KV Packet: Recomputation-Free Context-Independent KV Caching for LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely heavily on Key-Value (KV) caching to minimize inference latency. However, standard KV caches are context-dependent: reusing a cached document in a new context requires recomputing KV states to account for shifts in attention distribution. Existing solutions such as CacheBlend, EPIC, and SAM-KV mitigate this issue by selectively recomputing a subset of tokens; however, they still incur non-negligible computational overhead (FLOPs) and increased Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency. In this paper, we propose KV Packet, a recomputation-free cache reuse framework that treats cached documents as immutable ``packets'' wrapped in light-weight trainable soft-token adapters, which are trained via self-supervised distillation to bridge context discontinuities. Experiments on Llama-3.1 and Qwen2.5 demonstrate that the proposed KV Packet method achieves near-zero FLOPs and lower TTFT than recomputation-based baselines, while retaining F1 scores comparable to those of the full recomputation baseline.

NTIRE 2026 The 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) Challenge: Professional Image Quality Assessment (Track 1)

In this paper, we present an overview of the NTIRE 2026 challenge on the 3rd Restore Any Image Model in the Wild, specifically focusing on Track 1: Professional Image Quality Assessment. Conventional Image Quality Assessment (IQA) typically relies on scalar scores. By compressing complex visual characteristics into a single number, these methods fundamentally struggle to distinguish subtle differences among uniformly high-quality images. Furthermore, they fail to articulate why one image is superior, lacking the reasoning capabilities required to provide guidance for vision tasks. To bridge this gap, recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising paradigm. Inspired by this potential, our challenge establishes a novel benchmark exploring the ability of MLLMs to mimic human expert cognition in evaluating high-quality image pairs. Participants were tasked with overcoming critical bottlenecks in professional scenarios, centering on two primary objectives: (1) Comparative Quality Selection: reliably identifying the visually superior image within a high-quality pair; and (2) Interpretative Reasoning: generating grounded, expert-level explanations that detail the rationale behind the selection. In total, the challenge attracted nearly 200 registrations and over 2,500 submissions. The top-performing methods significantly advanced the state of the art in professional IQA. The challenge dataset is available at https://github.com/narthchin/RAIM-PIQA, and the official homepage is accessible at https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12789/.

Making MLLMs Blind: Adversarial Smuggling Attacks in MLLM Content Moderation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly being deployed as automated content moderators. Within this landscape, we uncover a critical threat: Adversarial Smuggling Attacks. Unlike adversarial perturbations (for misclassification) and adversarial jailbreaks (for harmful output generation), adversarial smuggling exploits the Human-AI capability gap. It encodes harmful content into human-readable visual formats that remain AI-unreadable, thereby evading automated detection and enabling the dissemination of harmful content. We classify smuggling attacks into two pathways: (1) Perceptual Blindness, disrupting text recognition; and (2) Reasoning Blockade, inhibiting semantic understanding despite successful text recognition. To evaluate this threat, we constructed SmuggleBench, the first comprehensive benchmark comprising 1,700 adversarial smuggling attack instances. Evaluations on SmuggleBench reveal that both proprietary (e.g., GPT-5) and open-source (e.g., Qwen3-VL) state-of-the-art models are vulnerable to this threat, producing Attack Success Rates (ASR) exceeding 90%. By analyzing the vulnerability through the lenses of perception and reasoning, we identify three root causes: the limited capabilities of vision encoders, the robustness gap in OCR, and the scarcity of domain-specific adversarial examples. We conduct a preliminary exploration of mitigation strategies, investigating the potential of test-time scaling (via CoT) and adversarial training (via SFT) to mitigate this threat. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhihengli-casia/smugglebench.

Beyond Semantic Search: Towards Referential Anchoring in Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) has demonstrated significant potential by enabling flexible multimodal queries that combine a reference image and modification text. However, CIR inherently prioritizes semantic matching, struggling to reliably retrieve a user-specified instance across contexts. In practice, emphasizing concrete instance fidelity over broad semantics is often more consequential. In this work, we propose Object-Anchored Composed Image Retrieval (OACIR), a novel fine-grained retrieval task that mandates strict instance-level consistency. To advance research on this task, we construct OACIRR (OACIR on Real-world images), the first large-scale, multi-domain benchmark comprising over 160K quadruples and four challenging candidate galleries enriched with hard-negative instance distractors. Each quadruple augments the compositional query with a bounding box that visually anchors the object in the reference image, providing a precise and flexible way to ensure instance preservation. To address the OACIR task, we propose AdaFocal, a framework featuring a Context-Aware Attention Modulator that adaptively intensifies attention within the specified instance region, dynamically balancing focus between the anchored instance and the broader compositional context. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdaFocal substantially outperforms existing compositional retrieval models, particularly in maintaining instance-level fidelity, thereby establishing a robust baseline for this challenging task while opening new directions for more flexible, instance-aware retrieval systems.

Captioning Daily Activity Images in Early Childhood Education: Benchmark and Algorithm

Image captioning for Early Childhood Education (ECE) is essential for automated activity understanding and educational assessment. However, existing methods face two key challenges. First, the lack of large-scale, domain-specific datasets limits the model's ability to capture fine-grained semantic concepts unique to ECE scenarios, resulting in generic and imprecise descriptions. Second, conventional training paradigms exhibit limitations in enhancing professional object description capability, as supervised learning tends to favor high-frequency expressions, while reinforcement learning may suffer from unstable optimization on difficult samples. To address these limitations, we introduce ECAC, a large-scale benchmark for ECE daily activity image captioning, comprising 256,121 real-world images annotated with expert-level captions and fine-grained labels. ECAC is further equipped with a domain-oriented evaluation protocol, the Teaching Toy Recognition Score (TTS), to explicitly measure professional object naming accuracy. Furthermore, we propose RSRS (Reward-Conditional Switch of Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning), a hybrid training framework that dynamically alternates between RL and supervised optimization. By rerouting hard samples with zero rewards to supervised fine-tuning, RSRS effectively mitigates advantage collapse and enables stable optimization for fine-grained recognition. Leveraging ECAC and RSRS, we develop KinderMM-Cap-3B, a domain-adapted multimodal large language model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves a TTS of 51.06, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining superior caption quality, highlighting its potential for specialized educational applications.

OptINC: Optical In-Network-Computing for Scalable Distributed Learning

Distributed learning is widely used for training large models on large datasets by distributing parts of the model or dataset across multiple devices and aggregating the computed results for subsequent computations or parameter updates. Existing communication algorithms for distributed learning such as ring all-reduce result in heavy communication overhead between servers. Since communication in large-scale systems uses optical fibers, we propose an Optical In-Network-Computing (OptINC) architecture to offload the computation in servers onto the optical interconnects. To execute gradient averaging and quantization in the optical domain, we incorporate optical devices such as Mach-Zehnder-Interferometers (MZIs) into the interconnects. Such a de facto optical neural network (ONN) can effectively reduce the communication overhead in existing distributed training solutions. To reduce dataset complexity for training this neural network, a preprocessing algorithm implemented in the optical domain is also proposed. Hardware cost is lowered by approximating the weight matrices of the optical neural network with unitary and diagonal matrices, while the accuracy is maintained by a proposed hardware-aware training algorithm. The proposed solution was evaluated on real distributed learning tasks, including ResNet50 on CIFAR-100, and a LLaMA-based network on Wikipedia-1B. In both cases, the proposed framework can achieve comparable training accuracy to the ring all-reduce baseline, while eliminating communication overhead.

Beyond Dataset Distillation: Lossless Dataset Concentration via Diffusion-Assisted Distribution Alignment

The high cost and accessibility problem associated with large datasets hinder the development of large-scale visual recognition systems. Dataset Distillation addresses these problems by synthesizing compact surrogate datasets for efficient training, storage, transfer, and privacy preservation. The existing state-of-the-art diffusion-based dataset distillation methods face three issues: lack of theoretical justification, poor efficiency in scaling to high data volumes, and failure in data-free scenarios. To address these issues, we establish a theoretical framework that justifies the use of diffusion models by proving the equivalence between dataset distillation and distribution matching, and reveals an inherent efficiency limit in the dataset distillation paradigm. We then propose a Dataset Concentration (DsCo) framework that uses a diffusion-based Noise-Optimization (NOpt) method to synthesize a small yet representative set of samples, and optionally augments the synthetic data via "Doping", which mixes selected samples from the original dataset with the synthetic samples to overcome the efficiency limit of dataset distillation. DsCo is applicable in both data-accessible and data-free scenarios, achieving SOTA performances for low data volumes, and it extends well to high data volumes, where it nearly reduces the dataset size by half with no performance degradation.

Amped: Adaptive Multi-stage Non-edge Pruning for Edge Detection

Edge detection is a fundamental image analysis task that underpins numerous high-level vision applications. Recent advances in Transformer architectures have significantly improved edge quality by capturing long-range dependencies, but this often comes with computational overhead. Achieving higher pixel-level accuracy requires increased input resolution, further escalating computational cost and limiting practical deployment. Building on the strong representational capacity of recent Transformer-based edge detectors, we propose an Adaptive Multi-stage non-edge Pruning framework for Edge Detection(Amped). Amped identifies high-confidence non-edge tokens and removes them as early as possible to substantially reduce computation, thus retaining high accuracy while cutting GFLOPs and accelerating inference with minimal performance loss. Moreover, to mitigate the structural complexity of existing edge detection networks and facilitate their integration into real-world systems, we introduce a simple yet high-performance Transformer-based model, termed Streamline Edge Detector(SED). Applied to both existing detectors and our SED, the proposed pruning strategy provides a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency-reducing GFLOPs by up to 40% with only a 0.4% drop in ODS F-measure. In addition, despite its simplicity, SED achieves a state-of-the-art ODS F-measure of 86.5%. The code will be released.

MultiLoc: Multi-view Guided Relative Pose Regression for Fast and Robust Visual Re-Localization

Relative Pose Regression (RPR) generalizes well to unseen environments, but its performance is often limited due to pairwise and local spatial views. To this end, we propose MultiLoc, a novel multi-view guided RPR model trained at scale, equipping relative pose regression with globally consistent spatial and geometric understanding. Specifically, our method jointly fuses multiple reference views and their associated camera poses in a single forward pass, enabling accurate zero-shot pose estimation with real-time efficiency. To reliably supply informative context, we further propose a co-visibility-driven retrieval strategy for geometrically relevant reference view selection. MultiLoc establishes a new benchmark in visual re-localization, consistently outperforming existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) relative pose regression (RPR) methods across diverse datasets, including WaySpots, Cambridge Landmarks, and Indoor6. Furthermore, MultiLoc's pose regressor exhibits SOTA performance in relative pose estimation, surpassing RPR, feature matching and non-regression-based techniques on the MegaDepth-1500, ScanNet-1500, and ACID benchmarks. These results demonstrate robust domain generalization of MultiLoc across indoor, outdoor and natural environments. Code will be made publicly available.

Deep Learning-Based Airway Segmentation in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Patients with Interstitial Lung Disease (SLE-ILD): A Comparative High-Resolution CT Analysis

To characterize lobar and segmental airway volume differences between systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients with interstitial lung disease (ILD) and those without ILD (non-ILD) using a deep learning-based approach on non-contrast chest high-resolution CT (HRCT). Methods: A retrospective analysis was conducted on 106 SLE patients (27 SLE-ILD, 79 SLE-non-ILD) who underwent HRCT. A customized deep learning framework based on the U-Net architecture was developed to automatically segment airway structures at the lobar and segmental levels via HRCT. Volumetric measurements of lung lobes and segments derived from the segmentations were statistically compared between the two groups using two-sample t-tests (significance threshold: p < 0.05). Results: At lobar level, significant airway volume enlargement in SLE-ILD patients was observed in the right upper lobe (p=0.009) and left upper lobe (p=0.039) compared to SLE-non-ILD. At the segmental level, significant differences were found in segments including R1 (p=0.016), R3 (p<0.001), and L3 (p=0.038), with the most marked changes in the upper lung zones, while lower zones showed non-significant trends. Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that an automated deep learning-based approach can effectively quantify airway volumes on HRCT scans and reveal significant, region-specific airway dilation in patients with SLE-ILD compared to those without ILD. The pattern of involvement, predominantly affecting the upper lobes and specific segments, highlights a distinct topographic phenotype of SLE-ILD and implicates airway structural alterations as a potential biomarker for disease presence. This AI-powered quantitative imaging biomarker holds promise for enhancing the early detection and monitoring of ILD in the SLE population, ultimately contributing to more personalized patient management.