Multibeam imaging sonar produces intensity images degraded by coherent speckle and system-induced blur, while clean reflectivity targets are rarely available. Existing despeckling methods often rely on simplified intensity-domain noise models, synthetic clean targets, or blind-spot self-supervision, and typically do not jointly model deblurring and speckle suppression. We propose a physics-consistent self-supervised framework for joint despeckling and deblurring of multibeam imaging sonar. A stochastic coherent image-formation model yields a conditional-mean forward operator that relates latent scene reflectivity to expected intensity through the squared magnitude of the system point spread function. We then use registered multi-frame sonar sequences to train without clean ground truth images, showing that, under an idealized inter-frame conditional-mean condition, the expected paired loss equals the corresponding forward-prediction loss up to a network-independent constant. To stabilize the ill-conditioned inverse problem, we further adapt robust equivariant imaging using stochastic coherent simulation and introduce a paired forward prediction error metric for ground-truth-free evaluation. Experiments on two real multibeam sonar datasets demonstrate a favourable balance between forward-prediction agreement, homogeneous-region speckle suppression, and preservation of visible structural boundaries compared with representative baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31490
Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) aims to recover well-exposed and perceptually faithful images from severely degraded observations. Recent diffusion-based generative methods achieve strong perceptual quality by leveraging powerful image priors, but their iterative sampling incurs substantial computational cost, limiting practical deployment. Despite recent efficiency gains in generative LLIE, high-quality enhancement with a single function evaluation and low overall computation remains challenging, particularly under diverse real-world low-light conditions. We introduce GLOW-FM, a one-step latent flow-matching framework for efficient generative LLIE. GLOW-FM performs conditional transport in the latent space of a frozen Tiny-VAE and leverages Terminal Velocity Matching (TVM) to enable enhancement with a single function evaluation. Matched comparisons with alternative one-step objectives support TVM as an effective design choice, and, to the best of our knowledge, this is its first adaptation to image restoration and specifically to LLIE. Extensive experiments on challenging real-world benchmarks demonstrate that GLOW-FM achieves competitive image quality and state-of-the-art cross-dataset generalization while requiring only a single function evaluation and 34 GFLOPs for the small variant. These findings highlight the potential of GLOW-FM to bring generative LLIE closer to practical deployment through single-step inference and compact latent modeling. Code will be made publicly available upon publication.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31222
Self-supervised learning (SSL) representations are widely used in speech restoration (SR), and the prevailing trend is SSL feature cleansing: fine-tuning the SSL to recover clean features from degraded speech, then conditioning the restoration model on them. However, the representational capability of SSL when encoding degraded speech has been underexplored, and we ask whether cleansing always benefits SR training. Across SSL encoders and perceptual quality proxies, we discover perceptual correlation collapse---under severe degradation, cleansing degraded SSL features toward clean ones misaligns with the SR objective. We hypothesize the restoration backbone can supply the SSL with clues to resolve this collapse, since its intermediate layers already produce partially restored features. We therefore propose Early Restoration Injection (ERI), which routes intermediate features from the restoration backbone into the SSL through a lightweight conditioning network. ERI excels over the unconditioned baseline and, on the VoiceFixer benchmark, achieves competitive performance among multiple baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30869
Motion planning is central to robotics, and it is increasingly used to correct the motions proposed by learned planners and policies. In both uses, constraints must hold at every instant of the motion, not only at sampled times. To our knowledge, no algorithm provably converges to a globally optimal motion once a smoothness cost is combined with such constraints. We cast planning and steering as a single continuous-time program: robots avoid one another and static or moving obstacles, and a learned proposal is steered by keeping the motion close to it. The program is elementary to state, yet nonconvex. We propose GlobMP (Global Motion Planning), a gradient projection method over piecewise-polynomial curves, on which each constraint is one polynomial per piece that must stay nonnegative over the whole motion; it alternates cost reduction with feasibility restoration. Under mild assumptions, we show that, from a fine grid start, its cost approaches the global optimum as the number of polynomial pieces grows, with every constraint met to any chosen tolerance, or exactly on stable instances. We demonstrate its superior performance over strong baselines in real and synthetic experiments, including teams of up to $200$ robots, multi-robot planning on the Robotarium testbed and an extended benchmark, maze navigation, and steering tactile-reactive policies on a bimanual humanoid.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30607
Transformer-based models achieve strong performance on blind compressed image restoration (CIR) under unknown compression settings, but their densely stacked projection operators make deployment costly. We study training-free acceleration for such models through an empirical, operator-level analysis. Specifically, we profile where computation is concentrated, characterize channel-wise activation distributions under compressed inputs, and examine the singular-value decay of representative projection weights. These measurements identify the recurring projections in the attention, feed-forward, convolutional, and prompt-conditioning pathways as effective low-rank replacement targets that preserve the original inference graph. They further establish truncated SVD (TSVD) as a principled training-free baseline for blind CIR and reveal why a uniform low-rank objective is mismatched to the channel-imbalanced feature distributions of compressed images. Accordingly, we formulate Activation-Calibrated Singular Value Decomposition (ASVD) for this restoration setting, deriving low-rank factors entirely offline from pretrained weights and lightweight activation statistics gathered from only a few compressed calibration images. By weighting the decomposition with channel-wise activation magnitudes, our ASVD assigns larger penalties to errors on more active channels, requiring neither retraining nor online calibration and leaving the restoration pipeline intact. When instantiated on PromptCIR at rank 64, ASVD consistently improves PSNR-B over TSVD across four standard benchmarks under identical parameter and MAC budgets. At this operating point, the factorized model cuts parameters by 59% (34.75M to 14.34M) and computation by 16.1% (258.79 to 217.16 GMACs for a 256 x 256 input), enabling acceleration without retraining.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29959
Existing paired clean-degraded datasets have advanced learning-based underwater image enhancement, but they remain either limited in scale or difficult to acquire, and still fail to adequately cover the diverse degradations encountered in real-world underwater environments. Such scarce and insufficient data ultimately restrict the generalization of underwater image enhancement models, highlighting the need for realistic and controllable degradation modeling to better capture real underwater conditions and improve enhancement robustness. To this end, we propose a unified degradation-aware training framework for the underwater image enhancement task. A Text-Conditioned Degradation Augmentation Pipeline uses a text-guided diffusion model to synthesize diverse and semantically consistent degraded samples, providing paired data to support the subsequent curriculum learning strategy. The proposed Progressive Degradation Curriculum organizes training across multiple attributes and difficulty levels to promote balanced learning, and a Transmission-Guided One-Step Diffusion Model leverages this progressive process to better address the wide range of degradation severity and restoration ambiguity in underwater images. Extensive experiments on multiple underwater benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior performance. Our code and models will be released upon the publication of this work.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29569
Image registration underpins measurement across scanning, camera, and microscopy imaging, yet a fundamental question is rarely posed: when is the sample-to-position map recoverable at all, and when does any estimator that reports a position necessarily fabricate one? We show that in reference-perturbed sampled imaging, where samples are localized through a perturbed reference, position fidelity (where samples land) and phase fidelity (which reference index becomes each block's origin) are logically independent: no policy acting on position information alone can guarantee phase fidelity. We derive a tight resolution threshold separating recoverable from provably-unidentifiable registration, and a recovery framework that certifies identifiable regions--recovering them exactly--while abstaining on provably-unidentifiable regions rather than hallucinating structure. On a deployed scanning system we measure a direction-bimodal registration offset consistent with the theory. Against classical and learned restoration baselines, certificate-free offset estimators fabricate structure on the unidentifiable regime, whereas the certified method abstains rather than fabricating. Finally, the certified-abstention mechanism carries across scanning, rolling-shutter, and cryo-electron-microscopy imaging--declining rather than fabricating on the regime it flags--though how completely it abstains and how tightly it bounds kept-region risk stay modality-specific (at extreme SNR the cryo-EM certificate abstains only partially): a structural-versus-statistical boundary in registration reliability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29272
Executing vision-language models (VLMs) aboard low-Earth orbit satellites enables flexible processing of observation data without first downlinking it to the ground. On commercial off-the-shelf payloads, however, a request may span multiple execution windows: power and thermal constraints, fault-triggered reboots, and competing payload demands can interrupt inference before it completes. Each shutdown discards volatile activations and KV caches, forcing an unprotected request to repeat work after restart. We present OrbitWeaver, a framework that preserves VLM inference progress across onboard interruptions through coordinated checkpointing and recovery. Its phase-aware checkpointing selects recovery boundaries according to the state lifetimes and computational characteristics of vision encoding, language-model prefill, and decoding, balancing storage traffic against recomputation. Its dependency-aware dynamic recovery schedules restoration from partially completed states across the layer and token-chunk dimensions. By overlapping checkpoint and weight reads with recomputation, it reduces restart latency; the recovery planner computes an optimal execution order under its scheduling model within 100 ms. Experiments on satellite payload hardware using on-orbit telemetry traces show up to a 4.07-fold end-to-end speedup and a 3.56-fold reduction in SSD write volume over the evaluated baselines. A 72-hour deployment on two low-Earth orbit satellites demonstrates that OrbitWeaver retains inference progress and resumes execution across repeated bus-enforced shutdowns.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29183
This paper presents XingChen-UniFE, a unified large audio language model (LALM) for general speech restoration (GSR) and target speaker extraction (TSE). The proposed model employs complementary semantic and acoustic representations through a dual-stream encoder, where a self-supervised learning model provides hierarchical semantic features and a learnable acoustic branch captures fine-grained structures from complex spectra. A bidirectional cross-attention module further facilitates information exchange between the two representations. The fused representation conditions the LALM for discrete speech token generation with task and speaker information. Experiments demonstrate strong performance on both GSR and TSE and robust generalization to unseen degradation conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29164
Blind all-in-one image restoration must adapt a shared model to heterogeneous and sometimes mixed degradations without a task label at test time. We introduce WaFIR, a decoder module that decomposes features into Haar subbands, summarizes each subband with a compact Fourier descriptor, and routes it to prompt-conditioned spectral modulation experts. Unlike image-level frequency conditioning, WaFIR makes routing decisions at the subband level, enabling frequency-specific processing while retaining the task context learned by the backbone. Under a unified training and evaluation protocol for denoising, deraining, and dehazing, WaFIR improves average PSNR over the three tasks by 0.48 dB over the PromptIR baseline and by 0.38 dB over the recent Up-Restorer. Matched-capacity and routing controls show that the gain is not explained by additional parameters alone. On unseen noise intensities, descriptor-based routing is more robust than a discrete label-conditioned alternative and remains on par under compound degradations, while routing analyses show stable subband-dependent expert use across degradation types. These results support subband frequency structure as an interpretable complement to prompt-based conditioning for blind image restoration. Code is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29108
Understanding the properties of fish populations is increasingly important. Analyzing fish length, width, and mass is integral to maintaining healthy stock in the aquaculture industry, while counting wild fish populations supports marine conservation and coastal reef restoration efforts. Deep learning-based segmentation models offer a promising means of obtaining such information at scale. Most of these models, however, require costly and time-consuming per-pixel segmentation labels for training, which can take up to two minutes per fish to annotate manually. To address this inefficiency, we propose a weakly supervised segmentation pipeline that requires only point-labeled data (one click per fish) to produce accurate segmentation masks. Our pipeline consists of four stages. First, a point-supervised tracker predicts point annotations for each frame. These points are then converted into motion-informed language expressions, which guide a language-conditioned segmentation model (LMPM++) to capture temporal consistency and produce candidate segmentation masks. Finally, optical flow and background subtraction are applied as post-processing filters to suppress noise from incorrect segmentations. Experiments on the DeepFish dataset show improvement in foreground mean intersection over union (mIoU) as compared to baseline models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29047
Camera-trap imagery presents substantial variation in animal appearance, illumination, background clutter, and visual degradation. Masked autoencoders (MAEs) offer a label-free framework for modeling such data through reconstruction of randomly hidden image patches. We present WildMAE, a decoder-side extension of MAE that combines local structure-aware refinement with masked-to-visible cross-attention. A zero-gated convolutional residual path introduces a two-dimensional neighborhood prior, while gated cross-attention allows masked positions to retrieve contextual information from visible-position features without replacing the original Transformer decoder. The associated training recipe progressively introduces normalized-pixel, Sobel-edge, and perceptual objectives. In the original Snapshot Serengeti study, covering 4,744 test images at 75% masking, the reported reconstruction scores were 27.90 versus 24.33 dB PSNR, 0.840 versus 0.780 SSIM, and 0.160 versus 0.320 LPIPS for WildMAE and vanilla MAE, respectively. Additional historical records document favorable average differences under four synthetic degradation conditions and describe component variants. We present the method, experimental observations, and their scope together: the retained metrics are historical protocol-dependent results, rather than a newly reproduced, harmonized comparison or a validation of restoration from genuinely unavailable pixels. WildMAE provides a practical architectural case study for combining global token mixing with spatial and targeted contextual refinement in wildlife masked-image modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28590
Large Language Model (LLM) agents can handle increasingly complex tasks, navigating long trajectories of observations and actions. As these trajectories grow, key-value (KV) cache I/O and storage become the dominant cost. Trajectories can also exceed the LLM's maximum context length, requiring control over active cache growth. Prior work uses context engineering to reduce cache size by trimming or summarizing history. However, modifying the trajectory prefix invalidates subsequent cached states and triggers costly re-prefilling of retained context. Task accuracy can also suffer when too little context is retained to limit re-prefill costs. We propose cache engineering as a new scheme. It allows agents to directly control their active KV cache without modifying the trajectory or re-prefilling retained context. Specifically, agents can proactively use drop to exclude selected cache from future attention and repos to adjust retained keys' position encodings. We formalize these cache operations and identify history dependence as a serving challenge: identical token sequences can yield different cache states under different cache operation sequences, making prefix matching insufficient for correct cache reuse. Thus, we co-design the AKV serving engine. It provides a stateless interface compatible with existing serving APIs, while internally managing stateful cache reuse, eviction, and restoration. Experiments show that a tool-response rolling-drop cache policy improves average benchmark scores by 1.7 points and reduces average cost by 27.7%, compared with conventional threshold-triggered summarization. With AKV, it achieves up to 1.2x the output throughput and a 1.5x speedup in P95 request latency. Recursive self-improvement of cache policies further reduces cost by 7.1% over expert design. Our code is at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28577
Incorrect exposure degrades both image brightness and recoverable scene detail. Existing sRGB-based correction methods are limited by the non-linear image signal processing pipeline, whereas RAW-based methods are usually developed for a single degradation type, such as low-light denoising or high-light recovery. In this paper, we focus on joint exposure correction and restoration directly in the RAW domain and propose a unified RAW Image Exposure Correction and Restoration (RIECR) framework for both under- and over-exposed images. RIECR decomposes the problem into two coupled sub-problems that follow the RAW imaging model: linear illumination correction and residual degradation restoration. First, a Linear Illumination Correction Network (LICN) estimates exposure-aware linear gains by using channel-specific RAW cues. It exploits the high signal-to-noise ratio of Green channels for robust brightening and the relatively unsaturated Red/Blue responses for high-light darkening. Second, a dual-branch Frequency-based Enhancement Network (FEN) restores the remaining degradation with a Frequency Dynamic Convolution (FDC) module. FDC decomposes convolutional responses into low- and high-frequency components and adaptively suppresses amplified noise or recovers clipped textures according to the exposure context. We further build a real paired RAW benchmark containing 223 scenes and 1,784 pairs covering complex multi-exposure errors. Experiments against sixteen state-of-the-art methods show that RIECR achieves state-of-the-art performance on real RAW exposure correction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28191
Car-following (CF) models is a fundamental component of microscopic traffic simulation and underpin the analysis of collective traffic dynamics, while its modeling becomes more challenging due to diverse human driving behaviors and the increasing presence of automated vehicle. Analytical CF models offer interpretable representations of longitudinal vehicle interactions, but their prescribed functional structures may limit the representation of heterogeneous driving behavior. This study proposes an agent-centered, physics-aware framework for the empirical discovery of CF laws from multi-source trajectory data. The framework iteratively combines agent-guided hypothesis generation, informed by traffic flow knowledge and state-dependent reconstruction errors, with evolutionary symbolic search and physics-aware multi-objective evaluation. Using NGSIM US-101, highD, and exiD, the framework discovers the Adaptive Equilibrium Response Model (AERM), which couples state-dependent relative-speed response with spacing-dependent equilibrium-speed restoration. AERM admits analytical equilibrium speed-spacing and flow-density relationships; its stability conditions are derived for the zero-delay formulation, and platoon simulations examine disturbance propagation. Evaluated against seven classical CF models on Shanghai naturalistic driving data, NGSIM I-80, and Waymo trajectories, AERM attains the lowest spacing and speed reconstruction errors under trajectory-specific calibration, reducing spacing RMSE by 9.11%, 7.59%, and 21.73% relative to the strongest baselines, and remains competitive under dataset-level shared parameters. These results demonstrate the fitting flexibility and analytical tractability of the discovered CF law, providing an interpretable basis for microscopic traffic simulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27836
Vulnerability benchmarks and software engineering research depend on rebuilding historical software. Yet builds rely on external resources, such as base images and packages, that change independently of the source code. In this study, we examine this environment decay on 14,159 OSS-Fuzz cases. We find that 69.7% no longer complete reconstruction and verification, and that most failures share a small number of recurring failure symptoms. A recurring failure can therefore be diagnosed once and its repair reused. We present Relay, a hybrid framework that uses an LLM to derive and validate deterministic repair rules from representative failures, reuses them without model calls, and escalates cases unresolved by rules to a per-case agent. We evaluate Relay in human-guided and fully automated rule-derivation campaigns and compare it with a per-case agent approach. We find that rule derivation can be fully automated, and that reusable rules restore as many builds as per-case agents with fewer build executions. However, agents restore cases that the rules cannot. Our results show that a hybrid approach that applies rules first and escalates the remaining cases to an agent restores more builds than either approach alone and at a lower cost than using agents alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27784
Latent diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable progress in Real-world Image Super-Resolution (Real-SR). However, existing methods consistently exhibit a persistent seesaw effect: enhancing perceptual realism compromises structural fidelity. This effect, we argue, is not intrinsic to diffusion models, but largely stems from the architectural constraints of prevailing two-stage frameworks. To address this challenge, we propose PixelSR, a novel single-stage Pixel Diffusion Transformer for Real-SR that operates directly in pixel space. Specifically, PixelSR consists of two core designs: Pixel-space Conditional Diffusion and Orthogonal Flow Decoupling. The former establishes an effective pixel-space restoration framework by integrating spatially aligned LR conditioning, visual semantic guidance, and lightweight texture refinement, thereby bypassing VAE compression and enabling end-to-end optimization directly in RGB space. Complementarily, the latter decomposes the asymmetric flow target into a low-rank semantic component and a noise-free orthogonal texture component. By routing these components to specialized branches, it achieves decoupled optimization with reduced mutual interference. Benefiting from these designs, our PixelSR restores perceptually realistic details while faithfully preserving structural content. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PixelSR not only achieves competitive performance, but also effectively mitigates the fidelity--realism seesaw effect.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27759
Backdoor attacks have emerged as a critical security threat in machine learning, where adversaries embed triggers within poisoned training samples to manipulate a model's predictions on targeted inputs while leaving its general behavior unaffected. This stealthy nature makes backdoor attacks difficult to detect, as the model functions normally until activated by a specific malicious trigger. Current purification-based defenses use image transformations (e.g., blurring) to disrupt trigger patterns but often degrade image quality. Even with advanced restoration techniques like diffusion models, these approaches can still alter visual or semantic information, reducing utility for downstream tasks. To address this, we propose the first semantics-aware data purification framework for black-box backdoor defense, SemPurify, which explicitly incorporates multi-level semantics (i.e., low-level semantic embeddings and high-level image tags) within a text-to-image (T2I) framework to guide image restoration during purification. Using this semantic information, the T2I model subsequently refines the transformed samples, helping preserve visual details and semantic information during restoration. Extensive experiments spanning multiple backdoor scenarios, i.e., classification models, CLIP-style encoders, and generative models, demonstrate that SemPurify reliably removes backdoors while effectively preserving semantic information for downstream tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23589
Atmospheric turbulence degrades image quality in long-range imaging. The degradation is generally modeled with two spatio-temporally varying components, tilt and blur. Recent unsupervised turbulence mitigation methods have demonstrated the effectiveness of representing a sharp image as an implicit neural representation (INR). However, their tilt and blur representations remain frame-dependent, and the number of optimization parameters grows with the number of input frames. To address this limitation, we propose TriINR, an unsupervised turbulence mitigation method that recovers a sharp image from multiple degraded frames. TriINR represents the sharp image, tilt, and blur as three implicit neural representations. By modeling tilt and blur as spatio-temporal INRs, TriINR achieves frame-count-independent degradation representation and memory-efficient optimization. We further incorporate physical and statistical properties of atmospheric turbulence as constraints on the INRs to improve restoration accuracy. Experiments on synthesized turbulence data with three degradation strengths show that TriINR restores images more robustly across varying turbulence strengths than prior TM methods and achieves the highest accuracy among the evaluated unsupervised methods. Our method also demonstrates robustness on real long-range scenes containing additional non-ideal motion.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23454
Polarimetric image restoration aims to recover polarization angle images and reliable polarimetric quantities from degraded observations. Beyond visual fidelity, it also requires preserving the physical relationships underlying reliable polarimetric estimation. However, existing methods typically address either device- or environment-induced degradations in isolation, limiting their applicability to color polarization filter array (CPFA) imaging, where both often coexist. Such compound degradations jointly perturb image intensities and cross angle polarization differences. Consequently, improved image fidelity alone does not necessarily ensure accurate Stokes, DoLP, and AoLP recovery. To address this challenge, we propose UniPolar, a coupled Image Stokes framework for joint image polarimetric restoration from compound-degraded CPFA observations. Specifically, UniPolar employs two complementary streams to reconstruct four polarization-angle images and directly predict Stokes difference components. To coordinate these streams, Degradation Conditioned Cross Domain Interaction combines Dual Domain Frequency Interaction for frequency selective evidence exchange with Degradation Conditioned Modulation for condition adaptive feature correction. Furthermore, at the output level, Image Stokes Physical Consistency Learning aligns image derived and directly predicted Stokes components while regularizing angular fidelity and the physical feasibility of DoLP. On the compound-degradation benchmark, UniPolar achieves average image and DoLP PSNR of 31.522 dB and 24.097 dB, respectively, with an average AoLP error of 16.833 degree. These results underscore the importance of jointly considering visual fidelity and polarimetric reliability, offering a physically grounded perspective on learning based restoration under compound degradations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23360