Abstract:Unified image restoration models for diverse and mixed degradations often suffer from unstable optimization dynamics and inter-task conflicts. This paper introduces Self-Improved Privilege Learning (SIPL), a novel paradigm that overcomes these limitations by innovatively extending the utility of privileged information (PI) beyond training into the inference stage. Unlike conventional Privilege Learning, where ground-truth-derived guidance is typically discarded after training, SIPL empowers the model to leverage its own preliminary outputs as pseudo-privileged signals for iterative self-refinement at test time. Central to SIPL is Proxy Fusion, a lightweight module incorporating a learnable Privileged Dictionary. During training, this dictionary distills essential high-frequency and structural priors from privileged feature representations. Critically, at inference, the same learned dictionary then interacts with features derived from the model's initial restoration, facilitating a self-correction loop. SIPL can be seamlessly integrated into various backbone architectures, offering substantial performance improvements with minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SIPL significantly advances the state-of-the-art on diverse all-in-one image restoration benchmarks. For instance, when integrated with the PromptIR model, SIPL achieves remarkable PSNR improvements of +4.58 dB on composite degradation tasks and +1.28 dB on diverse five-task benchmarks, underscoring its effectiveness and broad applicability. Codes are available at our project page https://github.com/Aitical/SIPL.
Abstract:Generalized gait recognition, which aims to achieve robust performance across diverse domains, remains a challenging problem due to severe domain shifts in viewpoints, appearances, and environments. While mixed-dataset training is widely used to enhance generalization, it introduces new obstacles including inter-dataset optimization conflicts and redundant or noisy samples, both of which hinder effective representation learning. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework that systematically improves cross-domain gait recognition. First, we design a disentangled triplet loss that isolates supervision signals across datasets, mitigating gradient conflicts during optimization. Second, we introduce a targeted dataset distillation strategy that filters out the least informative 20\% of training samples based on feature redundancy and prediction uncertainty, enhancing data efficiency. Extensive experiments on CASIA-B, OU-MVLP, Gait3D, and GREW demonstrate that our method significantly improves cross-dataset recognition for both GaitBase and DeepGaitV2 backbones, without sacrificing source-domain accuracy. Code will be released at https://github.com/li1er3/Generalized_Gait.
Abstract:We present Seed1.5-VL, a vision-language foundation model designed to advance general-purpose multimodal understanding and reasoning. Seed1.5-VL is composed with a 532M-parameter vision encoder and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLM of 20B active parameters. Despite its relatively compact architecture, it delivers strong performance across a wide spectrum of public VLM benchmarks and internal evaluation suites, achieving the state-of-the-art performance on 38 out of 60 public benchmarks. Moreover, in agent-centric tasks such as GUI control and gameplay, Seed1.5-VL outperforms leading multimodal systems, including OpenAI CUA and Claude 3.7. Beyond visual and video understanding, it also demonstrates strong reasoning abilities, making it particularly effective for multimodal reasoning challenges such as visual puzzles. We believe these capabilities will empower broader applications across diverse tasks. In this report, we mainly provide a comprehensive review of our experiences in building Seed1.5-VL across model design, data construction, and training at various stages, hoping that this report can inspire further research. Seed1.5-VL is now accessible at https://www.volcengine.com/ (Volcano Engine Model ID: doubao-1-5-thinking-vision-pro-250428)
Abstract:Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.
Abstract:Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents have unlocked new possibilities for automating human tasks. While prior work has focused on well-defined tasks with specified goals, the capabilities of agents in creative design tasks with open-ended goals remain underexplored. We introduce GraphicBench, a new planning benchmark for graphic design that covers 1,079 user queries and input images across four design types. We further present GraphicTown, an LLM agent framework with three design experts and 46 actions (tools) to choose from for executing each step of the planned workflows in web environments. Experiments with six LLMs demonstrate their ability to generate workflows that integrate both explicit design constraints from user queries and implicit commonsense constraints. However, these workflows often do not lead to successful execution outcomes, primarily due to challenges in: (1) reasoning about spatial relationships, (2) coordinating global dependencies across experts, and (3) retrieving the most appropriate action per step. We envision GraphicBench as a challenging yet valuable testbed for advancing LLM-agent planning and execution in creative design tasks.
Abstract:All-in-one image restoration, addressing diverse degradation types with a unified model, presents significant challenges in designing task-specific prompts that effectively guide restoration across multiple degradation scenarios. While adaptive prompt learning enables end-to-end optimization, it often yields overlapping or redundant task representations. Conversely, explicit prompts derived from pretrained classifiers enhance discriminability but may discard critical visual information for reconstruction. To address these limitations, we introduce Contrastive Prompt Learning (CPL), a novel framework that fundamentally enhances prompt-task alignment through two complementary innovations: a \emph{Sparse Prompt Module (SPM)} that efficiently captures degradation-specific features while minimizing redundancy, and a \emph{Contrastive Prompt Regularization (CPR)} that explicitly strengthens task boundaries by incorporating negative prompt samples across different degradation types. Unlike previous approaches that focus primarily on degradation classification, CPL optimizes the critical interaction between prompts and the restoration model itself. Extensive experiments across five comprehensive benchmarks demonstrate that CPL consistently enhances state-of-the-art all-in-one restoration models, achieving significant improvements in both standard multi-task scenarios and challenging composite degradation settings. Our framework establishes new state-of-the-art performance while maintaining parameter efficiency, offering a principled solution for unified image restoration.
Abstract:Image restoration has witnessed significant advancements with the development of deep learning models. Although Transformer architectures have progressed considerably in recent years, challenges remain, particularly the limited receptive field in window-based self-attention. In this work, we propose DSwinIR, a Deformable Sliding window Transformer for Image Restoration. DSwinIR introduces a novel deformable sliding window self-attention that adaptively adjusts receptive fields based on image content, enabling the attention mechanism to focus on important regions and enhance feature extraction aligned with salient features. Additionally, we introduce a central ensemble pattern to reduce the inclusion of irrelevant content within attention windows. In this way, the proposed DSwinIR model integrates the deformable sliding window Transformer and central ensemble pattern to amplify the strengths of both CNNs and Transformers while mitigating their limitations. Extensive experiments on various image restoration tasks demonstrate that DSwinIR achieves state-of-the-art performance. For example, in image deraining, compared to DRSformer on the SPA dataset, DSwinIR achieves a 0.66 dB PSNR improvement. In all-in-one image restoration, compared to PromptIR, DSwinIR achieves over a 0.66 dB and 1.04 dB improvement on three-task and five-task settings, respectively. Pretrained models and code are available at our project https://github.com/Aitical/DSwinIR.
Abstract:Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are autonomous systems that interpret and generate actions, enabling intelligent user assistance and automation. Effective training of these agent presents unique challenges, such as sparsity in supervision signals, scalability for large datasets, and the need for nuanced user understanding. We propose stateful screen schema, an efficient representation of GUI interactions that captures key user actions and intentions over time. Building on this foundation, we introduce ScreenLLM, a set of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) tailored for advanced UI understanding and action prediction. Extensive experiments on both open-source and proprietary models show that ScreenLLM accurately models user behavior and predicts actions. Our work lays the foundation for scalable, robust, and intelligent GUI agents that enhance user interaction in diverse software environments.
Abstract:We present SKALD, a multi-shot video assembly method that constructs coherent video sequences from candidate shots with minimal reliance on text. Central to our approach is the Learned Clip Assembly (LCA) score, a learning-based metric that measures temporal and semantic relationships between shots to quantify narrative coherence. We tackle the exponential complexity of combining multiple shots with an efficient beam-search algorithm guided by the LCA score. To train our model effectively with limited human annotations, we propose two tasks for the LCA encoder: Shot Coherence Learning, which uses contrastive learning to distinguish coherent and incoherent sequences, and Feature Regression, which converts these learned representations into a real-valued coherence score. We develop two variants: a base SKALD model that relies solely on visual coherence and SKALD-text, which integrates auxiliary text information when available. Experiments on the VSPD and our curated MSV3C datasets show that SKALD achieves an improvement of up to 48.6% in IoU and a 43% speedup over the state-of-the-art methods. A user study further validates our approach, with 45% of participants favoring SKALD-assembled videos, compared to 22% preferring text-based assembly methods.
Abstract:Graphical User Interface (GUI) action grounding is a critical step in GUI automation that maps language instructions to actionable elements on GUI screens. Most recent works of GUI action grounding leverage large GUI datasets to fine-tune MLLMs. However, the fine-tuning data always covers limited GUI environments, and we find the performance of the resulting model deteriorates in novel environments. We argue that the GUI grounding models should be further aligned to the novel environments to reveal their full potential, when the inference is known to involve novel environments, i.e., environments not used during the previous fine-tuning. To realize this, we first propose GUI-Bee, an MLLM-based autonomous agent, to collect high-quality, environment-specific data through exploration and then continuously fine-tune GUI grounding models with the collected data. Our agent leverages a novel Q-value-Incentive In-Context Reinforcement Learning (Q-ICRL) method to optimize exploration efficiency and data quality. Additionally, we introduce NovelScreenSpot, a benchmark for testing how well the data can help align GUI action grounding models to novel environments and demonstrate the effectiveness of data collected by GUI-Bee in the experiments. Furthermore, we conduct an ablation study to validate the Q-ICRL method in enhancing the efficiency of GUI-Bee. Project page: https://gui-bee.github.io