconstruction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14702
This paper presents a review of the NTIRE 2026 Low-light Enhancement: Twilight Cowboy Challenge. The objective of the competition was to merge a set of misaligned smartphone images in the raw domain, captured in low-light conditions, into a single, clean image. Introduced setup simultaneously addresses two problems of low-light photography: visual degradations such as high noise and mixed scene illuminants, and the geometric inconsistencies caused by hand movement during multi-frame capture. To advance research in low-light and nighttime computational photography, a challenging dataset was collected comprising 585 real-world scenes, spanning indoor low-light and outdoor nighttime conditions, for training and benchmarking participant solutions. The competition employed a three-stage evaluation protocol: automatic validation via the CodaBench platform in stages one and two, followed by blind assessment on a private test set for the final ranking. Ten teams surpassed the established baseline, achieving improvements of up to +6.49 dB in PSNR and +0.0101 in SSIM, thereby establishing new state-of-the-art performance for burst-based low-light image enhancement. These results demonstrate significant progress in handling real-world noise, motion, and illumination variability in the low-light setting. Comprehensive results, leaderboards, and additional information are publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09782
UAV vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) focuses on enabling an aerial agent to follow natural-language instructions in open 3D environments from egocentric visual observations. Current approaches suffer from three coupled issues: weak grounding of instruction-relevant landmarks in visual observations, insufficient exploitation of long-horizon history, and unstable decisions under local traps or repeated exploration. To address these issues, we propose a unified semantic-to-decision framework. First, we present an instruction-grounded semantic enhancement module that injects object-level semantics and relative spatial cues into the current observation state. Subsequently, we develop a relevance-aware dynamic temporal aggregation strategy that reweights the full history buffer while converting a few high-relevance frames into structured landmark prompts for the decoder. Finally, we devise a topology-aware decision method that combines local-optimum cognition with group-relative policy optimization under progress, goal, semantic, and path-compliance rewards. Experiments on the widely used AerialVLN and OpenFly benchmarks clearly demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09564
Human pose monitoring is crucial in fields such as rehabilitation assessment and human-computer interaction. Due to its privacy-preserving nature, pressure-based human pose monitoring has become a primary approach for unobtrusive sensing. However, existing methods are generally limited to a single device, which restricts the effective monitoring range. To address this limitation, we propose MDP-Net, an end-to-end network capable of directly estimating human meshes from temporal pressure data across multiple devices. We introduce a multimodal fusion mechanism inspired by the Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework to achieve effective complementarity and enhancement of cross-device pressure information. To support the training and evaluation of MDP-Net, we constructed MDP, a high-quality multi-device temporal pressure dataset that includes various pose labels such as 2D/3D joints and human meshes. Experimental results demonstrate that MDP-Net achieves a joint position error of 12.6 cm on the MDP dataset. These results prove that fusing multi-device pressure information is an effective and promising new solution for daily human pose monitoring.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09550
All-in-one image restoration is a unified low-level vision task that aims to effectively recover high-quality images from inputs degraded by various types and levels of corruption using a single model. Recent works have achieved remarkable progress by learning degradation-adaptive prompts or network architectures. However, these methods typically apply a uniform restoration strategy across the entire image, neglecting the fact that different regions may suffer from distinct degradation types and varying degrees of severity. In contrast, we propose to perform restoration at the pixel level, thereby enabling more fine-grained and precise control over the restoration process. Specifically, we present MGN-AIR, a novel pixel-level restoration framework for all-in-one image restoration. Our approach first learns to estimate a pixel-level visual prompt. Then, it leverages both textual and visual prompts to provide global and local degradation cues, guiding the model on where to look and how to restore at each pixel. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple all-in-one image restoration benchmarks, covering a wide range of tasks including denoising, deraining, deblurring, dehazing, desnowing, and low-light enhancement. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently and significantly outperforms existing approaches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09482
Audio-visual speech enhancement under real-world conditions remains challenging due to unreliable visual inputs and the lack of large-scale training data with realistic acoustic conditions. Existing approaches usually fuse visual features directly into the separation network, making them vulnerable to degraded visual signals. In this paper, we present DAVE, a decoupled audio-visual enhancement framework for real-world speech separation. Firstly, to address the data scarcity issue, we construct DAVE-Corpus, a large-scale training corpus with 219,411 mixtures generated from public meeting corpora through combinatorial acoustic augmentation. Then, we introduce a progressive multi-objective optimization strategy to jointly improve speech separation, intelligibility, speaker identity preservation, and perceptual quality. We further develop a certified selective enhancement chain that applies scene routing, GAN-based denoising, and loudness normalization only within the no-reference partition, guaranteeing non-degradation of reference-based metrics. Experimental results on the Real-World Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement Challenge demonstrate the robustness of DAVE under both real-world mixed scenarios and visual degradation conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09288
I present a training-free low-light enhancement method that combines local bright-channel illumination estimation, Retinex division, and edge-preserving denoising. For a fixed illumination estimate, a conditional Negative -Binominal psueduo-count method characterises the heteroscedastic noise amplified by division. The unconstrained reflectance ratio is the pixelwise maximum-likelihood estimate, with a boundary solution for zero-valued observations; the implemented estimate additionally applies illumination filtering and range clipping. The NB model is a diagnostic noise analysis rather than a calibrated sensor model, and the final fixed-bandwidth bilateral filter is an empirical approximation rather than the exact Bayesian solution. On the LOL-v1 dataset, the methodobtains mean PSNR/SSIM of 17.74dB/0.739, the highest values among the evaluated with conventional methods. A 400X600 image is processed at approximately 43 FPS on an Apple M2 Pro CPU.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09137
Web navigation agents are capable of addressing various types of tasks on different websites. Current baselines on web navigation are either unimodal or lack strong reasoning abilities given multimodal inputs. Focusing on the WebShop benchmark, a real-world website simulation, we explore the alignment of text and images, as well as multimodal reasoning and planning abilities, to enhance the performance of web navigation agents. We propose three innovative multimodal enhancements: Multimodal Enhanced LLM for Online Navigation (MELLON), VQAgent, and Multimodal Ranker. MELLON demonstrates a significant improvement in task completion accuracy, with a 9.26% increase after just one epoch of training. Our findings suggest the necessity of further exploration into multimodal approaches, with a focus on more extensive training and alignment strategies to enhance the effectiveness of web navigation agents.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09121
Underwater images often suffer from diverse and coexisting degradations, including color distortion, scattering haze, texture attenuation, and uneven illumination. These degradations vary across regions and may coexist locally, making conventional uniform restoration difficult to adapt to different degradation patterns. To address this problem, we propose Coexisting and Region-wise Degradation for Underwater Image Enhancement (\textbf{CoRe-UIE}), a degradation-oriented expert collaboration framework. CoRe-UIE combines a content-preserving shared expert with four shared-backbone routed experts for color correction, scattering suppression, texture recovery, and illumination protection. The routed experts share the same architecture but have independent parameters, and are assigned to different regions through input-derived degradation cues and region-adaptive Top-\(k\) routing. We further introduce a Hilbert--Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC)-based representation constraint to reduce statistical dependence among expert features and alleviate redundant expert responses. Experiments on UIEB, LSUI, and U45 demonstrate that CoRe-UIE achieves competitive quantitative performance and visually balanced enhancement under diverse underwater degradation conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08965