Restoration
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SkillIR: Evolving Scene-Aware Skills for Agentic Image Restoration
2026-09-18 08:17:31Jie Shao, Shengkai Hu, Xu Zhang, Beihang Song, Yongcheng Jing, Xu Wu, Jun WanAbstract
This paper studies agentic image restoration, in which multimodal agents coordinate specialized restoration tools to recover images affected by complex degradations. Existing restoration agents often derive complete tool-use plans from the original degraded image or retrieve previously successful trajectories, providing limited support for adapting individual actions to evolving intermediate restoration states. We find that accepted tool executions can change the residual degradation state and, consequently, the applicability of subsequent tools. To address this issue, we propose SkillIR, a skill-guided framework that represents restoration experience as degradation-centered action evidence rather than complete tool-use trajectories. SkillIR consolidates context-dependent action outcomes into scene-aware restoration skills that characterize applicable conditions, expected effects, and attributable failure cases. Instead of prescribing a complete restoration plan, the retrieved skills guide one bounded action at a time within a verified residual-state loop: each tool output is treated as a candidate, committed only after transition verification, and followed by reassessment of the active residual degradations. After each rollout, the resulting evidence is used to create, refine, or patch dynamic skills, enabling accumulated restoration experience to improve decision-making for subsequent inputs. Experiments on synthetic and real-world multi-degradation datasets demonstrate that SkillIR improves restoration quality and enables more reliable and effective tool use.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21468
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4DGS-Fixer: Generative Sparse-View 4D Gaussian Splatting with Iterative Refinement Guided by Video Diffusion Priors
2026-09-18 00:37:53Haitao Huang, Shenghao Zhao, Boyuan Tian, Shin-Fang Chng, Songlin Yang, Sheila Lim, Huangying Zhan, Yi Xu, Anyi Rao, Frank GuanAbstract
This paper addresses the challenges of dynamic scene synthesis from sparse-view videos. Existing methods employ geometric priors, adaptive optimization, or density-control strategies to improve 4D Gaussian modeling under sparse observations. However, they cannot fundamentally resolve the ill-posed problem caused by insufficient observations and missing scene information. Moreover, sparse-view 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) often suffers from poor geometric initialization: with only a few input views, COLMAP typically reconstructs sparse and incomplete point clouds, leaving large scene regions without sufficient Gaussian support and making them difficult to recover through subsequent optimization. To address these limitations, we propose a novel iterative refinement framework based on a video diffusion model to improve the completeness and consistency of dynamic 4D scenes. Specifically, we first estimate multi-view depth maps and fuse them into dense point clouds to provide more complete geometric initialization for a dynamic 4DGS representation. We then employ a pretrained video restoration model to refine sequences rendered along novel camera trajectories at different time steps. The restored sequences serve as pseudo-supervision to regularize and iteratively refine the 4DGS representation. Experiments on a widely used benchmark dataset demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing baselines, achieving nearly a 2 dB PSNR improvement over the previous best-performing method.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21176
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Beyond Patch Removal: Persistent Adversarial Effects in Vision-Language-Action Policies
2026-09-17 04:14:19Enhao Wu, Fusen Guo, Yuxin Cao, Ziyang Lyu, Lin Li, Wei SongAbstract
Adversarial patches to Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies can cause both immediate action corruption and persistent state effects that remain after the patch is removed. Existing evaluations largely focus on continuous attacks and do not separate these two effects. We introduce a state-restoration protocol that removes the patch at matched action-chunk boundaries and measures subsequent recoverability under the same remaining step budget. Clean, random-patch, deviation-matched, and fixed-direction controls distinguish adversarial effects from occlusion, action-error magnitude, and directional persistence. We also evaluate a recovery adapter trained on attack-induced states under controlled intervention latency. On OpenVLA-OFT with EDPA attacks, only 36.2% of LIBERO-Long episodes remain recoverable after five chunks, compared with 89.9% and 87.0% for the deviation-matched and fixed-direction controls. Similar persistent effects are observed on autoregressive OpenVLA. The recovery adapter improves recovery from 7.7% to 47.4% at one-chunk latency, but its benefit decreases substantially with delayed intervention. These results show that adversarial effects can persist after patch removal and that timely intervention is critical for recovery.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19669
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Copy What Is Seen, Generate What Is Not: Training-Free Anomaly-Aware Video Restoration
2026-09-16 15:43:21Zhida Qu, Shengchao ChenAbstract
A surveillance system that detects an anomaly often has to repair the footage as well, yet the two tasks are studied in isolation: training-free anomaly detectors stop at a score or a label, while training-free video editing answers to a user prompt rather than to a detector. This paper proposes AVR (Anomaly-aware Video Restoration), which closes that gap with frozen pretrained models alone and generates content only where the clip offers no evidence to copy. Motion evidence first gates open-vocabulary proposals into spatio-temporal masks. A background prior computed from the clip then fills every pixel the anomaly ever uncovers, leaving diffusion to synthesize only what no frame showed, and a frozen verifier decides per clip whether to trust a classical, a prior-anchored, or a background-conditioned restorer. Extensive experiments on three surveillance datasets, under both full-reference anomaly injection and real anomalies, show that AVR leads full-frame fidelity under oracle masks, matches three trained video inpainters inside the edited region, and outperforms a detect-then-generate pipeline on the masks it produces itself, while suppressing both the residual anomaly and the flicker of free diffusion.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18836
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ProgramDistill: From Interactive Web Apps to Verifiable Reference-Guided SWE Tasks
2026-09-16 15:19:05Jeonghye Kim, Minseon Kim, Young Jin Kim, Matheus Pereira, Marc-Alexandre C\^ot\'e, Alessandro Sordoni, Xingdi Yuan, Zhengyan ShiAbstract
Coding agents are typically evaluated with desired behavior specified through issues or instructions. In practical web development, however, agents may need to infer behavior from working software and implement it in an incomplete application. We introduce ProgramDistill, a benchmark evaluating coding agents on features discovered through interaction with fully functional reference applications. We build ProgramDistill by factorizing applications into features of different granularities, each associated with replayable behaviors executable via its gold patch. Our pipeline, mine-craft-patch, discovers 1,975 replay-verified behaviors across 26 applications and constructs 4,063 tasks without human intervention. Across nine frontier coding agents, GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5 achieve 49.2% and 28.8% success on cumulative workflows in full-application reconstruction. In partial-application reconstruction, success falls from 100% to 64.0% and from 96% to 32% as restoration depth increases from 1 to 8. ProgramDistill thus provides a scalable benchmark with controlled difficulty for evaluating and diagnosing coding agents, and a natural basis for future curriculum-based training.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18805
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FIERCE: From Generalist Robot Policies to Fast Specialists via Progress-Failure Feedback
2026-09-16 13:34:08Runjia Tan, Yuang Tu, Yujie Yan, Lan Yu, Xuesong Tian, Chen LvAbstract
Generalist robot policies offer useful initialization, but refining compact specialists through limited physical interaction requires informative learning feedback. We present FIERCE, a generalist-initialized reinforcement learning framework centered on a unified, task-adaptive progress-failure evaluator. Its architecture shares an observation-language representation between an observed-progress head and an action-conditioned latent predictor whose past and current predictions feed a causal sequence head for task-failure estimation. Joint supervision from progress and preference labels, synchronized commands and observations, and terminal outcomes trains the evaluator; target-task rollouts support adaptation and calibration. Fixed evaluator snapshots provide progress shaping and failure-risk penalties alongside independently verified terminal rewards, while evaluator and policy updates alternate as new experience is collected. Refinement requires neither continued generalist action queries nor a dedicated target-task simulator or manually annotated dense rewards. Only the compact specialist is retained at deployment. The evaluation separates feedback quality, policy-learning efficiency, and deployment cost across simulation and two contact-rich real tasks. Code, model weights, and data-restoration tools are released at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18651
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Perceptual Refinement of an End-to-End Video Streaming Pipeline via Generative AI Layers
2026-09-16 12:33:08Emanuele Artioli, Farzad Tashtarian, Christian TimmererAbstract
Traditional codecs treat every region of a frame alike; a generative layer can instead degrade the regions a viewer attends to least and reconstruct them at the client. We present PRESLEY, which extends the prior conference work ELVIS by replacing destructive block removal with adaptive in-place degradation under a removability mask, signaling per-block strength in a bit-packed side channel, and restoring via generative backbones conditioned on transmitted visual priors rather than unconditioned in-painting. We separate the problem into three goals: choosing which blocks to degrade, degrading them so the encoder spends fewer bits, and restoring them. Against its predecessor at matched rate, PRESLEY achieves a decisive mean -56.4% BD-rate reduction on delivered background quality across 13 rate ladders spanning multiple codecs and dataset families. Against pristine baselines, PRESLEY defines the operating regime of generative transport: delivering substantial bitrate savings (up to -29.4% BD-rate) and superior background quality (17/23 sequences) in the target bit-starved regime, while maintaining foreground fidelity bit-exact. We further map where the theoretical headroom in this class of architecture lies. Using an exact leave-one-superblock-out combinatorial oracle as an additive empirical bound, we show that existing complexity heuristics already capture 83.3% of bit-cost savings, bounding remaining cost-axis headroom at about 5% of total bitrate. We then identify and model the primary unaddressed axis -- post-restoration damage -- which disperses widely (4.9-8.4 dB). We prove that this damage is predictable before transmission (held-out rho = +0.400), establishing the feasibility of transmit-time restorability modeling and defining the roadmap for joint rate-distortion-restoration selection rules.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19215
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Learning A Unified Template for Gait Recognition
2026-09-16 11:27:36Panjian Huang, Saihui Hou, Junzhou Huang, Yongzhen HuangAbstract
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."Human wisdom reveals that creation is one of the highest forms of learning. For example, Diffusion Models have demonstrated remarkable semantic structure and memory in image generation, understanding, and restoration, which intuitively benefits representation learning. However, current gait networks rarely embrace this perspective, relying primarily on learning by contrasting gait samples under varying complex conditions, leading to semantic inconsistency and uniformity issues. To address these issues, we propose Origins with generative capabilities whose underlying philosophy is that different entities are generated from a unified template, inherently regularizing gait representations within a consistent and diverse semantic space to capture accurate gait differences. Admittedly, learning this unified template is exceedingly challenging, as it requires the comprehensiveness of the template to encompass gait representations with various conditions. Inspired by Diffusion Models, Origins diffuses the unified template into timestep templates for gait generative learning, and meanwhile transfers the unified template for gait representation learning. Especially, gait generative and representation learning serve as a unified framework for end-to-end joint training. Extensive experiments on CASIA-B, CCPG,SUSTech1K, Gait3D, GREW and CCGR-MINI demonstrate that Origins performs unified generative and representation learning, achieving superior performance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18490
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Rollback the World, Keep the Reflection: Rollback-Induced Reflection for Long-Horizon LLM Agents
2026-09-16 08:26:14Yi Yu, Liuyi Yao, Yaliang Li, Enshu Wang, Libing WuAbstract
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly tackle long-horizon tasks through multi-step environment interaction, yet a single erroneous action can alter subsequent states and observations, causing errors to compound over time. Existing methods either correct the context without repairing altered environment states or restore earlier states while discarding useful experience, making it difficult to both eliminate failure conditions and avoid repeating past mistakes. We argue that reliable recovery should instead be treated as a rollback-boundary control problem that jointly determines when to intervene, where to resume, and what information should survive recovery. Based on this view, we propose Rollback-Induced Reflection (RIR), a unified recovery framework that restores execution to a selected prior state while carrying forward reusable knowledge distilled from the abandoned trajectory to guide subsequent decisions. We further characterize recovery through a unified operator over rollback depth and retained memory, providing a general view of state restoration and knowledge retention. Experiments on three long-horizon benchmarks demonstrate that RIR consistently improves task performance across multiple LLM backbones, with structured reflection memory preserving useful experience and selective rollback enabling efficient recovery.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18304
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Bi-FlowGS: Bridging Generative View Completion and Gaussian Geometry through Bidirectional Flow Co-Refinement
2026-09-15 11:47:35Yuetong Wang, Jinsheng Quan, Yi Yang, Yawei LuoAbstract
Sparse-view 3D scene reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is inherently underconstrained. Plausible renderings can also coexist with erroneous Gaussian geometry, as errors in positions or depths may be concealed by opacity, scale, and appearance; we term this failure mode Geometry Cheating. Existing regularization methods constrain geometry but remain limited to observed views, while video-diffusion-based methods complete unseen views yet mainly use them as RGB pseudo-supervision, underusing motion and temporal priors and lacking explicit geometry supervision. We present Bi-FlowGS, which uses optical flow to bridge generative view completion and Gaussian geometry regularization. Our plug-and-play Video-to-Geometry Flow Distillation (V2G) distills temporal correspondence priors from restored videos into Gaussian geometry to alleviate Geometry Cheating. Conversely, Geometry-to-Video Flow-Guided Restoration (G2V) uses the current 3DGS geometry to guide temporally consistent video restoration, providing more reliable generative supervision. Together, V2G and G2V form an implicit bidirectional co-refinement process, enabling restored videos and the optimized 3DGS scene to iteratively improve each other. Experiments demonstrate improved rendering quality and geometric consistency across wide-baseline and unbounded 360° benchmarks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17039
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TTTIR: Unlocking Instance-Specific State Evolution via Test-Time Training for Image Restoration
2026-09-15 09:51:46Kaihang Zheng, Jun Li, Hang Guo, Hongyu Chi, Zimo Liu, Tao Dai, Jinpeng Wang, Yaowei WangAbstract
Image restoration is inherently challenging due to the diverse and highly input-dependent nature of real-world degradations. While recent architectures like Transformers and state-space models have advanced the field, they predominantly rely on static, globally shared parameters, which struggle to fully accommodate instance-specific degradation patterns. Test-Time Training (TTT) offers a promising paradigm for generating data-dependent operators, yet its standard self-supervised inner loop lacks the explicit guidance required to transition degraded features toward clean structures. To address this, we propose TTTIR, a novel framework that reformulates image restoration as an instance-specific state evolution process. Specifically, we design Progressive State Sequence Generation (PSSG) to construct complementary spatial-frequency target states (defining what to recover), and State Transition Evolution (STE) to adapt lightweight transition operators via a restoration-oriented TTT inner loop (determining how the features should evolve). Extensive experiments demonstrate that TTTIR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models across multiple image restoration benchmarks, achieving dynamic instance-specific recovery with favorable computational scalability. The code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26151
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RiskChainBench: A Benchmark for Obfuscated Platform Message Restoration and Evidence-Grounded Web Investigation
2026-09-15 09:32:45ZhuoXin Liu, Zhiming Ma, Ying Zhang, Mengzheng Yang, Yifan Wang, Zhengqi Huang, Yanhan Zhou, Zekun Lin, Jun Zhang, Shun Zhang, Yue Chen, Qiao Zhao, Peng ChenAbstract
Platform abuse campaigns conceal redirection instructions with emojis, homophones, character decomposition, and redundant symbols, then route users through disguised links to services associated with pornography, fraud, gambling, or illicit transactions. Existing benchmarks evaluate obfuscated text and risky webpages separately, obscuring how target recovery affects downstream evidence acquisition. We introduce RiskChainBench, pairing 3,600 synthetic token-text restoration inputs from 600 source sessions with 600 corresponding human-labeled local web environments. A model first restores the message, operational intent, and destination; the same underlying model then acts as a VLM-driven web agent that investigates the correctly associated website and produces a frozen, evidence-cited risk report without message-side semantics or domain-reputation cues. We score restoration and correct-routing web investigation separately and compose them offline by applying the frozen primary-entry prediction as a gate to the same Task 2 result. Human labels determine task correctness, while a fixed multimodal evidence judge assesses faithfulness, sufficiency, completeness, and consistency. Across ten models, Entry Top-1 ranges from 35.2% to 95.2% and web decision accuracy from 26.3% to 62.8%; the leading systems differ across entry recovery, full reconstruction, website decisions, and fine-grained typing. Execution failures account for 31.9% of web runs, whereas post-decision type errors account for only 0.9%, identifying stable exploration and risk judgment as the principal bottlenecks. We release the benchmark, protocol, and resettable local sandbox.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16900
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GraLoD: Graphics-Inspired Continuous Level-of-Detail Learning for Image Restoration
2026-09-15 03:22:22Hu Gao, Lizhuang Ma, Yulong ChenAbstract
The spatial support required for image restoration varies across degradation types, image regions, and reconstruction stages. However, most existing methods rely on predefined multi-scale hierarchies and aggregate features through fixed fusion or attention, leaving the representation scale itself largely determined by the network architecture. This limitation becomes more pronounced when a task-specific backbone is extended to heterogeneous degradations in all-in-one restoration. Inspired by level-of-detail (LOD) rendering in computer graphics, we propose GraLoD, a plug-and-play framework that treats restoration scale as a spatially varying and stage-dependent continuous variable. GraLoD reuses the native encoder hierarchy, aligns its multi-scale features into a shared LOD representation space, and predicts a stage-conditioned LOD field at each decoder stage. Each spatial location then continuously queries only two neighboring representation levels, enabling the effective restoration scale to adapt to both local image content and reconstruction progress. To prevent degenerate or arbitrary scale selection, we further introduce minimal-sufficient footprint calibration (MSFC) together with structure-aware regularization (SAR) to encourage restoration-effective and spatially coherent LOD assignments. GraLoD can be directly integrated into existing restoration backbones without redesigning their fundamental feature-processing blocks. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in task-specific and all-in-one restoration.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16578
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LynnReal-Omni: Native multi-modal Video Generation for Agentic Visual Workflows
2026-09-14 16:55:25Xiaofeng Mao, Peijia Lin, Shaohao Rui, Yibo Zhang, Haibin Wan, Weijie MaAbstract
Video diffusion models are stochastic and hard to control: precise content often requires repeated sampling without guaranteed success, and long-horizon scenes drift in appearance, interactions, and temporal coherence. Agentic visual creation provides explicit references, editable 3D scenes, or executable game states for stable control, but does not by itself guarantee high object or character fidelity. Combining the two can enable stable, high-quality generation. To realize this combination, we present LynnReal-Omni, a native multimodal video generation framework built on a 32B shared multimodal diffusion transformer that unifies text-to-video, image-conditioned generation, reference-guided generation, structural control, editing, degraded video restoration, and long-video generation. It accepts heterogeneous visual inputs, including appearance references, editable 3D renders, and game recordings, allowing agents to compose visual conditions within a unified model. We also train a dedicated 27B Flash shared multimodal diffusion transformer for real-time rendering. We build a systematic data pipeline for video cleaning, subject association, multimodal annotation, and aligned control construction, yielding a curated corpus of multi-shot audiovisual segments, and introduce MSAVP, a 100-prompt, 20-metric evaluation design that separates instruction following, generating plausibility, visual quality, temporal behavior, and audio coordination. LynnReal-Omni-Flash further reduces inference cost through model and decoding acceleration, including a lightweight VAE decoder; on one H100, warm generation and decoding of a 22-frame 540p video take 843 ms with LynnReal-Omni and 377 ms with Flash. These results provide a foundation for real-time streaming video generation, making LynnReal-Omni a unified, controllable, and efficient basis for agentic visual creation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15863
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LIMODENet: Attention-Free Compact Encoders for Information-Preserving Onboard Satellite Image Restoration
2026-09-13 17:47:31Thanh-Dung Le, Vu Nguyen Ha, Ti Ti Nguyen, Symeon ChatzinotasAbstract
Onboard satellites must restore a channel-degraded image on a few watts, using neuromorphic accelerators (e.g., BrainChip Akida, Intel Loihi-2) that support no softmax or attention. We ask which encoder restores best under that constraint and introduce LIMODENet (LinearMix-ODENet), a 0.69M softmax-/QKV-free backbone whose residual stages read as ODE discretizations and which is empirically information-preserving (probe accuracy rises 79.9% -> 98.4% from stem to head). At iso-parameters it restores 1 dB DVB-S2X-degraded EuroSAT better than a CNN autoencoder (+1.75 dB PSNR) and a skip-connection U-Net (+1.07 dB), three seeds, non-overlapping. Unconstrained modern restorers (NAFNet, Restormer) win on fidelity; we decompose that gap: spiking-legal additive skips recover about half, and the rest traces to attention and channel gating. LIMODENet then converts end-to-end to a spiking network with zero blocked operations, versus 22-24 for the competitors: not the best restorer available, but the best verified deployable within a real power budget.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14690
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Newton Deep Unfolding for Compressed Sensing
2026-09-13 08:56:59Changhua He, Xianchao XiuAbstract
Compressed sensing (CS) reconstructs images from highly limited measurements, but existing deep unfolding methods are typically driven by first-order optimization and weakly exploit the optimization states generated during reconstruction. To address these limitations, we propose a Newton deep unfolding network (NDU-Net), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first deep unfolding framework that leverages second-order optimization for CS reconstruction. Specifically, NDU-Net introduces a Newton update (NU) module to estimate Newton-type update directions and generate optimization states that characterize the current reconstruction process. Furthermore, a Newton-guided multi-scale prior (MP) module is designed to incorporate these optimization states into multi-scale feature restoration, thereby enabling the learned prior to adapt to the current reconstruction stage. Experimental results under different CS ratios confirm that our proposed NDU-Net achieves promising reconstruction performance and exhibits enhanced robustness. Our code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14391
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Robust low-rank tensor completion via factorized weighted tensor schatten-p norm minimization
2026-09-13 06:02:35Binghao Wang, Feng Zhang, Wendong Wang, Jianjun WangAbstract
Low-rank tensor factorization provides a flexible framework for completing multidimensional data from incomplete and corrupted observations. However, unweighted spectral regularizers impose a common shrinkage profile across singular components, which may excessively attenuate dominant low-rank components, and factorized variants either lack component-specific weighting or require costly singular value decompositions (SVDs). This paper proposes two weighted Schatten-$p$ tensor factorization models, termed \WSpTFI{} and \WSpTFII{}, under the tensor-tensor product (t-product) framework to address these limitations. \WSpTFI{} is motivated by a factorized weighted tensor Schatten-$p$ norm identity and permits flexible, possibly asymmetric factor exponents. \WSpTFII{} constructs a regularizer from transform-domain column-pair energies, yielding SVD-free main factor updates and a column-pruning mechanism for reducing redundant rank components. This paper further develops an iteratively reweighted alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-type scheme for \WSpTFI{} and an iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS)--block successive upper-bound minimization (BSUM) scheme for \WSpTFII{}. Theoretical analysis establishes the weighted factorization relation and provides a conditional limiting Karush--Kuhn--Tucker (KKT) characterization for \WSpTFI{}. For \WSpTFII{}, the actual damped quadratic block updates yield a quantitative sufficient-decrease mechanism for the fixed-$\delta$ smoothed factor objective. This implies asymptotic regularity, and every accumulation point of the fixed-dimensional tail is stationary. Experiments on synthetic tensor completion, color-image restoration, hyperspectral inpainting, and printed-circuit-board defect detection demonstrate competitive reconstruction quality and robustness under various degradation conditions.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14307
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Restore What Matters: Lessons from Joint Restoration and Recognition
2026-09-12 08:08:08Lanqing Guo, Xijun Wang, Minchul Kim, Yu Yuan, Wes Robbins, Xingguang Zhang, Nicholas Chimitt, Stanley H. Chan, Zhangyang Wang, Xiaoming LiuAbstract
Recognition pipelines typically adopt a restore-then-recognize workflow, yet decades of experience show that generating visually pleasing images seldom translates to improved recognition. We propose a Joint Restoration-for-Recognition (JR$^2$) paradigm: restore only what downstream tasks truly require, with task signals dictating where, how much, and whether restoration is necessary. JR$^2$ rests on three pillars: (i) Physics, employing optics-accurate turbulence simulation, extensible to blur and noise, to ground restoration in real image formation; (ii) Neuroscience, drawing on selective attention and neuroplasticity to direct model capacity toward identity-critical regions and frames while bypassing already-clean inputs; and (iii) Vision & Learning, coupling recognition loss end-to-end through restoration and alignment so that low-level edits maximize high-level identity stability. Evaluations on IARPA-BRIAR show consistent improvements (e.g., TAR@0.01% FAR +0.6; FNIR@1% FPIR -2.5), while a quality gate skips ~70% of clean frames, reducing cost. Ablations confirm physics priors enhance realism, joint training prevents catastrophic forgetting, and selective restoration suffices in many cases. We conclude that better-looking images are neither necessary nor sufficient; restoration modules must be task-driven, selective, and physically aware. Code, pretrained models, and recipes are provided for integration.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13791
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Inside VLM Chart Reading: Tracing Value Reading from Vertical Bar Charts Across Space and Depth
2026-09-12 06:28:11Tianhao Niu, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang CheAbstract
Vision--language models (VLMs) can answer chart questions accurately, but output accuracy does not show how they combine the evidence needed to recover an exact value. We study vertical-bar value reading with controlled counterfactual activation patching in Qwen2.5VL-7B-Instruct and InternVL3.5-8B. The study connects three analyses: (1) The single-factor results show that the changed bar-top region restores much more answer preference than the unchanged bar body, despite containing fewer visual tokens. Legend- and series-related states also lose local recoverability earlier than bar-geometry and axis-scale states. (2) In the handoff analysis, restoration shifts from visual legend regions in early layers to prompt-series positions in middle layers. Resetting the prompt-series state selectively reduces legend-source rescue, supporting its role as a partial mediator. (3) In the factorial analysis, both models can use geometry and scale states from separate donors to favor the combined target. InternVL performs similarly when the states come from separate donors or one image, while Qwen shows lower restoration for separate donors which suggests higher context sensitivity. Together, these results provide preliminary causal evidence for localizing the internal computations that support exact bar-value reading.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13745
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Recoverability as a System Primitive for Long-Horizon AI Agents
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AI agents can be interrupted while editing files, calling tools, or carrying out multi-step tasks. Restarting repeats completed work, but continuing from unverified or outdated progress can carry earlier errors forward. A saved state is not necessarily a suitable place to resume. We introduce recoverability as a system primitive that makes reuse an explicit decision: select a supported starting point and a permitted recovery action, or withhold automatic continuation. Its behavioral contract binds that choice to supporting evidence, execution, and independent checks. A reference architecture connects persistence, validation, and control, with complementary runtime instances testing distinct responsibilities. Four deterministic and 20 paired file challenges demonstrate that accurate restoration and successful completion can conceal disallowed starting points. Progress controls attribute retained work to shared restoration. Event-time tests show that permission must also constrain the action, and that independently held policy evidence can expose violations even after an effect occurs. These findings establish why recovery decisions need their own evaluation, beyond restored bytes and final task success. Within supplied policies and a declared trust model, the contribution is a common, testable interface for retaining justified progress and making the conditions for its reuse explicit and enforceable.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13672
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