Image-to-text (I2T) understanding and text-to-image (T2I) generation are two fundamental, important yet traditionally isolated multimodal tasks. Despite their intrinsic connection, existing approaches typically optimize them independently, missing the opportunity for mutual enhancement. In this paper, we argue that the both tasks can be connected under a shared Auto-Encoder perspective, where text serves as the intermediate latent representation bridging the two directions - encoding images into textual semantics (I2T) and decoding text back into images (T2I). Our key insight is that if the encoder truly "understands" the image, it should capture all essential structure, and if the decoder truly "understands" the text, it should recover that structure faithfully. Building upon this principle, we propose Unified-GRPO, a post-training method based on reinforcement learning that jointly optimizes both modules through reconstructive rewards, maximizing the semantic consistency between the input and the generated images. Under this reconstruction objective, the encoder is encouraged to extract as much accurate and comprehensive semantic information from the input image to maximize reconstruction quality, while the decoder is simultaneously optimized to generate conditioned on the encoder's prior, enabling a self-evolving improvement. Empirically, we find that using text as the intermediate representation and training under a reconstructive RL paradigm effectively benefits both I2T and T2I. The I2T module gains stronger fine-grained visual perception, such as small-object recognition, grounding, etc, while its dense embeddings and language priors, in turn, provide richer semantic signals that improve T2I fidelity and complex instruction following. These results demonstrate that the reconstructive RL establishes a mutually reinforcing cross-modal synergy within the auto-encoding framework.
论文检索
输入标题、作者或关键词，从 9,654 篇学术成果中精准定位
Visual encoding and decoding models act as gateways to understanding the neural mechanisms underlying human visual perception. Typically, visual encoding models that predict brain activity from stimuli and decoding models that reproduce stimuli from brain activity are treated as distinct tasks, requiring separate models and training procedures. This separation is inefficient and fails to model the consistency between encoding and decoding processes. To address this limitation, we propose NeuroFlow, the first unified framework that jointly models visual encoding and decoding from neural activity within a single flow model. NeuroFlow introduces two key components: (i) NeuroVAE is designed as a variational backbone to model neural variability and establish a compact, semantically structured latent space for bidirectional modeling across visual and neural modalities. (ii) Cross-modal Flow Matching (XFM) bypasses the typical paradigm of noise-to-data diffusion guided by a specific modality condition, instead learning a reversibly consistent flow model between visual and neural latent distributions. For the first time, visual encoding and decoding are reformulated as a time-dependent, reversible process within a shared latent space for unified modeling. Empirical results demonstrate that NeuroFlow achieves superior overall performance in visual encoding and decoding tasks with higher computational efficiency compared to any isolated methods. We further analyze principal factors that steer the model toward encoding-decoding consistency and, through brain functional analyses, demonstrate that NeuroFlow captures consistent activation patterns underlying neural variability. NeuroFlow marks a major step toward unified visual encoding and decoding from neural activity, providing mechanistic insights that inform future bidirectional visual brain-computer interfaces. Code and project page are publicly available at https://michaelmaiii.github.io/NeuroFlow-S.
Towards an Incremental Unified Multimodal Anomaly Detection: Augmenting Multimodal Denoising From an Information Bottleneck Perspective
PDF ↗The quest for incremental unified multimodal anomaly detection seeks to empower a single model with the ability to systematically detect anomalies across all categories and support incremental learning to accommodate emerging objects/categories. Central to this pursuit is resolving the catastrophic forgetting dilemma, which involves acquiring new knowledge while preserving prior learned knowledge. Despite some efforts to address this dilemma, a key oversight persists: ignoring the potential impact of spurious and redundant features on catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we delve into the negative effect of spurious and redundant features on this dilemma in incremental unified frameworks, and reveal that under similar conditions, the multimodal framework developed by naive aggregation of unimodal architectures is more prone to forgetting. To address this issue, we introduce a novel denoising framework called IB-IUMAD, which exploits the complementary benefits of the Mamba decoder and information bottleneck fusion module: the former dedicated to disentangle inter-object feature coupling, preventing spurious feature interference between objects; the latter serves to filter out redundant features from the fused features, thus explicitly preserving discriminative information. A series of theoretical analyses and experiments on MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies datasets demonstrates the effectiveness and competitive performance of IB-IUMAD. Code Link.
The appeal of RGB-T tracking lies in its resilience when RGB fails under night scenes, glare, fog, and partial occlusion. Despite notable accuracy gains, recent architectures emphasize deep fusion and large parameter counts, driving up FLOPs and bandwidth. This computational burden constrains real-time performance and limits scalability beyond high-end GPUs. To balance accuracy and efficiency, we propose Adaptive Early-Exit (AEE): we augment the backbone with anytime heads and pair them with a confidence-calibrated early-exit policy that halts inference at the earliest reliable layer, skipping redundant computation. For cross-modal interaction, we design a Holistic-Token-Guided Interaction (HTGI) module, where each modality is compressed into a compact set of holistic state tokens and injected into the other modality's modeling stream without layer-wise alignment, enabling targeted information exchange at extremely low cost. On RGB-T benchmarks, the lightweight tracker substantially reduces latency while maintaining competitive accuracy; on LasHeR, it achieves 70.2% precision and 56.3% success, running at 148.3 FPS on GPU, 50.2 FPS on CPU, and 28.7 FPS on an edge device.
Feed-forward 3D modeling has emerged as a promising approach for rapid and high-quality 3D reconstruction. In particular, directly generating explicit 3D representations, such as 3D Gaussian splatting, has attracted significant attention due to its fast and high-quality rendering. However, many state-of-the-art methods, primarily based on transformer architectures, suffer from severe scalability issues because they rely on full attention across image tokens from multiple input views, resulting in prohibitive computational costs as the number of views or image resolution increases. Toward a scalable and efficient feed-forward 3D reconstruction, we introduce an iterative Large 3D Reconstruction Model (iLRM) that generates 3D Gaussian representations through an iterative refinement mechanism, guided by three core principles: (1) decoupling the scene representation from input images to enable compact 3D representations; (2) decomposing global multi-view interactions into a two-stage attention scheme to reduce computational costs; and (3) injecting high-resolution information at every layer to achieve high-fidelity reconstruction. Experimental results on widely used datasets, such as RE10K and DL3DV, demonstrate that iLRM outperforms existing methods in both reconstruction quality and speed.
RDF-MIG: A Robust Diffusion Framework for Masked Image Generation to Augment Semantic Segmentation and Change Detection
PDF ↗Change detection and semantic segmentation are key techniques for satellite image analysis in remote sensing. However, acquiring high-quality labeled data is costly and time-consuming. Although recent studies have explored generative models to ease data scarcity, a unified framework supporting both tasks is still lacking, and most methods overlook noise accumulation and cannot generate multispectral images. To address this, we propose the robust diffusion framework for masked image generation (RDF-MIG). RDF-MIG generates bi-temporal change-labeled and single-temporal segmentation-labeled images to enhance downstream change detection and semantic segmentation tasks. Furthermore, to address noise accumulation and improve the quality of generated image-mask pairs, we reformulate the diffusion model training objective by proposing the Maximum Correntropy Robust Diffusion (MCRD) loss, and further design an MSE-consistency calibration that analytically aligns small-error gradients with the MSE objective while preserving robustness to outliers. Experiments indicate that the proposed RDF-MIG framework can generate multispectral image-mask pairs to improve downstream performance, while MCRD loss further enhances the quality of the synthesized data.
Conventional physically-based rendering (PBR) pipelines generate photorealistic images through computationally expensive light transport simulations. Although recent deep learning approaches leverage diffusion model priors with geometry buffers (G-buffers) to produce visually compelling results without explicit scene geometry or light simulation, they remain constrained by two major limitations. First, the iterative nature of the diffusion process introduces substantial latency. Second, the inherent stochasticity of these generative models compromises physical accuracy and temporal consistency. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel, end-to-end, deterministic single-step neural rendering framework RenderFlow built upon a flow matching paradigm. To further strengthen both rendering quality and generalization, we propose an efficient and effective module for sparse keyframe guidance. Our method significantly accelerates the rendering process and, by optionally incorporating sparsely rendered keyframes as guidance, enhances both the physical plausibility and overall visual quality of the output. The resulting pipeline achieves near real-time performance with photorealistic rendering quality, effectively bridging the gap between the efficiency of modern generative models and the precision of traditional physically based rendering. Furthermore, we demonstrate the versatility of our framework by introducing a lightweight, adapter-based module that efficiently repurposes the pretrained forward model for the inverse rendering task of intrinsic decomposition.
Prior panorama stitching approaches heavily rely on pairwise feature correspondences and are unable to leverage geometric consistency across multiple views. This leads to severe distortion and misalignment, especially in challenging scenes with weak textures, large parallax, and repetitive patterns. Given that multi-view geometric correspondences can be directly constructed in 3D space, making them more accurate and globally consistent, we extend the 2D alignment task to the 3D photogrammetric space. We adopt a novel transformer-based architecture to achieve 3D awareness and aggregate global information across all views. It directly utilizes camera poses to guide image warping for global alignment in 3D space and employs a multi-feature joint optimization strategy to compute the seams. Additionally, to establish an evaluation benchmark and train our network, we constructed a large-scale dataset of real-world scenes. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms existing alternatives in alignment accuracy and perceptual quality.
Classical video quality assessment (VQA) methods generate a numerical score to judge a video's perceived visual fidelity and clarity. Yet, a score fails to describe the video's complex quality dimensions (e.g., noise), restricting its applicability. Benefiting from the human-friendly linguistic output, adapting video large multimodal models (LMMs) to VQA via instruction tuning has the potential to address this issue. The core of the approach lies in the video quality-centric instruction data. Previous explorations mainly focus on the image domain, and their data generation processes heavily rely on human quality annotations and proprietary systems (e.g., GPT-4), limiting data scalability and effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose the Score-based Instruction Generation (SIG) pipeline. Specifically, SIG first scores multiple quality dimensions of an unlabeled video and maps scores to text-defined levels. It then explicitly incorporates a hierarchical Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to model the correlation between specific dimensions and overall quality, mimicking the human visual system's (HVS) reasoning process. The automated pipeline eliminates the reliance on expert-written quality descriptions and proprietary systems, ensuring data scalability and generation efficiency. To this end, the resulting Score2Instruct (S2I) dataset contains over 320K diverse instruction-response pairs, laying the basis for instruction tuning. Moreover, to advance video LMMs' quality scoring and justification abilities simultaneously, we devise a progressive tuning strategy to fully unleash the power of S2I. Built upon SIG, we further curate a benchmark termed S2I-Bench with 400 open-ended questions to better evaluate the quality justification capacity of video LMMs. Experimental results on the S2I-Bench and existing benchmarks indicate that our method consistently improves quality scoring and justification capabilities across multiple video LMMs. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/KeiChiTse/S2I.
Predict Before You Explore: Predictive Planning with Specialized Memory for Embodied Question Answering
PDF ↗Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires agents to navigate 3D environments, accumulate visual evidence, and reason over partial observations to answer questions. However, current agents struggle to maintain coherent, long-horizon behavior: planning remains reactive, causing inconsistent actions, while monolithic memories entangle all observations, hindering retrieval of the sparse but crucial evidence. We address these issues by reframing EQA through the lens of predictive processing, in which coherent behavior emerges from a prediction-correction loop grounded in stable priors. Guided by this perspective, we propose Predict Before You Explore (Pred-EQA), an architecture that integrates predictive planning with specialized memory. A high-level planner predicts where question-relevant evidence is likely to appear and generates a compact set of actionable exploration branches encoding long-horizon intent. A low-level executor then reduces uncertainty within these branches, revising predictions when they fail. A dual-memory system complements this process by separating slowly evolving structural priors from compact, question-relevant visual evidence, enabling consistent planning and efficient evidence accumulation. Through this prediction-guided exploration, Pred-EQA achieves coherent trajectories under partial observability. Experiments on OpenEQA and Express-Bench show that Pred-EQA achieves state-of-the-art results in both accuracy and exploration efficiency, demonstrating the benefits of prediction-driven embodied reasoning.
Differentiable Stroke Planning with Dual Parameterization for Efficient and High-Fidelity Painting Creation
PDF ↗In stroke-based rendering, search methods often get trapped in local minima due to discrete stroke placement, while differentiable optimizers lack structural awareness and produce unstructured layouts. To bridge this gap, we propose a dual representation that couples discrete polylines with continuous Bezier control points via a bidirectional mapping mechanism. This enables collaborative optimization: local gradients refine global stroke structures, while content-aware stroke proposals help escape poor local optima. Our representation further supports Gaussian-splatting-inspired initialization, enabling highly parallel stroke optimization across the image. Experiments show that our approach reduces the number of strokes by 30-50%, achieves more structurally coherent layouts, and improves reconstruction quality, while cutting optimization time by 30-40% compared to existing differentiable vectorization methods.
Tokenization is a fundamental technique in the generative modeling of various modalities. In particular, it plays a critical role in autoregressive (AR) models, which have recently emerged as a compelling option for 3D generation.However, optimal tokenization of 3D shapes remains an open question. State-of-the-art (SOTA) methods primarily rely on geometric level-of-detail (LoD) hierarchies, originally designed for rendering and compression. These spatial hierarchies are often token-inefficient and lack semantic coherence for AR modeling. We propose Level-of-Semantics Tokenization (LoST), which orders tokens by semantic salience, such that early prefixes decode into complete, plausible shapes that possess principal semantics, while subsequent tokens refine instance-specific geometric and semantic details. To train LoST, we introduce Relational Inter-Distance Alignment (RIDA), a novel 3D semantic alignment loss, inspired by relational knowledge distillation, that aligns the relational structure of the 3D shape latent space with that of the semantic DINO feature space. Experiments show that LoST achieves SOTA reconstruction, surpassing previous LoD-based 3D shape tokenizers by large margins on both geometric and semantic reconstruction metrics. Moreover, LoST achieves efficient, high-quality AR 3D generation and enables downstream tasks like semantic retrieval, while using only 0.1%-10% of the tokens needed by prior 3D AR models. Code is available via the project website at https://lost3d.github.io/
Beyond [CLS] Token: Query-Driven Token-Level Forgery Purification for Generalizable Deepfake Detection
PDF ↗We investigate state-of-the-art deepfake detectors that leverage ViT-based vision foundation models and discover that the [CLS] token suffers from the Pre-trained Information Bias (PIB), i.e., it tends to mainly focus on global semantics due to the knowledge dominated by pre-trained model parameters, while struggling to emphasize subtle local forgery cues. To overcome this limitation, one potential way is incorporating the token-level features to reform a detection-specific token. To this end, we propose Query-Driven Token-Level Forgery Purification (QTFP) framework to better capture local forgery traces without losing useful pre-trained prior. Specifically, we introduce randomly initialized, learnable query tokens independent of the backbone and prior knowledge, which effectively aggregate multi-patch evidence into a global token for detection. To make query tokens focus on meaningful regions, we propose a theoretical fake-likelihood contrastive learning loss, which employs a weighting strategy to highlight significant fake regions while diminishing real-like patch impact. Using SNR theory, we verify that the designed weight is both reliable and informative. To further maintain useful authentic information, a real-attention alignment constraint is applied to query tokens. These designs go beyond relying solely on the [CLS] token by jointly reorganizing real and fake information across all tokens, which successfully enhance detector robustness. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
We suggest a new multi-modal algorithm for joint inference of paired structurally aligned samples with Rectified Flow models. While some existing methods propose a codependent generation process, they do not view the problem of joint generation from a structural alignment perspective. Recent work uses Score Distillation Sampling to generate aligned 3D models, but SDS is known to be time-consuming, prone to mode collapse, and often provides cartoonish results. By contrast, our suggested approach relies on the joint transport of a segment in the sample space, yielding faster computation at inference time. Our approach can be built on top of an arbitrary Rectified Flow model operating on the structured latent space. We show the applicability of our method to the domains of image, video, and 3D shape generation using state-of-the-art baselines and evaluate it against both editing-based and joint inference-based competing approaches. We demonstrate a high degree of structural alignment for the sample pairs obtained with our method and a high visual quality of the samples. Our method improves the state-of-the-art for image and video generation pipelines. For 3D generation, it is able to show comparable quality while working orders of magnitude faster.
Capturing dynamic spatiotemporal neural activity is essential for understanding large-scale brain mechanisms. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides high-resolution cortical representations that form a strong basis for characterizing fine-grained brain activity patterns. The high acquisition cost of fMRI limits large-scale applications, therefore making high-quality fMRI reconstruction a crucial task. Electroencephalography (EEG) offers millisecond-level temporal cues that complement fMRI. Leveraging this complementarity, we present an EEG-conditioned framework for reconstructing dynamic fMRI as continuous neural sequences with high spatial fidelity and strong temporal coherence at the cortical-vertex level. To address sampling irregularities common in real fMRI acquisitions, we incorporate a null-space intermediate-frame reconstruction, enabling measurement-consistent completion of arbitrary intermediate frames and improving sequence continuity and practical applicability. Experiments on the CineBrain dataset demonstrate superior voxel-wise reconstruction quality and robust temporal consistency across whole-brain and functionally specific regions. The reconstructed fMRI also preserves essential functional information, supporting downstream visual decoding tasks. This work provides a new pathway for estimating high-resolution fMRI dynamics from EEG and advances multimodal neuroimaging toward more dynamic brain activity modeling.
Large vision-language models struggle with medical video understanding, where spatial precision, temporal reasoning, and clinical semantics are critical. To address this, we first introduce MedVidBench, a large-scale benchmark of 531,850 video-instruction pairs across 8 medical sources spanning video, segment, and frame-level tasks, curated through a rigorous quality assurance pipeline with expert-guided prompting and dual-model validation. While supervised fine-tuning on MedVidBench yields noticeable gains, standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) fails due to imbalanced reward scales across datasets, which destabilizes optimization and leads to training collapse. To overcome this, we introduce MedGRPO, a novel RL framework for balanced multi-dataset training with two key innovations: (1) cross-dataset reward normalization that maps each dataset's median performance to a common reward value, ensuring fair optimization regardless of difficulty, and (2) a medical LLM judge that evaluates caption quality on five clinical dimensions through comparative similarity scoring. Supervised fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B on MedVidBench substantially outperforms GPT-4.1 and Gemini-2.5-Flash across all tasks, demonstrating MedVidBench's efficacy, while our MedGRPO framework further improves upon the SFT baseline across grounding and captioning tasks. Our work establishes a foundational benchmark and robust training methodology for advancing vision-language models in medical domains.
Accurate camera viewpoint estimation under sparse-view conditions remains challenging, particularly in two-view scenarios. Recent approaches leverage diffusion models such as Zero123 to synthesize novel views conditioned on relative viewpoint, showing promising results when repurposed for viewpoint estimation via optimization with MSE loss. However, existing methods often suffer from non-convex loss landscape with numerous local minima, making them sensitive to initialization and reliant on naive multi-start strategies. We analyze these optimization challenges and visualize failure cases, showing that geometric ambiguities, such as symmetry and self-similarity, can mislead gradient-based updates toward incorrect viewpoints. To address these limitations, we propose a score-based method that reshapes the optimization landscape to guide updates toward the ground-truth viewpoint, followed by a refinement stage using a viewpoint-conditioned diffusion model. Experiments show that our method improves convergence, reduces reliance on brute-force sampling, and achieves competitive accuracy with higher sample-efficiency.
We introduce OLATverse, a large-scale dataset comprising around 9M images of 765 real-world objects, captured from multiple viewpoints under a diverse set of precisely controlled lighting conditions. While recent advances in object-centric inverse rendering, novel view synthesis and relighting have shown promising results, most techniques still heavily rely on the synthetic datasets for training and small-scale real-world datasets for benchmarking, which limits their realism and generalization. To address this gap, OLATverse offers two key advantages over existing datasets: large-scale coverage of real objects and high-fidelity appearance under precisely controlled illuminations. Specifically, OLATverse contains 765 common and uncommon real-world objects, spanning a wide range of material categories. Each object is captured using 35 DSLR cameras and 331 individually controlled light sources, enabling the simulation of diverse illumination conditions. In addition, for each object, we provide well-calibrated camera parameters, accurate object masks, photometric surface normals, and diffuse albedo as auxiliary resources. We also construct an extensive evaluation set, establishing the first comprehensive real-world object-centric benchmark for inverse rendering and normal estimation. OLATverse is publicly available at https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/OLATverse/.
Visual autoregressive models achieve remarkable generation quality through next-scale predictions across multi-scale token pyramids. However, the conventional method uses uniform scale downsampling to build these pyramids, leading to aliasing artifacts that compromise fine details and introduce unwanted jaggies and moire patterns. To tackle this issue, we present FVAR, which reframes the paradigm from next-scale prediction to next-focus prediction, mimicking the natural process of camera focusing from blur to clarity. Our approach introduces three key innovations: 1) Next-Focus Prediction Paradigm that transforms multi-scale autoregression by progressively reducing blur rather than simply downsampling; 2) Progressive Refocusing Pyramid Construction that uses physics-consistent defocus kernels to build clean, alias-free multi-scale representations; and 3) High-Frequency Residual Learning that employs a specialized residual teacher network to effectively incorporate alias information during training while maintaining deployment simplicity. Specifically, we construct optical low-pass views using defocus point spread function (PSF) kernels with decreasing radius, creating smooth blur-to-clarity transitions that eliminate aliasing at its source. To further enhance detail generation, we introduce a High-Frequency Residual Teacher that learns from both clean structure and alias residuals, distilling this knowledge to a vanilla VAR deployment network for seamless inference. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that FVAR substantially reduces aliasing artifacts, improves fine detail preservation, and enhances text readability, achieving superior performance with perfect compatibility to existing VAR frameworks.
CREval: An Automated Interpretable Evaluation for Creative Image Manipulation under Complex Instructions
PDF ↗Instruction-based multimodal image manipulation has recently made rapid progress. However, existing evaluation methods lack a systematic and human-aligned framework for assessing model performance on complex and creative editing tasks. To address this gap, we propose CREval, a fully automated question-answer (QA)-based evaluation pipeline that overcomes the incompleteness and poor interpretability of opaque Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) scoring. Simultaneously, we introduce CREval-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for creative image manipulation under complex instructions. CREval-Bench covers three categories and nine creative dimensions, comprising over 800 editing samples and 13K evaluation queries. Leveraging this pipeline and benchmark, we systematically evaluate a diverse set of state-of-the-art open and closed-source models. The results reveal that while closed-source models generally outperform open-source ones on complex and creative tasks, all models still struggle to complete such edits effectively. In addition, user studies demonstrate strong consistency between CREval's automated metrics and human judgments. Therefore, CREval provides a reliable foundation for evaluating image editing models on complex and creative image manipulation tasks, and highlights key challenges and opportunities for future research.