Ensuring fairness in medical vision-language models (VLMs) is essential for equitable healthcare, yet existing models amplify biases across demographic subgroups such as race and gender. Traditional fairness mitigation approaches relying on broad distribution alignment, fall short in addressing these nuanced intersectional disparities. We propose fairness-aware relational prompting (FRP), a novel framework that reformulates prompt generation as a dynamic, fairness-aware reasoning process. FRP constructs a relational graph to capture fine-grained, sample-level similarities and employs a hyperbolic graph layer to explicitly model the hierarchical structure of intersectional identities. Leveraging hyperbolic geometry enables reasoning over complex attribute combinations, effectively reducing entrenched biases. Evaluations on the FairVLMed and Harvard-GF datasets demonstrate that FRP achieves state-of-the-art diagnostic performance, with an area under the curve of 77.50% and 85.94% respectively, while substantially improving the demographic parity difference and equalized odds difference.
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Table recognition (TR) aims to transform table images into semi-structured representations such as HTML or Markdown.As a core component of document parsing, TR has long relied on supervised learning, with recent efforts dominated by fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) using labeled data.While VLMs have brought TR to the next level, pushing performance further demands large-scale labeled data that is costly to obtain.Consequently, although proprietary models have continuously pushed the performance boundary, open-source models, often trained with limited resources and, in practice, the only viable option for many due to privacy regulations, still lag far behind.To bridge this gap, we introduce TRivia, a self-supervised fine-tuning method that enables pretrained VLMs to learn TR directly from unlabeled table images in the wild. Built upon Group Relative Policy Optimization, TRivia automatically identifies unlabeled samples that most effectively facilitate learning and eliminates the need for human annotations through a question-answering-based reward mechanism. An attention-guided module generates diverse questions for each table image, and the ability to interpret the recognition results and answer them correctly provides feedback to optimize the TR model.This closed-loop process allows the TR model to autonomously learn to recognize, structure, and reason over tables without labeled data. Leveraging this pipeline, we present TRivia-3B, an open-sourced, compact, and state-of-the-art TR model that surpasses existing systems (e.g., Gemini 2.5 Pro, MinerU2.5) on three popular benchmarks.
Burst image restoration aims to reconstruct a high-quality image from burst images, which are typically captured using manually designed exposure settings.Although these exposure settings significantly influence the final restoration performance, the problem of finding optimal exposure settings has been overlooked.In this paper, we present Dynamic Exposure Burst Image Restoration (DEBIR), a novel burst image restoration pipeline that enhances restoration quality by dynamically predicting exposure times tailored to the shooting environment.In our pipeline, Burst Auto-Exposure Network (BAENet) estimates the optimal exposure time for each burst image based on a preview image, as well as motion magnitude and gain.Subsequently, a burst image restoration network reconstructs a high-quality image from burst images captured using these optimal exposure times.For training, we introduce a differentiable burst simulator and a three-stage training strategy. Our experiments demonstrate that our pipeline achieves state-of-the-art restoration quality. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our approach on a real-world camera system, demonstrating its practicality.
The rapid development of generative models has significantly advanced image and video applications. Among these, video creation, aimed at generating videos under various conditions, has gained substantial attention. However, existing video creation models either focus solely on a few specific conditions or suffer from excessively long generation times due to complex model inference, making them impractical for real-world applications. To mitigate these issues, we propose an efficient unified video creation model, named VDOT. Concretely, we model the training process with the distribution matching distillation (DMD) paradigm. Instead of using the Kullback-Leibler (KL) minimization, we additionally employ a novel computational optimal transport (OT) technique to optimize the discrepancy between the real and fake score distributions. The OT distance inherently imposes geometric constraints, mitigating potential zero-forcing or gradient collapse issues that may arise during KL-based distillation within the few-step generation scenario, and thus, enhances the efficiency and stability of the distillation process. Further, we integrate a discriminator to enable the model to perceive real video data, thereby enhancing the quality of generated videos. To support training unified video creation models, we propose a fully automated pipeline for video data annotation and filtering that accommodates multiple video creation tasks. Meanwhile, we curate a unified testing benchmark, UVCBench, to advance the field. Experiments demonstrate that our 4-step VDOT outperforms or matches the performance of other baselines with 50 denoising steps. Code is available at https://vdot-page.github.io.
Video question answering (VideoQA) is a challenging task that requires integrating spatial, temporal, and semantic information to capture the complex dynamics of video sequences. Although recent advances have introduced various approaches for video understanding, most existing methods still rely on locating relevant frames to answer questions rather than reasoning through the evolving storyline as humans do. Humans naturally interpret videos through coherent storylines, an ability that is crucial for making robust and contextually grounded predictions. To address this gap, we propose SVAgent, a storyline-guided cross-modal multi-agent framework for VideoQA. The storyline agent progressively constructs a narrative representation based on frames suggested by a refinement suggestion agent that analyzes historical failures. In addition, cross-modal decision agents independently predict answers from visual and textual modalities under the guidance of the evolving storyline. Their outputs are then evaluated by a meta-agent to align cross-modal predictions and enhance reasoning robustness and answer consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that SVAgent achieves superior performance and interpretability by emulating human-like storyline reasoning in video understanding.
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown remarkable success in image novel view synthesis (NVS), inspiring extensions to LiDAR NVS. However, most methods heavily rely on accurate camera poses for scene reconstruction. The sparsity and textureless nature of LiDAR data also present distinct challenges, leading to geometric holes and discontinuous surfaces. To address these issues, we propose SG-NLF, a pose-free LiDAR NeRF framework that integrates spectral information with geometric consistency. Specifically, we design a hybrid representation based on spectral priors to reconstruct smooth geometry. For pose optimization, we construct a confidence-aware graph based on feature compatibility to achieve global alignment. In addition, an adversarial learning strategy is introduced to enforce cross-frame consistency, thereby enhancing reconstruction quality. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, especially in challenging low-frequency scenarios. Compared to previous state-of-the-art methods, SG-NLF improves reconstruction quality and pose accuracy by over 35.8% and 68.8%. Our work can provide a novel perspective for LiDAR view synthesis.
$\oslash$ Source Models Leak What They Shouldn't $\nrightarrow$: Unlearning Zero-Shot Transfer in Domain Adaptation Through Adversarial Optimization
PDF ↗The increasing adaptation of vision models across domains, such as satellite imagery and medical scans, has raised an emerging privacy risk: models may inadvertently retain and leak sensitive source-domain specific information in the target domain. This creates a compelling use case for machine unlearning to protect the privacy of sensitive source-domain data. Among adaptation techniques, source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) calls for an urgent need for machine unlearning (MU), where the source data itself is protected, yet the source model exposed during adaptation encodes its influence. Our experiments reveal that existing SFDA methods exhibit strong zero-shot performance on source-exclusive classes in the target domain, indicating they inadvertently leak knowledge of these classes into the target domain, even when they are not represented in the target data. We identify and address this risk by proposing an MU setting called SCADA-UL: Unlearning Source-exclusive ClAsses in Domain Adaptation. Existing MU methods do not address this setting as they are not designed to handle data distribution shifts. We propose a new unlearning method, where an adversarially generated forget class sample is unlearned by the model during the domain adaptation process using a novel rescaled labeling strategy and adversarial optimization.We also extend our study to two variants: a continual version of this problem setting and to one where the specific source classes to be forgotten may be unknown.Alongside theoretical interpretations, our comprehensive empirical results show that our method consistently outperforms baselines in the proposed setting while achieving retraining-level unlearning performance on benchmark datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/D-Arnav/SCADA
MAPS: Preserving Vision-Language Representations via Module-Wise Proximity Scheduling for Better Vision-Language-Action Generalization
PDF ↗Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit strong priors from pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but naive fine-tuning often disrupts these representations and harms generalization. Existing fixes -- freezing modules or applying uniform regularization -- either overconstrain adaptation or ignore the differing roles of VLA components. We present MAPS (Module-Wise Proximity Scheduling), the first robust fine-tuning framework for VLAs. Through systematic analysis, we uncover an empirical order in which proximity constraints should be relaxed to balance stability and flexibility. MAPS linearly schedules this relaxation, enabling visual encoders to stay close to their pretrained priors while action-oriented language layers adapt more freely. MAPS introduces no additional parameters or data, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing VLAs. Across MiniVLA-VQ, MiniVLA-OFT, OpenVLA-OFT, and challenging benchmarks such as SimplerEnv, CALVIN, LIBERO, as well as real-world evaluations on the Franka Emika Panda platform, MAPS consistently boosts both in-distribution and out-of-distribution performance (up to +30%). Our findings highlight empirically guided proximity to pretrained VLMs as a simple yet powerful principle for preserving generalization in VLM-to-VLA transfer.
Reference-to-video (R2V) generation aims to synthesize videos that align with a text prompt while preserving the subject identity from reference images. However, current R2V methods are hindered by the reliance on explicit reference image-video-text triplets, whose construction is highly expensive and difficult to scale. We bypass this bottleneck by introducing Saber, a scalable zero-shot framework that requires no explicit R2V data. Trained exclusively on video-text pairs, Saber employs a masked training strategy and a tailored attention-based model design to learn identity-consistent and reference-aware representations. Mask augmentation techniques are further integrated to mitigate copy-paste artifacts common in reference-to-video generation. Moreover, Saber demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities across a varying number of references and achieves superior performance on the OpenS2V-Eval benchmark compared to methods trained with R2V data.
Contrastive learning (CL) has become a powerful approach for learning representations from unlabeled images. However, existing CL methods focus predominantly on visual appearance features while neglecting topological characteristics (e.g., connectivity patterns, boundary configurations, cavity formations) that provide valuable cues for medical image analysis. To address this limitation, we propose a new topological CL framework (TopoCL) that explicitly exploits topological structures during contrastive learning for medical imaging. Specifically, we first introduce topology-aware augmentations that control topological perturbations using a relative bottleneck distance between persistence diagrams, preserving medically relevant topological properties while enabling controlled structural variations. We then design a Hierarchical Topology Encoder that captures topological features through self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms. Finally, we develop an adaptive mixture-of-experts (MoE) module to dynamically integrate visual and topological representations. TopoCL can be seamlessly integrated with existing CL methods. We evaluate TopoCL on five representative CL methods (SimCLR, MoCo-v3, BYOL, DINO, and Barlow Twins) and five diverse medical image classification datasets. The experimental results show that TopoCL achieves consistent improvements: an average gain of 3.26% in linear probe classification accuracy with strong statistical significance, verifying its effectiveness.
Generalized and Personalized Federated Learning with Black-Box Foundation Models via Orthogonal Transformations
PDF ↗Federated Learning (FL) facilitates decentralized model training while preserving data privacy. However, achieving both robust generalization and effective personalization simultaneously in heterogeneous (non-IID) environments remains a formidable challenge. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of proprietary Foundation Models (FMs) introduces a critical requirement for dual privacy: (a) protecting sensitive client data and (b) securing the server's valuable intellectual property. This mandates strictly black-box access to the FM. To address these multifaceted challenges, we introduce FedOT, a novel FL framework optimized for black-box FMs. FedOT employs a shared global task-dependent classifier while facilitating local adaptation through client-specific orthogonal transformations applied externally to the FM embeddings. This architecture inherently guarantees that the FM's internal parameters remain inaccessible and unmodified. By enforcing orthogonality, FedOT effectively mitigates gradient conflicts across diverse clients, which is theoretically bounded, preserves the semantic integrity of the FM representations, and achieves robust performance under significant data heterogeneity. The synergy of global and local parameters optimally balances generalization and personalization, markedly outperforming baseline FL methods across diverse benchmarks. Extensive empirical analysis, including rigorous multi-seed validation and scalability assessments, substantiates the robustness, efficiency, and superior performance of FedOT.
Spike cameras are a novel class of neuromorphic vision sensors that capture scene dynamics with ultra-high temporal resolution via spike planes. While recent methods have addressed motion blur and noise in spike-based reconstruction, defocus blur caused by shallow depth of field or lens adjustment delays remains a critical yet underexplored issue in real-world applications such as autonomous driving. In this work, we present DeSpike, the first end-to-end defocus removal framework specifically designed for spike cameras. Our method begins by explicitly modeling the defocus formation process using a physics-inspired thin-lens approximation to simulate spike responses under optical blur. Guided by this formulation, DeSpike employs multi-temporal-scale integrate-and-fire (IF) neurons to compensate for FPN and extract defocus-aware features from spike streams. These features are then processed by a physics-informed deblurring module constructed from learnable discrete PSF priors. To address spatially variant blur, we introduce a Transformer-based fusion mechanism that adaptively weighs multi-scale deblurring results through attention across defocus levels. Finally, a coarse-to-fine iterative refinement stage combines spike features and PSF priors for progressive restoration. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world defocused spike datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art deblurring approaches in terms of structural fidelity, perceptual sharpness, and contrast, setting a new benchmark for defocus-aware spike-based image reconstruction.
Foundation models pre-trained with self-supervised learning (SSL) on large-scale datasets have become powerful general-purpose feature extractors. However, their immense size and computational cost make them prohibitive for deployment on edge devices such as robots and AR/VR headsets. Existing compression techniques like standard knowledge distillation create efficient `specialist' models but sacrifice the crucial, downstream-agnostic generality that makes foundation models so valuable.In this paper, we introduce Foundation Model Distillation (FMD), a new paradigm for compressing large SSL models into compact, efficient, and faithful proxies that retain their general-purpose representational power. We present Foundry, the first implementation of FMD for 3D point clouds. Our approach, Foundry, trains a student to learn a compressed set of SuperTokens that reconstruct the teacher's token-level representations, capturing a compact basis of its latent space. A single distilled model maintains strong transferability across diverse downstream tasks--classification, part segmentation, and few-shot scenarios--approaching full foundation-model performance while using significantly fewer tokens and FLOPs, making such models more practical for deployment on resource-constrained hardware.
TDATR: Improving End-to-End Table Recognition via Table Detail-Aware Learning and Cell-Level Visual Alignment
PDF ↗Tables are pervasive in diverse documents, making table recognition (TR) a fundamental task in document analysis. Existing modular TR pipelines separately model table structure and content, leading to suboptimal integration and complex workflows.End-to-end approaches rely heavily on large-scale TR data and struggle in data-constrained scenarios.To address these issues, we propose TDATR (Table Detail-Aware Table Recognition) improves end-to-end TR through table detail-aware learning and cell-level visual alignment.TDATR adopts a "perceive-then-fuse" strategy. The model first performs table detail-aware learning to jointly perceive table structure and content through multiple structure understanding and content recognition tasks designed under a language modeling paradigm. These tasks can naturally leverage document data from diverse scenarios to enhance model robustness.The model then integrates implicit table details to generate structured HTML outputs, enabling more efficient TR modeling when trained with limited data.Furthermore, we design a structure-guided cell localization module integrated into the end-to-end TR framework, which efficiently locates cell and strengthens vision-language alignment. It enhances the interpretability and accuracy of TR.We achieve state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance on seven benchmarks without dataset-specific fine-tuning.
ConeSep: Cone-based Robust Noise-Unlearning Compositional Network for Composed Image Retrieval
PDF ↗The Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) task provides a flexible retrieval paradigm via a reference image and modification text, but it heavily relies on expensive and error-prone triplet annotations. This paper systematically investigates the Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) problem introduced by annotations. We find that NTC noise, particularly "hard noise" (i.e., the reference and target images are highly similar but the modification text is incorrect), poses a unique challenge to existing Noise Correspondence Learning (NCL) methods because it breaks the traditional "small loss hypothesis". We identify and elucidate three key, yet overlooked, challenges in the NTC task, namely (C1) Modality Suppression, (C2) Negative Anchor Deficiency, and (C3) Unlearning Backlash. To address these challenges, we propose a Cone-based robuSt noisE-unlearning comPositional network (ConeSep). Specifically, we first propose Geometric Fidelity Quantization, theoretically establishing and practically estimating a noise boundary to precisely locate noisy correspondence. Next, we introduce Negative Boundary Learning, which learns a "diagonal negative combination" for each query as its explicit semantic opposite-anchor in the embedding space. Finally, we design Boundary-based Targeted Unlearning, which models the noisy correction process as an optimal transport problem, elegantly avoiding Unlearning Backlash. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets (FashionIQ and CIRR) demonstrate that ConeSep significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, which fully demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our method.
Procedural activities, ranging from routine cooking to complex surgical operations, are highly structured sequences of actions performed in a specific temporal order. Despite the success of current self-supervised learning (SSL) methods on static images and short clips, these models often overlook the underlying sequential structure of such activities. We expose this lack of procedural awareness with a motivating experiment: models pretrained on forward and time-reversed sequences produce highly similar features, confirming that their representations are blind to the underlying procedural order. To address this shortcoming, we propose PL-Stitch, a self-supervised framework that harnesses the inherent temporal order of video frames as a powerful supervisory signal. Our approach integrates two novel probabilistic objectives based on the Plackett-Luce (PL) model. The primary PL objective trains the model to sort sampled frames chronologically, compelling it to learn the global workflow progression. The secondary objective, a spatio-temporal jigsaw loss, complements the learning by capturing fine-grained, cross-frame object correspondences. Our approach consistently achieves superior performance across five surgical and cooking benchmarks. Specifically, PL-Stitch yields significant gains in surgical phase recognition (e.g., +11.4 pp in k-NN accuracy on Cholec80) and cooking action segmentation (e.g., +5.7 pp in linear probing accuracy on Breakfast), demonstrating its effectiveness for procedural video representation learning. Code and models are available at https://github.com/visurg-ai/PL-Stitch.
EMGauss: Continuous Slice-to-3D Reconstruction via Dynamic Gaussian Modeling in Volume Electron Microscopy
PDF ↗Volume electron microscopy (vEM) enables nanoscale 3D imaging of biological structures but remains constrained by acquisition trade-offs, leading to anisotropic volumes with limited axial resolution. Existing deep learning methods seek to restore isotropy by leveraging lateral priors; yet their assumptions break down for morphologically anisotropic structures. We present **EMGauss**, a general framework for 3D reconstruction from planar scanned 2D slices with applications in vEM, which circumvents the inherent limitations of isotropy-based approaches. Our key innovation is to reframe slice-to-3D reconstruction as a 3D dynamic scene rendering problem based on Gaussian splatting, where the progression of axial slices is modeled as the temporal evolution of 2D Gaussian point clouds. To enhance fidelity in data-sparse regimes, we incorporate a **Teacher-Student bootstrapping mechanism** that uses high-confidence predictions on unobserved slices as pseudo-supervisory signals. Compared with diffusion- and GAN-based reconstruction methods, EMGauss substantially improves interpolation quality, enables continuous slice synthesis, and eliminates the need for large-scale pretraining. Beyond vEM, it potentially provides a generalizable slice-to-3D solution across diverse imaging domains.
The proliferation of AI-generated content (AIGC) has facilitated sophisticated face manipulation, severely undermining visual integrity and posing unprecedented challenges to intellectual property (IP). In response, a common proactive defense leverages fragile watermarks to detect, localize, or even recover manipulated regions. However, these methods always assume an adversary unaware of the embedded watermark, overlooking their inherent vulnerability to watermark removal attacks. Furthermore, this fragility is exacerbated in the commonly used dual-watermark strategy that adds a robust watermark for image ownership verification, where mutual interference and limited embedding capacity reduce the fragile watermark's effectiveness.To address the gap, we propose RecoverMark, a watermarking framework that achieves robust manipulation localization, content recovery, and ownership verification simultaneously. Our key insight is twofold. First, we exploit a critical real-world constraint: an adversary must preserve the background's semantic consistency to avoid visual detection, even if they apply global, imperceptible watermark removal attacks. Second, using the image's own content (face, in this paper) as the watermark enhances extraction robustness. Based on these insights, RecoverMark treats the protected face content itself as the watermark and embeds it into the surrounding background. By designing a robust two-stage training paradigm with carefully crafted distortion layers that simulate comprehensive potential attacks and a progressive training strategy, RecoverMark achieves a robust watermark embedding in no fragile manner for image manipulation localization, recovery, and image IP protection simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed RecoverMark's robustness against both seen and unseen attacks and its generalizability to in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) data.
AntiStyler: Defending Object Detection Models Against Adversarial Patch Attacks Using Style Removal
PDF ↗Adversarial patch attacks pose a significant threat to the reliability of object detection (OD) models, particularly in real-time security applications. Although several defenses have been proposed, they often suffer from two limitations: 1) reduced performance on benign images, and 2) impractical processing time for real-time OD applications. In this paper, we present AntiStyler, a novel and rapid defense against adversarial patches. Given an input image, AntiStyler identifies and masks pixels that exhibit a "random" style associated with adversarial attacks and uses a series of spatial filters to enhance the mask and remove unwanted noise, efficiently masking adversarial patches. AntiStyler features model-, patch-, and attack-agnostic capabilities and does not require any training, making it a fully agnostic zero-shot defense against adversarial patch attacks. Our evaluation on the COCO, INRIA, Superstore, and APRICOT datasets, with both digital and physical attacks, demonstrates AntiStyler's state-of-the-art robustness (improving adversarial performance by 8-15 mAP%) without compromising the original performance on benign images. Additionally, unlike most existing defenses, AntiStyler can process 10-12 frames per second (FPS), making it efficient and relevant for real-time OD applications.
Pan-sharpening, a fundamental image preprocessing technique in remote sensing, aims to generate spatially and spectrally enriched multispectral imagery by integrating complementary information from texture-rich panchromatic (PAN) images and paired low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) counterparts. Although recent generative diffusion models have achieved impressive fusion quality, these performance gains often come with substantial computational costs, rendering them impractical for resource-constrained scenarios common in remote sensing applications. This work introduces a function-space diffusion model built upon a neural operator architecture that achieves compelling performance with promising efficiency. Specifically, our framework replaces the standard attention-based denoising backbone with a Galerkin-type neural operator, significantly reducing computational complexity while maintaining excellent representational capacity. Furthermore, by explicitly integrating pixel-wise spatial-spectral consistency residuals into each reverse diffusion step, our method establishes a fine-grained, closed-loop guidance mechanism that dynamically calibrates spatial details and spectral fidelity throughout the generation process. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.