Chia-Wen Lin

Chunwei Tian, Yixuan Yuan, Shichao Zhang et al.

CNNs with strong learning abilities are widely chosen to resolve super-resolution problem. However, CNNs depend on deeper network architectures to improve performance of image super-resolution, which may increase computational cost in general. In this paper, we present an enhanced super-resolution group CNN (ESRGCNN) with a shallow architecture by fully fusing deep and wide channel features to extract more accurate low-frequency information in terms of correlations of different channels in single image super-resolution (SISR). Also, a signal enhancement operation in the ESRGCNN is useful to inherit more long-distance contextual information for resolving long-term dependency. An adaptive up-sampling operation is gathered into a CNN to obtain an image super-resolution model with low-resolution images of different sizes. Extensive experiments report that our ESRGCNN surpasses the state-of-the-arts in terms of SISR performance, complexity, execution speed, image quality evaluation and visual effect in SISR. Code is found at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/ESRGCNN.

Chunwei Tian, Yanning Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo et al.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have obtained remarkable performance via deep architectures. However, these CNNs often achieve poor robustness for image super-resolution (SR) under complex scenes. In this paper, we present a heterogeneous group SR CNN (HGSRCNN) via leveraging structure information of different types to obtain a high-quality image. Specifically, each heterogeneous group block (HGB) of HGSRCNN uses a heterogeneous architecture containing a symmetric group convolutional block and a complementary convolutional block in a parallel way to enhance internal and external relations of different channels for facilitating richer low-frequency structure information of different types. To prevent appearance of obtained redundant features, a refinement block with signal enhancements in a serial way is designed to filter useless information. To prevent loss of original information, a multi-level enhancement mechanism guides a CNN to achieve a symmetric architecture for promoting expressive ability of HGSRCNN. Besides, a parallel up-sampling mechanism is developed to train a blind SR model. Extensive experiments illustrate that the proposed HGSRCNN has obtained excellent SR performance in terms of both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Codes can be accessed at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/HGSRCNN.

Yi Xiao, Qiangqiang Yuan, Kui Jiang et al.

Optical-flow-based and kernel-based approaches have been extensively explored for temporal compensation in satellite Video Super-Resolution (VSR). However, these techniques are less generalized in large-scale or complex scenarios, especially in satellite videos. In this paper, we propose to exploit the well-defined temporal difference for efficient and effective temporal compensation. To fully utilize the local and global temporal information within frames, we systematically modeled the short-term and long-term temporal discrepancies since we observed that these discrepancies offer distinct and mutually complementary properties. Specifically, we devise a Short-term Temporal Difference Module (S-TDM) to extract local motion representations from RGB difference maps between adjacent frames, which yields more clues for accurate texture representation. To explore the global dependency in the entire frame sequence, a Long-term Temporal Difference Module (L-TDM) is proposed, where the differences between forward and backward segments are incorporated and activated to guide the modulation of the temporal feature, leading to a holistic global compensation. Moreover, we further propose a Difference Compensation Unit (DCU) to enrich the interaction between the spatial distribution of the target frame and temporal compensated results, which helps maintain spatial consistency while refining the features to avoid misalignment. Rigorous objective and subjective evaluations conducted across five mainstream video satellites demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches. Code will be available at https://github.com/XY-boy/LGTD

Kui Jiang, Zhongyuan Wang, Chen Chen et al.

Convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer have achieved great success in multimedia applications. However, little effort has been made to effectively and efficiently harmonize these two architectures to satisfy image deraining. This paper aims to unify these two architectures to take advantage of their learning merits for image deraining. In particular, the local connectivity and translation equivariance of CNN and the global aggregation ability of self-attention (SA) in Transformer are fully exploited for specific local context and global structure representations. Based on the observation that rain distribution reveals the degradation location and degree, we introduce degradation prior to help background recovery and accordingly present the association refinement deraining scheme. A novel multi-input attention module (MAM) is proposed to associate rain perturbation removal and background recovery. Moreover, we equip our model with effective depth-wise separable convolutions to learn the specific feature representations and trade off computational complexity. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method (dubbed as ELF) outperforms the state-of-the-art approach (MPRNet) by 0.25 dB on average, but only accounts for 11.7\% and 42.1\% of its computational cost and parameters. The source code is available at https://github.com/kuijiang94/Magic-ELF.

Liang Liao, Wenyi Chen, Jing Xiao et al.

Understanding foggy image sequence in the driving scenes is critical for autonomous driving, but it remains a challenging task due to the difficulty in collecting and annotating real-world images of adverse weather. Recently, the self-training strategy has been considered a powerful solution for unsupervised domain adaptation, which iteratively adapts the model from the source domain to the target domain by generating target pseudo labels and re-training the model. However, the selection of confident pseudo labels inevitably suffers from the conflict between sparsity and accuracy, both of which will lead to suboptimal models. To tackle this problem, we exploit the characteristics of the foggy image sequence of driving scenes to densify the confident pseudo labels. Specifically, based on the two discoveries of local spatial similarity and adjacent temporal correspondence of the sequential image data, we propose a novel Target-Domain driven pseudo label Diffusion (TDo-Dif) scheme. It employs superpixels and optical flows to identify the spatial similarity and temporal correspondence, respectively and then diffuses the confident but sparse pseudo labels within a superpixel or a temporal corresponding pair linked by the flow. Moreover, to ensure the feature similarity of the diffused pixels, we introduce local spatial similarity loss and temporal contrastive loss in the model re-training stage. Experimental results show that our TDo-Dif scheme helps the adaptive model achieve 51.92% and 53.84% mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) on two publicly available natural foggy datasets (Foggy Zurich and Foggy Driving), which exceeds the state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptive semantic segmentation methods. Models and data can be found at https://github.com/velor2012/TDo-Dif.

Wenjie Li, Juncheng Li, Guangwei Gao et al.

Lightweight image super-resolution aims to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution images using low computational costs. However, existing methods result in the loss of middle-layer features due to activation functions. To minimize the impact of intermediate feature loss on reconstruction quality, we propose a Feature Interaction Weighted Hybrid Network (FIWHN), which comprises a series of Wide-residual Distillation Interaction Block (WDIB) as the backbone. Every third WDIB forms a Feature Shuffle Weighted Group (FSWG) by applying mutual information shuffle and fusion. Moreover, to mitigate the negative effects of intermediate feature loss, we introduce Wide Residual Weighting units within WDIB. These units effectively fuse features of varying levels of detail through a Wide-residual Distillation Connection (WRDC) and a Self-Calibrating Fusion (SCF). To compensate for global feature deficiencies, we incorporate a Transformer and explore a novel architecture to combine CNN and Transformer. We show that our FIWHN achieves a favorable balance between performance and efficiency through extensive experiments on low-level and high-level tasks. Codes will be available at \url{https://github.com/IVIPLab/FIWHN}.

Taorong Liu, Liang Liao, Delin Chen et al.

Image inpainting for completing complicated semantic environments and diverse hole patterns of corrupted images is challenging even for state-of-the-art learning-based inpainting methods trained on large-scale data. A reference image capturing the same scene of a corrupted image offers informative guidance for completing the corrupted image as it shares similar texture and structure priors to that of the holes of the corrupted image. In this work, we propose a transformer-based encoder-decoder network, named TransRef, for reference-guided image inpainting. Specifically, the guidance is conducted progressively through a reference embedding procedure, in which the referencing features are subsequently aligned and fused with the features of the corrupted image. For precise utilization of the reference features for guidance, a reference-patch alignment (Ref-PA) module is proposed to align the patch features of the reference and corrupted images and harmonize their style differences, while a reference-patch transformer (Ref-PT) module is proposed to refine the embedded reference feature. Moreover, to facilitate the research of reference-guided image restoration tasks, we construct a publicly accessible benchmark dataset containing 50K pairs of input and reference images. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the reference information and the proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods in completing complex holes. Code and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/Cameltr/TransRef.

Wengyi Zhan, Mingbao Lin, Chia-Wen Lin et al.

In an effort to improve the efficiency and scalability of single-image super-resolution (SISR) applications, we introduce AnySR, to rebuild existing arbitrary-scale SR methods into any-scale, any-resource implementation. As a contrast to off-the-shelf methods that solve SR tasks across various scales with the same computing costs, our AnySR innovates in: 1) building arbitrary-scale tasks as any-resource implementation, reducing resource requirements for smaller scales without additional parameters; 2) enhancing any-scale performance in a feature-interweaving fashion, inserting scale pairs into features at regular intervals and ensuring correct feature/scale processing. The efficacy of our AnySR is fully demonstrated by rebuilding most existing arbitrary-scale SISR methods and validating on five popular SISR test datasets. The results show that our AnySR implements SISR tasks in a computing-more-efficient fashion, and performs on par with existing arbitrary-scale SISR methods. For the first time, we realize SISR tasks as not only any-scale in literature, but also as any-resource. Code is available at https://github.com/CrispyFeSo4/AnySR.

Wenjie Li, Mei Wang, Kai Zhang et al.

Face restoration (FR) is a specialized field within image restoration that aims to recover low-quality (LQ) face images into high-quality (HQ) face images. Recent advances in deep learning technology have led to significant progress in FR methods. In this paper, we begin by examining the prevalent factors responsible for real-world LQ images and introduce degradation techniques used to synthesize LQ images. We also discuss notable benchmarks commonly utilized in the field. Next, we categorize FR methods based on different tasks and explain their evolution over time. Furthermore, we explore the various facial priors commonly utilized in the restoration process and discuss strategies to enhance their effectiveness. In the experimental section, we thoroughly evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art FR methods across various tasks using a unified benchmark. We analyze their performance from different perspectives. Finally, we discuss the challenges faced in the field of FR and propose potential directions for future advancements. The open-source repository corresponding to this work can be found at https:// github.com/ 24wenjie-li/ Awesome-Face-Restoration.

Fu-Jen Tsai, Yan-Tsung Peng, Yen-Yu Lin et al.

Images taken in dynamic scenes may contain unwanted motion blur, which significantly degrades visual quality. Such blur causes short- and long-range region-specific smoothing artifacts that are often directional and non-uniform, which is difficult to be removed. Inspired by the current success of transformers on computer vision and image processing tasks, we develop, Stripformer, a transformer-based architecture that constructs intra- and inter-strip tokens to reweight image features in the horizontal and vertical directions to catch blurred patterns with different orientations. It stacks interlaced intra-strip and inter-strip attention layers to reveal blur magnitudes. In addition to detecting region-specific blurred patterns of various orientations and magnitudes, Stripformer is also a token-efficient and parameter-efficient transformer model, demanding much less memory usage and computation cost than the vanilla transformer but works better without relying on tremendous training data. Experimental results show that Stripformer performs favorably against state-of-the-art models in dynamic scene deblurring.

Jin-Ting He, Fu-Jen Tsai, Jia-Hao Wu et al.

Dynamic scene video deblurring aims to remove undesirable blurry artifacts captured during the exposure process. Although previous video deblurring methods have achieved impressive results, they suffer from significant performance drops due to the domain gap between training and testing videos, especially for those captured in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a domain adaptation scheme based on a blurring model to achieve test-time fine-tuning for deblurring models in unseen domains. Since blurred and sharp pairs are unavailable for fine-tuning during inference, our scheme can generate domain-adaptive training pairs to calibrate a deblurring model for the target domain. First, a Relative Sharpness Detection Module is proposed to identify relatively sharp regions from the blurry input images and regard them as pseudo-sharp images. Next, we utilize a blurring model to produce blurred images based on the pseudo-sharp images extracted during testing. To synthesize blurred images in compliance with the target data distribution, we propose a Domain-adaptive Blur Condition Generation Module to create domain-specific blur conditions for the blurring model. Finally, the generated pseudo-sharp and blurred pairs are used to fine-tune a deblurring model for better performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve state-of-the-art video deblurring methods, providing performance gains of up to 7.54dB on various real-world video deblurring datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jin-Ting-He/DADeblur.

Ammarah Hashmi, Sahibzada Adil Shahzad, Chia-Wen Lin et al.

The recent proliferation of hyper-realistic deepfake videos has drawn attention to the threat of audio and visual forgeries. Most previous studies on detecting artificial intelligence-generated fake videos only utilize visual modality or audio modality. While some methods exploit audio and visual modalities to detect forged videos, they have not been comprehensively evaluated on multimodal datasets of deepfake videos involving acoustic and visual manipulations, and are mostly based on convolutional neural networks with low detection accuracy. Considering that human cognition instinctively integrates multisensory information including audio and visual cues to perceive and interpret content and the success of transformer in various fields, this study introduces the audio-visual transformer-based ensemble network (AVTENet). This innovative framework tackles the complexities of deepfake technology by integrating both acoustic and visual manipulations to enhance the accuracy of video forgery detection. Specifically, the proposed model integrates several purely transformer-based variants that capture video, audio, and audio-visual salient cues to reach a consensus in prediction. For evaluation, we use the recently released benchmark multimodal audio-video FakeAVCeleb dataset. For a detailed analysis, we evaluate AVTENet, its variants, and several existing methods on multiple test sets of the FakeAVCeleb dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms all existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on Testset-I and Testset-II of the FakeAVCeleb dataset. We also compare AVTENet against humans in detecting video forgery. The results show that AVTENet significantly outperforms humans.

Chunwei Tian, Menghua Zheng, Chia-Wen Lin et al.

Deep networks can usually depend on extracting more structural information to improve denoising results. However, they may ignore correlation between pixels from an image to pursue better denoising performance. Window transformer can use long- and short-distance modeling to interact pixels to address mentioned problem. To make a tradeoff between distance modeling and denoising time, we propose a heterogeneous window transformer (HWformer) for image denoising. HWformer first designs heterogeneous global windows to capture global context information for improving denoising effects. To build a bridge between long and short-distance modeling, global windows are horizontally and vertically shifted to facilitate diversified information without increasing denoising time. To prevent the information loss phenomenon of independent patches, sparse idea is guided a feed-forward network to extract local information of neighboring patches. The proposed HWformer only takes 30% of popular Restormer in terms of denoising time.

Po-Sheng Liu, Fu-Jen Tsai, Yan-Tsung Peng et al.

Most previous deblurring methods were built with a generic model trained on blurred images and their sharp counterparts. However, these approaches might have sub-optimal deblurring results due to the domain gap between the training and test sets. This paper proposes a reblur-deblur meta-transferring scheme to realize test-time adaptation without using ground truth for dynamic scene deblurring. Since the ground truth is usually unavailable at inference time in a real-world scenario, we leverage the blurred input video to find and use relatively sharp patches as the pseudo ground truth. Furthermore, we propose a reblurring model to extract the homogenous blur from the blurred input and transfer it to the pseudo-sharps to obtain the corresponding pseudo-blurred patches for meta-learning and test-time adaptation with only a few gradient updates. Extensive experimental results show that our reblur-deblur meta-learning scheme can improve state-of-the-art deblurring models on the DVD, REDS, and RealBlur benchmark datasets.

Jin-Ting He, Fu-Jen Tsai, Yan-Tsung Peng et al.

Diffusion models show promise for dynamic scene deblurring; however, existing studies often fail to leverage the intrinsic nature of the blurring process within diffusion models, limiting their full potential. To address it, we present a Blur Diffusion Model (BlurDM), which seamlessly integrates the blur formation process into diffusion for image deblurring. Observing that motion blur stems from continuous exposure, BlurDM implicitly models the blur formation process through a dual-diffusion forward scheme, diffusing both noise and blur onto a sharp image. During the reverse generation process, we derive a dual denoising and deblurring formulation, enabling BlurDM to recover the sharp image by simultaneously denoising and deblurring, given pure Gaussian noise conditioned on the blurred image as input. Additionally, to efficiently integrate BlurDM into deblurring networks, we perform BlurDM in the latent space, forming a flexible prior generation network for deblurring. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BlurDM significantly and consistently enhances existing deblurring methods on four benchmark datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jin-Ting-He/BlurDM.

Yi Xiao, Qiangqiang Yuan, Kui Jiang et al.

Recent progress in remote sensing image (RSI) super-resolution (SR) has exhibited remarkable performance using deep neural networks, e.g., Convolutional Neural Networks and Transformers. However, existing SR methods often suffer from either a limited receptive field or quadratic computational overhead, resulting in sub-optimal global representation and unacceptable computational costs in large-scale RSI. To alleviate these issues, we develop the first attempt to integrate the Vision State Space Model (Mamba) for RSI-SR, which specializes in processing large-scale RSI by capturing long-range dependency with linear complexity. To achieve better SR reconstruction, building upon Mamba, we devise a Frequency-assisted Mamba framework, dubbed FMSR, to explore the spatial and frequent correlations. In particular, our FMSR features a multi-level fusion architecture equipped with the Frequency Selection Module (FSM), Vision State Space Module (VSSM), and Hybrid Gate Module (HGM) to grasp their merits for effective spatial-frequency fusion. Considering that global and local dependencies are complementary and both beneficial for SR, we further recalibrate these multi-level features for accurate feature fusion via learnable scaling adaptors. Extensive experiments on AID, DOTA, and DIOR benchmarks demonstrate that our FMSR outperforms state-of-the-art Transformer-based methods HAT-L in terms of PSNR by 0.11 dB on average, while consuming only 28.05% and 19.08% of its memory consumption and complexity, respectively. Code will be available at https://github.com/XY-boy/FreMamba

Weng-Tai Su, Yi-Chun Hung, Po-Jen Yu et al.

Terahertz (THz) tomographic imaging has recently attracted significant attention thanks to its non-invasive, non-destructive, non-ionizing, material-classification, and ultra-fast nature for object exploration and inspection. However, its strong water absorption nature and low noise tolerance lead to undesired blurs and distortions of reconstructed THz images. The diffraction-limited THz signals highly constrain the performances of existing restoration methods. To address the problem, we propose a novel multi-view Subspace-Attention-guided Restoration Network (SARNet) that fuses multi-view and multi-spectral features of THz images for effective image restoration and 3D tomographic reconstruction. To this end, SARNet uses multi-scale branches to extract intra-view spatio-spectral amplitude and phase features and fuse them via shared subspace projection and self-attention guidance. We then perform inter-view fusion to further improve the restoration of individual views by leveraging the redundancies between neighboring views. Here, we experimentally construct a THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) system covering a broad frequency range from 0.1 THz to 4 THz for building up a temporal/spectral/spatial/ material THz database of hidden 3D objects. Complementary to a quantitative evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our SARNet model on 3D THz tomographic reconstruction applications.

Xin Yuan, Zhiyong Zhang, Xin Xu et al.

With the increasing demand for robust person Re-ID in unconstrained environments, learning from datasets with noisy labels and sparse per-identity samples remains a critical challenge. Existing noise-robust person Re-ID methods primarily rely on loss-correction or sample-selection strategies using softmax outputs. However, these methods suffer from two key limitations: 1) Softmax exhibits translation invariance, leading to over-confident and unreliable predictions on corrupted labels. 2) Conventional sample selection based on small-loss criteria often discards valuable hard positives that are crucial for learning discriminative features. To overcome these issues, we propose the CAlibration-to-REfinement (CARE) method, a two-stage framework that seeks certainty through probabilistic evidence propagation from calibration to refinement. In the calibration stage, we propose the probabilistic evidence calibration (PEC) that dismantles softmax translation invariance by injecting adaptive learnable parameters into the similarity function, and employs an evidential calibration loss to mitigate overconfidence on mislabeled samples. In the refinement stage, we design the evidence propagation refinement (EPR) that can more accurately distinguish between clean and noisy samples. Specifically, the EPR contains two steps: Firstly, the composite angular margin (CAM) metric is proposed to precisely distinguish clean but hard-to-learn positive samples from mislabeled ones in a hyperspherical space; Secondly, the certainty-oriented sphere weighting (COSW) is developed to dynamically allocate the importance of samples according to CAM, ensuring clean instances drive model updates. Extensive experimental results on Market1501, DukeMTMC-ReID, and CUHK03 datasets under both random and patterned noises show that CARE achieves competitive performance.

Sichen Guo, Wenjie Li, Yuanyang Liu et al.

Recently, Mamba-based super-resolution (SR) methods have demonstrated the ability to capture global receptive fields with linear complexity, addressing the quadratic computational cost of Transformer-based SR approaches. However, existing Mamba-based methods lack fine-grained transitions across different modeling scales, which limits the efficiency of feature representation. In this paper, we propose T-PMambaSR, a lightweight SR framework that integrates window-based self-attention with Progressive Mamba. By enabling interactions among receptive fields of different scales, our method establishes a fine-grained modeling paradigm that progressively enhances feature representation with linear complexity. Furthermore, we introduce an Adaptive High-Frequency Refinement Module (AHFRM) to recover high-frequency details lost during Transformer and Mamba processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that T-PMambaSR progressively enhances the model's receptive field and expressiveness, yielding better performance than recent Transformer- or Mamba-based methods while incurring lower computational cost. Our codes will be released after acceptance.

Yanguang Zhao, Jie Yang, Shengqiong Wu et al.

Spatial reasoning, the ability to understand spatial relations, causality, and dynamic evolution, is central to human intelligence and essential for real-world applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. Existing studies, however, primarily assess models on visible spatio-temporal understanding, overlooking their ability to infer unseen past or future spatial states. In this work, we introduce Spatial Causal Prediction (SCP), a new task paradigm that challenges models to reason beyond observation and predict spatial causal outcomes. We further construct SCP-Bench, a benchmark comprising 2,500 QA pairs across 1,181 videos spanning diverse viewpoints, scenes, and causal directions, to support systematic evaluation. Through comprehensive experiments on {23} state-of-the-art models, we reveal substantial gaps between human and model performance, limited temporal extrapolation, and weak causal grounding. We further analyze key factors influencing performance and propose perception-enhancement and reasoning-guided strategies toward advancing spatial causal intelligence. The project page is https://guangstrip.github.io/SCP-Bench.

Hao-Chiang Shao, Guan-Yu Chen, Yu-Hsien Lin et al.

Recent advances in VLSI fabrication technology have led to die shrinkage and increased layout density, creating an urgent demand for advanced hotspot detection techniques. However, by taking an object detection network as the backbone, recent learning-based hotspot detectors learn to recognize only the problematic layout patterns in the training data. This fact makes these hotspot detectors difficult to generalize to real-world scenarios. We propose a novel lithography simulator-powered hotspot detection framework to overcome this difficulty. Our framework integrates a lithography simulator with an object detection backbone, merging the extracted latent features from both the simulator and the object detector via well-designed cross-attention blocks. Consequently, the proposed framework can be used to detect potential hotspot regions based on I) the variation of possible circuit shape deformation estimated by the lithography simulator, and ii) the problematic layout patterns already known. To this end, we utilize RetinaNet with a feature pyramid network as the object detection backbone and leverage LithoNet as the lithography simulator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed simulator-guided hotspot detection framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on real-world data.

Ke Sun, Shen Chen, Taiping Yao et al.

Face manipulation techniques have achieved significant advances, presenting serious challenges to security and social trust. Recent works demonstrate that leveraging multimodal models can enhance the generalization and interpretability of face forgery detection. However, existing annotation approaches, whether through human labeling or direct Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) generation, often suffer from hallucination issues, leading to inaccurate text descriptions, especially for high-quality forgeries. To address this, we propose Face Forgery Text Generator (FFTG), a novel annotation pipeline that generates accurate text descriptions by leveraging forgery masks for initial region and type identification, followed by a comprehensive prompting strategy to guide MLLMs in reducing hallucination. We validate our approach through fine-tuning both CLIP with a three-branch training framework combining unimodal and multimodal objectives, and MLLMs with our structured annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only achieves more accurate annotations with higher region identification accuracy, but also leads to improvements in model performance across various forgery detection benchmarks. Our Codes are available in https://github.com/skJack/VLFFD.git.

Jia-Hao Wu, Fu-Jen Tsai, Yan-Tsung Peng et al.

Image deblurring aims to remove undesired blurs from an image captured in a dynamic scene. Much research has been dedicated to improving deblurring performance through model architectural designs. However, there is little work on data augmentation for image deblurring. Since continuous motion causes blurred artifacts during image exposure, we aspire to develop a groundbreaking blur augmentation method to generate diverse blurred images by simulating motion trajectories in a continuous space. This paper proposes Implicit Diffusion-based reBLurring AUgmentation (ID-Blau), utilizing a sharp image paired with a controllable blur condition map to produce a corresponding blurred image. We parameterize the blur patterns of a blurred image with their orientations and magnitudes as a pixel-wise blur condition map to simulate motion trajectories and implicitly represent them in a continuous space. By sampling diverse blur conditions, ID-Blau can generate various blurred images unseen in the training set. Experimental results demonstrate that ID-Blau can produce realistic blurred images for training and thus significantly improve performance for state-of-the-art deblurring models. The source code is available at https://github.com/plusgood-steven/ID-Blau.

Taorong Liu, Zhen Zhang, Liang Liao et al.

Test-time domain adaption (TTDA) for semantic segmentation aims to adapt a segmentation model trained on a source domain to a target domain for inference on-the-fly, where both efficiency and effectiveness are critical. However, existing TTDA methods either rely on costly frame-wise optimization or assume unrealistic domain shifts, resulting in poor adaptation efficiency and continuous semantic ambiguities. To address these challenges, we propose a real-time framework for TTDA semantic segmentation, called Dynamic Ambiguity-Wise Adaptation (DAWA), which adaptively detects domain shifts and dynamically adjusts the learning strategies to mitigate continuous ambiguities in the test time. Specifically, we introduce the Dynamic Ambiguous Patch Mask (DAP Mask) strategy, which dynamically identifies and masks highly disturbed regions to prevent error accumulation in ambiguous classes. Furthermore, we present the Dynamic Ambiguous Class Mix (DAC Mix) strategy that leverages vision-language models to group semantically similar classes and augment the target domain with a meta-ambiguous class buffer. Extensive experiments on widely used TTDA benchmarks demonstrate that DAWA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining real-time inference speeds of approximately 40 FPS.

Jingcheng Ke, Dele Wang, Jun-Cheng Chen et al.

One common belief is that with complex models and pre-training on large-scale datasets, transformer-based methods for referring expression comprehension (REC) perform much better than existing graph-based methods. We observe that since most graph-based methods adopt an off-the-shelf detector to locate candidate objects (i.e., regions detected by the object detector), they face two challenges that result in subpar performance: (1) the presence of significant noise caused by numerous irrelevant objects during reasoning, and (2) inaccurate localization outcomes attributed to the provided detector. To address these issues, we introduce a plug-and-adapt module guided by sub-expressions, called dynamic gate constraint (DGC), which can adaptively disable irrelevant proposals and their connections in graphs during reasoning. We further introduce an expression-guided regression strategy (EGR) to refine location prediction. Extensive experimental results on the RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, Flickr30K, RefClef, and Ref-reasoning datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the DGC module and the EGR strategy in consistently boosting the performances of various graph-based REC methods. Without any pretaining, the proposed graph-based method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) transformer-based methods.

Quanxing Xu, Yuhao Tian, Ling Zhou et al.

Visual Question Answering (VQA), as the representative multimodal task, serves as a key benchmark for evaluating the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing evaluations largely rely on static datasets and accuracy-based metrics, which fail to capture robustness, consistency, and generalization. Inspired by Metamorphic Testing (MT), we propose Metamorphic Robustness Assessment (MetaRA), a testing framework that employs Metamorphic Relations (MRs) to systematically probe vulnerabilities in MLLM-based VQA systems. MetaRA generates controlled variations of image-question inputs based on specific MRs and evaluates models across diverse conditions. Applying MetaRA to multiple MLLM-based VQA models across different tasks reveals nuanced failure patterns, including sensitivity to linguistic perturbations, over-reliance on superficial visual cues, and deeper weaknesses in multimodal reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that MetaRA provides richer diagnostic insights than conventional accuracy metrics, exposing failure modes that remain hidden under standard benchmarks. Overall, this work highlights the need for systematic robustness evaluation in VQA and positions metamorphic assessment as a scalable, model-agnostic approach toward trustworthy multimodal AI.

Xujie Wan, Wenjie Li, Guangwei Gao et al.

Recently, CNN and Transformer hybrid networks demonstrated excellent performance in face super-resolution (FSR) tasks. Since numerous features at different scales in hybrid networks, how to fuse these multiscale features and promote their complementarity is crucial for enhancing FSR. However, existing hybrid network-based FSR methods ignore this, only simply combining the Transformer and CNN. To address this issue, we propose an attention-guided Multiscale interaction network (AMINet), which incorporates local and global feature interactions, as well as encoder-decoder phase feature interactions. Specifically, we propose a Local and Global Feature Interaction Module (LGFI) to promote the fusion of global features and the local features extracted from different receptive fields by our Residual Depth Feature Extraction Module (RDFE). Additionally, we propose a Selective Kernel Attention Fusion Module (SKAF) to adaptively select fusions of different features within the LGFI and encoder-decoder phases. Our above design allows the free flow of multiscale features from within modules and between the encoder and decoder, which can promote the complementarity of different scale features to enhance FSR. Comprehensive experiments confirm that our method consistently performs well with less computational consumption and faster inference.

Zihui Zhao, Yifei Zhang, Zheng Wang et al.

The raw depth images captured by RGB-D cameras using Time-of-Flight (TOF) or structured light often suffer from incomplete depth values due to weak reflections, boundary shadows, and artifacts, which limit their applications in downstream vision tasks. Existing methods address this problem through depth completion in the image domain, but they overlook the physical characteristics of raw depth images. It has been observed that the presence of invalid depth areas alters the frequency distribution pattern. In this work, we propose a Spatio-Spectral Mutual Learning framework (S2ML) to harmonize the advantages of both spatial and frequency domains for depth completion. Specifically, we consider the distinct properties of amplitude and phase spectra and devise a dedicated spectral fusion module. Meanwhile, the local and global correlations between spatial-domain and frequency-domain features are calculated in a unified embedding space. The gradual mutual representation and refinement encourage the network to fully explore complementary physical characteristics and priors for more accurate depth completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed S2ML method, outperforming the state-of-the-art method CFormer by 0.828 dB and 0.834 dB on the NYU-Depth V2 and SUN RGB-D datasets, respectively.

Sahibzada Adil Shahzad, Ammarah Hashmi, Junichi Yamagishi et al.

Multimodal deepfakes can exhibit subtle visual artifacts and cross-modal inconsistencies, which remain challenging to detect, especially when detectors are trained primarily on curated synthetic forgeries. Such synthetic dependence can introduce dataset and generator bias, limiting scalability and robustness to unseen manipulations. We propose SAVe, a self-supervised audio-visual deepfake detection framework that learns entirely on authentic videos. SAVe generates on-the-fly, identity-preserving, region-aware self-blended pseudo-manipulations to emulate tampering artifacts, enabling the model to learn complementary visual cues across multiple facial granularities. To capture cross-modal evidence, SAVe also models lip-speech synchronization via an audio-visual alignment component that detects temporal misalignment patterns characteristic of audio-visual forgeries. Experiments on FakeAVCeleb and AV-LipSync-TIMIT demonstrate competitive in-domain performance and strong cross-dataset generalization, highlighting self-supervised learning as a scalable paradigm for multimodal deepfake detection.

Chunwei Tian, Kai Liu, Bob Zhang et al.

Stable consumer electronic systems can assist traffic better. Good traffic consumer electronic systems require collaborative work between traffic algorithms and hardware. However, performance of popular traffic algorithms containing vehicle detection methods based on deep networks via learning data relation rather than learning differences in different lighting and occlusions is limited. In this paper, we present a dynamic Transformer network for vehicle detection (DTNet). DTNet utilizes a dynamic convolution to guide a deep network to dynamically generate weights to enhance adaptability of an obtained detector. Taking into relations of different information account, a mixed attention mechanism based channel attention and Transformer is exploited to strengthen relations of channels and pixels to extract more salient information for vehicle detection. To overcome the drawback of difference in an image account, a translation-variant convolution relies on spatial location information to refine obtained structural information for vehicle detection. Experimental results illustrate that our DTNet is competitive for vehicle detection. Code of the proposed DTNet can be obtained at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/DTNet.

Ammarah Hashmi, Sahibzada Adil Shahzad, Chia-Wen Lin et al.

Deep Learning has been successfully applied in diverse fields, and its impact on deepfake detection is no exception. Deepfakes are fake yet realistic synthetic content that can be used deceitfully for political impersonation, phishing, slandering, or spreading misinformation. Despite extensive research on unimodal deepfake detection, identifying complex deepfakes through joint analysis of audio and visual streams remains relatively unexplored. To fill this gap, this survey first provides an overview of audiovisual deepfake generation techniques, applications, and their consequences, and then provides a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art methods that combine audio and visual modalities to enhance detection accuracy, summarizing and critically analyzing their strengths and limitations. Furthermore, we discuss existing open source datasets for a deeper understanding, which can contribute to the research community and provide necessary information to beginners who want to analyze deep learning-based audiovisual methods for video forensics. By bridging the gap between unimodal and multimodal approaches, this paper aims to improve the effectiveness of deepfake detection strategies and guide future research in cybersecurity and media integrity.

Yi Xiao, Qiangqiang Yuan, Kui Jiang et al.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are emerging as a promising alternative to traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs), offering biological plausibility and energy efficiency. Despite these merits, SNNs are frequently hampered by limited capacity and insufficient representation power, yet remain underexplored in remote sensing super-resolution (SR) tasks. In this paper, we first observe that spiking signals exhibit drastic intensity variations across diverse textures, highlighting an active learning state of the neurons. This observation motivates us to apply SNNs for efficient SR of RSIs. Inspired by the success of attention mechanisms in representing salient information, we devise the spiking attention block (SAB), a concise yet effective component that optimizes membrane potentials through inferred attention weights, which, in turn, regulates spiking activity for superior feature representation. Our key contributions include: 1) we bridge the independent modulation between temporal and channel dimensions, facilitating joint feature correlation learning, and 2) we access the global self-similar patterns in large-scale remote sensing imagery to infer spatial attention weights, incorporating effective priors for realistic and faithful reconstruction. Building upon SAB, we proposed SpikeSR, which achieves state-of-the-art performance across various remote sensing benchmarks such as AID, DOTA, and DIOR, while maintaining high computational efficiency. Code of SpikeSR will be available at https://github.com/XY-boy/SpikeSR.

Wenxuan Zhu, Bing Li, Cheng Zheng et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive 2D image/video understanding capabilities. However, there are no publicly standardized benchmarks to assess the abilities of MLLMs in understanding the 4D objects (3D objects with temporal evolution over time). In this paper, we introduce 4D-Bench, the first benchmark to evaluate the capabilities of MLLMs in 4D object understanding, featuring tasks in 4D object Question Answering (4D object QA) and 4D object captioning. 4D-Bench provides 4D objects with diverse categories, high-quality annotations, and tasks necessitating multi-view spatial-temporal understanding, different from existing 2D image/video-based benchmarks. With 4D-Bench, we evaluate a wide range of open-source and closed-source MLLMs. The results from the 4D object captioning experiment indicate that MLLMs generally exhibit weaker temporal understanding compared to their appearance understanding, notably, while open-source models approach closed-source performance in appearance understanding, they show larger performance gaps in temporal understanding. 4D object QA yields surprising findings: even with simple single-object videos, MLLMs perform poorly, with state-of-the-art GPT-4o achieving only 63\% accuracy compared to the human baseline of 91\%. These findings highlight a substantial gap in 4D object understanding and the need for further advancements in MLLMs.

Guanyu Zhou, Wenxuan Liu, Wenxin Huang et al.

The lack of occlusion data in common action recognition video datasets limits model robustness and hinders consistent performance gains. We build OccludeNet, a large-scale occluded video dataset including both real and synthetic occlusion scenes in different natural settings. OccludeNet includes dynamic occlusion, static occlusion, and multi-view interactive occlusion, addressing gaps in current datasets. Our analysis shows occlusion affects action classes differently: actions with low scene relevance and partial body visibility see larger drops in accuracy. To overcome the limits of existing occlusion-aware methods, we propose a structural causal model for occluded scenes and introduce the Causal Action Recognition (CAR) method, which uses backdoor adjustment and counterfactual reasoning. This approach strengthens key actor information and improves model robustness to occlusion. We hope the challenges of OccludeNet will encourage more study of causal links in occluded scenes and lead to a fresh look at class relations, ultimately leading to lasting performance improvements. Our code and data is availibale at: https://github.com/The-Martyr/OccludeNet-Dataset

Mingbao Lin, Liujuan Cao, Yuxin Zhang et al.

This paper focuses on filter-level network pruning. A novel pruning method, termed CLR-RNF, is proposed. We first reveal a "long-tail" long-tail pruning problem in magnitude-based weight pruning methods, and then propose a computation-aware measurement for individual weight importance, followed by a Cross-Layer Ranking (CLR) of weights to identify and remove the bottom-ranked weights. Consequently, the per-layer sparsity makes up of the pruned network structure in our filter pruning. Then, we introduce a recommendation-based filter selection scheme where each filter recommends a group of its closest filters. To pick the preserved filters from these recommended groups, we further devise a k-Reciprocal Nearest Filter (RNF) selection scheme where the selected filters fall into the intersection of these recommended groups. Both our pruned network structure and the filter selection are non-learning processes, which thus significantly reduce the pruning complexity, and differentiate our method from existing works. We conduct image classification on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet to demonstrate the superiority of our CLR-RNF over the state-of-the-arts. For example, on CIFAR-10, CLR-RNF removes 74.1% FLOPs and 95.0% parameters from VGGNet-16 with even 0.3\% accuracy improvements. On ImageNet, it removes 70.2% FLOPs and 64.8% parameters from ResNet-50 with only 1.7% top-5 accuracy drops. Our project is at https://github.com/lmbxmu/CLR-RNF.

Chunwei Tian, Yong Xu, Wangmeng Zuo et al.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely applied for low-level vision over the past five years. According to nature of different applications, designing appropriate CNN architectures is developed. However, customized architectures gather different features via treating all pixel points as equal to improve the performance of given application, which ignores the effects of local power pixel points and results in low training efficiency. In this paper, we propose an asymmetric CNN (ACNet) comprising an asymmetric block (AB), a memory enhancement block (MEB) and a high-frequency feature enhancement block (HFFEB) for image super-resolution. The AB utilizes one-dimensional asymmetric convolutions to intensify the square convolution kernels in horizontal and vertical directions for promoting the influences of local salient features for SISR. The MEB fuses all hierarchical low-frequency features from the AB via residual learning (RL) technique to resolve the long-term dependency problem and transforms obtained low-frequency features into high-frequency features. The HFFEB exploits low- and high-frequency features to obtain more robust super-resolution features and address excessive feature enhancement problem. Addditionally, it also takes charge of reconstructing a high-resolution (HR) image. Extensive experiments show that our ACNet can effectively address single image super-resolution (SISR), blind SISR and blind SISR of blind noise problems. The code of the ACNet is shown at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/ACNet.

Kui Jiang, Zhongyuan Wang, Zheng Wang et al.

Low-light image enhancement aims to improve an image's visibility while keeping its visual naturalness. Different from existing methods tending to accomplish the relighting task directly by ignoring the fidelity and naturalness recovery, we investigate the intrinsic degradation and relight the low-light image while refining the details and color in two steps. Inspired by the color image formulation (diffuse illumination color plus environment illumination color), we first estimate the degradation from low-light inputs to simulate the distortion of environment illumination color, and then refine the content to recover the loss of diffuse illumination color. To this end, we propose a novel Degradation-to-Refinement Generation Network (DRGN). Its distinctive features can be summarized as 1) A novel two-step generation network for degradation learning and content refinement. It is not only superior to one-step methods, but also capable of synthesizing sufficient paired samples to benefit the model training; 2) A multi-resolution fusion network to represent the target information (degradation or contents) in a multi-scale cooperative manner, which is more effective to address the complex unmixing problems. Extensive experiments on both the enhancement task and joint detection task have verified the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method, surpassing the SOTA by \textit{0.70dB on average and 3.18\% in mAP}, respectively. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/kuijiang0802/DRGN}.

Bing Li, Yuanlue Zhu, Yitong Wang et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework to translate a portrait photo-face into an anime appearance. Our aim is to synthesize anime-faces which are style-consistent with a given reference anime-face. However, unlike typical translation tasks, such anime-face translation is challenging due to complex variations of appearances among anime-faces. Existing methods often fail to transfer the styles of reference anime-faces, or introduce noticeable artifacts/distortions in the local shapes of their generated faces. We propose AniGAN, a novel GAN-based translator that synthesizes high-quality anime-faces. Specifically, a new generator architecture is proposed to simultaneously transfer color/texture styles and transform local facial shapes into anime-like counterparts based on the style of a reference anime-face, while preserving the global structure of the source photo-face. We propose a double-branch discriminator to learn both domain-specific distributions and domain-shared distributions, helping generate visually pleasing anime-faces and effectively mitigate artifacts. Extensive experiments on selfie2anime and a new face2anime dataset qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods. The new dataset is available at https://github.com/bing-li-ai/AniGAN .

Mingbao Lin, Rongrong Ji, Zihan Xu et al.

Binary neural networks (BNNs) have attracted broad research interest due to their efficient storage and computational ability. Nevertheless, a significant challenge of BNNs lies in handling discrete constraints while ensuring bit entropy maximization, which typically makes their weight optimization very difficult. Existing methods relax the learning using the sign function, which simply encodes positive weights into +1s, and -1s otherwise. Alternatively, we formulate an angle alignment objective to constrain the weight binarization to {0,+1} to solve the challenge. In this paper, we show that our weight binarization provides an analytical solution by encoding high-magnitude weights into +1s, and 0s otherwise. Therefore, a high-quality discrete solution is established in a computationally efficient manner without the sign function. We prove that the learned weights of binarized networks roughly follow a Laplacian distribution that does not allow entropy maximization, and further demonstrate that it can be effectively solved by simply removing the $\ell_2$ regularization during network training. Our method, dubbed sign-to-magnitude network binarization (SiMaN), is evaluated on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, demonstrating its superiority over the sign-based state-of-the-arts. Our source code, experimental settings, training logs and binary models are available at https://github.com/lmbxmu/SiMaN.

Yunpeng Luo, Jiayi Ji, Xiaoshuai Sun et al.

Descriptive region features extracted by object detection networks have played an important role in the recent advancements of image captioning. However, they are still criticized for the lack of contextual information and fine-grained details, which in contrast are the merits of traditional grid features. In this paper, we introduce a novel Dual-Level Collaborative Transformer (DLCT) network to realize the complementary advantages of the two features. Concretely, in DLCT, these two features are first processed by a novelDual-way Self Attenion (DWSA) to mine their intrinsic properties, where a Comprehensive Relation Attention component is also introduced to embed the geometric information. In addition, we propose a Locality-Constrained Cross Attention module to address the semantic noises caused by the direct fusion of these two features, where a geometric alignment graph is constructed to accurately align and reinforce region and grid features. To validate our model, we conduct extensive experiments on the highly competitive MS-COCO dataset, and achieve new state-of-the-art performance on both local and online test sets, i.e., 133.8% CIDEr-D on Karpathy split and 135.4% CIDEr on the official split. Code is available at https://github.com/luo3300612/image-captioning-DLCT.

Mingbao Lin, Rongrong Ji, Zihan Xu et al.

Binary Neural Network (BNN) shows its predominance in reducing the complexity of deep neural networks. However, it suffers severe performance degradation. One of the major impediments is the large quantization error between the full-precision weight vector and its binary vector. Previous works focus on compensating for the norm gap while leaving the angular bias hardly touched. In this paper, for the first time, we explore the influence of angular bias on the quantization error and then introduce a Rotated Binary Neural Network (RBNN), which considers the angle alignment between the full-precision weight vector and its binarized version. At the beginning of each training epoch, we propose to rotate the full-precision weight vector to its binary vector to reduce the angular bias. To avoid the high complexity of learning a large rotation matrix, we further introduce a bi-rotation formulation that learns two smaller rotation matrices. In the training stage, we devise an adjustable rotated weight vector for binarization to escape the potential local optimum. Our rotation leads to around 50% weight flips which maximize the information gain. Finally, we propose a training-aware approximation of the sign function for the gradient backward. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet demonstrate the superiorities of RBNN over many state-of-the-arts. Our source code, experimental settings, training logs and binary models are available at https://github.com/lmbxmu/RBNN.

Chunwei Tian, Ruibin Zhuge, Zhihao Wu et al.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with strong expressive ability have achieved impressive performances on single image super-resolution (SISR). However, their excessive amounts of convolutions and parameters usually consume high computational cost and more memory storage for training a SR model, which limits their applications to SR with resource-constrained devices in real world. To resolve these problems, we propose a lightweight enhanced SR CNN (LESRCNN) with three successive sub-blocks, an information extraction and enhancement block (IEEB), a reconstruction block (RB) and an information refinement block (IRB). Specifically, the IEEB extracts hierarchical low-resolution (LR) features and aggregates the obtained features step-by-step to increase the memory ability of the shallow layers on deep layers for SISR. To remove redundant information obtained, a heterogeneous architecture is adopted in the IEEB. After that, the RB converts low-frequency features into high-frequency features by fusing global and local features, which is complementary with the IEEB in tackling the long-term dependency problem. Finally, the IRB uses coarse high-frequency features from the RB to learn more accurate SR features and construct a SR image. The proposed LESRCNN can obtain a high-quality image by a model for different scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed LESRCNN outperforms state-of-the-arts on SISR in terms of qualitative and quantitative evaluation. The code of LESRCNN is accessible on https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/LESRCNN.

Sadid Sahami, Gene Cheung, Chia-Wen Lin

User-generated videos (UGVs) uploaded from mobile phones to social media sites like YouTube and TikTok are short and non-repetitive. We summarize a transitory UGV into several keyframes in linear time via fast graph sampling based on Gershgorin disc alignment (GDA). Specifically, we first model a sequence of $N$ frames in a UGV as an $M$-hop path graph $\mathcal{G}^o$ for $M \ll N$, where the similarity between two frames within $M$ time instants is encoded as a positive edge based on feature similarity. Towards efficient sampling, we then "unfold" $\mathcal{G}^o$ to a $1$-hop path graph $\mathcal{G}$, specified by a generalized graph Laplacian matrix $\mathcal{L}$, via one of two graph unfolding procedures with provable performance bounds. We show that maximizing the smallest eigenvalue $λ_{\min}(\mathbf{B})$ of a coefficient matrix $\mathbf{B} = \textit{diag}\left(\mathbf{h}\right) + μ\mathcal{L}$, where $\mathbf{h}$ is the binary keyframe selection vector, is equivalent to minimizing a worst-case signal reconstruction error. We maximize instead the Gershgorin circle theorem (GCT) lower bound $λ^-_{\min}(\mathbf{B})$ by choosing $\mathbf{h}$ via a new fast graph sampling algorithm that iteratively aligns left-ends of Gershgorin discs for all graph nodes (frames). Extensive experiments on multiple short video datasets show that our algorithm achieves comparable or better video summarization performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, at a substantially reduced complexity.

Quanxing Xu, Ling Zhou, Xian Zhong et al.

With advances in multimodal research and deep learning, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for a wide range of multimodal tasks. As a core problem in vision-language research, Visual Question Answering (VQA) has increasingly employed MLLMs to improve performance, particularly in open-domain settings where external knowledge is essential. In this work, we aim to further enhance retrieval-based VQA by more effectively integrating MLLMs with structured reasoning and knowledge acquisition. We introduce a logical prompting strategy that fuses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with Visual Question Decomposition (VQD), termed CoVQD, to guide retrieval toward more accurate and relevant knowledge for MLLM inference. Building on this idea, we propose a new framework, CoVQD-guided RAG (CgRAG), which enables MLLMs to access more comprehensive and coherent external knowledge while benefiting from structured visual-text reasoning guidance, thereby improving generalization and reliability in complex cross-domain VQA scenarios. Extensive experiments on E-VQA, InfoSeek, and OKVQA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Chunwei Tian, Menghua Zheng, Tiancai Jiao et al.

Popular convolutional neural networks mainly use paired images in a supervised way for image watermark removal. However, watermarked images do not have reference images in the real world, which results in poor robustness of image watermark removal techniques. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised convolutional neural network (CNN) in image watermark removal (SWCNN). SWCNN uses a self-supervised way to construct reference watermarked images rather than given paired training samples, according to watermark distribution. A heterogeneous U-Net architecture is used to extract more complementary structural information via simple components for image watermark removal. Taking into account texture information, a mixed loss is exploited to improve visual effects of image watermark removal. Besides, a watermark dataset is conducted. Experimental results show that the proposed SWCNN is superior to popular CNNs in image watermark removal.

Shufan Pei, Junhong Lin, Wenxi Liu et al.

In addition to low light, night images suffer degradation from light effects (e.g., glare, floodlight, etc). However, existing nighttime visibility enhancement methods generally focus on low-light regions, which neglects, or even amplifies the light effects. To address this issue, we propose an Adaptive Multi-scale Fusion network (AMFusion) with infrared and visible images, which designs fusion rules according to different illumination regions. First, we separately fuse spatial and semantic features from infrared and visible images, where the former are used for the adjustment of light distribution and the latter are used for the improvement of detection accuracy. Thereby, we obtain an image free of low light and light effects, which improves the performance of nighttime object detection. Second, we utilize detection features extracted by a pre-trained backbone that guide the fusion of semantic features. Hereby, we design a Detection-guided Semantic Fusion Module (DSFM) to bridge the domain gap between detection and semantic features. Third, we propose a new illumination loss to constrain fusion image with normal light intensity. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of AMFusion with better visual quality and detection accuracy. The source code will be released after the peer review process.

Ammarah Hashmi, Sahibzada Adil Shahzad, Chia-Wen Lin et al.

The emergence of contemporary deepfakes has attracted significant attention in machine learning research, as artificial intelligence (AI) generated synthetic media increases the incidence of misinterpretation and is difficult to distinguish from genuine content. Currently, machine learning techniques have been extensively studied for automatically detecting deepfakes. However, human perception has been less explored. Malicious deepfakes could ultimately cause public and social problems. Can we humans correctly perceive the authenticity of the content of the videos we watch? The answer is obviously uncertain; therefore, this paper aims to evaluate the human ability to discern deepfake videos through a subjective study. We present our findings by comparing human observers to five state-ofthe-art audiovisual deepfake detection models. To this end, we used gamification concepts to provide 110 participants (55 native English speakers and 55 non-native English speakers) with a webbased platform where they could access a series of 40 videos (20 real and 20 fake) to determine their authenticity. Each participant performed the experiment twice with the same 40 videos in different random orders. The videos are manually selected from the FakeAVCeleb dataset. We found that all AI models performed better than humans when evaluated on the same 40 videos. The study also reveals that while deception is not impossible, humans tend to overestimate their detection capabilities. Our experimental results may help benchmark human versus machine performance, advance forensics analysis, and enable adaptive countermeasures.

Fu-Jen Tsai, Yan-Tsung Peng, Yen-Yu Lin et al.

Image dehazing aims to remove unwanted hazy artifacts in images. Although previous research has collected paired real-world hazy and haze-free images to improve dehazing models' performance in real-world scenarios, these models often experience significant performance drops when handling unseen real-world hazy images due to limited training data. This issue motivates us to develop a flexible domain adaptation method to enhance dehazing performance during testing. Observing that predicting haze patterns is generally easier than recovering clean content, we propose the Physics-guided Haze Transfer Network (PHATNet) which transfers haze patterns from unseen target domains to source-domain haze-free images, creating domain-specific fine-tuning sets to update dehazing models for effective domain adaptation. Additionally, we introduce a Haze-Transfer-Consistency loss and a Content-Leakage Loss to enhance PHATNet's disentanglement ability. Experimental results demonstrate that PHATNet significantly boosts state-of-the-art dehazing models on benchmark real-world image dehazing datasets.

Chih-Ling Chang, Fu-Jen Tsai, Zi-Ling Huang et al.

Image dehazing faces challenges when dealing with hazy images in real-world scenarios. A huge domain gap between synthetic and real-world haze images degrades dehazing performance in practical settings. However, collecting real-world image datasets for training dehazing models is challenging since both hazy and clean pairs must be captured under the same conditions. In this paper, we propose a Physics-guided Parametric Augmentation Network (PANet) that generates photo-realistic hazy and clean training pairs to effectively enhance real-world dehazing performance. PANet comprises a Haze-to-Parameter Mapper (HPM) to project hazy images into a parameter space and a Parameter-to-Haze Mapper (PHM) to map the resampled haze parameters back to hazy images. In the parameter space, we can pixel-wisely resample individual haze parameter maps to generate diverse hazy images with physically-explainable haze conditions unseen in the training set. Our experimental results demonstrate that PANet can augment diverse realistic hazy images to enrich existing hazy image benchmarks so as to effectively boost the performances of state-of-the-art image dehazing models.

Ching-Yi Lai, Chih-Yu Jian, Pei-Cheng Chuang et al.

In deepfake detection, the varying degrees of compression employed by social media platforms pose significant challenges for model generalization and reliability. Although existing methods have progressed from single-modal to multimodal approaches, they face critical limitations: single-modal methods struggle with feature degradation under data compression in social media streaming, while multimodal approaches require expensive data collection and labeling and suffer from inconsistent modal quality or accessibility in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Unimodal-generated Multimodal Contrastive Learning (UMCL) framework for robust cross-compression-rate (CCR) deepfake detection. In the training stage, our approach transforms a single visual modality into three complementary features: compression-robust rPPG signals, temporal landmark dynamics, and semantic embeddings from pre-trained vision-language models. These features are explicitly aligned through an affinity-driven semantic alignment (ASA) strategy, which models inter-modal relationships through affinity matrices and optimizes their consistency through contrastive learning. Subsequently, our cross-quality similarity learning (CQSL) strategy enhances feature robustness across compression rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance across various compression rates and manipulation types, establishing a new benchmark for robust deepfake detection. Notably, our approach maintains high detection accuracy even when individual features degrade, while providing interpretable insights into feature relationships through explicit alignment.