Real-world degradations such as blur, shadow, distortion, and moire patterns severely impair the document question-answering capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Applying restoration tools before Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an intuitive solution. However, existing restoration approaches remain limited, as manually designing and executing restoration strategies is labor-intensive and requires domain expertise. Agentic restoration offers new possibilities for automation, yet existing frameworks primarily target natural images and pursue perceptual quality, overlooking that restoration should serve downstream tasks rather than optimize generic image quality metrics. To this end, we explore the value of agentic restoration for real-world degraded document VQA and propose DocIntent, a training-free Answerability-Guided Agentic Restoration framework. DocIntent first assesses question answerability, then identifies task-relevant degradations and selectively invokes restoration tools. A Comparison-Based Rollback mechanism validates each restoration step and reverts it when question-relevant evidence becomes less decipherable. The entire process requires no additional pretrained degradation classifier or image quality assessment model. Extensive experiments on the WildDoc benchmark show that DocIntent consistently improves the average score and consistency of different open- and closed-source MLLMs. The code and experimental data will be publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29037
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently made strong progress in visual--linguistic understanding. However, their performance on text-centric video reasoning remains highly sensitive to input quality. Real-world user-provided videos often contain motion blur, compression artifacts, noise, and low-resolution text, which impair reliable text reading and downstream reasoning. Whether MLLMs can robustly read and reason about real-world scene text under diverse quality conditions remains a fundamental open question. We introduce ClearText-Video (CTVid), a large-scale, scene-text-aware benchmark for studying text-centric video understanding under controlled quality variation. CTVid contains 4,639 real-world text-rich egocentric videos, 550K+ frames, 1.6M human-verified scene-text annotations, and 220K+ spatial/temporal question--answer pairs in Chinese and English. For each high-quality video, CTVid provides content-matched Degraded-Quality and Restored-Quality variants, supporting two task families: Text-Centric Video Restoration and Multi-Quality VideoQA. We evaluate 18 representative restoration methods and 16 state-of-the-art MLLMs on CTVid. The results show that visual enhancement does not guarantee textual fidelity or downstream reasoning gains: blur is more damaging than low resolution, restored videos can alter the textual evidence used by MLLMs, and OCR-only pipelines remain far below direct multimodal reasoning. CTVid exposes the gap between video restoration and text-grounded understanding, providing a rigorous foundation for restoration-aware, quality-robust text-centric video systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28784
Latest JPEG restoration systems achieve strong quality with large models, yet often remain too slow and expensive for efficient on-device deployment. We present a 65M-parameter generative restorer that attains the lowest LPIPS at QF 10 and 20 on LIVE-1, Urban100, and DIV2K-val while sustaining 8.05 images/s at $1024\times1024$ on a single RTX 3090, roughly $4.9\times$ the reported throughput of one-step SODiff at one-twentieth of its parameters. Trained from scratch, the model replaces the learned VAE encoder-decoder with an exactly invertible two-level Haar transform, predicts a clean wavelet-domain residual through a rank-enhanced linear-attention DiT that estimates compression severity internally, and is optimized with an improved MeanFlow objective that enables inference in one or two network evaluations without distillation. Large pretrained priors remain stronger under severe compression (QF 5), whereas our model prioritizes throughput for deployment-constrained restoration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28730
Purpose - This study investigates the feasibility of restoring missing text caused by physical lacunae in damaged ancient manuscripts using language models. Methodology - The study proposes different scenarios to replicate real-world conditions. Language models of different architectures are applied according to their suitability to each scenario. We also propose several decoding strategies that further enhance performance and address the discrepancy between lacuna boundaries and the models' tokenization schemes. Findings - The results reveal that text restoration of these documents cannot be fully automated, but it can serve as a useful tool to assist paleographers in their work. Model performance varies greatly depending on which structural part of the document needs to be restored and whether the character length of missing text is available. Originality - This is the first study and to analyze model performance on formulaic and non-formulaic content and the impact of lacuna length awareness in manuscript restoration. Both are recurring challenges in paleographers' manual restoration work. Through systematic comparison and both qualitative and quantitative analysis of different models' performance under varying settings, this study offers a guideline for developing assistive tools to support paleographers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28170
Chinese neologisms exploit diverse and unique linguistic mechanisms, such as phonetic substitution (e.g., 886 for ``bye-bye'') and visual character decomposition that are rare in other languages. We introduce CNeo-Bench, a benchmark of 4,759 such neologisms with reference definitions, organized into five top-level categories and nine subcategories by the linguistic mechanism behind each expression. CNeo-Bench is paired with a two-tier evaluation framework that separates whether a model can describe a neologism from whether it can operate on its underlying mechanism. Evaluating 18 LLMs, we find that Chinese neologisms remain an open challenge; most models fall below 40\% on definition generation, and on several subcategories a systematic recognition-manipulation gap emerges: models describe neologisms correctly but, in source-form restoration tasks, substitute a semantic equivalent (paraphrase) for the source form rather than producing the source form itself. A few-shot analysis on 1,058 hard items shows that in-context examples can solve many difficult cases, but leave a noticeable portion of errors remaining, indicating challenges beyond prompting alone can address.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28053
Keypoint detection under motion blur remains a significant challenge, as blur distorts local image structure and degrades the repeatability of feature localization. Existing approaches either rely on computationally expensive deblur-then-detect pipelines that may introduce restoration artifacts, or learn to regress the image positions of handcrafted keypoints extracted on sharp images, which reflects the assumptions of the handcrafted detector rather than what is truly repeatable under blur. We present SSMB, a deblur-free, self-supervised keypoint detector for motion-blurred images that requires neither handcrafted detectors nor external pseudo-labels. SSMB introduces the Local Discriminability Enhancement (LDE) module, which restores fine-grained local discriminability after global feature mixing. Training is performed in two stages. First, geometric pretraining on synthetic shapes bootstraps spatially discriminative keypoint detection without any external detector, just from the rendered geometry. Second, blur-aware training on real sharp-blur image pairs learns blur-invariant detection through a multi-component self-supervised objective that enforces cross-domain consistency, geometric alignment, and spatial coverage. Extensive evaluations on keypoint detection, image matching, relative pose estimation, and visual localization under motion blur demonstrate that SSMB establishes a new state-of-the-art among sparse keypoint detectors, consistently outperforming both supervised and self-supervised baselines across all tasks. Code, models, and datasets will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27181
Zero-shot image restoration methods with text-to-image latent diffusion models have achieved great success in universal image restoration tasks without training. However, applying them to video restoration will result in severe temporal flickering. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for zero-shot video restoration and enhancement which uses a text-to-image latent diffusion model and multi-modal references. Through the proposed dual prompt tuning inversion and sampling, the inference time can be reduced to nearly 1/3 of the original. The performance and temporal consistency can be also significantly stregthened. By using the proposed texture-aware video token merging, the temporal correlation between frames can be further utilized to improve the temporal consistency. We futher propose the referenced self-attention and referenced token merging to support image reference. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in restoring and enhancing temporally consistent videos.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26476
The underwater environment is challenging for 3D reconstruction, because particles suspended in the water scatter and diffuse light, turbidity varies, absorption depends on wavelength, and illumination is rarely uniform. Methods based on Gaussian splatting have generally been developed for conditions that allow good image quality, and have primarily been tested on relatively shallow water. This paper examines how well Gaussian splatting performs across publicly available underwater datasets representing different degrees of turbidity, loss of illumination, and colour attenuation, together with an industrial survey. Five systems with public code are run under one protocol, with shared poses, initialisation, budget, and evaluator, to establish their relative advantages, disadvantages, and limitations. What these methods can do turns out to depend more on the setup than on the architecture. Water clarity binds upstream of rendering, since structure-from-motion registers 99.5 \% of frames in clear water and 0.0 \% at 12 NTU. Illumination geometry decides whether a medium model helps at all: under an artificial light that moves with the camera, medium-blind splatting beats both medium-aware systems. On the survey the benchmark's photometric leader comes last, beaten on geometry by a restoration pre-pass in front of vanilla 3DGS---and none of it is visible in the scores the field reports. Scene builds, per-run configurations, and evaluation code are released at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25483
Diffusion-based real-world image super-resolution (SR) achieves impressive perceptual quality but inherently suffers from severe texture hallucination. To overcome this limitation, we propose GraftSR, a texture-reference-guided generative SR framework that leverages reference images of the identical instance to anchor the restoration of authentic textures. However, severe spatial misalignment between low-quality inputs and their references poses significant challenges, often leading to ambiguous transfer targets and background feature leakage. To address these issues, GraftSR employs a novel dual-mask reference guidance mechanism that systematically decouples the cross-view texture injection process. By explicitly isolating what authentic textures to extract from the reference and precisely localizing where to apply them within the target, GraftSR achieves robust texture transfer without relying on brittle spatial alignment. Furthermore, to bridge the critical gap in appropriate training data, we construct TexRefSR-141K, the first large-scale dataset providing high-quality reference tuples equipped with complementary spatial masks. Extensive experiments on our newly established benchmark, TexRefSR-Eval, demonstrate that GraftSR sets a new state-of-the-art. Notably, it reduces LPIPS by 20.2\% over top-performing baselines, achieving superior reference-faithful restoration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25334
Partial deepfake speech, where only limited segments of an utterance are synthesized or manipulated, poses a significant challenge to existing deepfake detection systems. As the proportion of spoofed regions decreases, passive detectors become increasingly unreliable, and accurate detection and restoration remain challenging. In this paper, we revisit audio steganography from a new perspective and propose its use as a proactive defense against partially deepfaked audio. In particular, we consider a self-embedding strategy in which a clean speech signal embeds a compressed representation of itself, enabling post-hoc extraction of reference content. We demonstrate how existing audio steganography methods can be repurposed to support detection of partial deepfakes through codec-based restoration. Experiments on a benchmark dataset show that the proposed approach complements passive defenses. Remarkably, the proposed method operates without any training, providing a robust and data-efficient alternative for partial deepfake detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25285
Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) plays a vital role in enhancing the reliability of deep learning model predictions, especially in scenarios with high-dimensional output spaces. This paper addresses the dual nature of uncertainty -- aleatoric and epistemic -- focusing on their joint integration in high-dimensional regression tasks. For example, in applications like medical image segmentation or restoration, aleatoric uncertainty captures inherent data noise, while epistemic uncertainty quantifies the model's confidence in unfamiliar conditions. Modeling both jointly enables more reliable predictions by reflecting both unavoidable variability and knowledge gaps, whereas modeling only one limits transparency and robustness. We propose a novel approach that approximates the resulting joint uncertainty using a low-rank plus diagonal covariance structure, capturing essential output correlations while avoiding the computational burdens of full covariance matrices. Unlike prior work, our method explicitly combines aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties into a unified second-order distribution that supports robust downstream analyses like sampling and log-likelihood evaluation. We further introduce stabilization strategies for efficient training and inference, achieving superior UQ in the tasks of image inpainting, colorization, optical flow, and depth estimation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24518
Tooth preparation refers to the controlled removal of tooth structure to create an optimal substrate for fixed restorations and is a core procedure in restorative dentistry. Automating this task is particularly challenging for robots because the dental bur must operate within a densely constrained intraoral workspace, where even sub-millimeter deviations can compromise outcomes or damage adjacent structures. This paper presents a novel robotic system for autonomous full-crown tooth preparation. The proposed framework includes: 1) an anatomy-aware toolpath planning algorithm that conforms precisely to a technician-designed preparation model while protecting adjacent teeth, and 2) a clearance-oriented end-effector yaw assignment strategy that allows intraoral access while reducing the risk of soft-tissue interference. Together, these features enable the robot to accurately mill the irregular tooth surface with an average geometric deviation of 0.117 mm (RMSE), achieving both restoration quality and clinical safety. A series of simulations and phantom-head experiments validate the system's feasibility and effectiveness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24155
Recent progress in image restoration has converged on all-in-one architectures that jointly handle multiple degradations within a single network. These methods are effective on static benchmarks but target a closed-world setting that assumes simultaneous access to every target degradation at training time. In practice, degradations are encountered sequentially as field-deployed systems progressively face new environmental conditions, and historical training data is often unavailable due to privacy or storage constraints. Accommodating a new degradation then requires either retraining on the union of all prior data, which is often costly or infeasible, or fine-tuning, which causes catastrophic forgetting. We formulate multi-degradation image restoration as a continual domain-incremental learning problem, in which degradations arrive incrementally and prior data is unavailable. Our proposed Restoring without Forgetting (RwF) framework learns a lightweight adapter for each new degradation, eliminating forgetting by construction at a fraction of the cost of dedicated per-domain networks. To isolate degradation learning from dataset variation, we construct a benchmark spanning five degradation domains under shared image content. At test time, an unsupervised routing mechanism identifies the appropriate restoration path for unknown inputs without requiring domain labels. Across the five-domain sequence, RwF improves final average PSNR over naive sequential fine-tuning by 15.25 dB and 11.83 dB on the Restormer and NAFNet backbones, respectively. The framework transfers to eleven canonical real-degradation benchmarks (3,465 images) at 89.5% routing accuracy with only a +0.94 dB oracle PSNR gap, establishing, to our knowledge, the first systematic baseline for continual multi-degradation image restoration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23799
Image acquisition with a camera involves several degradations due to the optical system, sensor, or low-level processing steps. We address blind deblurring in professional photography: we aim to invert unknown isotropic blur without knowledge of the degradation this http URL such inverse problems,where some high-frequency information is lost, it is challenging to use generative models to produce details that are both photo-realistic and faithful to the input. We propose SuperSharpen, a diffusion-based blind deblurring method offering explicit control over restoration strength through a blur measure. We compare two conditioning strategies: a ControlNet-style adapter on a frozen backbone, and full finetuning of the diffusion prior. Our experiments show that finetuning achieves better fidelity with fewer hallucinated details. We validate our approach on synthetic and real-world blur, demonstrating improved perceptual quality and controllable restoration strength.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23343
In light-field (LF) imaging systems, dense spatial sampling from a camera array enables powerful post-capture capabilities such as refocusing and depth estimation. However, real-world LF capture is often affected by hardware malfunctions, where one or more cameras in the array fail, leading to missing sub-aperture images and degraded reconstruction quality. This paper addresses the problem of defective or missing view restoration in light-field camera arrays. We propose a novel generative framework that synthesizes the absent views by exploiting information from a carefully selected subset of neighboring cameras. These selected images, along with a positional encoding map indicating both their locations and the desired target view, are fed into a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) trained to generate the missing viewpoint in a geometrically consistent manner. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world LF datasets demonstrate that our method produces visually plausible and photometrically accurate reconstructions, outperforming baselines for view interpolation both quantitatively and qualitatively. The proposed framework thus offers a robust and efficient solution for fault-tolerant light-field image acquisition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23175
Poor illumination obscures small, low-contrast defects in UAV bridge imagery, reducing the reliability and operational flexibility of automated inspection. This paper investigates whether degradation-aware image restoration can improve bridge damage detection under low-light conditions and transfer from synthetic degradations to real inspection scenes. We propose DaL- MoE, a detector-agnostic restoration front end trained with an ISP-aware low-light synthesis pipeline and equipped with degradation-aware guidance estimation and complementary experts for noise suppression, color adjustment, and structural-detail recovery. On paired synthetic data, DaL-MoE achieves 23.12 dB PSNR and 0.8482 SSIM, increasing YOLOv11m box mAP50 from 0.3097 to 0.4923 and mask mAP50 from 0.2281 to 0.3529. On real low-light UAV imagery without paired normal-light references, sim-to-real evaluation shows improved defect visibility and more complete detections than direct inference on raw low-light inputs. Future work will develop low-light-aware bridge damage detectors with stronger cross-scene generalization across bridge sites, imaging conditions, and illumination levels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23136
Long-horizon GUI agents can retain a complete interaction trace cheaply as textual action records, but expose only a few past events to the policy in high-fidelity pixels. We formulate this as conditional fidelity restoration: each event persists in summary-only form and is linked to an archived screenshot, while an active visual-context budget $B$ limits how many events may be promoted to summary-plus-image form. Recent-$B$ spends every slot on the latest events. CausalCache instead reallocates the same $B$ promotions over the complete trace, evicting a recent image only when a distant event has higher conditional marginal utility. Its history-gated key/value (HGKV) adapter modifies only restored history-image tokens and is exactly bypassed with no history image. Matched-budget replacement groups and per-arm-anchored difference-in-differences supervision make uniform history amplification worth zero; a budget-aware selector then chooses which summarized events to restore. On desktop, the frozen policy shows no reliable preference for a task-relevant archived screenshot over the recent frame it would displace; HGKV learns exactly that selectivity inside a pre-specified drift envelope. On OSWorld-Verified, restoring history to high fidelity is worth about $13$ success points over summary-only memory, while same-budget allocations remain indistinguishable. Zero-shot on a cross-application mobile benchmark, CausalCache significantly improves overall success over the same-budget recent allocation ($+3.7$ points on the full roster), and the gain concentrates where it should: $+8.6$ points on the memory-critical split fixed by benchmark metadata at construction, no detectable effect on matched controls, and a significant split-by-method interaction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22577
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) can provide efficient image generation, while diffusion models offer high-quality image restoration but require iterative sampling. This paper presents a hybrid GAN-guided diffusion framework that uses a pretrained Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) as a feature prior for conditional diffusion-based image restoration. Intermediate features from the frozen WGAN-GP generator are incorporated into a diffusion U-Net through cross-attention and remain fixed during the DDIM sampling process. The framework is evaluated on two restoration tasks, Gaussian denoising and 2Xsuper-resolution, using CelebA face images. During development, several sources of instability were identified and addressed, including adversarial learning-rate imbalance, inappropriate diffusion initialization, excessive corruption, and insufficient parameter averaging. The resulting framework consistently improves the quality of both degraded and low-resolution images. In particular, it improves denoising performance by 4.40 dB in PSNR and super-resolution performance by 3.70 dB over their respective input baselines. These results demonstrate the potential of a frozen GAN feature prior to guide diffusion models toward stable and effective image restoration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22272
We present our solution for the MOSEv2 track of the 8th Large-scale Video Object Segmentation (LSVOS) Challenge at ECCV 2026. The challenge evaluates robust video object segmentation under complex temporal dynamics, including long-term occlusion, disappearance and reappearance, large appearance changes, and strong interference from visually similar objects. Our method builds on SAM~3 and focuses on its memory readout. Standard target-only memory retrieval can confuse the annotated target with same-class non-target objects because such distractors are represented only implicitly as background. Our method introduces Competitive Memory Readout, which explicitly incorporates same-class competitor evidence when retrieving target information from memory. To prevent excessive suppression of weak or reappearing targets, we further apply a lightweight adaptive restoration rule after competition. The resulting system retains the original SAM~3 tracking pipeline while improving target identity preservation in challenging videos. Our submission achieves 66.20 on the primary challenge score and ranks 2nd in the MOSEv2 track.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22064
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has achieved remarkable success in novel view synthesis; however, reconstructions under sparse views often exhibit noticeable artifacts. While recent video diffusion models provide strong spatio-temporal priors for 3DGS restoration, directly fine-tuning them for restoration is suboptimal, as they lack awareness of the underlying multi-camera geometry, resulting in multi-view inconsistencies. In this work, we propose a novel 3D-aware video restoration framework designed to enhance the quality of sparse 3DGS reconstruction. Specifically, we construct a large-scale 3DGS video dataset to enable specialized fine-tuning. To bridge the gap between 2D video generation and 3D multi-view constraints, we introduce a camera-conditioned geometric prior. By using the first and last frames as boundary anchors and encoding the corresponding camera relationships, we explicitly inject spatial structure into the video generation pipeline. This boundary-anchored, camera-aware prior guides the network toward geometrically grounded restoration that remains coherent across viewpoints. Extensive experiments show that, among video-prior restoration methods, our approach attains the best pixel- and structure-level fidelity (PSNR/SSIM) and improves multi-view consistency, while remaining competitive in perceptual quality (LPIPS).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21849