Beyond Fidelity: Semantic Similarity Assessment in Low-Level Image Processing

Low-level image processing has long been evaluated mainly from the perspective of visual fidelity. However, with the rise of deep learning and generative models, processed images may preserve perceptual quality while altering semantic content, making conventional Image Quality Assessment (IQA) insufficient for semantic-level assessment. In this paper, we formalize \textit{Semantic Similarity} as a new evaluation task for low-level image processing, aimed at measuring whether semantic content is preserved after processing. We further present a structured formulation of image semantics based on semantic entities and their relations, and discuss the desired properties and constraints of a valid semantic similarity index. Based on this formulation, we propose Triplet-based Semantic Similarity Score (T3S), which models image semantics through foreground entities, background entities, and relations. T3S combines semantic entity extraction, foreground-background disentanglement, and open-world class/relation modeling. Experiments on COCO and SPA-Data show that T3S consistently outperforms existing fidelity-oriented metrics and representative semantic-level baselines, while better reflecting progressive semantic changes under diverse degradations. These results highlight the importance of semantic assessment in modern low-level vision.

EgoSelf: From Memory to Personalized Egocentric Assistant

Egocentric assistants often rely on first-person view data to capture user behavior and context for personalized services. Since different users exhibit distinct habits, preferences, and routines, such personalization is essential for truly effective assistance. However, effectively integrating long-term user data for personalization remains a key challenge. To address this, we introduce EgoSelf, a system that includes a graph-based interaction memory constructed from past observations and a dedicated learning task for personalization. The memory captures temporal and semantic relationships among interaction events and entities, from which user-specific profiles are derived. The personalized learning task is formulated as a prediction problem where the model predicts possible future interactions from individual user's historical behavior recorded in the graph. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EgoSelf as a personalized egocentric assistant. Code is available at https://abie-e.github.io/EgoSelf/.

Robotic Scene Cloning:Advancing Zero-Shot Robotic Scene Adaptation in Manipulation via Visual Prompt Editing

Modern robots can perform a wide range of simple tasks and adapt to diverse scenarios in the well-trained environment. However, deploying pre-trained robot models in real-world user scenarios remains challenging due to their limited zero-shot capabilities, often necessitating extensive on-site data collection. To address this issue, we propose Robotic Scene Cloning (RSC), a novel method designed for scene-specific adaptation by editing existing robot operation trajectories. RSC achieves accurate and scene-consistent sample generation by leveraging a visual prompting mechanism and a carefully tuned condition injection module. Not only transferring textures but also performing moderate shape adaptations in response to the visual prompts, RSC demonstrates reliable task performance across a variety of object types. Experiments across various simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that RSC significantly enhances policy generalization in target environments.

Ultra-Low Bitrate Perceptual Image Compression with Shallow Encoder

Ultra-low bitrate image compression (below 0.05 bits per pixel) is increasingly critical for bandwidth-constrained and computation-limited encoding scenarios such as edge devices. Existing frameworks typically rely on large pretrained encoders (e.g., VAEs or tokenizer-based models) and perform transform coding within their generative latent space. While these approaches achieve impressive perceptual fidelity, their reliance on heavy encoder networks makes them unsuitable for deployment on weak sender devices. In this work, we explore the feasibility of applying shallow encoders for ultra-low bitrate compression and propose a novel Asymmetric Extreme Image Compression (AEIC) framework that pursues simultaneously encoding simplicity and decoding quality. Specifically, AEIC employs moderate or even shallow encoder networks, while leveraging an one-step diffusion decoder to maintain high-fidelity and high-realism reconstructions under extreme bitrates. To further enhance the efficiency of shallow encoders, we design a dual-side feature distillation scheme that transfers knowledge from AEIC with moderate encoders to its shallow encoder variants. Experiments demonstrate that AEIC not only outperforms existing methods on rate-distortion-perception performance at ultra-low bitrates, but also delivers exceptional encoding efficiency for 35.8 FPS on 1080P input images, while maintaining competitive decoding speed compared to existing methods.

CoMA: Complementary Masking and Hierarchical Dynamic Multi-Window Self-Attention in a Unified Pre-training Framework

Masked Autoencoders (MAE) achieve self-supervised learning of image representations by randomly removing a portion of visual tokens and reconstructing the original image as a pretext task, thereby significantly enhancing pretraining efficiency and yielding excellent adaptability across downstream tasks. However, MAE and other MAE-style paradigms that adopt random masking generally require more pre-training epochs to maintain adaptability. Meanwhile, ViT in MAE suffers from inefficient parameter use due to fixed spatial resolution across layers. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Complementary Masked Autoencoders (CoMA), which employ a complementary masking strategy to ensure uniform sampling across all pixels, thereby improving effective learning of all features and enhancing the model's adaptability. Furthermore, we introduce DyViT, a hierarchical vision transformer that employs a Dynamic Multi-Window Self-Attention (DM-MSA), significantly reducing the parameters and FLOPs while improving fine-grained feature learning. Pre-trained on ImageNet-1K with CoMA, DyViT matches the downstream performance of MAE using only 12% of the pre-training epochs, demonstrating more effective learning. It also attains a 10% reduction in pre-training time per epoch, further underscoring its superior pre-training efficiency.

From Data to Modeling: Fully Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation

We present OvSGTR, a novel transformer-based framework for fully open-vocabulary scene graph generation that overcomes the limitations of traditional closed-set models. Conventional methods restrict both object and relationship recognition to a fixed vocabulary, hindering their applicability to real-world scenarios where novel concepts frequently emerge. In contrast, our approach jointly predicts objects (nodes) and their inter-relationships (edges) beyond predefined categories. OvSGTR leverages a DETR-like architecture featuring a frozen image backbone and text encoder to extract high-quality visual and semantic features, which are then fused via a transformer decoder for end-to-end scene graph prediction. To enrich the model's understanding of complex visual relations, we propose a relation-aware pre-training strategy that synthesizes scene graph annotations in a weakly supervised manner. Specifically, we investigate three pipelines--scene parser-based, LLM-based, and multimodal LLM-based--to generate transferable supervision signals with minimal manual annotation. Furthermore, we address the common issue of catastrophic forgetting in open-vocabulary settings by incorporating a visual-concept retention mechanism coupled with a knowledge distillation strategy, ensuring that the model retains rich semantic cues during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on the VG150 benchmark demonstrate that OvSGTR achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple settings, including closed-set, open-vocabulary object detection-based, relation-based, and fully open-vocabulary scenarios. Our results highlight the promise of large-scale relation-aware pre-training and transformer architectures for advancing scene graph generation towards more generalized and reliable visual understanding.

HQC-NBV: A Hybrid Quantum-Classical View Planning Approach

Efficient view planning is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and robotic perception, critical for tasks ranging from search and rescue operations to autonomous navigation. While classical approaches, including sampling-based and deterministic methods, have shown promise in planning camera viewpoints for scene exploration, they often struggle with computational scalability and solution optimality in complex settings. This study introduces HQC-NBV, a hybrid quantum-classical framework for view planning that leverages quantum properties to efficiently explore the parameter space while maintaining robustness and scalability. We propose a specific Hamiltonian formulation with multi-component cost terms and a parameter-centric variational ansatz with bidirectional alternating entanglement patterns that capture the hierarchical dependencies between viewpoint parameters. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that quantum-specific components provide measurable performance advantages. Compared to the classical methods, our approach achieves up to 49.2% higher exploration efficiency across diverse environments. Our analysis of entanglement architecture and coherence-preserving terms provides insights into the mechanisms of quantum advantage in robotic exploration tasks. This work represents a significant advancement in integrating quantum computing into robotic perception systems, offering a paradigm-shifting solution for various robot vision tasks.

Compile Scene Graphs with Reinforcement Learning

Next token prediction is the fundamental principle for training large language models (LLMs), and reinforcement learning (RL) further enhances their reasoning performance. As an effective way to model language, image, video, and other modalities, the use of LLMs for end-to-end extraction of structured visual representations, such as scene graphs, remains underexplored. It requires the model to accurately produce a set of objects and relationship triplets, rather than generating text token by token. To achieve this, we introduce R1-SGG, a multimodal LLM (M-LLM) initially trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on the scene graph dataset and subsequently refined using reinforcement learning to enhance its ability to generate scene graphs in an end-to-end manner. The SFT follows a conventional prompt-response paradigm, while RL requires the design of effective reward signals. Given the structured nature of scene graphs, we design a graph-centric reward function that integrates node-level rewards, edge-level rewards, and a format consistency reward. Our experiments demonstrate that rule-based RL substantially enhances model performance in the SGG task, achieving a zero failure rate--unlike supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which struggles to generalize effectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/gpt4vision/R1-SGG.

VideoMind: A Chain-of-LoRA Agent for Long Video Reasoning

Videos, with their unique temporal dimension, demand precise grounded understanding, where answers are directly linked to visual, interpretable evidence. Despite significant breakthroughs in reasoning capabilities within Large Language Models, multi-modal reasoning - especially for videos - remains unexplored. In this work, we introduce VideoMind, a novel video-language agent designed for temporal-grounded video understanding. VideoMind incorporates two key innovations: (i) We identify essential capabilities for video temporal reasoning and develop a role-based agentic workflow, including a planner for coordinating different roles, a grounder for temporal localization, a verifier to assess temporal interval accuracy, and an answerer for question-answering. (ii) To efficiently integrate these diverse roles, we propose a novel Chain-of-LoRA strategy, enabling seamless role-switching via lightweight LoRA adaptors while avoiding the overhead of multiple models, thus balancing efficiency and flexibility. Extensive experiments on 14 public benchmarks demonstrate that our agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse video understanding tasks, including 3 on grounded video question-answering, 6 on video temporal grounding, and 5 on general video question-answering, underscoring its effectiveness in advancing video agent and long-form temporal reasoning.

FedPCA: Noise-Robust Fair Federated Learning via Performance-Capacity Analysis

Training a model that effectively handles both common and rare data-i.e., achieving performance fairness-is crucial in federated learning (FL). While existing fair FL methods have shown effectiveness, they remain vulnerable to mislabeled data. Ensuring robustness in fair FL is therefore essential. However, fairness and robustness inherently compete, which causes robust strategies to hinder fairness. In this paper, we attribute this competition to the homogeneity in loss patterns exhibited by rare and mislabeled data clients, preventing existing loss-based fair and robust FL methods from effectively distinguishing and handling these two distinct client types. To address this, we propose performance-capacity analysis, which jointly considers model performance on each client and its capacity to handle the dataset, measured by loss and a newly introduced feature dispersion score. This allows mislabeled clients to be identified by their significantly deviated performance relative to capacity while preserving rare data clients. Building on this, we introduce FedPCA, an FL method that robustly achieves fairness. FedPCA first identifies mislabeled clients via a Gaussian Mixture Model on loss-dispersion pairs, then applies fairness and robustness strategies in global aggregation and local training by adjusting client weights and selectively using reliable data. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate FedPCA's effectiveness in tackling this complex challenge. Code will be publicly available upon acceptance.