Daily Papers

Recent advances in latent diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in high-fidelity RGB image synthesis by leveraging pretrained VAEs to compress and reconstruct pixel data at low computational cost. However, the generation of transparent or layered content (RGBA image) remains largely unexplored, due to the lack of large-scale benchmarks. In this work, we propose ALPHA, the first comprehensive RGBA benchmark that adapts standard RGB metrics to four-channel images via alpha blending over canonical backgrounds. We further introduce ALPHAVAE, a unified end-to-end RGBA VAE that extends a pretrained RGB VAE by incorporating a dedicated alpha channel. The model is trained with a composite objective that combines alpha-blended pixel reconstruction, patch-level fidelity, perceptual consistency, and dual KL divergence constraints to ensure latent fidelity across both RGB and alpha representations. Our RGBA VAE, trained on only 8K images in contrast to 1M used by prior methods, achieves a +4.9 dB improvement in PSNR and a +3.2% increase in SSIM over LayerDiffuse in reconstruction. It also enables superior transparent image generation when fine-tuned within a latent diffusion framework. Our code, data, and models are released on https://github.com/o0o0o00o0/AlphaVAE for reproducibility.

There is growing interest in integrating high-fidelity visual synthesis capabilities into large language models (LLMs) without compromising their strong reasoning capabilities. Existing methods that directly train LLMs or bridge LLMs and diffusion models usually suffer from costly training since the backbone LLMs have not seen image representations during pretraining. We present Bifrost-1, a unified framework that bridges pretrained multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and diffusion models using patch-level CLIP image embeddings as latent variables, which are natively aligned with the MLLM's CLIP visual encoder. These patch-level image embeddings are integrated into the diffusion model with a lightweight adaptation of its ControlNet. To retain the original multimodal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, we equip the MLLM with a visual generation branch initialized from the original MLLM parameters when predicting the patch-level image embeddings. By seamlessly integrating pretrained MLLMs and diffusion models with patch-level CLIP latents, our framework enables high-fidelity controllable image generation with significant training efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate that Bifrost-1 achieves comparable or better performance than previous methods in terms of visual fidelity and multimodal understanding, with substantially lower compute during training. We also provide comprehensive ablation studies showing the effectiveness of our design choices.

Pre-trained video generation models hold great potential for generative video super-resolution (VSR). However, adapting them for full-size VSR, as most existing methods do, suffers from unnecessary intensive full-attention computation and fixed output resolution. To overcome these limitations, we make the first exploration into utilizing video diffusion priors for patch-wise VSR. This is non-trivial because pre-trained video diffusion models are not native for patch-level detail generation. To mitigate this challenge, we propose an innovative approach, called PatchVSR, which integrates a dual-stream adapter for conditional guidance. The patch branch extracts features from input patches to maintain content fidelity while the global branch extracts context features from the resized full video to bridge the generation gap caused by incomplete semantics of patches. Particularly, we also inject the patch's location information into the model to better contextualize patch synthesis within the global video frame. Experiments demonstrate that our method can synthesize high-fidelity, high-resolution details at the patch level. A tailor-made multi-patch joint modulation is proposed to ensure visual consistency across individually enhanced patches. Due to the flexibility of our patch-based paradigm, we can achieve highly competitive 4K VSR based on a 512x512 resolution base model, with extremely high efficiency.

A recent cutting-edge topic in multimodal modeling is to unify visual comprehension and generation within a single model. However, the two tasks demand mismatched decoding regimes and visual representations, making it non-trivial to jointly optimize within a shared feature space. In this work, we present Cheers, a unified multimodal model that decouples patch-level details from semantic representations, thereby stabilizing semantics for multimodal understanding and improving fidelity for image generation via gated detail residuals. Cheers includes three key components: (i) a unified vision tokenizer that encodes and compresses image latent states into semantic tokens for efficient LLM conditioning, (ii) an LLM-based Transformer that unifies autoregressive decoding for text generation and diffusion decoding for image generation, and (iii) a cascaded flow matching head that decodes visual semantics first and then injects semantically gated detail residuals from the vision tokenizer to refine high-frequency content. Experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that Cheers matches or surpasses advanced UMMs in both visual understanding and generation. Cheers also achieves 4x token compression, enabling more efficient high-resolution image encoding and generation. Notably, Cheers outperforms the Tar-1.5B on the popular benchmarks GenEval and MMBench, while requiring only 20% of the training cost, indicating effective and efficient (i.e., 4x token compression) unified multimodal modeling. We will release all code and data for future research.

Diffusion- and flow-based models usually allocate compute uniformly across space, updating all patches with the same timestep and number of function evaluations. While convenient, this ignores the heterogeneity of natural images: some regions are easy to denoise, whereas others benefit from more refinement or additional context. Motivated by this, we explore patch-level noise scales for image synthesis. We find that naively varying timesteps across image tokens performs poorly, as it exposes the model to overly informative training states that do not occur at inference. We therefore introduce a timestep sampler that explicitly controls the maximum patch-level information available during training, and show that moving from global to patch-level timesteps already improves image generation over standard baselines. By further augmenting the model with a lightweight per-patch difficulty head, we enable adaptive samplers that allocate compute dynamically where it is most needed. Combined with noise levels varying over both space and diffusion time, this yields Patch Forcing (PF), a framework that advances easier regions earlier so they can provide context for harder ones. PF achieves superior results on class-conditional ImageNet, remains orthogonal to representation alignment and guidance methods, and scales to text-to-image synthesis. Our results suggest that patch-level denoising schedules provide a promising foundation for adaptive image generation.

Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) are generally trained at fixed resolutions, limiting their capability when scaling up to high-resolution images. While training-based approaches address this limitation by training on high-resolution datasets, they require large amounts of data and considerable computational resources, making them less practical. Consequently, training-free methods, particularly patch-based approaches, have become a popular alternative. These methods divide an image into patches and fuse the denoising paths of each patch, showing strong performance on high-resolution generation. However, we observe two critical issues for patch-based approaches, which we call ``patch-level distribution shift" and ``increased patch monotonicity." To address these issues, we propose Adaptive Path Tracing (APT), a framework that combines Statistical Matching to ensure patch distributions remain consistent in upsampled latents and Scale-aware Scheduling to deal with the patch monotonicity. As a result, APT produces clearer and more refined details in high-resolution images. In addition, APT enables a shortcut denoising process, resulting in faster sampling with minimal quality degradation. Our experimental results confirm that APT produces more detailed outputs with improved inference speed, providing a practical approach to high-resolution image generation.

Adversarial patch attacks pose a severe threat to deep neural networks, yet most existing approaches rely on unrealistic white-box assumptions, untargeted objectives, or produce visually conspicuous patches that limit real-world applicability. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for fully controllable adversarial patch generation, where the attacker can freely choose both the input image x and the target class y target, thereby dictating the exact misclassification outcome. Our method combines a generative U-Net design with Grad-CAM-guided patch placement, enabling semantic-aware localization that maximizes attack effectiveness while preserving visual realism. Extensive experiments across convolutional networks (DenseNet-121, ResNet-50) and vision transformers (ViT-B/16, Swin-B/16, among others) demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across all settings, with attack success rates (ASR) and target-class success (TCS) consistently exceeding 99%. Importantly, we show that our method not only outperforms prior white-box attacks and untargeted baselines, but also surpasses existing non-realistic approaches that produce detectable artifacts. By simultaneously ensuring realism, targeted control, and black-box applicability-the three most challenging dimensions of patch-based attacks-our framework establishes a new benchmark for adversarial robustness research, bridging the gap between theoretical attack strength and practical stealthiness.

Process Reward Models (PRMs) aim to improve multi-step reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) by supervising intermediate steps and identifying errors. However, building effective PRMs remains challenging due to the lack of scalable, high-quality annotations. Existing approaches rely on costly human labeling, LLM-based self-evaluation that is prone to hallucination, or Monte Carlo (MC) estimation, which infers step quality solely from rollout outcomes and often introduces noisy, misaligned supervision due to credit misattribution. These issues result in three core limitations: noisy rewards, low factual fidelity, and misalignment with step-level reasoning objectives. To address these challenges, we introduce GroundedPRM, a tree-guided and fidelity-aware framework for automatic process supervision. To reduce reward noise and enable fine-grained credit assignment, we construct structured reasoning paths via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). To eliminate hallucinated supervision, we validate each intermediate step using an external tool, providing execution-grounded correctness signals. To combine both step-level validation and global outcome assessment, we design a hybrid reward aggregation mechanism that fuses tool-based verification with MCTS-derived feedback. Finally, we format the reward signal into a rationale-enhanced, generative structure to promote interpretability and compatibility with instruction-tuned LLMs. GroundedPRM is trained on only 40K automatically labeled samples, amounting to just 10% of the data used by the best-performing PRM trained with auto-labeled supervision. Nevertheless, it achieves up to a 26% relative improvement in average performance on ProcessBench. When used for reward-guided greedy search, GroundedPRM outperforms even PRMs trained with human-labeled supervision, offering a scalable and verifiable path toward high-quality process-level reasoning.

Recent advances in deep learning have shown exciting promise in filling large holes in natural images with semantically plausible and context aware details, impacting fundamental image manipulation tasks such as object removal. While these learning-based methods are significantly more effective in capturing high-level features than prior techniques, they can only handle very low-resolution inputs due to memory limitations and difficulty in training. Even for slightly larger images, the inpainted regions would appear blurry and unpleasant boundaries become visible. We propose a multi-scale neural patch synthesis approach based on joint optimization of image content and texture constraints, which not only preserves contextual structures but also produces high-frequency details by matching and adapting patches with the most similar mid-layer feature correlations of a deep classification network. We evaluate our method on the ImageNet and Paris Streetview datasets and achieved state-of-the-art inpainting accuracy. We show our approach produces sharper and more coherent results than prior methods, especially for high-resolution images.

We propose an effective denoising diffusion model for generating high-resolution images (e.g., 1024times512), trained on small-size image patches (e.g., 64times64). We name our algorithm Patch-DM, in which a new feature collage strategy is designed to avoid the boundary artifact when synthesizing large-size images. Feature collage systematically crops and combines partial features of the neighboring patches to predict the features of a shifted image patch, allowing the seamless generation of the entire image due to the overlap in the patch feature space. Patch-DM produces high-quality image synthesis results on our newly collected dataset of nature images (1024times512), as well as on standard benchmarks of smaller sizes (256times256), including LSUN-Bedroom, LSUN-Church, and FFHQ. We compare our method with previous patch-based generation methods and achieve state-of-the-art FID scores on all four datasets. Further, Patch-DM also reduces memory complexity compared to the classic diffusion models.

We target a 3D generative model for general natural scenes that are typically unique and intricate. Lacking the necessary volumes of training data, along with the difficulties of having ad hoc designs in presence of varying scene characteristics, renders existing setups intractable. Inspired by classical patch-based image models, we advocate for synthesizing 3D scenes at the patch level, given a single example. At the core of this work lies important algorithmic designs w.r.t the scene representation and generative patch nearest-neighbor module, that address unique challenges arising from lifting classical 2D patch-based framework to 3D generation. These design choices, on a collective level, contribute to a robust, effective, and efficient model that can generate high-quality general natural scenes with both realistic geometric structure and visual appearance, in large quantities and varieties, as demonstrated upon a variety of exemplar scenes.

We present PatchmatchNet, a novel and learnable cascade formulation of Patchmatch for high-resolution multi-view stereo. With high computation speed and low memory requirement, PatchmatchNet can process higher resolution imagery and is more suited to run on resource limited devices than competitors that employ 3D cost volume regularization. For the first time we introduce an iterative multi-scale Patchmatch in an end-to-end trainable architecture and improve the Patchmatch core algorithm with a novel and learned adaptive propagation and evaluation scheme for each iteration. Extensive experiments show a very competitive performance and generalization for our method on DTU, Tanks & Temples and ETH3D, but at a significantly higher efficiency than all existing top-performing models: at least two and a half times faster than state-of-the-art methods with twice less memory usage.

Single image depth estimation is a foundational task in computer vision and generative modeling. However, prevailing depth estimation models grapple with accommodating the increasing resolutions commonplace in today's consumer cameras and devices. Existing high-resolution strategies show promise, but they often face limitations, ranging from error propagation to the loss of high-frequency details. We present PatchFusion, a novel tile-based framework with three key components to improve the current state of the art: (1) A patch-wise fusion network that fuses a globally-consistent coarse prediction with finer, inconsistent tiled predictions via high-level feature guidance, (2) A Global-to-Local (G2L) module that adds vital context to the fusion network, discarding the need for patch selection heuristics, and (3) A Consistency-Aware Training (CAT) and Inference (CAI) approach, emphasizing patch overlap consistency and thereby eradicating the necessity for post-processing. Experiments on UnrealStereo4K, MVS-Synth, and Middleburry 2014 demonstrate that our framework can generate high-resolution depth maps with intricate details. PatchFusion is independent of the base model for depth estimation. Notably, our framework built on top of SOTA ZoeDepth brings improvements for a total of 17.3% and 29.4% in terms of the root mean squared error (RMSE) on UnrealStereo4K and MVS-Synth, respectively.

Subject-driven generation is a critical task in creative AI; yet current state-of-the-art methods present a stark trade-off. They either rely on computationally expensive, per-subject fine-tuning, sacrificing efficiency and zero-shot capability, or employ feed-forward architectures built on diffusion models, which are inherently plagued by slow inference speeds. Visual Auto-Regressive (VAR) models are renowned for their rapid sampling speeds and strong generative quality, making them an ideal yet underexplored foundation for resolving this tension. To bridge this gap, we introduce EchoGen, a pioneering framework that empowers VAR models with subject-driven generation capabilities. The core design of EchoGen is an effective dual-path injection strategy that disentangles a subject's high-level semantic identity from its low-level fine-grained details, enabling enhanced controllability and fidelity. We employ a semantic encoder to extract the subject's abstract identity, which is injected through decoupled cross-attention to guide the overall composition. Concurrently, a content encoder captures intricate visual details, which are integrated via a multi-modal attention mechanism to ensure high-fidelity texture and structural preservation. To the best of our knowledge, EchoGen is the first feed-forward subject-driven framework built upon VAR models. Both quantitative and qualitative results substantiate our design, demonstrating that EchoGen achieves subject fidelity and image quality comparable to state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods with significantly lower sampling latency. Code and models will be released soon.

A very recent trend in generative modeling is building 3D-aware generators from 2D image collections. To induce the 3D bias, such models typically rely on volumetric rendering, which is expensive to employ at high resolutions. During the past months, there appeared more than 10 works that address this scaling issue by training a separate 2D decoder to upsample a low-resolution image (or a feature tensor) produced from a pure 3D generator. But this solution comes at a cost: not only does it break multi-view consistency (i.e. shape and texture change when the camera moves), but it also learns the geometry in a low fidelity. In this work, we show that it is possible to obtain a high-resolution 3D generator with SotA image quality by following a completely different route of simply training the model patch-wise. We revisit and improve this optimization scheme in two ways. First, we design a location- and scale-aware discriminator to work on patches of different proportions and spatial positions. Second, we modify the patch sampling strategy based on an annealed beta distribution to stabilize training and accelerate the convergence. The resulted model, named EpiGRAF, is an efficient, high-resolution, pure 3D generator, and we test it on four datasets (two introduced in this work) at 256^2 and 512^2 resolutions. It obtains state-of-the-art image quality, high-fidelity geometry and trains {approx} 2.5 times faster than the upsampler-based counterparts. Project website: https://universome.github.io/epigraf.

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.

Since the future of computing is heterogeneous, scalability is a crucial problem for single image super-resolution. Recent works try to train one network, which can be deployed on platforms with different capacities. However, they rely on the pixel-wise sparse convolution, which is not hardware-friendly and achieves limited practical speedup. As image can be divided into patches, which have various restoration difficulties, we present a scalable method based on Adaptive Patch Exiting (APE) to achieve more practical speedup. Specifically, we propose to train a regressor to predict the incremental capacity of each layer for the patch. Once the incremental capacity is below the threshold, the patch can exit at the specific layer. Our method can easily adjust the trade-off between performance and efficiency by changing the threshold of incremental capacity. Furthermore, we propose a novel strategy to enable the network training of our method. We conduct extensive experiments across various backbones, datasets and scaling factors to demonstrate the advantages of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/littlepure2333/APE

Supervised neural networks are known to achieve excellent results in various image restoration tasks. However, such training requires datasets composed of pairs of corrupted images and their corresponding ground truth targets. Unfortunately, such data is not available in many applications. For the task of image denoising in which the noise statistics is unknown, several self-supervised training methods have been proposed for overcoming this difficulty. Some of these require knowledge of the noise model, while others assume that the contaminating noise is uncorrelated, both assumptions are too limiting for many practical needs. This work proposes a novel self-supervised training technique suitable for the removal of unknown correlated noise. The proposed approach neither requires knowledge of the noise model nor access to ground truth targets. The input to our algorithm consists of easily captured bursts of noisy shots. Our algorithm constructs artificial patch-craft images from these bursts by patch matching and stitching, and the obtained crafted images are used as targets for the training. Our method does not require registration of the images within the burst. We evaluate the proposed framework through extensive experiments with synthetic and real image noise.

The non-local self-similarity property of natural images has been exploited extensively for solving various image processing problems. When it comes to video sequences, harnessing this force is even more beneficial due to the temporal redundancy. In the context of image and video denoising, many classically-oriented algorithms employ self-similarity, splitting the data into overlapping patches, gathering groups of similar ones and processing these together somehow. With the emergence of convolutional neural networks (CNN), the patch-based framework has been abandoned. Most CNN denoisers operate on the whole image, leveraging non-local relations only implicitly by using a large receptive field. This work proposes a novel approach for leveraging self-similarity in the context of video denoising, while still relying on a regular convolutional architecture. We introduce a concept of patch-craft frames - artificial frames that are similar to the real ones, built by tiling matched patches. Our algorithm augments video sequences with patch-craft frames and feeds them to a CNN. We demonstrate the substantial boost in denoising performance obtained with the proposed approach.

Machine learning models are known to be susceptible to adversarial perturbation. One famous attack is the adversarial patch, a sticker with a particularly crafted pattern that makes the model incorrectly predict the object it is placed on. This attack presents a critical threat to cyber-physical systems that rely on cameras such as autonomous cars. Despite the significance of the problem, conducting research in this setting has been difficult; evaluating attacks and defenses in the real world is exceptionally costly while synthetic data are unrealistic. In this work, we propose the REAP (REalistic Adversarial Patch) benchmark, a digital benchmark that allows the user to evaluate patch attacks on real images, and under real-world conditions. Built on top of the Mapillary Vistas dataset, our benchmark contains over 14,000 traffic signs. Each sign is augmented with a pair of geometric and lighting transformations, which can be used to apply a digitally generated patch realistically onto the sign. Using our benchmark, we perform the first large-scale assessments of adversarial patch attacks under realistic conditions. Our experiments suggest that adversarial patch attacks may present a smaller threat than previously believed and that the success rate of an attack on simpler digital simulations is not predictive of its actual effectiveness in practice. We release our benchmark publicly at https://github.com/wagner-group/reap-benchmark.

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models have been extensively adopted for real-world image Super-Resolution because of their powerful generative priors through textual guidance. However, when super-resolving high-resolution images with patch-wise inference strategy, most existing diffusion-based SR methods tend to suffer from over-generation, due to the misalignment between the global prompt from LR image and the incomplete semantic information of local patches during each inference step. On the other hand, most existing methods also failed to generate detailed texture in local patches due to the overemphasis on global generation capabilities in network designs and training strategies. To address this issue, we present DreamSR, a novel SR model that suppresses local over-generation and improves fine-detail synthesis, thereby achieving visually faithful results with ultra-high-quality details. Specifically, we propose a dual-branch MM-ControlNet, where the ControlNet generates local textual feature with patch-level prompts while the pre-trained DiT provides global textual feature with global prompts, thereby mitigating over-generation and ensuring semantic consistency across patches. We also design a comprehensive training strategy with stage-specific data processing pipelines and a Receptive-Field Enhancement strategy, enhancing the model's capability to capture patch information and effectively restore local textures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamSR outperforms state-of-the-art methods, providing high-quality SR results. Code and model are available at https://github.com/jerrydong0219/DreamSR.

We present an approach to enhancing the realism of synthetic images. The images are enhanced by a convolutional network that leverages intermediate representations produced by conventional rendering pipelines. The network is trained via a novel adversarial objective, which provides strong supervision at multiple perceptual levels. We analyze scene layout distributions in commonly used datasets and find that they differ in important ways. We hypothesize that this is one of the causes of strong artifacts that can be observed in the results of many prior methods. To address this we propose a new strategy for sampling image patches during training. We also introduce multiple architectural improvements in the deep network modules used for photorealism enhancement. We confirm the benefits of our contributions in controlled experiments and report substantial gains in stability and realism in comparison to recent image-to-image translation methods and a variety of other baselines.

Finetuning-free personalized image generation can synthesize customized images without test-time finetuning, attracting wide research interest owing to its high efficiency. Current finetuning-free methods simply adopt a single training stage with a simple image reconstruction task, and they typically generate low-quality images inconsistent with the reference images during test-time. To mitigate this problem, inspired by the recent DPO (i.e., direct preference optimization) technique, this work proposes an additional training stage to improve the pre-trained personalized generation models. However, traditional DPO only determines the overall superiority or inferiority of two samples, which is not suitable for personalized image generation because the generated images are commonly inconsistent with the reference images only in some local image patches. To tackle this problem, this work proposes PatchDPO that estimates the quality of image patches within each generated image and accordingly trains the model. To this end, PatchDPO first leverages the pre-trained vision model with a proposed self-supervised training method to estimate the patch quality. Next, PatchDPO adopts a weighted training approach to train the model with the estimated patch quality, which rewards the image patches with high quality while penalizing the image patches with low quality. Experiment results demonstrate that PatchDPO significantly improves the performance of multiple pre-trained personalized generation models, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both single-object and multi-object personalized image generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/hqhQAQ/PatchDPO.

Activation patching is a standard method in mechanistic interpretability for localizing the components of a model responsible for specific behaviors, but it is computationally expensive to apply at scale. Attribution patching offers a faster, gradient-based approximation, yet suffers from noise and reduced reliability in deep, highly non-linear networks. In this work, we introduce Relevance Patching (RelP), which replaces the local gradients in attribution patching with propagation coefficients derived from Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP). LRP propagates the network's output backward through the layers, redistributing relevance to lower-level components according to local propagation rules that ensure properties such as relevance conservation or improved signal-to-noise ratio. Like attribution patching, RelP requires only two forward passes and one backward pass, maintaining computational efficiency while improving faithfulness. We validate RelP across a range of models and tasks, showing that it more accurately approximates activation patching than standard attribution patching, particularly when analyzing residual stream and MLP outputs in the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. For instance, for MLP outputs in GPT-2 Large, attribution patching achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.006, whereas RelP reaches 0.956, highlighting the improvement offered by RelP. Additionally, we compare the faithfulness of sparse feature circuits identified by RelP and Integrated Gradients (IG), showing that RelP achieves comparable faithfulness without the extra computational cost associated with IG.

With the development of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), plenty of methods based on DNNs have been proposed for Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). However, existing methods mostly train the DNNs on uniformly sampled LR-HR patch pairs, which makes them fail to fully exploit informative patches within the image. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective data augmentation method. We first devise a heuristic metric to evaluate the informative importance of each patch pair. In order to reduce the computational cost for all patch pairs, we further propose to optimize the calculation of our metric by integral image, achieving about two orders of magnitude speedup. The training patch pairs are sampled according to their informative importance with our method. Extensive experiments show our sampling augmentation can consistently improve the convergence and boost the performance of various SISR architectures, including EDSR, RCAN, RDN, SRCNN and ESPCN across different scaling factors (x2, x3, x4). Code is available at https://github.com/littlepure2333/SamplingAug

Observing certain patches in an image reduces the uncertainty of others. Their realization lowers the distribution entropy of each remaining patch feature, analogous to collapsing a particle's wave function in quantum mechanics. This phenomenon can intuitively be called patch collapse. To identify which patches are most relied on during a target region's collapse, we learn an autoencoder that softly selects a subset of patches to reconstruct each target patch. Graphing these learned dependencies for each patch's PageRank score reveals the optimal patch order to realize an image. We show that respecting this order benefits various masked image modeling methods. First, autoregressive image generation can be boosted by retraining the state-of-the-art model MAR. Next, we introduce a new setup for image classification by exposing Vision Transformers only to high-rank patches in the collapse order. Seeing 22\% of such patches is sufficient to achieve high accuracy. With these experiments, we propose patch collapse as a novel image modeling perspective that promotes vision efficiency. Our project is available at https://github.com/wguo-ai/CoP .

Existing image inpainting methods often produce artifacts when dealing with large holes in real applications. To address this challenge, we propose an iterative inpainting method with a feedback mechanism. Specifically, we introduce a deep generative model which not only outputs an inpainting result but also a corresponding confidence map. Using this map as feedback, it progressively fills the hole by trusting only high-confidence pixels inside the hole at each iteration and focuses on the remaining pixels in the next iteration. As it reuses partial predictions from the previous iterations as known pixels, this process gradually improves the result. In addition, we propose a guided upsampling network to enable generation of high-resolution inpainting results. We achieve this by extending the Contextual Attention module to borrow high-resolution feature patches in the input image. Furthermore, to mimic real object removal scenarios, we collect a large object mask dataset and synthesize more realistic training data that better simulates user inputs. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. More results and Web APP are available at https://zengxianyu.github.io/iic.

We present GB-LSR (Global-Bandwidth Local Spectral Representation), a fixed-grid local spectral representation for continuous image reconstruction. The image domain is partitioned into non-overlapping square patches, each carrying coefficients for a truncated Fourier basis predicted from shared convolutional-encoder features. A single trainable scalar bandwidth is shared globally across all patches and images, and reconstruction at any continuous coordinate is a fixed-size basis contraction whose cost is independent of image size. We study three bandwidth-handling variants: a trainable global scalar (main), a fixed global scalar, and a per-patch bandwidth field. On a standardized native-reconstruction benchmark across Kodak, Set14, and Urban100, the main variant outperforms matched-budget amortized LIIF / LTE / WIRE re-implementations by 2.8-3.6 dB PSNR and 0.11-0.15 LPIPS, while running at roughly one-quarter of the slowest baseline's inference cost. The single global scalar suffices empirically: per-patch adaptive-bandwidth alternatives do not improve over it on either a closed-form locality diagnostic or an end-to-end ablation. In a separate arbitrary-scale super-resolution (ASR) extension, GB-LSR achieves competitive PSNR-Y under a canonical-style SR protocol and runs 1.44x faster than LIIF-RDN and 3.25x faster than LTE-SwinIR at x4; within the same extension, a variant trained and evaluated without 4-corner local-ensemble averaging gives a 1.77x speedup with 35% lower peak memory and negligible PSNR change, while additionally widening the RDN encoder from 64 to 96 channels gives a small positive PSNR shift with a 1.58x speedup and 31% lower peak memory. Native-reconstruction claims are scoped to the matched-budget amortized protocol, and ASR claims are scoped to a separate canonical-style SR protocol.

Video generation powers a vast array of downstream applications. However, while the de facto standard, i.e., latent diffusion models, typically employ heavily conditioned denoising networks, their decoders often remain unconditional. We observe that this architectural asymmetry leads to significant loss of detail and inconsistency relative to the input image. To address this, we argue that the decoder requires equal conditioning to preserve structural integrity. We introduce RefDecoder, a reference-conditioned video VAE decoder by injecting high-fidelity reference image signal directly into the decoding process via reference attention. Specifically, a lightweight image encoder maps the reference frame into the detail-rich high-dimensional tokens, which are co-processed with the denoised video latent tokens at each decoder up-sampling stage. We demonstrate consistent improvements across several distinct decoder backbones (e.g., Wan 2.1 and VideoVAE+), achieving up to +2.1dB PSNR over the unconditional baselines on the Inter4K, WebVid, and Large Motion reconstruction benchmarks. Notably, RefDecoder can be directly swapped into existing video generation systems without additional fine-tuning, and we report across-the-board improvements in subject consistency, background consistency, and overall quality scores on the VBench I2V benchmark. Beyond I2V, RefDecoder generalizes well to a wide range of visual generation tasks such as style transfer and video editing refinement.

Identifying AI-generated content is critical for the safe and ethical use of generative AI. Recent research has focused on developing detectors that generalize to unknown generators, with popular methods relying either on high-level features or low-level fingerprints. However, these methods have clear limitations: biased towards unseen content, or vulnerable to common image degradations, such as JPEG compression. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, SFLD, which incorporates PatchShuffle to integrate high-level semantic and low-level textural information. SFLD applies PatchShuffle at multiple levels, improving robustness and generalization across various generative models. Additionally, current benchmarks face challenges such as low image quality, insufficient content preservation, and limited class diversity. In response, we introduce TwinSynths, a new benchmark generation methodology that constructs visually near-identical pairs of real and synthetic images to ensure high quality and content preservation. Our extensive experiments and analysis show that SFLD outperforms existing methods on detecting a wide variety of fake images sourced from GANs, diffusion models, and TwinSynths, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance and generalization capabilities to novel generative models.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are improving quickly, but standard benchmarks can hide systematic failures that reduce real world trust. We introduce MATS (Multimodal Audit for Truthful Spatialization), a compact behavioral audit that measures whether models reject visually contradicted statements, and two metrics Spatial Consistency Score (SCS) and Incorrect Agreement Rate (IAR). Instruction tuned generative VLMs (LLaVA 1.5, QwenVLchat) exhibit very low SCS and high IAR, while contrastive encoders (CLIP, SigLIP) are far more robust. Activation patching causally localizes failure loci (mid to late cross attention for generative models, pooled projection components for contrastive models) and suggests concrete repair paths.

On-the-fly 3D reconstruction from monocular image sequences is a long-standing challenge in computer vision, critical for applications such as real-to-sim, AR/VR, and robotics. Existing methods face a major tradeoff: per-scene optimization yields high fidelity but is computationally expensive, whereas feed-forward foundation models enable real-time inference but struggle with accuracy and robustness. In this work, we propose ARTDECO, a unified framework that combines the efficiency of feed-forward models with the reliability of SLAM-based pipelines. ARTDECO uses 3D foundation models for pose estimation and point prediction, coupled with a Gaussian decoder that transforms multi-scale features into structured 3D Gaussians. To sustain both fidelity and efficiency at scale, we design a hierarchical Gaussian representation with a LoD-aware rendering strategy, which improves rendering fidelity while reducing redundancy. Experiments on eight diverse indoor and outdoor benchmarks show that ARTDECO delivers interactive performance comparable to SLAM, robustness similar to feed-forward systems, and reconstruction quality close to per-scene optimization, providing a practical path toward on-the-fly digitization of real-world environments with both accurate geometry and high visual fidelity. Explore more demos on our project page: https://city-super.github.io/artdeco/.

The ability to render scenes at adjustable fidelity from a single model, known as level of detail (LoD), is crucial for practical deployment of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Existing discrete LoD methods expose only a limited set of operating points, while concurrent continuous LoD approaches enable smoother scaling but often suffer noticeable quality degradation at full capacity, making LoD a costly design decision. We introduce Matryoshka Gaussian Splatting (MGS), a training framework that enables continuous LoD for standard 3DGS pipelines without sacrificing full-capacity rendering quality. MGS learns a single ordered set of Gaussians such that rendering any prefix, the first k splats, produces a coherent reconstruction whose fidelity improves smoothly with increasing budget. Our key idea is stochastic budget training: each iteration samples a random splat budget and optimises both the corresponding prefix and the full set. This strategy requires only two forward passes and introduces no architectural modifications. Experiments across four benchmarks and six baselines show that MGS matches the full-capacity performance of its backbone while enabling a continuous speed-quality trade-off from a single model. Extensive ablations on ordering strategies, training objectives, and model capacity further validate the designs.

Tokenizer-free language models eliminate the tokenizer step of the language modeling pipeline by operating directly on bytes; patch-based variants further aggregate contiguous byte spans into patches for efficiency. However, the average patch size chosen at the model design stage governs a tight trade-off: larger patches reduce compute and KV-cache footprint, but degrade modeling quality. We trace this trade-off to patch lag: until a patch is fully observed, byte predictions within it must rely on a stale representation from the previous patch to preserve causality; this lag widens as patches grow larger. We introduce Scratchpad Patching (SP), which inserts transient scratchpads inside each patch to aggregate the bytes seen so far and refresh patch-level context for subsequent predictions. SP triggers scratchpads using next-byte prediction entropy, selectively allocating compute to information-dense regions and enabling post-hoc adjustment of inference-time compute. Across experiments on natural language and code, SP improves model quality at the same patch size; for example, even at 16 bytes per patch, SP-augmented models match or closely approach the byte-level baseline on downstream evaluations while using a 16times smaller KV cache over patches and 3-4times less inference compute.

LLM-based multi-agent pipelines flip from correct to incorrect answers under simulated peer disagreement at rates we term yield, a vulnerability widely attributed to RLHF-induced sycophancy. We test this attribution across four model families and find it largely wrong: pretrained base models exhibit the same substitution pattern as their Instruct variants, averaging higher yield than Instruct. Using activation patching, we localize the corruption to a narrow mid-layer window where attention carries the causal weight and MLP contribution is negligible; patching above this window restores 96% of the clean-to-pressured P(correct) gap. The attack surface decomposes into two independent factors (channel framing and consensus strength) whose interaction produces a 47.5 percentage-point yield gap at majority consensus, preserved across jury sizes N in {4, 5, 6}. Two converging activation-space interventions show that pressure suppresses clean-reasoning features rather than activating a new sycophancy circuit. A single correctly-arguing dissenter reduces yield by 54-73 percentage points across all framings tested, whereas the strongest prompt-level defense fails on attack variants outside its design surface. Mitigations should target the mechanism, structured dissent at the pipeline level, rather than prompt-level defenses.

Deep neural networks have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial examples -- small, imperceptible changes constructed to cause mis-classification in otherwise highly accurate image classifiers. As a practical alternative, recent work proposed so-called adversarial patches: clearly visible, but adversarially crafted rectangular patches in images. These patches can easily be printed and applied in the physical world. While defenses against imperceptible adversarial examples have been studied extensively, robustness against adversarial patches is poorly understood. In this work, we first devise a practical approach to obtain adversarial patches while actively optimizing their location within the image. Then, we apply adversarial training on these location-optimized adversarial patches and demonstrate significantly improved robustness on CIFAR10 and GTSRB. Additionally, in contrast to adversarial training on imperceptible adversarial examples, our adversarial patch training does not reduce accuracy.

In this paper, we address the problem of degradation in inpainting quality of neural networks operating at high resolutions. Inpainting networks are often unable to generate globally coherent structures at resolutions higher than their training set. This is partially attributed to the receptive field remaining static, despite an increase in image resolution. Although downscaling the image prior to inpainting produces coherent structure, it inherently lacks detail present at higher resolutions. To get the best of both worlds, we optimize the intermediate featuremaps of a network by minimizing a multiscale consistency loss at inference. This runtime optimization improves the inpainting results and establishes a new state-of-the-art for high resolution inpainting. Code is available at: https://github.com/geomagical/lama-with-refiner/tree/refinement.

This paper introduces PatchRefiner, an advanced framework for metric single image depth estimation aimed at high-resolution real-domain inputs. While depth estimation is crucial for applications such as autonomous driving, 3D generative modeling, and 3D reconstruction, achieving accurate high-resolution depth in real-world scenarios is challenging due to the constraints of existing architectures and the scarcity of detailed real-world depth data. PatchRefiner adopts a tile-based methodology, reconceptualizing high-resolution depth estimation as a refinement process, which results in notable performance enhancements. Utilizing a pseudo-labeling strategy that leverages synthetic data, PatchRefiner incorporates a Detail and Scale Disentangling (DSD) loss to enhance detail capture while maintaining scale accuracy, thus facilitating the effective transfer of knowledge from synthetic to real-world data. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate PatchRefiner's superior performance, significantly outperforming existing benchmarks on the Unreal4KStereo dataset by 18.1% in terms of the root mean squared error (RMSE) and showing marked improvements in detail accuracy and consistent scale estimation on diverse real-world datasets like CityScape, ScanNet++, and ETH3D.

The exponential growth of AI-generated images (AIGIs) underscores the urgent need for robust and generalizable detection methods. In this paper, we establish two key principles for AIGI detection through systematic analysis: (1) All Patches Matter: Unlike conventional image classification where discriminative features concentrate on object-centric regions, each patch in AIGIs inherently contains synthetic artifacts due to the uniform generation process, suggesting that every patch serves as an important artifact source for detection. (2) More Patches Better: Leveraging distributed artifacts across more patches improves detection robustness by capturing complementary forensic evidence and reducing over-reliance on specific patches, thereby enhancing robustness and generalization. However, our counterfactual analysis reveals an undesirable phenomenon: naively trained detectors often exhibit a Few-Patch Bias, discriminating between real and synthetic images based on minority patches. We identify Lazy Learner as the root cause: detectors preferentially learn conspicuous artifacts in limited patches while neglecting broader artifact distributions. To address this bias, we propose the Panoptic Patch Learning (PPL) framework, involving: (1) Random Patch Replacement that randomly substitutes synthetic patches with real counterparts to compel models to identify artifacts in underutilized regions, encouraging the broader use of more patches; (2) Patch-wise Contrastive Learning that enforces consistent discriminative capability across all patches, ensuring uniform utilization of all patches. Extensive experiments across two different settings on several benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our approach.

The advent of adversarial patches poses a significant challenge to the robustness of AI models, particularly in the domain of computer vision tasks such as object detection. In contradistinction to traditional adversarial examples, these patches target specific regions of an image, resulting in the malfunction of AI models. This paper proposes Incremental Patch Generation (IPG), a method that generates adversarial patches up to 11.1 times more efficiently than existing approaches while maintaining comparable attack performance. The efficacy of IPG is demonstrated by experiments and ablation studies including YOLO's feature distribution visualization and adversarial training results, which show that it produces well-generalized patches that effectively cover a broader range of model vulnerabilities. Furthermore, IPG-generated datasets can serve as a robust knowledge foundation for constructing a robust model, enabling structured representation, advanced reasoning, and proactive defenses in AI security ecosystems. The findings of this study suggest that IPG has considerable potential for future utilization not only in adversarial patch defense but also in real-world applications such as autonomous vehicles, security systems, and medical imaging, where AI models must remain resilient to adversarial attacks in dynamic and high-stakes environments.

Although Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently advanced computer vision tasks significantly, an important real-world problem was overlooked: adapting to variable input resolutions. Typically, images are resized to a fixed resolution, such as 224x224, for efficiency during training and inference. However, uniform input size conflicts with real-world scenarios where images naturally vary in resolution. Modifying the preset resolution of a model may severely degrade the performance. In this work, we propose to enhance the model adaptability to resolution variation by optimizing the patch embedding. The proposed method, called Multi-Scale Patch Embedding (MSPE), substitutes the standard patch embedding with multiple variable-sized patch kernels and selects the best parameters for different resolutions, eliminating the need to resize the original image. Our method does not require high-cost training or modifications to other parts, making it easy to apply to most ViT models. Experiments in image classification, segmentation, and detection tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of MSPE, yielding superior performance on low-resolution inputs and performing comparably on high-resolution inputs with existing methods.

Existing image inpainting methods have shown impressive completion results for low-resolution images. However, most of these algorithms fail at high resolutions and require powerful hardware, limiting their deployment on edge devices. Motivated by this, we propose the first baseline for REal-Time High-resolution image INpainting on Edge Devices (RETHINED) that is able to inpaint at ultra-high-resolution and can run in real-time (leq 30ms) in a wide variety of mobile devices. A simple, yet effective novel method formed by a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to recover structure, followed by a resolution-agnostic patch replacement mechanism to provide detailed texture. Specially our pipeline leverages the structural capacity of CNN and the high-level detail of patch-based methods, which is a key component for high-resolution image inpainting. To demonstrate the real application of our method, we conduct an extensive analysis on various mobile-friendly devices and demonstrate similar inpainting performance while being 100 times faster than existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthemore, we realease DF8K-Inpainting, the first free-form mask UHD inpainting dataset.

An LLM agent's real-task performance is shaped as much by the harness around its model as by the frozen model itself: its prompts, injected knowledge, runtime control, and configuration. In deployment the harness is often the only lever available, so improving it automatically is the natural way to raise performance without touching the weights. The hard part is not generating changes but knowing which one truly helped. Self-generated feedback is noisy, and an apparent gain can be a measurement artifact or an edit that merely overfits the tasks it was tuned on. We present a self-evolving agent-harness framework that separates proposing changes from crediting them: a language model diagnoses failures and proposes patches, while all sampling, measurement, and significance testing are owned by deterministic code, so every credited improvement is trustworthy by construction. Patches populate a gated, categorical quality-diversity archive (GSME) keyed on the (WHERE x WHY) pathology an edit addresses rather than the tasks it fixes, an anti-overfitting inductive bias; generalization is measured on a sealed test scored only after evolution. Across seven domains with a frozen open-weight model, the harness is train-selected and scored once on a sealed test; its credited gains there are +9 to +15.5pp and retain 86-147% of the training gain, evidence they generalize rather than overfit. The winning patch tracks the model's dominant pathology, not its size or family: changing the model can change the pathology and the patch, while the same pathology-to-patch match recurs across two model families. What transfers is the diagnose-and-credit loop, not any specific harness.

We propose a GAN-based image compression method working at extremely low bitrates below 0.1bpp. Most existing learned image compression methods suffer from blur at extremely low bitrates. Although GAN can help to reconstruct sharp images, there are two drawbacks. First, GAN makes training unstable. Second, the reconstructions often contain unpleasing noise or artifacts. To address both of the drawbacks, our method adopts two-stage training and network interpolation. The two-stage training is effective to stabilize the training. Moreover, the network interpolation utilizes the models in both stages and reduces undesirable noise and artifacts, while maintaining important edges. Hence, we can control the trade-off between perceptual quality and fidelity without re-training models. The experimental results show that our model can reconstruct high quality images. Furthermore, our user study confirms that our reconstructions are preferable to state-of-the-art GAN-based image compression model. The code will be available.

Leveraging pre-trained Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for high-resolution (HR) image synthesis often leads to spatial layout collapse and degraded texture fidelity. Prior work mitigates these issues with complex pipelines that first perform a base-resolution (i.e., training-resolution) denoising process to guide HR generation. We instead explore the intrinsic generative mechanisms of DiTs and propose ResDiT, a training-free method that scales resolution efficiently. We identify the core factor governing spatial layout, position embeddings (PEs), and show that the original PEs encode incorrect positional information when extrapolated to HR, which triggers layout collapse. To address this, we introduce a PE scaling technique that rectifies positional encoding under resolution changes. To further remedy low-fidelity details, we develop a local-enhancement mechanism grounded in base-resolution local attention. We design a patch-level fusion module that aggregates global and local cues, together with a Gaussian-weighted splicing strategy that eliminates grid artifacts. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that ResDiT consistently delivers high-fidelity, high-resolution image synthesis and integrates seamlessly with downstream tasks, including spatially controlled generation.

Modern deep learning-based inpainting enables realistic local image manipulation, raising critical challenges for reliable detection. However, we observe that current detectors primarily rely on global artifacts that appear as inpainting side effects, rather than on locally synthesized content. We show that this behavior occurs because VAE-based reconstruction induces a subtle but pervasive spectral shift across the entire image, including unedited regions. To isolate this effect, we introduce Inpainting Exchange (INP-X), an operation that restores original pixels outside the edited region while preserving all synthesized content. We create a 90K test dataset including real, inpainted, and exchanged images to evaluate this phenomenon. Under this intervention, pretrained state-of-the-art detectors, including commercial ones, exhibit a dramatic drop in accuracy (e.g., from 91\% to 55\%), frequently approaching chance level. We provide a theoretical analysis linking this behavior to high-frequency attenuation caused by VAE information bottlenecks. Our findings highlight the need for content-aware detection. Indeed, training on our dataset yields better generalization and localization than standard inpainting. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/emirhanbilgic/INP-X.

This paper presents innovative enhancements to diffusion models by integrating a novel multi-resolution network and time-dependent layer normalization. Diffusion models have gained prominence for their effectiveness in high-fidelity image generation. While conventional approaches rely on convolutional U-Net architectures, recent Transformer-based designs have demonstrated superior performance and scalability. However, Transformer architectures, which tokenize input data (via "patchification"), face a trade-off between visual fidelity and computational complexity due to the quadratic nature of self-attention operations concerning token length. While larger patch sizes enable attention computation efficiency, they struggle to capture fine-grained visual details, leading to image distortions. To address this challenge, we propose augmenting the Diffusion model with the Multi-Resolution network (DiMR), a framework that refines features across multiple resolutions, progressively enhancing detail from low to high resolution. Additionally, we introduce Time-Dependent Layer Normalization (TD-LN), a parameter-efficient approach that incorporates time-dependent parameters into layer normalization to inject time information and achieve superior performance. Our method's efficacy is demonstrated on the class-conditional ImageNet generation benchmark, where DiMR-XL variants outperform prior diffusion models, setting new state-of-the-art FID scores of 1.70 on ImageNet 256 x 256 and 2.89 on ImageNet 512 x 512. Project page: https://qihao067.github.io/projects/DiMR

In this work, by re-examining the "matching" nature of Anomaly Detection (AD), we propose a new AD framework that simultaneously enjoys new records of AD accuracy and dramatically high running speed. In this framework, the anomaly detection problem is solved via a cascade patch retrieval procedure that retrieves the nearest neighbors for each test image patch in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Given a test sample, the top-K most similar training images are first selected based on a robust histogram matching process. Secondly, the nearest neighbor of each test patch is retrieved over the similar geometrical locations on those "global nearest neighbors", by using a carefully trained local metric. Finally, the anomaly score of each test image patch is calculated based on the distance to its "local nearest neighbor" and the "non-background" probability. The proposed method is termed "Cascade Patch Retrieval" (CPR) in this work. Different from the conventional patch-matching-based AD algorithms, CPR selects proper "targets" (reference images and locations) before "shooting" (patch-matching). On the well-acknowledged MVTec AD, BTAD and MVTec-3D AD datasets, the proposed algorithm consistently outperforms all the comparing SOTA methods by remarkable margins, measured by various AD metrics. Furthermore, CPR is extremely efficient. It runs at the speed of 113 FPS with the standard setting while its simplified version only requires less than 1 ms to process an image at the cost of a trivial accuracy drop. The code of CPR is available at https://github.com/flyinghu123/CPR.

In recent times, the need for effective super-resolution (SR) techniques has surged, especially for large-scale images ranging 2K to 8K resolutions. For DNN-based SISR, decomposing images into overlapping patches is typically necessary due to computational constraints. In such patch-decomposing scheme, one can allocate computational resources differently based on each patch's difficulty to further improve efficiency while maintaining SR performance. However, this approach has a limitation: computational resources is uniformly allocated within a patch, leading to lower efficiency when the patch contain pixels with varying levels of restoration difficulty. To address the issue, we propose the Pixel-level Classifier for Single Image Super-Resolution (PCSR), a novel method designed to distribute computational resources adaptively at the pixel level. A PCSR model comprises a backbone, a pixel-level classifier, and a set of pixel-level upsamplers with varying capacities. The pixel-level classifier assigns each pixel to an appropriate upsampler based on its restoration difficulty, thereby optimizing computational resource usage. Our method allows for performance and computational cost balance during inference without re-training. Our experiments demonstrate PCSR's advantage over existing patch-distributing methods in PSNR-FLOP trade-offs across different backbone models and benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/3587jjh/PCSR.

The CLIP model's outstanding generalization has driven recent success in Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) for detecting anomalies in unseen categories. The core challenge in ZSAD is to specialize the model for anomaly detection tasks while preserving CLIP's powerful generalization capability. Existing approaches attempting to solve this challenge share the fundamental limitation of a patch-agnostic design that processes all patches monolithically without regard for their unique characteristics. To address this limitation, we propose MoECLIP, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture for the ZSAD task, which achieves patch-level adaptation by dynamically routing each image patch to a specialized Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) expert based on its unique characteristics. Furthermore, to prevent functional redundancy among the LoRA experts, we introduce (1) Frozen Orthogonal Feature Separation (FOFS), which orthogonally separates the input feature space to force experts to focus on distinct information, and (2) a simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) loss to regulate the expert outputs to form maximally equiangular representations. Comprehensive experimental results across 14 benchmark datasets spanning industrial and medical domains demonstrate that MoECLIP outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/CoCoRessa/MoECLIP.

This paper attempts to address the object repetition issue in patch-wise higher-resolution image generation. We propose AccDiffusion, an accurate method for patch-wise higher-resolution image generation without training. An in-depth analysis in this paper reveals an identical text prompt for different patches causes repeated object generation, while no prompt compromises the image details. Therefore, our AccDiffusion, for the first time, proposes to decouple the vanilla image-content-aware prompt into a set of patch-content-aware prompts, each of which serves as a more precise description of an image patch. Besides, AccDiffusion also introduces dilated sampling with window interaction for better global consistency in higher-resolution image generation. Experimental comparison with existing methods demonstrates that our AccDiffusion effectively addresses the issue of repeated object generation and leads to better performance in higher-resolution image generation.

The diversity and complexity of degradations in real-world video super-resolution (VSR) pose non-trivial challenges in inference and training. First, while long-term propagation leads to improved performance in cases of mild degradations, severe in-the-wild degradations could be exaggerated through propagation, impairing output quality. To balance the tradeoff between detail synthesis and artifact suppression, we found an image pre-cleaning stage indispensable to reduce noises and artifacts prior to propagation. Equipped with a carefully designed cleaning module, our RealBasicVSR outperforms existing methods in both quality and efficiency. Second, real-world VSR models are often trained with diverse degradations to improve generalizability, requiring increased batch size to produce a stable gradient. Inevitably, the increased computational burden results in various problems, including 1) speed-performance tradeoff and 2) batch-length tradeoff. To alleviate the first tradeoff, we propose a stochastic degradation scheme that reduces up to 40\% of training time without sacrificing performance. We then analyze different training settings and suggest that employing longer sequences rather than larger batches during training allows more effective uses of temporal information, leading to more stable performance during inference. To facilitate fair comparisons, we propose the new VideoLQ dataset, which contains a large variety of real-world low-quality video sequences containing rich textures and patterns. Our dataset can serve as a common ground for benchmarking. Code, models, and the dataset will be made publicly available.

High-resolution datasets are essential for advancing super-resolution (SR) and text-to-image (T2I) diffusion research. However, current publicly available datasets lack both the native 4K resolution and the extensive scale necessary for training state-of-the-art models. To address this gap, we introduce a 4K Large Scale Dataset and Benchmark (4KLSDB), a large-scale, diverse dataset consisting of 129,484 carefully curated 4K resolution images spanning multiple categories such as nature, urban scenes, people, food, artwork, and CGI, alongside distinct validation and test sets containing 2,000 and 1,984 images respectively. Images were sourced from established open datasets including Photo Concept Bucket, Laion2B, and PD12M. 4KLSDB underwent rigorous multi-stage automated filtering and annotation pipelines involving both human annotators and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to ensure high aesthetic quality and dataset consistency. We demonstrate 4KLSDB's effectiveness by training representative super-resolution and diffusion models, observing significant improvements in performance on native 4K benchmarks. Comprehensive experiments illustrate a positive correlation between training on true 4K resolution data and improved fidelity in image restoration task, especially on 4K resolution. We provide the research community a valuable resource to drive progress toward genuinely high-fidelity image synthesis and restoration by providing 4KLSDB. Our project page is available at: https://4klsdb.github.io/.

Recent diffusion-based models achieve photorealism in image inpainting but require many sampling steps, limiting practical use. Few-step text-to-image models offer faster generation, but naively applying them to inpainting yields poor harmonization and artifacts between the background and inpainted region. We trace this cause to random Gaussian noise initialization, which under low function evaluations causes semantic misalignment and reduced fidelity. To overcome this, we propose InverFill, a one-step inversion method tailored for inpainting that injects semantic information from the input masked image into the initial noise, enabling high-fidelity few-step inpainting. Instead of training inpainting models, InverFill leverages few-step text-to-image models in a blended sampling pipeline with semantically aligned noise as input, significantly improving vanilla blended sampling and even matching specialized inpainting models at low NFEs. Moreover, InverFill does not require real-image supervision and only adds minimal inference overhead. Extensive experiments show that InverFill consistently boosts baseline few-step models, improving image quality and text coherence without costly retraining or heavy iterative optimization.

Existing inpainting methods have achieved promising performance in recovering defected images of specific scenes. However, filling holes involving multiple semantic categories remains challenging due to the obscure semantic boundaries and the mixture of different semantic textures. In this paper, we introduce coherence priors between the semantics and textures which make it possible to concentrate on completing separate textures in a semantic-wise manner. Specifically, we adopt a multi-scale joint optimization framework to first model the coherence priors and then accordingly interleavingly optimize image inpainting and semantic segmentation in a coarse-to-fine manner. A Semantic-Wise Attention Propagation (SWAP) module is devised to refine completed image textures across scales by exploring non-local semantic coherence, which effectively mitigates mix-up of textures. We also propose two coherence losses to constrain the consistency between the semantics and the inpainted image in terms of the overall structure and detailed textures. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method for challenging cases with complex holes.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable progress in language understanding and generation, their training efficiency has become a critical concern. Traditionally, LLMs are trained to predict the next token in a sequence. Despite the success of token-level training, it suffers from considerable computational costs due to the need to process an extensive number of tokens. To mitigate this issue, this paper introduces patch-level training for LLMs, which reduces the sequence length by compressing multiple tokens into a single patch. During patch-level training, we feed the language model shorter sequences of patches and train it to predict the next patch, thereby processing the majority of the training data at a significantly reduced computational cost. Following this, the model continues token-level training on the remaining training data to align with the inference mode. Experiments on a diverse range of models (370M-2.7B parameters) demonstrate that patch-level training can reduce overall computational costs to 0.5times, without compromising the model performance compared to token-level training. Source code: https://github.com/shaochenze/PatchTrain.

Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) is a high-precision object segmentation task for high-resolution natural images. The current mainstream methods focus on the optimization of local details but overlook the fundamental challenge of modeling the integrity of objects. We have found that the depth integrity-prior implicit in the the pseudo-depth maps generated by Depth Anything Model v2 and the local detail features of image patches can jointly address the above dilemmas. Based on the above findings, we have designed a novel Patch-Depth Fusion Network (PDFNet) for high-precision dichotomous image segmentation. The core of PDFNet consists of three aspects. Firstly, the object perception is enhanced through multi-modal input fusion. By utilizing the patch fine-grained strategy, coupled with patch selection and enhancement, the sensitivity to details is improved. Secondly, by leveraging the depth integrity-prior distributed in the depth maps, we propose an integrity-prior loss to enhance the uniformity of the segmentation results in the depth maps. Finally, we utilize the features of the shared encoder and, through a simple depth refinement decoder, improve the ability of the shared encoder to capture subtle depth-related information in the images. Experiments on the DIS-5K dataset show that PDFNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art non-diffusion methods. Due to the incorporation of the depth integrity-prior, PDFNet achieves or even surpassing the performance of the latest diffusion-based methods while using less than 11% of the parameters of diffusion-based methods. The source code at https://github.com/Tennine2077/PDFNet.

Multimodal adversarial attacks for dense prediction remain largely underexplored. In particular, visual-infrared (VI) perception systems introduce unique challenges due to heterogeneous spectral characteristics and modality-specific intensity distributions. Existing adversarial patch methods are primarily designed for single-modal inputs and fail to account for crossspectral inconsistencies, leading to reduced attack effectiveness and poor stealthiness when applied to VI dense prediction models. To address these challenges, we propose a joint position-color optimization framework (AP-PCO) for generating adversarial patches in visual-infrared settings. The proposed method optimizes patch placement and color composition simultaneously using a fitness function derived from model outputs, enabling a single patch to perturb both visible and infrared modalities. To further bridge spectral discrepancies, we introduce a crossmodal color adaptation strategy that constrains patch appearance according to infrared grayscale characteristics while maintaining strong perturbations in the visible domain, thereby reducing cross-spectral saliency. The optimization procedure operates without requiring internal model information, supporting flexible black-box attacks. Extensive experiments on visual-infrared dense prediction tasks demonstrate that the proposed AP-PCO achieves consistently strong attack performance across multiple architectures, providing a practical benchmark for robustness evaluation in VI perception systems.

We present a framework that enables fast reconstruction and real-time rendering of urban-scale scenes while maintaining robustness against appearance variations across multi-view captures. Our approach begins with scene partitioning for parallel training, employing a visibility-based image selection strategy to optimize training efficiency. A controllable level-of-detail (LOD) strategy explicitly regulates Gaussian density under a user-defined budget, enabling efficient training and rendering while maintaining high visual fidelity. The appearance transformation module mitigates the negative effects of appearance inconsistencies across images while enabling flexible adjustments. Additionally, we utilize enhancement modules, such as depth regularization, scale regularization, and antialiasing, to improve reconstruction fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively reconstructs urban-scale scenes and outperforms previous approaches in both efficiency and quality. The source code is available at: https://yzslab.github.io/REUrbanGS.

Human-product images, which showcase the integration of humans and products, play a vital role in advertising, e-commerce, and digital marketing. The essential challenge of generating such images lies in ensuring the high-fidelity preservation of product details. Among existing paradigms, reference-based inpainting offers a targeted solution by leveraging product reference images to guide the inpainting process. However, limitations remain in three key aspects: the lack of diverse large-scale training data, the struggle of current models to focus on product detail preservation, and the inability of coarse supervision for achieving precise guidance. To address these issues, we propose HiFi-Inpaint, a novel high-fidelity reference-based inpainting framework tailored for generating human-product images. HiFi-Inpaint introduces Shared Enhancement Attention (SEA) to refine fine-grained product features and Detail-Aware Loss (DAL) to enforce precise pixel-level supervision using high-frequency maps. Additionally, we construct a new dataset, HP-Image-40K, with samples curated from self-synthesis data and processed with automatic filtering. Experimental results show that HiFi-Inpaint achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering detail-preserving human-product images.

Previous work has suggested that preprocessing images through lossy compression can defend against adversarial perturbations, but comprehensive attack evaluations have been lacking. In this paper, we construct strong white-box and adaptive attacks against various compression models and identify a critical challenge for attackers: high realism in reconstructed images significantly increases attack difficulty. Through rigorous evaluation across multiple attack scenarios, we demonstrate that compression models capable of producing realistic, high-fidelity reconstructions are substantially more resistant to our attacks. In contrast, low-realism compression models can be broken. Our analysis reveals that this is not due to gradient masking. Rather, realistic reconstructions maintaining distributional alignment with natural images seem to offer inherent robustness. This work highlights a significant obstacle for future adversarial attacks and suggests that developing more effective techniques to overcome realism represents an essential challenge for comprehensive security evaluation.

Diffusion models deliver high-fidelity synthesis but remain slow due to iterative sampling. We empirically observe there exists feature invariance in deterministic sampling, and present InvarDiff, a training-free acceleration method that exploits the relative temporal invariance across timestep-scale and layer-scale. From a few deterministic runs, we compute a per-timestep, per-layer, per-module binary cache plan matrix and use a re-sampling correction to avoid drift when consecutive caches occur. Using quantile-based change metrics, this matrix specifies which module at which step is reused rather than recomputed. The same invariance criterion is applied at the step scale to enable cross-timestep caching, deciding whether an entire step can reuse cached results. During inference, InvarDiff performs step-first and layer-wise caching guided by this matrix. When applied to DiT and FLUX, our approach reduces redundant compute while preserving fidelity. Experiments show that InvarDiff achieves 2-3times end-to-end speed-ups with minimal impact on standard quality metrics. Qualitatively, we observe almost no degradation in visual quality compared with full computations.

While 2D generative adversarial networks have enabled high-resolution image synthesis, they largely lack an understanding of the 3D world and the image formation process. Thus, they do not provide precise control over camera viewpoint or object pose. To address this problem, several recent approaches leverage intermediate voxel-based representations in combination with differentiable rendering. However, existing methods either produce low image resolution or fall short in disentangling camera and scene properties, e.g., the object identity may vary with the viewpoint. In this paper, we propose a generative model for radiance fields which have recently proven successful for novel view synthesis of a single scene. In contrast to voxel-based representations, radiance fields are not confined to a coarse discretization of the 3D space, yet allow for disentangling camera and scene properties while degrading gracefully in the presence of reconstruction ambiguity. By introducing a multi-scale patch-based discriminator, we demonstrate synthesis of high-resolution images while training our model from unposed 2D images alone. We systematically analyze our approach on several challenging synthetic and real-world datasets. Our experiments reveal that radiance fields are a powerful representation for generative image synthesis, leading to 3D consistent models that render with high fidelity.

Since the introduction of Vision Transformer (ViT), patchification has long been regarded as a de facto image tokenization approach for plain visual architectures. By compressing the spatial size of images, this approach can effectively shorten the token sequence and reduce the computational cost of ViT-like plain architectures. In this work, we aim to thoroughly examine the information loss caused by this patchification-based compressive encoding paradigm and how it affects visual understanding. We conduct extensive patch size scaling experiments and excitedly observe an intriguing scaling law in patchification: the models can consistently benefit from decreased patch sizes and attain improved predictive performance, until it reaches the minimum patch size of 1x1, i.e., pixel tokenization. This conclusion is broadly applicable across different vision tasks, various input scales, and diverse architectures such as ViT and the recent Mamba models. Moreover, as a by-product, we discover that with smaller patches, task-specific decoder heads become less critical for dense prediction. In the experiments, we successfully scale up the visual sequence to an exceptional length of 50,176 tokens, achieving a competitive test accuracy of 84.6% with a base-sized model on the ImageNet-1k benchmark. We hope this study can provide insights and theoretical foundations for future works of building non-compressive vision models. Code is available at https://github.com/wangf3014/Patch_Scaling.

Higher-order adversarial attacks can directly be considered the result of a cat-and-mouse game -- an elaborate action involving constant pursuit, near captures, and repeated escapes. This idiom describes the enduring circular training of adversarial attack patterns and adversarial training the best. The following work investigates the impact of higher-order adversarial attacks on object detectors by successively training attack patterns and hardening object detectors with adversarial training. The YOLOv10 object detector is chosen as a representative, and adversarial patches are used in an evasion attack manner. Our results indicate that higher-order adversarial patches are not only affecting the object detector directly trained on but rather provide a stronger generalization capacity compared to lower-order adversarial patches. Moreover, the results highlight that solely adversarial training is not sufficient to harden an object detector efficiently against this kind of adversarial attack. Code: https://github.com/JensBayer/HigherOrder

The significant advancements in embodied vision navigation have raised concerns about its susceptibility to adversarial attacks exploiting deep neural networks. Investigating the adversarial robustness of embodied vision navigation is crucial, especially given the threat of 3D physical attacks that could pose risks to human safety. However, existing attack methods for embodied vision navigation often lack physical feasibility due to challenges in transferring digital perturbations into the physical world. Moreover, current physical attacks for object detection struggle to achieve both multi-view effectiveness and visual naturalness in navigation scenarios. To address this, we propose a practical attack method for embodied navigation by attaching adversarial patches to objects, where both opacity and textures are learnable. Specifically, to ensure effectiveness across varying viewpoints, we employ a multi-view optimization strategy based on object-aware sampling, which optimizes the patch's texture based on feedback from the vision-based perception model used in navigation. To make the patch inconspicuous to human observers, we introduce a two-stage opacity optimization mechanism, in which opacity is fine-tuned after texture optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our adversarial patches decrease the navigation success rate by an average of 22.39%, outperforming previous methods in practicality, effectiveness, and naturalness. Code is available at: https://github.com/chen37058/Physical-Attacks-in-Embodied-Nav

Recent deep learning based approaches have shown promising results for the challenging task of inpainting large missing regions in an image. These methods can generate visually plausible image structures and textures, but often create distorted structures or blurry textures inconsistent with surrounding areas. This is mainly due to ineffectiveness of convolutional neural networks in explicitly borrowing or copying information from distant spatial locations. On the other hand, traditional texture and patch synthesis approaches are particularly suitable when it needs to borrow textures from the surrounding regions. Motivated by these observations, we propose a new deep generative model-based approach which can not only synthesize novel image structures but also explicitly utilize surrounding image features as references during network training to make better predictions. The model is a feed-forward, fully convolutional neural network which can process images with multiple holes at arbitrary locations and with variable sizes during the test time. Experiments on multiple datasets including faces (CelebA, CelebA-HQ), textures (DTD) and natural images (ImageNet, Places2) demonstrate that our proposed approach generates higher-quality inpainting results than existing ones. Code, demo and models are available at: https://github.com/JiahuiYu/generative_inpainting.

Although achieving significant progress, existing deep generative inpainting methods are far from real-world applications due to the low generalization across different scenes. As a result, the generated images usually contain artifacts or the filled pixels differ greatly from the ground truth. Image-level predictive filtering is a widely used image restoration technique, predicting suitable kernels adaptively according to different input scenes. Inspired by this inherent advantage, we explore the possibility of addressing image inpainting as a filtering task. To this end, we first study the advantages and challenges of image-level predictive filtering for image inpainting: the method can preserve local structures and avoid artifacts but fails to fill large missing areas. Then, we propose semantic filtering by conducting filtering on the deep feature level, which fills the missing semantic information but fails to recover the details. To address the issues while adopting the respective advantages, we propose a novel filtering technique, i.e., Multilevel Interactive Siamese Filtering (MISF), which contains two branches: kernel prediction branch (KPB) and semantic & image filtering branch (SIFB). These two branches are interactively linked: SIFB provides multi-level features for KPB while KPB predicts dynamic kernels for SIFB. As a result, the final method takes the advantage of effective semantic & image-level filling for high-fidelity inpainting. We validate our method on three challenging datasets, i.e., Dunhuang, Places2, and CelebA. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on four metrics, i.e., L1, PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. Please try the released code and model at https://github.com/tsingqguo/misf.

While current high-resolution depth estimation methods achieve strong results, they often suffer from computational inefficiencies due to reliance on heavyweight models and multiple inference steps, increasing inference time. To address this, we introduce PatchRefiner V2 (PRV2), which replaces heavy refiner models with lightweight encoders. This reduces model size and inference time but introduces noisy features. To overcome this, we propose a Coarse-to-Fine (C2F) module with a Guided Denoising Unit for refining and denoising the refiner features and a Noisy Pretraining strategy to pretrain the refiner branch to fully exploit the potential of the lightweight refiner branch. Additionally, we introduce a Scale-and-Shift Invariant Gradient Matching (SSIGM) loss to enhance synthetic-to-real domain transfer. PRV2 outperforms state-of-the-art depth estimation methods on UnrealStereo4K in both accuracy and speed, using fewer parameters and faster inference. It also shows improved depth boundary delineation on real-world datasets like CityScape, ScanNet++, and KITTI, demonstrating its versatility across domains.

Physical adversarial attacks threaten to fool object detection systems, but reproducible research on the real-world effectiveness of physical patches and how to defend against them requires a publicly available benchmark dataset. We present APRICOT, a collection of over 1,000 annotated photographs of printed adversarial patches in public locations. The patches target several object categories for three COCO-trained detection models, and the photos represent natural variation in position, distance, lighting conditions, and viewing angle. Our analysis suggests that maintaining adversarial robustness in uncontrolled settings is highly challenging, but it is still possible to produce targeted detections under white-box and sometimes black-box settings. We establish baselines for defending against adversarial patches through several methods, including a detector supervised with synthetic data and unsupervised methods such as kernel density estimation, Bayesian uncertainty, and reconstruction error. Our results suggest that adversarial patches can be effectively flagged, both in a high-knowledge, attack-specific scenario, and in an unsupervised setting where patches are detected as anomalies in natural images. This dataset and the described experiments provide a benchmark for future research on the effectiveness of and defenses against physical adversarial objects in the wild.

Recent generative models can produce images that appear highly realistic, raising challenges in distinguishing real and AI-generated images. Yet existing detectors based on pre-trained feature extractors tend to over-rely on global semantics, limiting sensitivity to the critical micro-defects. In this work, we propose Micro-Defects expose Macro-Fakes (MDMF), a local distribution-aware detection framework that amplifies micro-scale statistical irregularities into macro-level distributional discrepancies. To avoid localized forensic cues being diluted by plain aggregation, we introduce a learnable Patch Forensic Signature that projects semantic patch embeddings into a compact forensic latent space. We then use Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to quantify distributional discrepancies between generated and real images. Our theory-grounded analysis shows that patch-wise modeling yields provably larger discrepancies when localized forensic signals are present in generated images, enabling more reliable separation from real images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDMF consistently outperforms baseline detectors across multiple benchmarks, validating its general effectiveness. Project page: https://zbox1005.github.io/MDMF-project/

Current open-weight large language models (LLMs) are prone to malicious finetuning attacks, which could compromise the safety alignment of LLMs with only a few steps of supervised finetuning (SFT) on poisoned datasets. Existing alignment-stage defenses are primarily designed to defend against attacks that use parameter-efficient finetuning methods. However, they fail to defend against stronger attacks that use full-parameter finetuning. In this paper, we propose Patcher, a method inspired by adversarial training and bi-level optimization, to combat such attacks. Patcher strengthens the simulated attack by scaling up the optimization steps in the adversarial loop, thus forcing the defender to find model parameters that are insensitive to stronger attacks. Furthermore, we propose an efficient parallel algorithm to implement Patcher, decreasing the wall-clock time of training while preserving Patcher's performance. Extensive experiments show that Patcher substantially improves the model's robustness compared to vanilla SFT alignment, and transfers to diverse attack scenarios and model sizes. Code is available at https://github.com/haomingwen/patcher.

Scene-agnostic visual inpainting remains very challenging despite progress in patch-based methods. Recently, Pathak et al. 2016 have introduced convolutional "context encoders" (CEs) for unsupervised feature learning through image completion tasks. With the additional help of adversarial training, CEs turned out to be a promising tool to complete complex structures in real inpainting problems. In the present paper we propose to push further this key ability by relying on perceptual reconstruction losses at training time. We show on a wide variety of visual scenes the merit of the approach for structural inpainting, and confirm it through a user study. Combined with the optimization-based refinement of Yang et al. 2016 with neural patches, our context encoder opens up new opportunities for prior-free visual inpainting.

Vision Transformers convert images to sequences by slicing them into patches. The size of these patches controls a speed/accuracy tradeoff, with smaller patches leading to higher accuracy at greater computational cost, but changing the patch size typically requires retraining the model. In this paper, we demonstrate that simply randomizing the patch size at training time leads to a single set of weights that performs well across a wide range of patch sizes, making it possible to tailor the model to different compute budgets at deployment time. We extensively evaluate the resulting model, which we call FlexiViT, on a wide range of tasks, including classification, image-text retrieval, open-world detection, panoptic segmentation, and semantic segmentation, concluding that it usually matches, and sometimes outperforms, standard ViT models trained at a single patch size in an otherwise identical setup. Hence, FlexiViT training is a simple drop-in improvement for ViT that makes it easy to add compute-adaptive capabilities to most models relying on a ViT backbone architecture. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/google-research/big_vision

Our goal is to significantly speed up the runtime of current state-of-the-art stereo algorithms to enable real-time inference. Towards this goal, we developed a differentiable PatchMatch module that allows us to discard most disparities without requiring full cost volume evaluation. We then exploit this representation to learn which range to prune for each pixel. By progressively reducing the search space and effectively propagating such information, we are able to efficiently compute the cost volume for high likelihood hypotheses and achieve savings in both memory and computation. Finally, an image guided refinement module is exploited to further improve the performance. Since all our components are differentiable, the full network can be trained end-to-end. Our experiments show that our method achieves competitive results on KITTI and SceneFlow datasets while running in real-time at 62ms.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in image and video generation, but their success comes at the cost of heavy computation. This inefficiency is largely due to the fixed tokenization process, which uses constant-sized patches throughout the entire denoising phase, regardless of the content's complexity. We propose dynamic tokenization, an efficient test-time strategy that varies patch sizes based on content complexity and the denoising timestep. Our key insight is that early timesteps only require coarser patches to model global structure, while later iterations demand finer (smaller-sized) patches to refine local details. During inference, our method dynamically reallocates patch sizes across denoising steps for image and video generation and substantially reduces cost while preserving perceptual generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: it achieves up to 3.52times and 3.2times speedup on FLUX-1.Dev and Wan 2.1, respectively, without compromising the generation quality and prompt adherence.

In this work, we propose a novel framework to enable diffusion models to adapt their generation quality based on real-time network bandwidth constraints. Traditional diffusion models produce high-fidelity images by performing a fixed number of denoising steps, regardless of downstream transmission limitations. However, in practical cloud-to-device scenarios, limited bandwidth often necessitates heavy compression, leading to loss of fine textures and wasted computation. To address this, we introduce a joint end-to-end training strategy where the diffusion model is conditioned on a target quality level derived from the available bandwidth. During training, the model learns to adaptively modulate the denoising process, enabling early-stop sampling that maintains perceptual quality appropriate to the target transmission condition. Our method requires minimal architectural changes and leverages a lightweight quality embedding to guide the denoising trajectory. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the visual fidelity of bandwidth-adapted generations compared to naive early-stopping, offering a promising solution for efficient image delivery in bandwidth-constrained environments. Code is available at: https://github.com/xzhang9308/BADiff.

Vision--language models (VLMs) often process visual inputs through a pretrained vision encoder, followed by a projection into the language model's embedding space via a connector component. While crucial for modality fusion, the potential information loss induced by this projection step and its direct impact on model capabilities remain understudied. We introduce two complementary approaches to examine and quantify this loss by analyzing the latent representation space. First, we evaluate semantic information preservation by analyzing changes in k-nearest neighbor relationships between image representations, before and after projection. Second, we directly measure information loss by reconstructing visual embeddings from the projected representation, localizing loss at an image patch level. Experiments reveal that connectors substantially distort the local geometry of visual representations, with k-nearest neighbors diverging by 40--60\% post-projection, correlating with degradation in retrieval performance. The patch-level embedding reconstruction provides interpretable insights for model behavior on visually grounded question-answering tasks, finding that areas of high information loss reliably predict instances where models struggle.

We introduce a novel approach to counter adversarial attacks, namely, image resampling. Image resampling transforms a discrete image into a new one, simulating the process of scene recapturing or rerendering as specified by a geometrical transformation. The underlying rationale behind our idea is that image resampling can alleviate the influence of adversarial perturbations while preserving essential semantic information, thereby conferring an inherent advantage in defending against adversarial attacks. To validate this concept, we present a comprehensive study on leveraging image resampling to defend against adversarial attacks. We have developed basic resampling methods that employ interpolation strategies and coordinate shifting magnitudes. Our analysis reveals that these basic methods can partially mitigate adversarial attacks. However, they come with apparent limitations: the accuracy of clean images noticeably decreases, while the improvement in accuracy on adversarial examples is not substantial. We propose implicit representation-driven image resampling (IRAD) to overcome these limitations. First, we construct an implicit continuous representation that enables us to represent any input image within a continuous coordinate space. Second, we introduce SampleNet, which automatically generates pixel-wise shifts for resampling in response to different inputs. Furthermore, we can extend our approach to the state-of-the-art diffusion-based method, accelerating it with fewer time steps while preserving its defense capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the adversarial robustness of diverse deep models against various attacks while maintaining high accuracy on clean images.

Contemporary image rescaling aims at embedding a high-resolution (HR) image into a low-resolution (LR) thumbnail image that contains embedded information for HR image reconstruction. Unlike traditional image super-resolution, this enables high-fidelity HR image restoration faithful to the original one, given the embedded information in the LR thumbnail. However, state-of-the-art image rescaling methods do not optimize the LR image file size for efficient sharing and fall short of real-time performance for ultra-high-resolution (e.g., 6K) image reconstruction. To address these two challenges, we propose a novel framework (HyperThumbnail) for real-time 6K rate-distortion-aware image rescaling. Our framework first embeds an HR image into a JPEG LR thumbnail by an encoder with our proposed quantization prediction module, which minimizes the file size of the embedding LR JPEG thumbnail while maximizing HR reconstruction quality. Then, an efficient frequency-aware decoder reconstructs a high-fidelity HR image from the LR one in real time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms previous image rescaling baselines in rate-distortion performance and can perform 6K image reconstruction in real time.

Although Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance, they are vulnerable to adversarial patches that introduce perceptible and localized perturbations to the input. Generating adversarial patches on images has received much attention, while adversarial patches on videos have not been well investigated. Further, decision-based attacks, where attackers only access the predicted hard labels by querying threat models, have not been well explored on video models either, even if they are practical in real-world video recognition scenes. The absence of such studies leads to a huge gap in the robustness assessment for video models. To bridge this gap, this work first explores decision-based patch attacks on video models. We analyze that the huge parameter space brought by videos and the minimal information returned by decision-based models both greatly increase the attack difficulty and query burden. To achieve a query-efficient attack, we propose a spatial-temporal differential evolution (STDE) framework. First, STDE introduces target videos as patch textures and only adds patches on keyframes that are adaptively selected by temporal difference. Second, STDE takes minimizing the patch area as the optimization objective and adopts spatialtemporal mutation and crossover to search for the global optimum without falling into the local optimum. Experiments show STDE has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in terms of threat, efficiency and imperceptibility. Hence, STDE has the potential to be a powerful tool for evaluating the robustness of video recognition models.

In the realm of image synthesis, achieving fidelity to a reference image while adhering to conditional prompts remains a significant challenge. This paper proposes a novel approach that integrates a diffusion model with latent space manipulation and gradient-based selective attention mechanisms to address this issue. Leveraging Grad-SAM (Gradient-based Selective Attention Manipulation), we analyze the cross attention maps of the cross attention layers and gradients for the denoised latent vector, deriving importance scores of elements of denoised latent vector related to the subject of interest. Using this information, we create masks at specific timesteps during denoising to preserve subjects while seamlessly integrating the reference image features. This approach ensures the faithful formation of subjects based on conditional prompts, while concurrently refining the background for a more coherent composition. Our experiments on places365 dataset demonstrate promising results, with our proposed model achieving the lowest mean and median Frechet Inception Distance (FID) scores compared to baseline models, indicating superior fidelity preservation. Furthermore, our model exhibits competitive performance in aligning the generated images with provided textual descriptions, as evidenced by high CLIP scores. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in both fidelity preservation and textual context preservation, offering a significant advancement in text-to-image synthesis tasks.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance in image and video synthesis. However, scaling them to high-resolution inputs is challenging and requires restructuring the diffusion pipeline into multiple independent components, limiting scalability and complicating downstream applications. This makes it very efficient during training and unlocks end-to-end optimization on high-resolution videos. We improve PDMs in two principled ways. First, to enforce consistency between patches, we develop deep context fusion -- an architectural technique that propagates the context information from low-scale to high-scale patches in a hierarchical manner. Second, to accelerate training and inference, we propose adaptive computation, which allocates more network capacity and computation towards coarse image details. The resulting model sets a new state-of-the-art FVD score of 66.32 and Inception Score of 87.68 in class-conditional video generation on UCF-101 256^2, surpassing recent methods by more than 100%. Then, we show that it can be rapidly fine-tuned from a base 36times 64 low-resolution generator for high-resolution 64 times 288 times 512 text-to-video synthesis. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first diffusion-based architecture which is trained on such high resolutions entirely end-to-end. Project webpage: https://snap-research.github.io/hpdm.

We propose a novel feed-forward network for video inpainting. We use a set of sampled video frames as the reference to take visible contents to fill the hole of a target frame. Our video inpainting network consists of two stages. The first stage is an alignment module that uses computed homographies between the reference frames and the target frame. The visible patches are then aggregated based on the frame similarity to fill in the target holes roughly. The second stage is a non-local attention module that matches the generated patches with known reference patches (in space and time) to refine the previous global alignment stage. Both stages consist of large spatial-temporal window size for the reference and thus enable modeling long-range correlations between distant information and the hole regions. Therefore, even challenging scenes with large or slowly moving holes can be handled, which have been hardly modeled by existing flow-based approach. Our network is also designed with a recurrent propagation stream to encourage temporal consistency in video results. Experiments on video object removal demonstrate that our method inpaints the holes with globally and locally coherent contents.

Diffusion models suffer severe object repetition and local distortion when the inference resolution differs from its pre-trained resolution. We propose AccDiffusion v2, an accurate method for patch-wise higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation without training. Our in-depth analysis in this paper shows that using an identical text prompt for different patches leads to repetitive generation, while the absence of a prompt undermines image details. In response, our AccDiffusion v2 novelly decouples the vanilla image-content-aware prompt into a set of patch-content-aware prompts, each of which serves as a more precise description of a patch. Further analysis reveals that local distortion arises from inaccurate descriptions in prompts about the local structure of higher-resolution images. To address this issue, AccDiffusion v2, for the first time, introduces an auxiliary local structural information through ControlNet during higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation aiming to mitigate the local distortions. Finally, our analysis indicates that global semantic information is conducive to suppressing both repetitive generation and local distortion. Hence, our AccDiffusion v2 further proposes dilated sampling with window interaction for better global semantic information during higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation. We conduct extensive experiments, including both quantitative and qualitative comparisons, to demonstrate the efficacy of our AccDiffusion v2. The quantitative comparison shows that AccDiffusion v2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in image generation extrapolation without training. The qualitative comparison intuitively illustrates that AccDiffusion v2 effectively suppresses the issues of repetitive generation and local distortion in image generation extrapolation. Our code is available at https://github.com/lzhxmu/AccDiffusion_v2.

Over the last decade, deep neural networks have achieved state of the art in computer vision tasks. These models, however, are susceptible to unusual inputs, known as adversarial examples, that cause them to misclassify or otherwise fail to detect objects. Here, we provide evidence that the increasing success of adversarial attacks is primarily due to increasing their size. We then demonstrate a method for generating the largest possible adversarial patch by building a adversarial pattern out of repeatable elements. This approach achieves a new state of the art in evading detection by YOLOv2 and YOLOv3. Finally, we present an experiment that fails to replicate the prior success of several attacks published in this field, and end with some comments on testing and reproducibility.

The commonly adopted detect-then-match approach to registration finds difficulties in the cross-modality cases due to the incompatible keypoint detection and inconsistent feature description. We propose, 2D3D-MATR, a detection-free method for accurate and robust registration between images and point clouds. Our method adopts a coarse-to-fine pipeline where it first computes coarse correspondences between downsampled patches of the input image and the point cloud and then extends them to form dense correspondences between pixels and points within the patch region. The coarse-level patch matching is based on transformer which jointly learns global contextual constraints with self-attention and cross-modality correlations with cross-attention. To resolve the scale ambiguity in patch matching, we construct a multi-scale pyramid for each image patch and learn to find for each point patch the best matching image patch at a proper resolution level. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate that 2D3D-MATR outperforms the previous state-of-the-art P2-Net by around 20 percentage points on inlier ratio and over 10 points on registration recall. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/minhaolee/2D3DMATR.

Image inpainting is the task of plausibly restoring missing pixels within a hole region that is to be removed from a target image. Most existing technologies exploit patch similarities within the image, or leverage large-scale training data to fill the hole using learned semantic and texture information. However, due to the ill-posed nature of the inpainting task, such methods struggle to complete larger holes containing complicated scenes. In this paper, we propose TransFill, a multi-homography transformed fusion method to fill the hole by referring to another source image that shares scene contents with the target image. We first align the source image to the target image by estimating multiple homographies guided by different depth levels. We then learn to adjust the color and apply a pixel-level warping to each homography-warped source image to make it more consistent with the target. Finally, a pixel-level fusion module is learned to selectively merge the different proposals. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on pairs of images across a variety of wide baselines and color differences, and generalizes to user-provided image pairs.

Existing deep learning based image inpainting methods use a standard convolutional network over the corrupted image, using convolutional filter responses conditioned on both valid pixels as well as the substitute values in the masked holes (typically the mean value). This often leads to artifacts such as color discrepancy and blurriness. Post-processing is usually used to reduce such artifacts, but are expensive and may fail. We propose the use of partial convolutions, where the convolution is masked and renormalized to be conditioned on only valid pixels. We further include a mechanism to automatically generate an updated mask for the next layer as part of the forward pass. Our model outperforms other methods for irregular masks. We show qualitative and quantitative comparisons with other methods to validate our approach.

Multi-Resolution Hash Encoding (MHE), the foundational technique behind Instant Neural Graphics Primitives, provides a powerful parameterization for neural fields. However, its spatial behavior lacks rigorous understanding from a physical systems perspective, leading to reliance on heuristics for hyperparameter selection. This work introduces a novel analytical approach that characterizes MHE by examining its Point Spread Function (PSF), which is analogous to the Green's function of the system. This methodology enables a quantification of the encoding's spatial resolution and fidelity. We derive a closed-form approximation for the collision-free PSF, uncovering inherent grid-induced anisotropy and a logarithmic spatial profile. We establish that the idealized spatial bandwidth, specifically the Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM), is determined by the average resolution, N_{avg}. This leads to a counterintuitive finding: the effective resolution of the model is governed by the broadened empirical FWHM (and therefore N_{avg}), rather than the finest resolution N_{max}, a broadening effect we demonstrate arises from optimization dynamics. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of finite hash capacity, demonstrating how collisions introduce speckle noise and degrade the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). Leveraging these theoretical insights, we propose Rotated MHE (R-MHE), an architecture that applies distinct rotations to the input coordinates at each resolution level. R-MHE mitigates anisotropy while maintaining the efficiency and parameter count of the original MHE. This study establishes a methodology based on physical principles that moves beyond heuristics to characterize and optimize MHE.

A well-known challenge in applying deep-learning methods to omnidirectional images is spherical distortion. In dense regression tasks such as depth estimation, where structural details are required, using a vanilla CNN layer on the distorted 360 image results in undesired information loss. In this paper, we propose a 360 monocular depth estimation pipeline, OmniFusion, to tackle the spherical distortion issue. Our pipeline transforms a 360 image into less-distorted perspective patches (i.e. tangent images) to obtain patch-wise predictions via CNN, and then merge the patch-wise results for final output. To handle the discrepancy between patch-wise predictions which is a major issue affecting the merging quality, we propose a new framework with the following key components. First, we propose a geometry-aware feature fusion mechanism that combines 3D geometric features with 2D image features to compensate for the patch-wise discrepancy. Second, we employ the self-attention-based transformer architecture to conduct a global aggregation of patch-wise information, which further improves the consistency. Last, we introduce an iterative depth refinement mechanism, to further refine the estimated depth based on the more accurate geometric features. Experiments show that our method greatly mitigates the distortion issue, and achieves state-of-the-art performances on several 360 monocular depth estimation benchmark datasets.

Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) was shown to be vulnerable to patch-based data poisoning backdoor attacks. It was shown that an adversary can poison a small part of the unlabeled data so that when a victim trains an SSL model on it, the final model will have a backdoor that the adversary can exploit. This work aims to defend self-supervised learning against such attacks. We use a three-step defense pipeline, where we first train a model on the poisoned data. In the second step, our proposed defense algorithm (PatchSearch) uses the trained model to search the training data for poisoned samples and removes them from the training set. In the third step, a final model is trained on the cleaned-up training set. Our results show that PatchSearch is an effective defense. As an example, it improves a model's accuracy on images containing the trigger from 38.2% to 63.7% which is very close to the clean model's accuracy, 64.6%. Moreover, we show that PatchSearch outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art defense approaches including those using additional clean, trusted data. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCDvision/PatchSearch

Current deep video quality assessment (VQA) methods are usually with high computational costs when evaluating high-resolution videos. This cost hinders them from learning better video-quality-related representations via end-to-end training. Existing approaches typically consider naive sampling to reduce the computational cost, such as resizing and cropping. However, they obviously corrupt quality-related information in videos and are thus not optimal for learning good representations for VQA. Therefore, there is an eager need to design a new quality-retained sampling scheme for VQA. In this paper, we propose Grid Mini-patch Sampling (GMS), which allows consideration of local quality by sampling patches at their raw resolution and covers global quality with contextual relations via mini-patches sampled in uniform grids. These mini-patches are spliced and aligned temporally, named as fragments. We further build the Fragment Attention Network (FANet) specially designed to accommodate fragments as inputs. Consisting of fragments and FANet, the proposed FrAgment Sample Transformer for VQA (FAST-VQA) enables efficient end-to-end deep VQA and learns effective video-quality-related representations. It improves state-of-the-art accuracy by around 10% while reducing 99.5% FLOPs on 1080P high-resolution videos. The newly learned video-quality-related representations can also be transferred into smaller VQA datasets, boosting performance in these scenarios. Extensive experiments show that FAST-VQA has good performance on inputs of various resolutions while retaining high efficiency. We publish our code at https://github.com/timothyhtimothy/FAST-VQA.

Standard single-image super-resolution creates paired training data from high-resolution images through fixed downsampling kernels. However, real-world super-resolution (RWSR) faces unknown degradations in the low-resolution inputs, all the while lacking paired training data. Existing methods approach this problem by learning blind general models through complex synthetic augmentations on training inputs; they sacrifice the performance on specific degradation for broader generalization to many possible ones. We address the unsupervised RWSR for a targeted real-world degradation. We study from a distillation perspective and introduce a novel pairwise distance distillation framework. Through our framework, a model specialized in synthetic degradation adapts to target real-world degradations by distilling intra- and inter-model distances across the specialized model and an auxiliary generalized model. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that our method significantly enhances fidelity and perceptual quality, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches in RWSR. The source code is available at https://github.com/Yuehan717/PDD.

3D Gaussian Splatting enables high-quality real-time rendering but often produces millions of splats, resulting in excessive storage and computational overhead. We propose a novel lossy compression method based on learnable confidence scores modeled as Beta distributions. Each splat's confidence is optimized through reconstruction-aware losses, enabling pruning of low-confidence splats while preserving visual fidelity. The proposed approach is architecture-agnostic and can be applied to any Gaussian Splatting variant. In addition, the average confidence values serve as a new metric to assess the quality of the scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate favorable trade-offs between compression and fidelity compared to prior work. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/amirhossein-razlighi/Confident-Splatting

OpenAI's GPT-4o model, integrating multi-modal inputs and outputs within an autoregressive architecture, has demonstrated unprecedented performance in image generation. In this work, we investigate its potential impact on the image restoration community. We present the first systematic evaluation of GPT-4o across diverse restoration tasks. Our experiments reveal that, although restoration outputs from GPT-4o are visually appealing, they often suffer from pixel-level structural fidelity when compared to ground-truth images. Common issues are variations in image proportions, shifts in object positions and quantities, and changes in viewpoint.To address it, taking image dehazing, derainning, and low-light enhancement as representative case studies, we show that GPT-4o's outputs can serve as powerful visual priors, substantially enhancing the performance of existing dehazing networks. It offers practical guidelines and a baseline framework to facilitate the integration of GPT-4o into future image restoration pipelines. We hope the study on GPT-4o image restoration will accelerate innovation in the broader field of image generation areas. To support further research, we will release GPT-4o-restored images from over 10 widely used image restoration datasets.

We introduce region-specific image refinement as a dedicated problem setting: given an input image and a user-specified region (e.g., a scribble mask or a bounding box), the goal is to restore fine-grained details while keeping all non-edited pixels strictly unchanged. Despite rapid progress in image generation, modern models still frequently suffer from local detail collapse (e.g., distorted text, logos, and thin structures). Existing instruction-driven editing models emphasize coarse-grained semantic edits and often either overlook subtle local defects or inadvertently change the background, especially when the region of interest occupies only a small portion of a fixed-resolution input. We present RefineAnything, a multimodal diffusion-based refinement model that supports both reference-based and reference-free refinement. Building on a counter-intuitive observation that crop-and-resize can substantially improve local reconstruction under a fixed VAE input resolution, we propose Focus-and-Refine, a region-focused refinement-and-paste-back strategy that improves refinement effectiveness and efficiency by reallocating the resolution budget to the target region, while a blended-mask paste-back guarantees strict background preservation. We further introduce a boundary-aware Boundary Consistency Loss to reduce seam artifacts and improve paste-back naturalness. To support this new setting, we construct Refine-30K (20K reference-based and 10K reference-free samples) and introduce RefineEval, a benchmark that evaluates both edited-region fidelity and background consistency. On RefineEval, RefineAnything achieves strong improvements over competitive baselines and near-perfect background preservation, establishing a practical solution for high-precision local refinement. Project Page: https://limuloo.github.io/RefineAnything/.

Diffusion models have revolutionized image generation, yet several challenges restrict their application to large-image domains, such as digital pathology and satellite imagery. Given that it is infeasible to directly train a model on 'whole' images from domains with potential gigapixel sizes, diffusion-based generative methods have focused on synthesizing small, fixed-size patches extracted from these images. However, generating small patches has limited applicability since patch-based models fail to capture the global structures and wider context of large images, which can be crucial for synthesizing (semantically) accurate samples. To overcome this limitation, we present ZoomLDM, a diffusion model tailored for generating images across multiple scales. Central to our approach is a novel magnification-aware conditioning mechanism that utilizes self-supervised learning (SSL) embeddings and allows the diffusion model to synthesize images at different 'zoom' levels, i.e., fixed-size patches extracted from large images at varying scales. ZoomLDM synthesizes coherent histopathology images that remain contextually accurate and detailed at different zoom levels, achieving state-of-the-art image generation quality across all scales and excelling in the data-scarce setting of generating thumbnails of entire large images. The multi-scale nature of ZoomLDM unlocks additional capabilities in large image generation, enabling computationally tractable and globally coherent image synthesis up to 4096 times 4096 pixels and 4times super-resolution. Additionally, multi-scale features extracted from ZoomLDM are highly effective in multiple instance learning experiments.

We propose a training-free method for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation using Vision-and-Language Models (VLMs). Our approach enhances the initial per-patch predictions of VLMs through label propagation, which jointly optimizes predictions by incorporating patch-to-patch relationships. Since VLMs are primarily optimized for cross-modal alignment and not for intra-modal similarity, we use a Vision Model (VM) that is observed to better capture these relationships. We address resolution limitations inherent to patch-based encoders by applying label propagation at the pixel level as a refinement step, significantly improving segmentation accuracy near class boundaries. Our method, called LPOSS+, performs inference over the entire image, avoiding window-based processing and thereby capturing contextual interactions across the full image. LPOSS+ achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free methods, across a diverse set of datasets. Code: https://github.com/vladan-stojnic/LPOSS

Despite the remarkable success of text-to-image diffusion models, their output of a single, flattened image remains a critical bottleneck for professional applications requiring layer-wise control. Existing solutions either rely on fine-tuning with large, inaccessible datasets or are training-free yet limited to generating isolated foreground elements, failing to produce a complete and coherent scene. To address this, we introduce the Training-free Noise Transplantation and Cultivation Diffusion Model (TAUE), a novel framework for zero-shot, layer-wise image generation. Our core technique, Noise Transplantation and Cultivation (NTC), extracts intermediate latent representations from both foreground and composite generation processes, transplanting them into the initial noise for subsequent layers. This ensures semantic and structural coherence across foreground, background, and composite layers, enabling consistent, multi-layered outputs without requiring fine-tuning or auxiliary datasets. Extensive experiments show that our training-free method achieves performance comparable to fine-tuned methods, enhancing layer-wise consistency while maintaining high image quality and fidelity. TAUE not only eliminates costly training and dataset requirements but also unlocks novel downstream applications, such as complex compositional editing, paving the way for more accessible and controllable generative workflows.

Vision-language models are emerging for autonomous driving, yet their robustness to physical adversarial attacks remains unexplored. This paper presents a systematic framework for comparative adversarial evaluation across three VLM architectures: Dolphins, OmniDrive (Omni-L), and LeapVAD. Using black-box optimization with semantic homogenization for fair comparison, we evaluate physically realizable patch attacks in CARLA simulation. Results reveal severe vulnerabilities across all architectures, sustained multi-frame failures, and critical object detection degradation. Our analysis exposes distinct architectural vulnerability patterns, demonstrating that current VLM designs inadequately address adversarial threats in safety-critical autonomous driving applications.

High-dynamic-range (HDR) formats and displays are becoming increasingly prevalent, yet state-of-the-art image generators (e.g., Stable Diffusion and FLUX) typically remain limited to low-dynamic-range (LDR) output due to the lack of large-scale HDR training data. In this work, we show that existing pretrained diffusion models can be easily adapted to HDR generation without retraining from scratch. A key challenge is that HDR images are natively represented in linear RGB, whose intensity and color statistics differ substantially from those of sRGB-encoded LDR images. This gap, however, can be effectively bridged by converting HDR inputs into perceptually uniform encodings (e.g., using PU21 or PQ). Empirically, we find that LDR-pretrained variational autoencoders (VAEs) reconstruct PU21-encoded HDR inputs with fidelity comparable to LDR data, whereas linear RGB inputs cause severe degradations. Motivated by this finding, we describe an efficient adaptation strategy that freezes the VAE and finetunes only the denoiser via low-rank adaptation in a perceptually uniform space. This results in a unified computational method that supports both text-to-HDR synthesis and single-image RAW-to-HDR reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate that our perceptually encoded adaptation consistently improves perceptual fidelity, text-image alignment, and effective dynamic range, relative to previous techniques.

In this paper, we propose GuideSR, a novel single-step diffusion-based image super-resolution (SR) model specifically designed to enhance image fidelity. Existing diffusion-based SR approaches typically adapt pre-trained generative models to image restoration tasks by adding extra conditioning on a VAE-downsampled representation of the degraded input, which often compromises structural fidelity. GuideSR addresses this limitation by introducing a dual-branch architecture comprising: (1) a Guidance Branch that preserves high-fidelity structures from the original-resolution degraded input, and (2) a Diffusion Branch, which a pre-trained latent diffusion model to enhance perceptual quality. Unlike conventional conditioning mechanisms, our Guidance Branch features a tailored structure for image restoration tasks, combining Full Resolution Blocks (FRBs) with channel attention and an Image Guidance Network (IGN) with guided attention. By embedding detailed structural information directly into the restoration pipeline, GuideSR produces sharper and more visually consistent results. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that GuideSR achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining the low computational cost of single-step approaches, with up to 1.39dB PSNR gain on challenging real-world datasets. Our approach consistently outperforms existing methods across various reference-based metrics including PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, DISTS and FID, further representing a practical advancement for real-world image restoration.

Generation-driven world models create immersive virtual environments but suffer slow inference due to the iterative nature of diffusion models. While recent advances have improved diffusion model efficiency, directly applying these techniques to world models introduces limitations such as quality degradation. In this paper, we present HERO, a training-free hierarchical acceleration framework tailored for efficient world models. Owing to the multi-modal nature of world models, we identify a feature coupling phenomenon, wherein shallow layers exhibit high temporal variability, while deeper layers yield more stable feature representations. Motivated by this, HERO adopts hierarchical strategies to accelerate inference: (i) In shallow layers, a patch-wise refresh mechanism efficiently selects tokens for recomputation. With patch-wise sampling and frequency-aware tracking, it avoids extra metric computation and remain compatible with FlashAttention. (ii) In deeper layers, a linear extrapolation scheme directly estimates intermediate features. This completely bypasses the computations in attention modules and feed-forward networks. Our experiments show that HERO achieves a 1.73times speedup with minimal quality degradation, significantly outperforming existing diffusion acceleration methods.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) partition input images into uniformly sized patches regardless of their content, resulting in long input sequence lengths for high-resolution images. We present Adaptive Patch Transformers (APT), which addresses this by using multiple different patch sizes within the same image. APT reduces the total number of input tokens by allocating larger patch sizes in more homogeneous areas and smaller patches in more complex ones. APT achieves a drastic speedup in ViT inference and training, increasing throughput by 40% on ViT-L and 50% on ViT-H while maintaining downstream performance, and can be applied to a previously fine-tuned ViT, converging in as little as 1 epoch. It also significantly reduces training and inference time without loss of performance in high-resolution dense visual tasks, achieving up to 30\% faster training and inference in visual QA, object detection, and semantic segmentation.

We show how to augment any convolutional network with an attention-based global map to achieve non-local reasoning. We replace the final average pooling by an attention-based aggregation layer akin to a single transformer block, that weights how the patches are involved in the classification decision. We plug this learned aggregation layer with a simplistic patch-based convolutional network parametrized by 2 parameters (width and depth). In contrast with a pyramidal design, this architecture family maintains the input patch resolution across all the layers. It yields surprisingly competitive trade-offs between accuracy and complexity, in particular in terms of memory consumption, as shown by our experiments on various computer vision tasks: object classification, image segmentation and detection.

Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) is essential for reliable face recognition systems. Current approaches primarily exploit only final-layer representations, while training-free methods require multiple forward passes or backpropagation. We propose ViTNT-FIQA, a training-free approach that measures the stability of patch embedding evolution across intermediate Vision Transformer (ViT) blocks. We demonstrate that high-quality face images exhibit stable feature refinement trajectories across blocks, while degraded images show erratic transformations. Our method computes Euclidean distances between L2-normalized patch embeddings from consecutive transformer blocks and aggregates them into image-level quality scores. We empirically validate this correlation on a quality-labeled synthetic dataset with controlled degradation levels. Unlike existing training-free approaches, ViTNT-FIQA requires only a single forward pass without backpropagation or architectural modifications. Through extensive evaluation on eight benchmarks (LFW, AgeDB-30, CFP-FP, CALFW, Adience, CPLFW, XQLFW, IJB-C), we show that ViTNT-FIQA achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods while maintaining computational efficiency and immediate applicability to any pre-trained ViT-based face recognition model.

Activation Patching is a method of directly computing causal attributions of behavior to model components. However, applying it exhaustively requires a sweep with cost scaling linearly in the number of model components, which can be prohibitively expensive for SoTA Large Language Models (LLMs). We investigate Attribution Patching (AtP), a fast gradient-based approximation to Activation Patching and find two classes of failure modes of AtP which lead to significant false negatives. We propose a variant of AtP called AtP*, with two changes to address these failure modes while retaining scalability. We present the first systematic study of AtP and alternative methods for faster activation patching and show that AtP significantly outperforms all other investigated methods, with AtP* providing further significant improvement. Finally, we provide a method to bound the probability of remaining false negatives of AtP* estimates.

Vision transformers (ViTs) have significantly changed the computer vision landscape and have periodically exhibited superior performance in vision tasks compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Although the jury is still out on which model type is superior, each has unique inductive biases that shape their learning and generalization performance. For example, ViTs have interesting properties with respect to early layer non-local feature dependence, as well as self-attention mechanisms which enhance learning flexibility, enabling them to ignore out-of-context image information more effectively. We hypothesize that this power to ignore out-of-context information (which we name patch selectivity), while integrating in-context information in a non-local manner in early layers, allows ViTs to more easily handle occlusion. In this study, our aim is to see whether we can have CNNs simulate this ability of patch selectivity by effectively hardwiring this inductive bias using Patch Mixing data augmentation, which consists of inserting patches from another image onto a training image and interpolating labels between the two image classes. Specifically, we use Patch Mixing to train state-of-the-art ViTs and CNNs, assessing its impact on their ability to ignore out-of-context patches and handle natural occlusions. We find that ViTs do not improve nor degrade when trained using Patch Mixing, but CNNs acquire new capabilities to ignore out-of-context information and improve on occlusion benchmarks, leaving us to conclude that this training method is a way of simulating in CNNs the abilities that ViTs already possess. We will release our Patch Mixing implementation and proposed datasets for public use. Project page: https://arielnlee.github.io/PatchMixing/

We present a novel approach to leverage prior knowledge encapsulated in pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models for blind super-resolution (SR). Specifically, by employing our time-aware encoder, we can achieve promising restoration results without altering the pre-trained synthesis model, thereby preserving the generative prior and minimizing training cost. To remedy the loss of fidelity caused by the inherent stochasticity of diffusion models, we introduce a controllable feature wrapping module that allows users to balance quality and fidelity by simply adjusting a scalar value during the inference process. Moreover, we develop a progressive aggregation sampling strategy to overcome the fixed-size constraints of pre-trained diffusion models, enabling adaptation to resolutions of any size. A comprehensive evaluation of our method using both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrates its superiority over current state-of-the-art approaches.

Autonomous vehicles increasingly utilize the vision-based perception module to acquire information about driving environments and detect obstacles. Correct detection and classification are important to ensure safe driving decisions. Existing works have demonstrated the feasibility of fooling the perception models such as object detectors and image classifiers with printed adversarial patches. However, most of them are indiscriminately offensive to every passing autonomous vehicle. In this paper, we propose TPatch, a physical adversarial patch triggered by acoustic signals. Unlike other adversarial patches, TPatch remains benign under normal circumstances but can be triggered to launch a hiding, creating or altering attack by a designed distortion introduced by signal injection attacks towards cameras. To avoid the suspicion of human drivers and make the attack practical and robust in the real world, we propose a content-based camouflage method and an attack robustness enhancement method to strengthen it. Evaluations with three object detectors, YOLO V3/V5 and Faster R-CNN, and eight image classifiers demonstrate the effectiveness of TPatch in both the simulation and the real world. We also discuss possible defenses at the sensor, algorithm, and system levels.

Being able to spot defective parts is a critical component in large-scale industrial manufacturing. A particular challenge that we address in this work is the cold-start problem: fit a model using nominal (non-defective) example images only. While handcrafted solutions per class are possible, the goal is to build systems that work well simultaneously on many different tasks automatically. The best performing approaches combine embeddings from ImageNet models with an outlier detection model. In this paper, we extend on this line of work and propose PatchCore, which uses a maximally representative memory bank of nominal patch-features. PatchCore offers competitive inference times while achieving state-of-the-art performance for both detection and localization. On the challenging, widely used MVTec AD benchmark PatchCore achieves an image-level anomaly detection AUROC score of up to 99.6%, more than halving the error compared to the next best competitor. We further report competitive results on two additional datasets and also find competitive results in the few samples regime.^* Work done during a research internship at Amazon AWS. Code: github.com/amazon-research/patchcore-inspection.

Adversarial attacks on machine learning models have seen increasing interest in the past years. By making only subtle changes to the input of a convolutional neural network, the output of the network can be swayed to output a completely different result. The first attacks did this by changing pixel values of an input image slightly to fool a classifier to output the wrong class. Other approaches have tried to learn "patches" that can be applied to an object to fool detectors and classifiers. Some of these approaches have also shown that these attacks are feasible in the real-world, i.e. by modifying an object and filming it with a video camera. However, all of these approaches target classes that contain almost no intra-class variety (e.g. stop signs). The known structure of the object is then used to generate an adversarial patch on top of it. In this paper, we present an approach to generate adversarial patches to targets with lots of intra-class variety, namely persons. The goal is to generate a patch that is able successfully hide a person from a person detector. An attack that could for instance be used maliciously to circumvent surveillance systems, intruders can sneak around undetected by holding a small cardboard plate in front of their body aimed towards the surveillance camera. From our results we can see that our system is able significantly lower the accuracy of a person detector. Our approach also functions well in real-life scenarios where the patch is filmed by a camera. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to attempt this kind of attack on targets with a high level of intra-class variety like persons.

Standard diffusion models corrupt an entire sample with a single shared noise level, forcing all spatial regions to follow the same denoising trajectory. We introduce AsyncPatch Diffusion, a joint-diffusion framework that assigns distinct noise levels to different input dimensions, such as image pixels, or latent tokens. We show how this asynchronous corruption defines a valid generative process while supporting a richer family of spatially heterogeneous denoising trajectories, and prove the first valid ELBO for this process. We show that a single pretrained model can perform spatially adaptive generation, where different regions are denoised on different schedules. A key challenge is training: naive independent noise-level sampling overemphasizes highly heterogeneous configurations and underrepresents homogeneous noise levels, that are crucial during sampling. We address this with a controlled noise-level sampler that regulates both the average corruption level and its spatial variability. AsyncPatch achieves generation quality comparable to conventional diffusion on ImageNet 256 and LSUN, while being natively suited for inpainting without task-specific fine-tuning. We further introduce input guidance, which uses clean or partially corrupted regions to guide the generation of unknown regions, improving local consistency and texture matching. Finally, we demonstrate adaptive generation strategies including uncertainty-guided acceleration and autoregressive sampling.

Multimodal agents repeatedly re-examine the same video frames, UI screenshots, and rendered artifacts as their context window slides and reasoning iterates, yet every look-back re-encodes from scratch, because prefix caches serve reuse only at a fixed leading position. We show this recompute is avoidable, and identify exactly what naive KV reuse loses: the cross-chunk conditioning a chunk absorbs from its neighbours. This loss is asymmetric. The direct readout of a cached chunk is recovered exactly and for free by the standard state-merge. What remains is a diffuse, low-rank residue concentrated in deep layers, invisible to single-hop retrieval but precisely what multi-hop reasoning binds on. Blind reuse therefore leaves single-hop recall intact while halving multi-hop accuracy; this is the failure mode prior position-independent caches, designed for single-context or single-image reuse, do not address. We repair it with a small, training-free low-rank conditioning patch stored alongside each position-free chunk. Reuse reduces to one operator across MLA, GQA, and MHA: exact RoPE re-rotation to any target position, plus the patch that restores cross-chunk binding. This makes three window operations cheap: reorder (one patch serves every ordering of a cached set), sliding-window survival (surviving chunks relocate via rotation only, zero re-encode), and recall (an evicted chunk is rehydrated by its patch, never re-encoded). A rank-m patch recovers full task accuracy on cross-chunk-binding benchmarks, MM-NIAH across two attention families and two-page doc-QA, at a fraction of the KV footprint, and reconstructs re-prefill KV to within bf16 rounding in a production SGLang kernel across six backbones. The conditioning signal is strongest in redundant vision and video streams, making our solution most impactful where multimodal agents spend their recompute budget.

Pixel-wise predictions are required in a wide variety of tasks such as image restoration, image segmentation, or disparity estimation. Common models involve several stages of data resampling, in which the resolution of feature maps is first reduced to aggregate information and then increased to generate a high-resolution output. Previous works have shown that resampling operations are subject to artifacts such as aliasing. During downsampling, aliases have been shown to compromise the prediction stability of image classifiers. During upsampling, they have been leveraged to detect generated content. Yet, the effect of aliases during upsampling has not yet been discussed w.r.t. the stability and robustness of pixel-wise predictions. While falling under the same term (aliasing), the challenges for correct upsampling in neural networks differ significantly from those during downsampling: when downsampling, some high frequencies can not be correctly represented and have to be removed to avoid aliases. However, when upsampling for pixel-wise predictions, we actually require the model to restore such high frequencies that can not be encoded in lower resolutions. The application of findings from signal processing is therefore a necessary but not a sufficient condition to achieve the desirable output. In contrast, we find that the availability of large spatial context during upsampling allows to provide stable, high-quality pixel-wise predictions, even when fully learning all filter weights.

Recent advances in 3D generative models have rapidly improved image-to-3D synthesis quality, enabling higher-resolution geometry and more realistic appearance. Yet fidelity, which measures pixel-level faithfulness of the generated 3D asset to the input image, still remains a central bottleneck. We argue this stems from an implicit 2D-3D correspondence issue: most 3D-native generators synthesize shape in canonical space and inject image cues via attention, leaving pixel-to-3D associations ambiguous. To tackle this issue, we draw inspiration from 3D reconstruction and propose Pixal3D, a pixel-aligned 3D generation paradigm for high-fidelity 3D asset creation from images. Instead of generating in a canonical pose, Pixal3D directly generates 3D in a pixel-aligned way, consistent with the input view. To enable this, we introduce a pixel back-projection conditioning scheme that explicitly lifts multi-scale image features into a 3D feature volume, establishing direct pixel-to-3D correspondence without ambiguity. We show that Pixal3D is not only scalable and capable of producing high-quality 3D assets, but also substantially improves fidelity, approaching the fidelity level of reconstruction. Furthermore, Pixal3D naturally extends to multi-view generation by aggregating back-projected feature volumes across views. Finally, we show pixel-aligned generation benefits scene synthesis, and present a modular pipeline that produces high-fidelity, object-separated 3D scenes from images. Pixal3D for the first time demonstrates 3D-native pixel-aligned generation at scale, and provides a new inspiring way towards high-fidelity 3D generation of object or scene from single or multi-view images. Project page: https://ldyang694.github.io/projects/pixal3d/

Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multi-spectral images by fusing the spatial detail of panchromatic images with the spectral richness of low-resolution MS data. However, most existing methods are evaluated under limited, low-resolution settings, limiting their generalization to real-world, high-resolution scenarios. To bridge this gap, we systematically investigate the data, algorithmic, and computational challenges of cross-scale pansharpening. We first introduce PanScale, the first large-scale, cross-scale pansharpening dataset, accompanied by PanScale-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating generalization across varying resolutions and scales. To realize scale generalization, we propose ScaleFormer, a novel architecture designed for multi-scale pansharpening. ScaleFormer reframes generalization across image resolutions as generalization across sequence lengths: it tokenizes images into patch sequences of the same resolution but variable length proportional to image scale. A Scale-Aware Patchify module enables training for such variations from fixed-size crops. ScaleFormer then decouples intra-patch spatial feature learning from inter-patch sequential dependency modeling, incorporating Rotary Positional Encoding to enhance extrapolation to unseen scales. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms SOTA methods in fusion quality and cross-scale generalization. The datasets and source code are available upon acceptance.

Latent diffusion models have emerged as a leading paradigm for efficient video generation. However, as user expectations shift toward higher-resolution outputs, relying solely on latent computation becomes inadequate. A promising approach involves decoupling the process into two stages: semantic content generation and detail synthesis. The former employs a computationally intensive base model at lower resolutions, while the latter leverages a lightweight cascaded video super-resolution (VSR) model to achieve high-resolution output. In this work, we focus on studying key design principles for latter cascaded VSR models, which are underexplored currently. First, we propose two degradation strategies to generate training pairs that better mimic the output characteristics of the base model, ensuring alignment between the VSR model and its upstream generator. Second, we provide critical insights into VSR model behavior through systematic analysis of (1) timestep sampling strategies, (2) noise augmentation effects on low-resolution (LR) inputs. These findings directly inform our architectural and training innovations. Finally, we introduce interleaving temporal unit and sparse local attention to achieve efficient training and inference, drastically reducing computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework over existing methods, with ablation studies confirming the efficacy of each design choice. Our work establishes a simple yet effective baseline for cascaded video super-resolution generation, offering practical insights to guide future advancements in efficient cascaded synthesis systems.

Free-form video inpainting is a very challenging task that could be widely used for video editing such as text removal. Existing patch-based methods could not handle non-repetitive structures such as faces, while directly applying image-based inpainting models to videos will result in temporal inconsistency (see http://bit.ly/2Fu1n6b ). In this paper, we introduce a deep learn-ing based free-form video inpainting model, with proposed 3D gated convolutions to tackle the uncertainty of free-form masks and a novel Temporal PatchGAN loss to enhance temporal consistency. In addition, we collect videos and design a free-form mask generation algorithm to build the free-form video inpainting (FVI) dataset for training and evaluation of video inpainting models. We demonstrate the benefits of these components and experiments on both the FaceForensics and our FVI dataset suggest that our method is superior to existing ones. Related source code, full-resolution result videos and the FVI dataset could be found on Github https://github.com/amjltc295/Free-Form-Video-Inpainting .