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Chengyang Liu, Zixuan Lin, Miaolin Han, Michael K. Ng, Huibin Li

This paper introduces a novel framework for wide-angle correction by distilling the geometric principles of quasi-conformal (QC) mapping into a generalizable and efficient deep neural network. Our methodology can be divided into two primary stages. In the first stage, we develop an annotation-free teacher pipeline that treats the distortion correction problem as a QC mapping task. Specifically, we minimize the Beltrami smoothness energy under constraints of both line structures and human body regions using a Linear Beltrami Solver and Proximal Gradient Descent (LBS-PGD) algorithm, thereby automatically generating high-quality QC correction flow labels. In the second stage, we propose the Quasi-conformal-mapping Distilled Wide-angle Correction Network (QDWC-Net) to learn the geometric transformation from these labels via distillation. Utilizing a Mamba-based backbone, a soft-argmin head, and a low-rank prior reconstruction module, QDWC-Net predicts the correction flow directly from a distorted input. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments verify the effectiveness of our approach. Notably, our distilled student network exhibits enhanced robustness compared to the teacher and achieves a massive 32x speedup (from 26.33s to 0.81s). Overall, our method provides a state-of-the-art solution that excels across multiple real-world datasets, especially in mitigating human body distortion.

Wonseon Lim, Jaesung Lee, Dae-Won Kim

Continual learning (CL) on edge devices requires not only high accuracy but also training-time efficiency to support on-device adaptation under strict memory and computational constraints. While prompt-based continual learning (PCL) is parameter-efficient and achieves competitive accuracy, prior work has focused mainly on accuracy or inference-time performance, often overlooking the memory and computational costs of on-device training. In this paper, we propose CPS-Prompt, a critical patch-aware sparse prompting framework that explicitly targets training-time memory usage and computational cost by integrating critical patch sampling (CPS) for task-aware token reduction and decoupled prompt and classifier training (DPCT) to reduce backpropagation overhead. Experiments on three public benchmarks and real edge hardware show that CPS-Prompt improves peak memory, training time, and energy efficiency by about 1.6x over the balanced CODA-Prompt baseline, while maintaining accuracy within 2% of the state-of-the-art C-Prompt on average and remaining competitive with CODA-Prompt in accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/laymond1/cpsprompt.

Zeyu Zhang, Danning Li, Ian Reid, Richard Hartley

Energy-based predictive world models provide a powerful approach for multi-step visual planning by reasoning over latent energy landscapes rather than generating pixels. However, existing approaches face two major challenges: (i) their latent representations are typically learned in Euclidean space, neglecting the underlying geometric and hierarchical structure among states, and (ii) they struggle with long-horizon prediction, which leads to rapid degradation across extended rollouts. To address these challenges, we introduce GeoWorld, a geometric world model that preserves geometric structure and hierarchical relations through a Hyperbolic JEPA, which maps latent representations from Euclidean space onto hyperbolic manifolds. We further introduce Geometric Reinforcement Learning for energy-based optimization, enabling stable multi-step planning in hyperbolic latent space. Extensive experiments on CrossTask and COIN demonstrate around 3% SR improvement in 3-step planning and 2% SR improvement in 4-step planning compared to the state-of-the-art V-JEPA-2.

Jihang Wang, Dongcheng Zhao, Ruolin Chen, Qian Zhang, Yi Zeng

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) utilize spike-based activations to mimic the brain's energy-efficient information processing. However, the binary and discontinuous nature of spike activations causes vanishing gradients, making adversarial robustness evaluation via gradient descent unreliable. While improved surrogate gradient methods have been proposed, their effectiveness under strong adversarial attacks remains unclear. We propose a more reliable framework for evaluating SNN adversarial robustness. We theoretically analyze the degree of gradient vanishing in surrogate gradients and introduce the Adaptive Sharpness Surrogate Gradient (ASSG), which adaptively evolves the shape of the surrogate function according to the input distribution during attack iterations, thereby enhancing gradient accuracy while mitigating gradient vanishing. In addition, we design an adversarial attack with adaptive step size under the L_infinity constraint--Stable Adaptive Projected Gradient Descent (SA-PGD), achieving faster and more stable convergence under imprecise gradients. Extensive experiments show that our approach substantially increases attack success rates across diverse adversarial training schemes, SNN architectures and neuron models, providing a more generalized and reliable evaluation of SNN adversarial robustness. The experimental results further reveal that the robustness of current SNNs has been significantly overestimated and highlighting the need for more dependable adversarial training methods. The code is released at https://github.com/craree/ASSG-SNNs-Robustness-Evaluation

Boyu He, Yunfan Ye, Chang Liu, Weishang Wu, Fang Liu, Zhiping Cai

Despite the advancements in diffusion-based image style transfer, existing methods are commonly limited by 1) semantic gap: the style reference could miss proper content semantics, causing uncontrollable stylization; 2) reliance on extra constraints (e.g., semantic masks) restricting applicability; 3) rigid feature associations lacking adaptive global-local alignment, failing to balance fine-grained stylization and global content preservation. These limitations, particularly the inability to flexibly leverage style inputs, fundamentally restrict style transfer in terms of personalization, accuracy, and adaptability.To address these, we propose StyleGallery, a training-free and semantic-aware framework that supports arbitrary reference images as input and enables effective personalized customization.It comprises three core stages: semantic region segmentation (adaptive clustering on latent diffusion features to divide regions without extra inputs); clustered region matching (block filtering on extracted features for precise alignment); and style transfer optimization (energy function-guided diffusion sampling with regional style loss to optimize stylization).Experiments on our introduced benchmark demonstrate that StyleGallery outperforms state-of-the-art methods in content structure preservation, regional stylization, interpretability, and personalized customization, particularly when leveraging multiple style references. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/iiiiiiiword/StyleGallery.

Kaichao Jiang, He Wang, Xiaoshuai Hao, Xiulong Yang, Ajian Liu, Qi Chu, Yunfeng Diao, Richang Hong

Joint Energy-based Models (JEMs) are well known for their ability to unify classification and generation within a single framework. Despite their promising generative and discriminative performance, their robustness remains far inferior to adversarial training (AT), which, conversely, achieves strong robustness but sacrifices clean accuracy and lacks generative ability. This inherent trilemma--balancing classification accuracy, robustness, and generative capability--raises a fundamental question: Can a single model achieve all three simultaneously? To answer this, we conduct a systematic energy landscape analysis of clean, adversarial, and generated samples across various JEM and AT variants. We observe that AT reduces the energy gap between clean and adversarial samples, while JEMs narrow the gap between clean and synthetic ones. This observation suggests a key insight: if the energy distributions of all three data types can be aligned, we might bridge their performance disparities. Building on this idea, we propose Energy-based Joint Distribution Adversarial Training (EB-JDAT), a unified generative-discriminative-robust framework that maximizes the joint probability of clean and adversarial distribution. EB-JDAT introduces a novel min-max energy optimization to explicitly aligning energies across clean, adversarial, and generated samples. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet subsets demonstrate that EB-JDAT achieves state-of-the-art robustness while maintaining near-original accuracy and competitive generation quality of JEMs, effectively achieving a new trade-off frontier between accuracy, robustness, and generation. The code is released at https://github.com/yujkc/EB-JDAT.

Alex Bocchieri, John Mamish, David Appleyard, Andreas Velten

Scintillators are transparent materials that interact with high-energy particles and emit visible light as a result. They are used in state of the art methods of measuring high-energy particles and radiation sources. Most existing methods use fast single-pixel detectors to detect and time scintillation events. Cameras provide spatial resolution but can only capture an average over many events, making it difficult to image the events associated with an individual particle. Emerging single-photon avalanche diode cameras combine speed and spatial resolution to enable capturing images of individual events. This allows us to use machine vision techniques to analyze events, enabling new types of detectors. The main challenge is the very low brightness of the events. Techniques have to work with a very limited number of photons. We propose a kaleidoscopic scintillator to increase light collection in a single-photon camera while preserving the event's spatial information. The kaleidoscopic geometry creates mirror reflections of the event in known locations for a given event location that are captured by the camera. We introduce theory for imaging an event in a kaleidoscopic scintillator and an algorithm to estimate the event's 3D position. We find that the kaleidoscopic scintillator design provides sufficient light collection to perform high-resolution event measurements for advanced radiation imaging techniques using a commercial CMOS single-photon camera.

Markus Gross, Sai B. Matha, Aya Fahmy, Rui Song, Daniel Cremers, Henri Meeß

Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) is essential for 3D perception in mobile robotics, as it enables holistic scene understanding by jointly estimating dense volumetric occupancy and per-voxel semantics. Although SSC has been widely studied in terrestrial domains such as autonomous driving, aerial settings like autonomous flying remain largely unexplored, thereby limiting progress on downstream applications. Furthermore, LiDAR sensors are the primary modality for SSC data generation, which poses challenges for most uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) due to flight regulations, mass and energy constraints, and the sparsity of LiDAR point clouds from elevated viewpoints. To address these limitations, we propose a LiDAR-free, camera-based data generation framework. By leveraging classical 3D reconstruction, our framework automates semantic label transfer by lifting <10% of annotated images into the reconstructed point cloud, substantially minimizing manual 3D annotation effort. Based on this framework, we introduce OccuFly, the first real-world, camera-based aerial SSC benchmark, captured across multiple altitudes and all seasons. OccuFly provides over 20,000 samples of images, semantic voxel grids, and metric depth maps across 21 semantic classes in urban, industrial, and rural environments, and follows established data organization for seamless integration. We benchmark both SSC and metric monocular depth estimation on OccuFly, revealing fundamental limitations of current vision foundation models in aerial settings and establishing new challenges for robust 3D scene understanding in the aerial domain. Visit https://github.com/markus-42/occufly.

Zhenbin Wang, Lei Zhang, Lituan Wang, Zhenwei Zhang, Guangwu Qian, Yan Wang, Wei Huang

This work tackles a key challenge in test-time energy adaptation: prohibitive time overhead arising from recent state-of-the-art test-time adaptation (TTA) methods, which are built on energy models relying on iterative Monte Carlo or Langevin dynamics sampling with multiple stochastic updates per test instance to approximate energy gradients. We tackle the problem from an innovative control system perspective by i) describing the energy as a complex-valued wave, where the amplitude encodes energy uncertainty and the phase characterizes its evolution, and ii) maintaining a time-dependent wave equation that interprets TTA as a control system evolution process. By enforcing the control system law of probability current conservation, our method directs probability current away from high-energy (error-prone) regions toward low-energy (accurate) ones, achieving adaptive energy redistribution without additional stochastic sampling while preserving the overall normalization of the energy landscape. Experimentally, the proposed method significantly outperforms baseline methods across several public benchmark datasets, with adaptive time being only 1/3 1/7 of that required by the compared Top-1 to Top-3 baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/wongzbb/APT.

Zhuang Qi, Ying-Peng Tang, Lei Meng, Guoqing Chao, Lei Wu, Han Yu, Xiangxu Meng

Exemplar replay has become an effective strategy for mitigating catastrophic forgetting in federated continual learning (FCL) by retaining representative samples from past tasks. Existing studies focus on designing sample-importance estimation mechanisms to identify information-rich samples. However, they typically overlook strategies for effectively utilizing the selected exemplars, which limits their performance under continual dynamic heterogeneity across clients and tasks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a federated geometry-aware correction method, termed FEAT, which alleviates imbalance-induced representation collapse that drags rare-class features toward frequent classes across clients. Specifically, it consists of two key modules: 1) the Geometric Structure Alignment module performs structural knowledge distillation by aligning the pairwise angular similarities between feature representations and their corresponding Equiangular Tight Frame prototypes, which are fixed and shared across clients to serve as a class-discriminative reference structure. This encourages geometric consistency across tasks and helps mitigate representation drift; 2) the Energy-based Geometric Correction module removes task-irrelevant directional components from feature embeddings, which reduces prediction bias toward majority classes. This improves sensitivity to minority classes and enhances the model's robustness under class-imbalanced data distributions. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that FEAT substantially achieves a 4%-8% improvement in Top-1 accuracy compared to nine state-of-the-art methods.

Lin Liu, Caiyan Jia, Guanyi Yu, Ziying Song, Junqiao Li, Feiyang Jia, Peiliang Wu, Xiaoshuai Hao, Yadan Luo

Driving planning is a critical component of end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving. However, prevailing Imitative E2E Planners often suffer from multimodal trajectory mode collapse, failing to produce diverse trajectory proposals. Meanwhile, Generative E2E Planners struggle to incorporate crucial safety and physical constraints directly into the generative process, necessitating an additional optimization stage to refine their outputs. In this paper, we propose GuideFlow, a novel planning framework that leverages Constrained Flow Matching. Concretely, GuideFlow explicitly models the flow matching process, which inherently mitigates mode collapse and allows for flexible guidance from various conditioning signals. Our core contribution lies in directly enforcing explicit constraints within the flow matching generation process, rather than relying on implicit constraint encoding. Crucially, GuideFlow unifies the training of the flow matching with the Energy-Based Model (EBM) to enhance the model's autonomous optimization capability to robustly satisfy physical constraints. Secondly, GuideFlow parameterizes driving aggressiveness as a control signal during generation, enabling precise manipulation of trajectory style. Extensive evaluations on major driving benchmarks (Bench2Drive, NuScenes, NavSim and ADV-NuScenes) validate the effectiveness of GuideFlow. Notably, on the NavSim test hard split (Navhard), GuideFlow achieved SOTA with an EPDMS score of 43.0. The code will be released in https://github.com/adept-thu/GuideFlow.

Yuhan Chen, Pengwen Dai, Chuan Wang, Dayan Wu, Xiaochun Cao

Text-video retrieval tasks have seen significant improvements due to the recent development of large-scale vision-language pre-trained models. Traditional methods primarily focus on video representations or cross-modal alignment, while recent works shift toward enriching text expressiveness to better match the rich semantics in videos. However, these methods use only interactions between text and frames/video, and ignore rich interactions among the internal frames within a video, so the final expanded text cannot capture frame contextual information, leading to disparities between text and video. In response, we introduce Energy-Aware Fine-Grained Relationship Learning Network (EagleNet) to generate accurate and context-aware enriched text embeddings. Specifically, the proposed Fine-Grained Relationship Learning mechanism (FRL) first constructs a text-frame graph by the generated text candidates and frames, then learns relationships among texts and frames, which are finally used to aggregate text candidates into an enriched text embedding that incorporates frame contextual information. To further improve fine-grained relationship learning in FRL, we design Energy-Aware Matching (EAM) to model the energy of text-frame interactions and thus accurately capture the distribution of real text-video pairs. Moreover, for more effective cross-modal alignment and stable training, we replace the conventional softmax-based contrastive loss with the sigmoid loss. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of EagleNet across MSRVTT, DiDeMo, MSVD, and VATEX.

Qianwei Tang, Baile Xu, Jian Zhao, Furao Shen

Three-dimensional molecular representation learning has shown great promise in modeling chemical structures and their properties. However, most existing approaches implicitly assume molecules are at or near equilibrium states. This assumption breaks down for non-equilibrium structures--ubiquitous in molecular dynamics (MD) trajectories--where standard coordinate denoising techniques fail because the direct equivalence between denoising scores and atomic forces no longer holds. To bridge this gap, we propose Node Denoising on non-Equilibrium Molecules (NDeM), a novel auxiliary task grounded in a second-order finite difference approximation of the potential energy surface. By explicitly accounting for the non-zero inherent forces in non-equilibrium states, NDeM provides a theoretically sound denoising objective applicable to arbitrary molecular conformations. Crucially, our method is designed as a lightweight, architecture-agnostic plugin that requires no pre-training and can be seamlessly integrated into various supervised learning pipelines. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks, including MD17, QM9, and the large-scale OC20 dataset, demonstrate that NDeM consistently improves baseline models, yielding highly competitive performance and validating its robustness across both equilibrium and non-equilibrium regimes.

Jungwook Seo, Minjeong Kim, Younkwan Lee, Seungho Shin, Sungyong Baik

Detecting subtle visual anomalies in images remains challenging, particularly when only normal samples are available a priori. Such unsupervised anomaly detection is typically solved by measuring feature similarity of a query patch to a memory of normal patches. However, similarity alone does not reveal how strongly a query patch violates the structure of the normal feature manifold. We propose a training-free Laplacian graph energy optimization formulation, named ANoCo that scores Anomaly by the cost of Non-Conformity of a query patch to align with a fixed normal manifold. For each query patch, we construct a bipartite query to normal graph weighted by cosine affinity, explicitly removing query-query and normal-normal edges to prevent evidence dilution. We formulate anomaly scoring as a convex Laplacian energy with anchored normal nodes, and solve in closed form. In particular, we do not use the optimized features themselves--the anomaly score is the magnitude of the update required to satisfy normality constraints, reframing the graph Laplacian as a non-conformity operator rather than a smoothing prior. The proposed method introduces no learnable parameters, message passing, or sampling, and has complexity comparable to a single linear solve. Across standard benchmarks, it delivers strong image-level AUROC, stable localization maps, and improved robustness over prior methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of using optimization-induced feature drift as anomaly measure.

Mingchen Song, Xiang Deng, Jie Wei, Dongmei Jiang, Liqiang Nie, Weili Guan

Recent advances in unimanual manipulation policies have achieved remarkable success across diverse robotic tasks through abundant training data and well-established model architectures. However, extending these capabilities to bimanual manipulation remains challenging due to the lack of bimanual demonstration data and the complexity of coordinating dual-arm actions. Existing approaches either rely on extensive bimanual datasets or fail to effectively leverage pre-trained unimanual policies. To address this limitation, we propose EnergyAction, a novel framework that compositionally transfers unimanual manipulation policies to bimanual tasks through the Energy-Based Models (EBMs). Specifically, our method incorporates three key innovations. First, we model individual unimanual policies as EBMs and leverage their compositional properties to compose left and right arm actions, enabling the fusion of unimanual policies into a bimanual policy. Second, we introduce an energy-based temporal-spatial coordination mechanism through energy constraints, ensuring the generated bimanual actions are both temporal coherence and spatial feasibility. Third, we propose two different energy-aware denoising strategies that dynamically adapt denoising steps based on action quality assessment. These strategies ensure the generation of high-quality actions while maintaining superior computational efficiency compared to fixed-step denoising approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that EnergyAction effectively transfers unimanual knowledge to bimanual tasks, achieving superior performance on both simulated and real-world tasks with minimal bimanual data.

Changzhou Han, Wanlun Ma, Xi Tang, Kun Hu, Sheng Wen, Yang Xiang

Sign Language Translation (SLT) converts continuous sign videos into spoken language text, yet current models, whether gloss-based or gloss-free, struggle with long or discourse-level inputs. Recent architectures such as TwoStreamNetwork and CV-SLT have nearly saturated short-sentence accuracy, but their performance degrades on long sentences and multi-sentence paragraphs. In real scenarios such as news, interviews or daily conversations, signers naturally produce extended signing sequences with complex contextual dependencies. Moreover, identifying precise gloss boundaries remains a key obstacle, while gloss-based methods, though often superior, incur heavy annotation costs. The community therefore needs a solution that mitigates gloss dependency while preserving translation quality. We present BoostSLT, a context-aware framework for enhancing semantic consistency over long sign sequences without gloss supervision. Instead of requiring explicit gloss segmentation, BoostSLT introduces an Energy-Aware Temporal Segmentation (EAT-Seg) module that dynamically partitions videos into semantically coherent fragments, followed by a Diffusion-based Semantic Reconstruction (DSR) module that stitches and refines fragment-level translations into globally fluent paragraphs. The framework is plug-and-play and model-agnostic, seamlessly integrating with existing gloss-based or gloss-free pipelines across languages. Experiments on PHOENIX-2014T, CSL-Daily, and Auslan-Daily show consistent BLEU and ROUGE-L gains, confirming that diffusion-driven semantic reconstruction effectively bridges local accuracy and global coherence in long-form SLT. Code is available at github.com/K1sna/BoostSLT.

Yuanhang Lei, Tao Cheng, Xingxuan Li, Boming Zhao, Siyuan Huang, Ruizhen Hu, Peter Yichen Chen, Hujun Bao, Zhaopeng Cui

Achieving real-time physics-based animation that generalizes across diverse 3D shapes and discretizations remains a fundamental challenge. We introduce PhysSkin, a physics-informed framework that addresses this challenge. In the spirit of Linear Blend Skinning, we learn continuous skinning fields as basis functions lifting motion subspace coordinates to full-space deformation, with subspace defined by handle transformations. To generate mesh-free, discretization-agnostic, and physically consistent skinning fields that generalize well across diverse 3D shapes, PhysSkin employs a new neural skinning fields autoencoder which consists of a transformer-based encoder and a cross-attention decoder.Furthermore, we also develop a novel physics-informed self-supervised learning strategy that incorporates on-the-fly skinning-field normalization and conflict-aware gradient correction, enabling effective balancing of energy minimization, spatial smoothness, and orthogonality constraints.PhysSkin shows outstanding performance on generalizable neural skinning and enables real-time physics-based animation.

Hongyi Pan, Gorkem Durak, Halil Ertugrul Aktas, Andrea M. Bejar, Baver Tutun, Emre Uysal, Ezgi Bulbul, Mehmet Fatih Dogan, Berrin Erok, Berna Akkus Yildirim 等

Publicly available full-field digital mammography (FFDM) datasets remain limited in size, clinical annotations, and vendor diversity, hindering the development of robust models. We introduce LUMINA, a curated, multi-vendor FFDM dataset that explicitly encodes acquisition energy and vendor metadata to capture clinically relevant appearance variations often overlooked in existing benchmarks. This dataset contains 1824 images from 468 patients (960 benign, 864 malignant), with pathology-confirmed labels, BI-RADS assessments, and breast-density annotations. LUMINA spans six acquisition systems and includes both high- and low-energy imaging styles, enabling systematic analysis of vendor- and energy-induced domain shifts. To address these variations, we propose a foreground-only pixel-space alignment method ("energy harmonization") that maps images to a low-energy reference while preserving lesion morphology. We benchmark CNN and transformer models on three clinically relevant tasks: diagnosis (benign vs. malignant), BI-RADS classification, and density estimation. Two-view models consistently outperform single-view models. EfficientNet-B0 achieves an AUC of 93.54% for diagnosis, while Swin-T achieves the best macro-AUC of 89.43% for density prediction. Harmonization improves performance across architectures and produces more localized Grad-CAM responses. Overall, LUMINA provides (1) a vendor-diverse benchmark and (2) a model-agnostic harmonization framework for reliable and deployable mammography AI.

Haiyang Zheng, Nan Pu, Yaqi Cai, Teng Long, Wenjing Li, Nicu Sebe, Zhun Zhong

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) leverages labeled data to categorize unlabeled samples from known or unknown classes. Most previous methods jointly optimize supervised and unsupervised objectives and achieve promising results. However, inherent optimization interference still limits their ability to improve further. Through quantitative analysis, we identify a key issue, i.e., gradient entanglement, which 1) distorts supervised gradients and weakens discrimination among known classes, and 2) induces representation-subspace overlap between known and novel classes, reducing the separability of novel categories. To address this issue, we propose the Energy-Aware Gradient Coordinator (EAGC), a plug-and-play gradient-level module that explicitly regulates the optimization process. EAGC comprises two components: Anchor-based Gradient Alignment (AGA) and Energy-aware Elastic Projection (EEP). AGA introduces a reference model to anchor the gradient directions of labeled samples, preserving the discriminative structure of known classes against the interference of unlabeled gradients. EEP softly projects unlabeled gradients onto the complement of the known-class subspace and derives an energy-based coefficient to adaptively scale the projection for each unlabeled sample according to its degree of alignment with the known subspace, thereby reducing subspace overlap without suppressing unlabeled samples that likely belong to known classes. Experiments show that EAGC consistently boosts existing methods and establishes new state-of-the-art results. Code is available at https://haiyangzheng.github.io/EAGC.

Xu Jiang, Bin Chen, Gehui Li, Yule Duan, Ronggang Wang, Jian Zhang

The explosive growth of Text-to-Image (T2I) models, from large-scale versions to lightweight, real-time ones, now faces diminishing marginal returns from single-model scaling. Agentic T2I methods emerged to alleviate this bottleneck by using multiple models. However, existing agentic T2I methods suffer from three key challenges: reliance on expensive handcrafted priors or human annotations, rigid single-path decision mechanisms, and a neglect of inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce OctoT2I, a novel agentic framework that reformulates the T2I task as a joint optimization of generation quality and inference efficiency. OctoT2I implements a stateful, multi-round routing strategy that adaptively selects the most suitable tool based on its knowledge and memory. This strategy is enabled by a knowledge base built from scratch by our novel Self-Evolving Mechanism. This mechanism, which requires no human supervision, first autonomously defines foundational Conceptual Dimensions (e.g., style, color, count) and then intelligently explores their combinations via an iterative "Propose--Solve--Evaluate--Learn" (PSEL) loop. The PSEL loop efficiently discovers each tool's capability frontier, driving continuous improvement without external guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OctoT2I achieves competitive performance (0.96) on GenEval while delivering a 90.3% inference speedup and a 56.6% energy-efficiency gain over the leading baseline (Flow-GRPO), striking an exceptional balance between performance and efficiency. Code and models will be made available.