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Qing Zhou, Lichang Yang, Yuyu Jia, Junyu Gao, Weiping Ni, Junzheng Wu, Qi Wang

We challenge the assumption that complex instruction-guided segmentation tasks necessitate equally complex and explicit supervision. This paper introduces RISE (Reasoning via Implicit Self-supervised Emergence), a framework that learns intricate compositional reasoning, spanning spatial relations to world knowledge, without a single ground-truth mask. To achieve this, RISE employs reinforcement learning with GRPO guided by a single, strikingly simple reward: the semantic alignment score between the textual instruction and the predicted image region. Our primary discovery is the implicit emergence of a high-quality chain-of-thought process from this minimalist signal. Within a structured format, the model autonomously learns to understand instructions by accessing its latent knowledge, inferring spatial relationships—capabilities inherent in its architecture but unlocked by our simple objective. Remarkably, our emergent reasoning yields highly competitive results: RISE achieves 58.7 gIoU on the ReasonSeg benchmark, on par with methods using geometric rewards. Furthermore, we show extreme data efficiency: a variant trained on only 2,000 ImageNet-label pairs establishes a new state-of-the-art for annotation-free referring segmentation with 79.6 cIoU on RefCOCO.

Mingxuan Zhou, Yirui Shen, Shuang Li, Jing Geng, Yutang Zhang, Shuigen Wang

The practical deployment of infrared imaging is hindered by its inherent output of low-resolution (LR) images. While the super-resolution (SR) technique is a promising remedy, we discover two major challenges concerning infrared image SR: preserving accurate thermal distributions, which are fundamental to infrared imaging, and addressing the ambiguity of high-frequency elements compared to visible images. To tackle these issues, we propose ThesIS, a tailored framework that utilizes Thermal-Physics guidance and dynamic high-frequency amplification for Infrared image Super-resolution to produce high-resolution (HR) images with accurate physical properties and delicate visual details. Specifically, Thermal Regularization is introduced to reconstruct the accurate thermal radiation distribution via the introduced Infrared Radiation Intensity Alignment Loss, mitigating the adverse effects of complex degradations while conducting initial upscaling. Additionally, we design a guidance mechanism to counter the randomness of the diffusion model, further refining the preservation of physical information. The proposed Dynamic High-Frequency Amplification effectively strengthens the ambiguous high-frequency information present in infrared images, leading to improved texture details and superior visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ThesIS successfully recovers accurate thermal information while delivering visually satisfying results with state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we introduce the InfraredSR dataset, which comprises 39,833 images at a resolution of 512 × 512, hoping to advance research in this field.

Linhan Zhou, Shuang Li, Neng Dong, Yonghang Tai, Yafei Zhang, Huafeng Li

Person re-identification (ReID) aims to retrieve target pedestrian images given either visual queries (image-to-image, I2I) or textual descriptions (text-to-image, T2I). Although both tasks share a common retrieval objective, they pose distinct challenges: I2I emphasizes discriminative identity learning, while T2I requires accurate cross-modal semantic alignment. Existing methods often treat these tasks separately, which may lead to representation entanglement and suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a unified framework named Hierarchical Prompt Learning (HPL), which leverages task-aware prompt modeling to jointly optimize both tasks. Specifically, we first introduce a Task-Routed Transformer, which incorporates dual classification tokens into a shared visual encoder to route features for I2I and T2I branches respectively. On top of this, we develop a hierarchical prompt generation scheme that integrates identity-level learnable tokens with instance-level pseudo-text tokens. These pseudo-tokens are derived from image or text features via modality-specific inversion networks, injecting fine-grained, instance-specific semantics into the prompts. Furthermore, we propose a Cross-Modal Prompt Regularization strategy to enforce semantic alignment in the prompt token space, ensuring that pseudo-prompts preserve source-modality characteristics while enhancing cross-modal transferability. Extensive experiments on multiple ReID benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both I2I and T2I tasks.

Lingyu Zhou, Yue Yu, Zhang Yi, Xiuyuan Xu

Entity hallucination poses a major challenge in radiology report generation (RRG), particularly for 3D CT scans where complex spatial contexts amplify factual errors. To address this, medical entity phrases serve as key carriers for multi-modal prompting, integrating expert knowledge into the vision-language model. Current methods use unified cross-attention for volume-phrase alignment, failing to account for anatomical specificity during the alignment process. In this work, we introduce the Dual-stream Entity Alignment Reporting network (DEAR) that separately models organ and lesion entities to resolve anatomical bias. Specifically, the dual-stream entity aligner is designed to partition medical entity phrases into organ and lesion streams, feeding them into separate cross-attention blocks in parallel to achieve fine-grained volume–phrase alignment. For structurally regular and spatially stable organ entities, an organ-guided cross-attention (OGCA) block is proposed to enforce structural consistency by retrieving the top-k voxel tokens via volume–phrase similarity and preserving spatial connectivity through morphological dilation. Meanwhile, a lesion-guided cross-attention (LGCA) block is introduced for structurally irregular and spatially variable lesion entities, enhancing anomaly sensitivity through phrase-weighted attention and refining discriminative boundaries via 3D residual Laplacian filtering. Experiments demonstrate that DEAR significantly reduces entity hallucinations and improves clinical factuality in 3D RRG benchmarks.

Lingru Zhou, Peng Wu, Manqing Zhang, Qingsheng Wang, Guansong Pang, Peng Wang

Understanding anomalous human behaviors at a fine-grained level remains a major challenge in complex scenarios. Existing video anomaly understanding (VAU) methods often rely on coarse frame-level cues or overlook structured modeling of individual actions, limiting their capacity for reasoning about human interactions and accountability. To address these challenges, we propose TargetVAU, a multimodal anomaly-aware reasoning framework designed for individual-level anomaly recognition and explanation. TargetVAU first extracts both global-level and human-centric visual features using a frozen Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder. An Anomaly-focused Temporal Sampler is then employed to select behaviorally informative frames via a density-aware strategy guided by predicted anomaly scores. A Spatio-Temporal Interaction Graph is constructed to explicitly model interactions among individuals across time and space. These structured representations are fused with prompt embeddings via a frozen Q-Former to form a unified semantic representation. Finally, a large language model fine-tuned with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) performs instruction-guided reasoning to identify anomalous individuals and generate natural language explanations. Extensive experiments on UCCD and HIVAU-70K demonstrate that TargetVAU significantly outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and interpretability, advancing the state of individual-level anomaly understanding in surveillance videos.

Liang Zhou, Qiming Wang, Tianze Chen

3D point cloud classification is a fundamental task in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. However, recent studies reveal that point cloud classifiers are vulnerable to structured adversarial perturbations and geometric corruptions, posing risks to their deployment in safety-critical scenarios. Existing certified defenses limit point-wise perturbations but overlook subtle geometric distortions that preserve individual points yet alter the overall structure, potentially leading to misclassification. In this work, we propose FreqCert, a novel certification framework that departs from conventional spatial domain defenses by shifting robustness analysis to the frequency domain, enabling structured certification against global l2-bounded perturbations. FreqCert first transforms the input point cloud via the graph Fourier transform (GFT), then applies structured frequency-aware subsampling to generate multiple sub-point clouds. Each sub-cloud is independently classified by a standard model, and the final prediction is obtained through majority voting, where sub-clouds are constructed based on spectral similarity rather than spatial proximity, making the partitioning more stable under l2 perturbations and better aligned with the object’s intrinsic structure. We derive a closed-form lower bound on the certified l2 robustness radius and prove its tightness under minimal and interpretable assumptions, establishing a theoretical foundation for frequency domain certification. Extensive experiments on the ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN datasets demonstrate that FreqCert consistently achieves higher certified accuracy and empirical accuracy under strong perturbations. Our results suggest that spectral representations provide an effective pathway toward certifiable robustness in 3D point cloud recognition.

Kaiyue Zhou, Zelong Tan, Hongxiao Wang, Ya-Li Li, Shengjin Wang

Recovering point clouds involves the sequential process of sampling and restoration, yet existing methods struggle to effectively leverage both topological and geometric attributes. To address this, we propose an end-to-end architecture named TopGeoFormer, which maintains these critical properties throughout the sampling and restoration phases. First, we revisit traditional feature extraction techniques to yield topological embedding using a continuous mapping of relative relationships between neighboring points, and integrate it in both phases for preserving the structure of the original space. Second, we propose the InterTwining Attention to fully merge topological and geometric embeddings, which queries shape with local awareness in both phases to form a learnable 3D shape context facilitated with point-wise, point-shape-wise, and intra-shape features. Third, we introduce a full geometry loss and a topological constraint loss to optimize the embeddings in both Euclidean and topological spaces. The geometry loss uses inconsistent matching between coarse-to-fine generations and targets for reconstructing better geometric details, and the constraint loss limits embedding variances for better approximation of the topological space. In experiments, we comprehensively analyze the circumstances using the conventional and learning-based sampling/upsampling/recovery algorithms. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing sampling and recovery methods.

Jun Zhou, Chi Xu, Kaifeng Tang, Yuting Ge, Tingrui Guo, Li Cheng

Estimating the 3D poses of hands and objects from a single RGB image is a fundamental yet challenging problem, with broad applications in augmented reality and human-computer interaction. Existing methods largely rely on visual cues alone, often producing results that violate physical constraints such as interpenetration or non-contact. Recent efforts to incorporate physics reasoning typically depend on post-optimization or non-differentiable physics engines, which compromise visual consistency and end-to-end trainability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework that jointly integrates visual and physical cues for hand-object pose estimation. This integration is achieved through two key ideas: 1) joint visual-physical cue learning: The model is trained to extract 2D visual cues and 3D physical cues, thereby enabling more comprehensive representation learning for hand-object interactions; 2) candidate pose aggregation: A novel refinement process that aggregates multiple diffusion-generated candidate poses by leveraging both visual and physical predictions, yielding a final estimate that is visually consistent and physically plausible. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in both pose accuracy and physical plausibility.

Jinxing Zhou, Ziheng Zhou, Yanghao Zhou, Yuxin Mao, Zhangling Duan, Dan Guo

The Dense Audio-Visual Event Localization (DAVEL) task aims to temporally localize events in untrimmed videos that occur simultaneously in both the audio and visual modalities. This paper explores DAVEL under a new and more challenging weakly-supervised setting (W-DAVEL task), where only video-level event labels are provided and the temporal boundaries of each event are unknown. We address W-DAVEL by exploiting cross-modal salient anchors, which are defined as reliable timestamps that are well predicted under weak supervision and exhibit highly consistent event semantics across audio and visual modalities. Specifically, we propose a Mutual Event Agreement Evaluation module, which generates an agreement score by measuring the discrepancy between the predicted audio and visual event classes. Then, the agreement score is utilized in a Cross-modal Salient Anchor Identification module, which identifies the audio and visual anchor features through global-video and local temporal window identification mechanisms. The anchor features after multimodal integration are fed into an Anchor-based Temporal Propagation module to enhance event semantic encoding in the original temporal audio and visual features, facilitating better temporal localization under weak supervision. We establish benchmarks for W-DAVEL on both the UnAV-100 and ActivityNet1.3 datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Jinxing Zhou, Yanghao Zhou, Mingfei Han, Tong Wang, Xiaojun Chang, Hisham Cholakkal, Rao Muhammad Anwer

Referring Audio-Visual Segmentation (Ref-AVS) aims to segment target objects in audible videos based on given reference expressions. Prior works typically rely on learning latent embeddings via multimodal fusion to prompt a tunable SAM/SAM2 decoder for segmentation, which requires strong pixel-level supervision and lacks interpretability. From a novel perspective of explicit reference understanding, we propose TGS-Agent, which decomposes the task into a Think-Ground-Segment process, mimicking the human reasoning procedure by first identifying the referred object through multimodal analysis, followed by coarse-grained grounding and precise segmentation. To this end, we first propose Ref-Thinker, a multimodal language model capable of reasoning over textual, visual, and auditory cues. We construct an instruction-tuning dataset with explicit object-aware think-answer chains for Ref-Thinker fine-tuning. The object description inferred by Ref-Thinker is used as an explicit prompt for Grounding-DINO and SAM2, which perform grounding and segmentation without relying on pixel-level supervision. Additionally, we introduce R2-AVSBench, a new benchmark with linguistically diverse and reasoning-intensive references for better evaluating model generalization. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on both standard Ref-AVSBench and proposed R2-AVSBench.

Jin Zhou, Yi Zhou, Hongliang Yang, Pengfei Xu, Hui Huang

In the field of sketch generation, raster-format trained models often produce non-stroke artifacts, while vector-format trained models typically lack a holistic understanding of sketches, leading to compromised recognizability. Moreover, existing methods struggle to extract common features from similar elements (e.g., eyes of animals) appearing at varying positions across sketches. To address these challenges, we propose StrokeFusion, a two-stage framework for vector sketch generation. It contains a dual-modal sketch feature learning network that maps strokes into a high-quality latent space. This network decomposes sketches into normalized strokes and jointly encodes stroke sequences with Unsigned Distance Function (UDF) maps, representing sketches as sets of stroke feature vectors. Building upon this representation, our framework exploits a stroke-level latent diffusion model that simultaneously adjusts stroke position, scale, and trajectory during generation. This enables high-fidelity stroke generation while supporting stroke interpolation editing. Extensive experiments across multiple sketch datasets, demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, validating its effectiveness in preserving structural integrity and semantic features.

Jiazhou Zhou, Qing Jiang, Kanghao Chen, Lutao Jiang, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Ying-Cong Chen, Lei Zhang

Object detection methods have evolved from closed-set to open-set paradigms over the years. Current open-set object detectors, however, remain constrained by their exclusive reliance on positive indicators based on given prompts like text descriptions or visual exemplars. This positive-only paradigm experiences consistent vulnerability to visually similar but semantically different distractors. We propose T-Rex-Omni, a novel framework that addresses this limitation by incorporating negative visual prompts to negate hard negative distractors. Specifically, we first introduce a unified visual prompt encoder that jointly processes positive and negative visual prompts. Next, a training-free Negating Negative Computing (NNC) module is proposed to dynamically suppress negative responses during the probability computing stage. To further boost performance through fine-tuning, our Negating Negative Hinge (NNH) loss enforces discriminative margins between positive and negative embeddings. T-Rex-Omni supports flexible deployment in both positive-only and joint positive-negative inference modes, accommodating either user-specified or automatically generated negative examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate remarkable zero-shot detection performance, significantly narrowing the performance gap between visual-prompted and text-prompted methods while showing particular strength in long-tailed scenarios (51.2 AP_r on LVIS-minival). This work establishes negative prompts as a crucial new dimension for advancing open-set visual recognition systems.

Hongkuan Zhou, Lavdim Halilaj, Sebastian Monka, Stefan Schmid, Yuqicheng Zhu, Jingcheng Wu, Nadeem Nazer, Steffen Staab

Open-domain visual entity recognition aims to identify and link entities depicted in images to a vast and evolving set of real-world concepts, such as those found in Wikidata. Unlike conventional classification tasks with fixed label sets, it operates under open-set conditions, where most target entities are unseen during training and exhibit long-tail distributions. This makes the task inherently challenging due to limited supervision, high visual ambiguity, and the need for semantic disambiguation. We propose a Knowledge-guided Contrastive Learning (KnowCoL) framework that combines both images and text descriptions into a shared semantic space grounded by structured information from Wikidata. By abstracting visual and textual inputs to a conceptual level, the model leverages entity descriptions, type hierarchies, and relational context to support zero-shot entity recognition. We evaluate our approach on the OVEN benchmark, a large-scale open-domain visual recognition dataset with Wikidata IDs as the label space. Our experiments show that using visual, textual, and structured knowledge greatly improves accuracy, especially for rare and unseen entities. Our smallest model improves the accuracy on unseen entities by 10.5% compared to the state-of-the-art, despite being 35 times smaller.

Haoliang Zhou, Feifei Zhang, Changsheng Xu

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) combines the reference image with text to retrieve the intended target image. Recently, zero-shot CIR has gained significant attention by eliminating the need for labeled triplets required in supervised CIR. However, it inevitably demands additional training corpus, storage, and computational resources, limiting its applicability in real-world scenarios. Inspired by advancements in Test-Time Adaptation (TTA), we propose a Test-Time CIR setting named TT-CIR, which aims to efficiently adapt models to unlabeled test samples while reducing resource consumption. Within the TT-CIR setting, we identify that naively introducing existing TTA methods (e.g., reward-based) into CIR faces two vital challenges: 1) Modification-restricted reward pool, which limits the exploration of semantically relevant candidate rewards; 2) Conservative knowledge feedback, which inhibits the adaptability of rewards to the current data distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a test-time reinforcement learning framework that integrates a Counterfactual-guided Multinomial Sampling (CMS) strategy and a Duplex Rewards Modeling (DRM) module. The CMS explores a candidate reward pool that is visually similar and semantically relevant to the given query, while the DRM generates stable and adaptive duplex rewards to guide model adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and adaptability of our method over existing approaches.

Hao Zhou, Xiaobao Guo, Yuzhe Zhu, Adams Wai-Kin Kong

Propelled by the breakthrough in deep generative models, audio-to-image generation has emerged as a pivotal cross-modal task that converts complex auditory signals into rich visual representations. However, previous works only focus on single-source audio inputs for image generation, ignoring the multi-source characteristic in natural auditory scenes, thus limiting the performance in generating comprehensive visual content. To bridge this gap, we propose a method called MACS to conduct multi-source audio-to-image generation. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that explicitly separates multi-source audio to capture the rich audio components before image generation. MACS is a two-stage method. In the first stage, multi-source audio inputs are separated by a weakly supervised method, where the audio and text labels are semantically aligned by casting into a common space using the large pre-trained CLAP model. We introduce a ranking loss to consider the contextual significance of the separated audio signals. In the second stage, effective image generation is achieved by mapping the separated audio signals to the generation condition using only a trainable adapter and a MLP layer. We preprocess the LLP dataset as the first full multi-source audio-to-image generation benchmark. The experiments are conducted on multi-source, mixed-source, and single-source audio-to-image generation tasks. The proposed MACS outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in 17 out of the 21 evaluation indexes on all tasks and delivers superior visual quality.

Haipeng Zhou, Zhaohu Xing, Hongqiu Wang, Jun Ma, Ping Li, Lei Zhu

High-precision scene parsing tasks, including image matting and dichotomous segmentation, aim to accurately predict masks with extremely fine details (such as hair). Most existing methods focus on salient, single foreground objects. While interactive methods allow for target adjustment, their class-agnostic design restricts generalization across different categories. Furthermore, the scarcity of high-quality annotation has led to a reliance on inharmonious synthetic data, resulting in poor generalization to real-world scenarios. To this end, we propose a Foreground Consistent Learning model, dubbed as FCLM, to address the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we first introduce a Depth-Aware Distillation strategy where we transfer the depth-related knowledge for better foreground representation. Considering the data dilemma, we term the processing of synthetic data as domain adaptation problem where we propose a domain-invariant learning strategy to focus on foreground learning. To support interactive prediction, we contribute an Object-Oriented Decoder that can receive both visual and language prompts to predict the referring target. Experimental results show that our method quantitatively and qualitatively outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Feng Zhou, Pu Cao, Yiyang Ma, Lu Yang, Yonghao Dang, Jianqin Yin

Denoising higher-resolution latents using a pre-trained U-Net often results in repetitive and disordered image patterns. In this work, we are motivated to reveal the intrinsic cause of such pattern disruption in high-resolution image generation. Through theoretical analysis and empirical studies, we reveal that the pre-trained U-Net fails to provide sufficient positional information for tokens at high-resolution. Specifically, 1) zero-padding serves as a critical mechanism for position encoding but lacks robustness across varying resolutions; and 2) tokens located farther from the feature map boundaries have increasing difficulty acquiring positional awareness, leading to pattern disruptions. Inspired by these findings, we propose a novel training-free approach for high-resolution generation, introducing a Progressive Boundary Complement (PBC) method. It creates dynamic virtual image boundaries inside the feature map to supplement position information at high resolution, enabling high-quality and rich-content high-resolution image synthesis. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves high-resolution image synthesis in terms of visual quality and content richness, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Donghao Zhou, Jingyu Lin, Guibao Shen, Quande Liu, Jialin Gao, Lihao Liu, Lan Du, Cunjian Chen, Chi-Wing Fu, Xiaowei Hu 等

Recent visual generative models enable story generation with consistent characters from text, but human-centric story generation faces additional challenges, such as maintaining detailed and diverse human face consistency and coordinating multiple characters across different images. This paper presents IdentityStory, a framework for human-centric story generation that ensures consistent character identity across multiple sequential images. By taming identity-preserving generators, the framework features two key components: Iterative Identity Discovery, which extracts cohesive character identities, and Re-denoising Identity Injection, which re-denoises images to inject identities while preserving desired context. Experiments on the ConsiStory-Human benchmark demonstrate that IdentityStory outperforms existing methods, particularly in face consistency, and supports multi-character combinations. The framework also shows strong potential for applications such as infinite-length story generation and dynamic character composition.

Dibin Zhou, Yantao Xu, Zongming Huang, Zengwei Yan, Wenhao Liu, Yongwei Miao, Jianfeng Ren, Fuchang Liu

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) largely lag human-level performance on abstract visual reasoning (AVR), which requires models to infer latent rules from visual question sets and generalize them to novel scenarios. Most AVR benchmarks are constrained to narrow and repetitive 2D patterns, involving relatively simple spatial relationships and assessing limited dimensions of reasoning ability. Drawing inspiration from real-world paper folding challenges, we propose Paper Folding Puzzles (PFP), a rigorously designed benchmark specifically developed to assess spatial reasoning capabilities. It comprises 150K visual question-answering samples across five diverse tasks, ranging from basic 2D geometric reasoning to 3D spatial understanding. The developed benchmark dataset can be employed to assess core spatial reasoning abilities essential to human cognition, encompassing fundamental symmetry reasoning and 3D spatial comprehension. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 18 leading MLLMs (both closed- and open-source variants) on the PFP benchmark to assess their spatial reasoning capabilities. Our findings show that most MLLMs achieve near-chance performance on FPF, exhibiting substantial performance gaps (>30%) relative to human baselines across all tasks. This highlights a critical research gap in improving spatial reasoning capabilities of MLLMs.

Chenliang Zhou, Zheyuan Hu, Alejandro Sztrajman, Yancheng Cai, Yaru Liu, Cengiz Oztireli

High-quality material synthesis is essential for replicating complex surface properties to create realistic scenes. Despite advances in the generation of material appearance based on analytic models, the synthesis of real-world measured BRDFs remains largely unexplored. To address this challenge, we propose M^3ashy, a novel multi-modal material synthesis framework based on hyperdiffusion. M^3ashy enables high-quality reconstruction of complex real-world materials by leveraging neural fields as a compact continuous representation of BRDFs. Furthermore, our multi-modal conditional hyperdiffusion model allows for flexible material synthesis conditioned on material type, natural language descriptions, or reference images, providing greater user control over material generation. To support future research, we contribute two new material datasets and introduce two BRDF distributional metrics for more rigorous evaluation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of M^3ashy through extensive experiments, including a novel statistics-based constrained synthesis, which enables the generation of materials of desired categories.