Lighting-Aware Representation Learning under Controllable Lighting Variation

Variations in illumination remain a major challenge for visual representation learning, as they induce substantial appearance changes both across and within environments. While existing approaches typically address this issue through data augmentations that encourage models to become invariant to lighting changes, such strategies do not explicitly model lighting information during learning. Inspired by theories of human vision, we propose a lighting-aware representation learning framework that incorporates illumination variation as an explicit training signal rather than a nuisance factor to be suppressed. Our method extends contrastive learning by introducing an auxiliary objective that captures illumination-dependent variation in rendered scenes, enabling the model to jointly learn representations that preserve semantic consistency while remaining sensitive to lighting-dependent visual structure. We evaluate the proposed model on image classification and object detection tasks across the ImageNet, ExDark, and PASCAL VOC benchmarks. Results demonstrate that the proposed lighting-aware training consistently improves downstream performance over standard contrastive learning baselines, while maintaining the same architecture and training budget. Furthermore, our approach shows promising performance in supervised learning frameworks and under settings involving simpler lighting variation, suggesting broad applicability beyond complex illumination scenarios. These results indicate its potential to enhance model robustness and adaptability in complex visual environments as well as in more conventional image processing tasks.

Numerical Stability of DFT Computation for Signals with Structured Support

We consider the problem of building numerically stable algorithms for computing Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of $N$- length signals with known frequency support of size $k$. A typical algorithm, in this case, would involve solving (possibly poorly conditioned) system of equations, causing numerical instability. When $N$ is a power of 2, and the frequency support is a random subset of $\mathbb{Z}_N$, we provide an algorithm that has (a possibly optimal) $O(k \log k)$ complexity to compute the DFT while solving system of equations that are $O(1)$ in size.