Enhancement
-
When Scene Text Hijacks the Scene: Uncovering, Exploiting, and Mitigating Rendered-Text Semantic Leakage in Image Generation Models
2026-10-08 05:50:40Feifei Li, Runjie Wang, Xiaohan Zhang, Zhenxing Qian, Mi Wen, Mi ZhangAbstract
The reliability and accountability of image generative models (IGMs) are essential for building responsible and trustworthy AI systems. Recent IGMs, such as Nano Banana and GPT-Image, now support complex instruction following, realistic image synthesis, and controllable scene-text rendering. As these capabilities expand, safety analysis must also account for new control channels introduced by complex prompts. In this work, we study rendered-text semantic leakage, a largely overlooked phenomenon in open-domain text rendering. Although rendered text is intended to serve as a local visual constraint that should be reproduced verbatim in the generated image, it also carries linguistic semantics that may be interpreted by the model as part of the input instruction. This makes rendered text a potential semantic control channel whose safety implications remain insufficiently understood. We systematically characterize this phenomenon by decoupling the main visual prompt from the rendered text and measuring their individual and compositional effects on generated images. We quantify semantic leakage and rendering fidelity, and further analyze how leakage emerges from intermediate model evidence. We then show that harmful semantics embedded in scene text can persist through LLM-based prompt enhancement pipelines and steer non-text image regions, even when the main visual prompt remains benign. Finally, we propose a preliminary mitigation approach that reduces unsafe semantic transfer from rendered text to non-text regions while preserving the intended text-rendering behavior on FLUX-2-dev. Our findings reveal rendered text as a dual-use carrier of visible data and latent semantics, exposing a text-centric cross-modal attack surface in modern IGMs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11286
PDF
-
SEER: Source-Conditioned Emotion Enhancement via Retrieval for Cochlear-Implant Speech
2026-10-08 02:56:52Hsing-Hang Chou, Yun-Shao Lin, Ching-Chin Sung, Chi-Chun LeeAbstract
Cochlear implants (CIs) restore speech access but weaken cues needed for vocal emotion recognition. Prior CI-oriented enhancement requires parallel normal/strong recordings and intensity labels. We propose SEER, a retrieval-based framework that learns which same-emotion reference helps each source remain recognizable after CI processing. A source-conditioned retriever learns CI-aware utility from sampled emotional voice conversion outcomes, while uncertainty-guided exploration avoids exhaustive pair evaluation; neither parallel recordings nor intensity labels are required. SEER improves Source macro-F1 at N8 by 7.30 points on RAVDESS and 11.66 points on ESD, with significant ESD gains across N4/N8/N16. Sixteen-listener RAVDESS gains are significant across all conditions. Exhaustive analysis finds an aggregate benefit from stronger references but little effect from matching gender or content.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11131
PDF
-
Contrast Enhancement or Noise Reduction? On Improving Cervical Cancer Classification
2026-10-08 01:57:18Ach Khozaimi, Ulfatun NahdhiyahAbstract
Purpose: Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Deep learning has shown promising performance in medical image classification. The influence of image preprocessing algorithms on classification performance remains insufficiently investigated in the literature. This research aims to evaluate the impact of image preprocessing algorithms on the performance of CNNs for Pap smear image classification. Methods: Three CNN architectures (ResNet-34, MobileNet-V2, and DenseNet-121) were trained and evaluated using the SIPaKMeD dataset. Two preprocessing algorithms were applied: the PMD filter for noise reduction and CLAHE for contrast enhancement. The model performance was assessed using a confusion matrix. Results: Preprocessing improved the classification performance of all models. CLAHE significantly increased the accuracy of ResNet-34 from 76.73% to 84.16% and DenseNet-121 from 76.73% to 84.16%. The PMD filter yielded limited improvement and slightly reduced the MobileNet-V2 performance. Novelty: This research provides a systematic comparison of contrast enhancement and noise reduction techniques across CNN architectures. This research demonstrates that contrast enhancement is more effective than noise reduction in improving CNN performance. The research provides new pipelines for improving cervical cancer classification.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11086
PDF
-
Refine Connections, Close the Gap: A Reliable Enhancement Framework for Driving Scene Topology
2026-10-08 01:15:14Xiaoqi Wang, Dingyi Zhaung, David Paz, Wenbin He, Yucai Bai, Peng Zhou, Rui Zhang, Jinhua Zhao, Liu RenAbstract
In autonomous driving, understanding scene topology - the connectivity between lanes and traffic elements - is critical for safe path planning and motion control. While current methods excel at detecting individual map elements, their connectivity reasoning often falls short of its theoretical potential, leaving a significant performance gap relative to the theoretical upper-bound achievable given the underlying detections. Furthermore, the decision-ready topology graphs passed to downstream tasks often remain unreliable. Current approaches typically derive connectivity by thresholding continuous topology scores; however, these scores often fail to reflect the true logical likelihood of connectivity, resulting in false positives or missing connections. Existing benchmarks further overlook this issue by primarily evaluating continuous metrics, rather than assessing the discrete connectivity required for decision-making. To bridge these gaps, we propose TopoEnhance, a novel topology enhancement framework designed to unlock the latent potential of existing methods and improve the reliability of decision-ready topology. We formulate topology enhancement as a denoising-based reconstruction process, where the model learns to recover structural consistency from stochastically corrupted ground-truth graphs. This formulation enables the model to resolve logical inconsistencies and rectify unreliable connections, producing robust discrete topology graphs that closely approach theoretical maximum performance. Extensive experiments across different baselines show that TopoEnhance consistently improves both continuous topology metrics (TOP score), and discrete connectivity measured by our adapted Topology Jaccard Similarity (TJS) metric. As a flexible, source-agnostic framework, TopoEnhance delivers substantial gains across diverse state-of-the-art baselines without requiring retraining.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11058
PDF
-
How Private is Private? A Comparative Study for Face De-Identification
2026-10-07 16:16:24Hui Wei, Hao Yu, Hui Kuurila-Zhang, Guoying ZhaoAbstract
Face de-identification (FDeID) has emerged as a critical privacy-preserving technology, yet its evaluation remains fundamentally fragmented. Existing protocols rely on inconsistent metrics, heterogeneous datasets, and partial annotation coverage, so methods targeting different utility dimensions, such as landmark versus expression preservation, are reported on different benchmarks under different metrics, rendering cross-method comparison infeasible. We revisit FDeID evaluation from both the data and metric perspectives. On the data side, we introduce UtilFace, a curated, demographically balanced benchmark with high identity diversity, assembled from four large-scale face datasets through identity-aware cleaning, resolution enhancement, and stratified filtering. On the metric side, we propose HiFD, a Hierarchical Face De-identification metric that unifies identity suppression, multi-level utility preservation, and image quality under a single consistency-based paradigm: every component is computed from pretrained estimators' outputs on the original face and its de-identified counterpart, directly quantifying how much identity is suppressed and how much downstream-perceivable utility survives. HiFD organizes facial signals into a three-level utility hierarchy spanning macro cues (L1), micro cues (L2), and imperceptible cues (L3), and aggregates the five resulting components into a single interpretable score via weighted harmonic mean, with configurable application-specific profiles. Using this unified protocol, we conduct a comprehensive comparative study spanning adversarial, GAN-based, and diffusion-based methods, surfacing trade-offs and failure modes that remain invisible under existing protocols. We release the benchmark and evaluation toolkit to foster systematic and reproducible research in privacy-preserving human face analysis.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10334
PDF
-
InscriptionOCR: A Dataset and Method for Understanding Inscriptions
2026-10-07 04:50:41Jaidev Sanjay Khalane, Akbar Ali, V. N. Prabhakar, Shanmuganathan RamanAbstract
Ancient script image restoration is a fundamental problem in computer vision, as it directly affects the reliable analysis and interpretation of historical documents and inscriptions. Ashokan Brahmi is an ancient script extensively used during the reign of Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BC, primarily for inscriptions in Prakrit. These inscriptions, including major and minor rock and pillar edicts, constitute a valuable yet largely unexplored source of data for computational analysis. The degraded nature of inscription imagery and the lack of standardized digital resources pose significant challenges for automated processing. We present an end-to-end AI-based framework for understanding ancient inscriptions that encompasses image enhancement, optical character recognition (OCR), transliteration, and neural machine translation (NMT). The proposed pipeline processes low-quality images captured directly from stone inscriptions, performs image restoration and Brahmi script character recognition, maps the recognized characters to the Roman script, and finally translates the resulting Prakrit text into English. We also introduce two new datasets: (i) InscriptionOCR Dataset: the largest publicly usable digital OCR dataset for Brahmi script to date, consisting of over 200,000 character images across about 600 classes, and (ii) a bilingual Prakrit-English parallel corpus comprising over 2,000 sentence pairs for NMT. We believe that the proposed framework and datasets will facilitate future research in ancient script analysis, low-resource OCR, and digital epigraphy.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09439
PDF
-
LiDAR Resolution Recovery via Foundation-Model-Guided Diffusion
2026-10-06 16:20:20Samed Do\u{g}an, Nico Leuze, Alfred Sch\"ottlAbstract
High-beam-count LiDAR sensors are costly, yet many perception pipelines require dense angular sampling. Using a pretrained Stable Diffusion model as the backbone, we fine-tune a LiDAR-conditioned depth model with pseudo-depth targets from a 2D foundation model. During training, the LiDAR conditioning is randomly decimated at different beam budgets. We then investigate how much of a LiDAR scan can be recovered from heavily decimated input and characterize performance across the input beam budget. We evaluate against physically held-out real beams on nuScenes and report recovery separately from fit accuracy. Our model yields its largest advantage in very sparse regimes, achieving a $\delta_{1.25}$ accuracy of $66.8$% from $4$-beam input where scattered interpolation reaches only $45.1$%. A class-stratified error breakdown further reveals that planar surfaces recover first while objects introducing depth discontinuities degrade earliest. Together, these results quantify the recovery/resolution trade-off for foundation-model-guided LiDAR enhancement.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08620
PDF
-
RACE-FPP: A Robust AI-assisted Characterisation Enhancement for Fringe Projection Profilometry
2026-10-06 12:07:04Osman Ali (Manufacturing Metrology Team, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom), Xiangjun Kong (Manufacturing Metrology Team, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom), Tibebe Yalew (Manufacturing Metrology Team, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom), Waiel Elmadih (Taraz Metrology Ltd., Nottingham, United Kingdom), Samanta Piano (Manufacturing Metrology Team, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom)Abstract
Fringe Projection Profilometry (FPP) requires precise system characterisation to achieve reliable three-dimensional (3D) reconstructions; however, characterisation accuracy strongly depends on robust checkerboard feature localisation, which can deteriorate under challenging imaging conditions such as lens blur and characterisation target orientations. Existing deep learning-based corner detectors are typically assessed using detection metrics and camera reprojection error alone, without considering their wider impact on projector characterisation, camera-projector stereo characterisation consistency, or overall measurement accuracy. In this work, we introduce a complete FPP characterisation pipeline that incorporates deep learning-based corner detection into the standard camera characterisation workflow. We also characterise the projector by sampling phase values at the centres of the white squares in the characterisation target. Rather than treating corner detection as an isolated task, the proposed framework explicitly analyses how localisation errors propagate throughout the entire FPP characterisation chain. Performance is evaluated using detection metrics (e.g., precision and recall), camera and projector reprojection errors, and the camera and projector stereo characterisation. Across a mixed dataset of clean and degraded images, the camera reprojection error is reduced from 1.237 pixels to 0.259 pixels, while the projector reprojection error is reduced by roughly 50%. Dimensional evaluation of reconstructed artefacts shows improved geometric accuracy compared with those resulting from the conventional pipeline. Overall, the findings indicate increased robustness of system-level characterisation under challenging imaging conditions, thereby enabling more reliable industrial FPP measurements.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08213
PDF
-
Fluorescence-enhanced Whisker Array with Vision-based Deformation Analysis for Underwater Source Localization
2026-10-05 19:15:58Xiaochi Xie, Hao Li, Shixuan Zhao, Siyue Yao, Shuran Song, Mark R. CutkoskyAbstract
Deep-water biological observation is essential for understanding marine organisms and their interactions with the environment. However, conventional optical and acoustic approaches can introduce stimuli that alter animal behavior and bias biological observations. This paper proposes a fluorescence-enhanced whisker array sensing system that pinpoints underwater hydrodynamic sources through local optical readout rather than direct source imaging. Five spatially oriented whiskers, fabricated with nitinol cores and fluorescent urethane shells, are integrated with ultraviolet excitation and a monocular camera. Image enhancement and segmentation are applied to track the whisker deformation. A lightweight convolutional neural network captures temporal and cross-whisker features from 2 s sequences to estimate source localization. Pool experiments achieve a mean spatial localization error of 88 mm, with 73.5 mm in radius and $2.5^\circ$ in angle, across a test region of 600 mm with $\pm30^\circ$. Real-time localization of a moving thruster demonstrates the capability of the proposed method in dynamic scenarios, highlighting its potential for integration into underwater robots for hydrodynamic source detection, localization, and tracking in low-light environments.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07275
PDF
-
A BEMD-Based Quaternion Filtering Approach Sharp-to-Soft Kernel CT Image Conversion
2026-10-05 08:52:03Mahmoud Nasr, Jan K. Argasinski, Krzysztof Brzostowski, Adam PiorkowskiAbstract
The quality of computed tomography (CT) images is significantly affected by the selection of reconstruction kernels: sharp kernels improve spatial resolution but increase noise, whereas soft kernels diminish noise at the expense of edge clarity. This study presents an innovative enhancement framework utilising Bidimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition in conjunction with Quaternion Bilateral Filtering (BEMD--QBF) to convert sharp-kernel CT images into representations resembling soft-kernels, while maintaining critical anatomical structures. The technique disaggregates each image into intrinsic mode functions via BEMD and analyzes them inside a cohesive quaternion framework to attain efficient noise reduction and structural integrity. The proposed methodology is evaluated using several reconstruction kernels (B50, B46, B41, B36, B35, B31) and compared with recognised filtering strategies, including Non-Local Means, Anisotropic Diffusion, Bilateral Filtering, and Quaternion Bilateral Filtering. Quantitative evaluations of the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) indicate that BEMD-QBF consistently attains superior structural fidelity and competitive noise reduction across all evaluated kernels. The results underscore the efficacy of the proposed strategy as a viable approach to enhancing post-reconstruction CT images, yielding superior image quality without requiring access to raw projection data.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07071
PDF
-
Decomposition-Guided Curvelet Thresholding for Sharp-to-Soft CT Kernel Conversion
2026-10-05 08:25:34Mahmoud Nasr, Jan K. Argasinski, Krzysztof Brzostowski, Adam PiorkowskiAbstract
Image denoising is a crucial task in image processing, focused on improving image quality by minimizing noise while maintaining essential structural elements. This study presents a hybrid denoising framework that combines several decomposition techniques, including empirical mode decomposition (EMD), variational mode decomposition (VMD), multichannel EMD (MEMD), and bidimensional EMD (BEMD), with curvelet transform thresholding. Each decomposition mode undergoes processing through both soft and hard thresholding, and the denoised modes are combined to rebuild the final image. Comprehensive evaluations of standard CT image datasets reconstructed with various kernels (B50, B46, B41, B36) reveal substantial enhancements in denoising efficacy. VMD consistently achieves the highest peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM), signifying exceptional noise reduction and feature preservation. The study analyses the trade-offs between soft and hard thresholding: soft thresholding maintains intricate visual details, whilst harsh thresholding provides enhanced noise reduction. The suggested method surpasses traditional techniques in both reference and non-reference quality criteria, indicating its potential for broader application in medical imaging and future incorporation with adaptive thresholding algorithms.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07067
PDF
-
UniDynamics: Event-RGB Fusion for Unified Future 4D Dynamic Scene Generation
2026-10-02 15:46:03Daikun Liu, Xin Zhan, Teng Wang, Xiaoping Wang, Changyin SunAbstract
We propose UniDynamics, a diffusion-based framework for future 4D dynamic scenes (RGB, depth, and optical flow) generation from a single event-RGB pair, without requiring long histories or control priors as in existing methods, while explicitly modeling future motion fields. The core idea is to leverage event streams to offer an alternative motion prior for single-RGB extrapolation, and to enforce geometric and motion constraints throughout generation via multimodal modeling. Specifically, we design an Event Latent Enhancement (ELE) module to align and enhance event latents into diffusion-injectable conditioning features, providing robust initial motion priors and reliable texture/structure cues. We further introduce a Perceptual Dynamics Space (PDS) embedded in the multi-scale U-Net, which decouples and adaptively interacts depth and flow while continuously feeding back constraints to appearance features, improving geometric-motion consistency for physically plausible and spatiotemporally coherent prediction. Experiments on VKitti2 and DSEC demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, producing high-quality, temporally coherent, and 4D-consistent future predictions, especially under challenging high-speed motion blur.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03473
PDF
-
ForestQuery: Boundary-Aware and Spatially Anchored Query Learning for Unified Forest Point Cloud Segmentation
2026-10-02 14:54:05Zhihao Zhan, Le Tao, Yifei Tian, Xin Liu, Jie YuanAbstract
Forest point cloud segmentation is fundamental for fine-grained 3D forest scene understanding, yet remains challenging due to irregular tree structures, severe occlusions, density variations, and ambiguous instance boundaries. Recent query-based forest segmentation methods have shown promise for unified semantic and instance prediction, but they still insufficiently exploit forest-specific spatial structure and account for boundary uncertainty. In this paper, we propose ForestQuery, a boundary-aware and spatially anchored query learning framework for unified forest point cloud segmentation. ForestQuery enhances instance and semantic query learning through two complementary designs. Specifically, boundary uncertainty is explicitly modeled to guide reliable instance query construction and modulate query optimization through adaptive loss reweighting. Meanwhile, spatially anchored semantic query enhancement (SA-SQE) introduces learnable 3D anchors encoding forest vertical stratification priors to enrich semantic queries with explicit spatial references. We evaluate ForestQuery on multiple public forest point cloud benchmarks and a self-collected annotated real-world dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in both individual-tree segmentation and semantic segmentation across diverse forest scenes. Code and data are publicly available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03403
PDF
-
VisionMX: Unlocking Microscaling Post-Training Quantization for Vision Models
2026-10-02 12:32:36Elad Dror Cohen, Ofir Gordon, Lior Dikstein, Idan Achituve, Hai Victor HabiAbstract
Microscaling (MX) formats are emerging as a hardware-supported approach to efficient training and inference. They combine low-precision elements with shared block scales, but their impact on vision models remains underexplored. We systematically investigate post-training MX quantization across vision models and tasks. An analysis of direct conversion identifies three sources of error: block-scale representation, the poor alignment of some small convolutional weight tensors with nonuniform element grids, and the underuse of signed codes by nonnegative activations. These findings motivate VisionMX, a post-training MX quantization method that optimizes bounded weight rounding and applies a foldable affine correction to activations. We evaluate VisionMX across image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and low-light image enhancement using several MX-style formats. It improves on direct conversion and the evaluated post-training quantization baselines, with the largest performance recoveries in architectures most sensitive to MX conversion
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03218
PDF
-
Revisiting Visual Representation Enhancement of VLMs via Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis
2026-10-02 02:54:59Peilin Yang, Xiaoyu Liu, Jian Sun, Qinghua TaoAbstract
Vision-language models such as CLIP exhibit strong semantic generalization, but remain limited in fine-grained visual perception. A recent work named KUEA presents a natural remedy by finetuning the image encoder under the supervision of the vision-centric DINOv2 to align their kernel matrices element-wisely, while regularizing the embeddings to remain close to the pretrained visual encoder for preserving image-text semantics in CLIP. However, we show that diminishing the role of the alignment loss to DINOv2 does not necessarily degrade its fine-grained visual performance, suggesting that the kernel-matrix discrepancy may be insufficient for further visual representation enhancement, motivating us to revisit the alignment formulation. In this work, we present a novel perspective to characterize representation alignment on feature subspaces through Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis (KCCA), which maximizes the projection correlations. In optimization, we derive an efficient end-to-end training scheme upon KKT conditions, avoiding the eigenvalue problem in KCCA. Further, we extend our method into a 3-view formulation, i.e., 3vKCCA, in which the projections from the pretrained text encoder are also incorporated under a unified optimization framework for joint alignment. With CLIP ViT-L/14 on ImageNet-1K, our 3vKCCA improves the MMVP-VLM accuracy from 17.8 to 25.9, substantially outperforming the existing methods, and meanwhile maintains zero-shot image--text retrieval performance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02718
PDF
-
FiVOS: A Fish Segmentation Algorithm Based on Interactive Video Object Segmentation and Filter Enhancement
2026-10-01 11:20:41Yuqing Duan, Song Zhang, Shili Zhao, Daoliang Li, Ran ZhaoAbstract
With the continuous expansion of aquaculture, precise and efficient monitoring of fish behavior has become increasingly critical for improving farming efficiency and reducing economic losses. In particular, with the ongoing enhancement of computational capabilities in deep learning models, vision-based fish segmentation methods are garnering growing attention. By analyzing video segmentation results, fish behavior can be effectively tracked, thereby providing reliable data support for the precise regulation of aquaculture environments. However, existing deep learning-based video segmentation methods for aquaculture scenarios often overlook the dynamic correlations between video frames. In contrast, Interactive Video Object Segmentation (IVOS) employs an interaction-propagation scheme to achieve high-precision segmentation while minimizing user effort, thereby enhancing monitoring efficiency. Yet, IVOS applications in aquaculture remain limited due to data scarcity, and are susceptible to error accumulation and mask loss over long sequence propagation due to high intra-class similarity. In response, this paper proposes an improved interactive video object segmentation method (FiVOS) and constructs two fish-specific datasets. FiVOS utilizes a mask block filter to enable early detection and correction of erroneous propagated mask blocks, enhancing filtering accuracy through a rule-based thresholding approach. Additionally, it serializes noise filters to further eliminate erroneous mask noise, thereby improving model robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that FiVOS achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in fish video segmentation tasks, providing robust technical support for fish behavior research.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01480
PDF
-
Enterprise Representation Simplification : Reducing Representational Complexity for Enterprise AI
2026-09-30 22:31:40Terry Dorsey, Kevin HugginsAbstract
Enterprise information is represented through artifacts shaped by applications, projects, technologies, organizational boundaries, and local requirements. These structures accumulate over time, creating representational complexity that must be maintained by the enterprise and interpreted by information consumers and AI systems. This paper introduces Enterprise Representation Simplification (ERS) as reducing unnecessary representational complexity while preserving required information within a defined scope, and Enterprise Representation Complexity (ERC), a representation-neutral model for comparing complexity across representation states. ERC characterizes representational extent through four dimensions: Representation Objects, Interactions, Behaviors, and Supporting Sources. Objects, Interactions, and Behaviors form dependent categories, while Supporting Sources characterize representation exposure. ERC is defined at representation and task levels, enabling comparison and distinguishing architectural simplification from retrieval optimization. The paper develops two consequences of ERS. First, representational structures create lifecycle obligations for maintenance, governance, dependencies, change, enhancement, and operation. An economic model distinguishes recurring global representation cost, recurring task-level cost, and one-time transformation cost, enabling evaluation over a defined time horizon. Second, reductions in task-level ERC reduce the representational extent an AI system must identify, relate, and interpret. Text-to-SQL research provides evidence that reduced schema and reasoning complexity can improve reasoning accuracy. ERC is not a universal complexity, performance, or cost metric. It provides measurable architectural variables for comparing representational alternatives, transformation effects, economic outcomes, and AI reasoning performance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00791
PDF
-
Learning Where to Look: Anatomical Grounding and Guided Attention for Cardiac MRI Vision-Language Models
2026-09-30 15:00:44Bangwei Guo, Xiao Chen, Boris Mailhe, Jia Yao, Yiqing Wang, Ankush Mukherjee, Yikang Liu, Zheyuan Zhang, Hang Yu, Terrence Chen, Shanhui SunAbstract
Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) enables assessment of cardiac anatomy, ventricular function, and myocardial tissue characteristics. Clinicians interpret these images by identifying cardiac structures and focusing on the regions relevant to each clinical question, motivating anatomically guided vision-language models (VLMs). Yet CMR-specific supervision for anatomical localisation and clinical question answering remains limited. To address this gap, we investigate fine-grained CMR visual question answering through anatomical grounding and guided attention. We construct 128,915 anatomical-grounding and 42,799 clinical QA pairs across short-axis cine, late gadolinium enhancement, and long-axis cine. These datasets support anatomical recognition, localisation, and clinical assessment without requiring paired reports for individual training images. To help the model learn where to look, we introduce Cardiac Anatomy-Routed Attention (CARA), which selects predicted anatomical priors according to the question and guides decoder attention with learned task-specific strengths. Combining anatomical grounding pretraining with CARA yields our model, CARA-VL. Experiments demonstrate CARA-VL's strengths in clinical assessment and regional localisation across CMR imaging settings, with promising generalization to an external clinical cohort. Together, our data and method provide a practical framework for studying and advancing cardiac visual understanding in VLMs. We will release the QA data derived from public datasets upon publication.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39899
PDF
-
Spatial-Temporal Multi-scale Network for Screen Content Video Quality Enhancement
2026-09-30 14:59:33Ziyin Huang, Sik-Ho Tsang, Xinyuan Qin, Yui-Lam Chan, Xueling Zhou, Feiyu ChenAbstract
Different from natural videos, Screen Content Videos (SCVs) are characterized by abrupt motion, scene switches, and high-frequency details such as text and graphics. Conventional video enhancement methods, which rely heavily on temporal continuity, often suffer from performance degradation when processing SCVs due to the disruption of temporal correlations. To address these challenges, we propose the Spatial-Temporal Multi-scale Network (STM-Net), a novel framework specifically tailored for compressed SCV enhancement. Our approach integrates three complementary components: a Prior-Guided Spatio-Temporal Dispatcher (PG-STD) that routes input into three parallel streams to avoid feature contamination, a Bidirectional Temporal Feature Extraction (BTFE) module that adaptively handles abrupt transitions without explicit detection, and a Cascaded Multi-scale Feature Distillation (CMFD) module that preserves critical high-frequency details. Experimental results demonstrate that STM-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both objective metrics and subjective visual quality, providing a robust solution for screen content artifacts. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39894
PDF
-
Cognitive Enhancement: Rethinking the Necessity of Role-Playing for Large Language Models
2026-09-30 14:42:03Xingjie Zhuang, Jialong Tang, Chulun Zhou, Buchao Zhan, Zhirui Li, Junhui Li, Yazheng Yang, Jinsong SuAbstract
Role-playing prompting has become a popular yet simple technique for improving LLM reasoning and output quality. However, whether it consistently boosts performance across diverse domains remains unclear, as systematic validation is lacking. To fill this gap, we run multi-model, cross-domain, and multilingual experiments on MMLU and MMLU-Redux. We find that gains from role-play prompting depend heavily on model capacity, knowledge domain, and prompt language. Drawing on metacognition theory, we propose the persona-related cognitive alignment hypothesis: role-play works only when the LLM correctly grasps the designated persona and its associated knowledge domain. We test this hypothesis through persona information richness ablation, layer-wise entropy divergence analysis, and latent thought-space deflection observation. To reduce persona cognitive bias and stabilize role-play performance, we propose \textbf{M}ixed-\textbf{L}anguage \textbf{C}oncatenate \textbf{P}rediction \textbf{(MLCP}), a simple, training-free, and efficient multilingual prompt concatenation strategy. It aggregates semantically equivalent role prompts to enrich complementary representational cues. Extensive experiments show that MLCP consistently outperforms vanilla role-play prompting across all tested LLMs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39853
PDF
