Predicting Functions, Not Features: KANs with Function-Space Joint-Embedding Predictive Learning for Medical Image Segmentation

Kolmogorov--Arnold Networks (KANs) introduce explicit functional representations by parameterizing each network edge as a learnable univariate function. However, existing KAN-based segmentation models optimize edge functions only through objectives defined after edge aggregation, leaving individual functions without an explicit pre-aggregation learning target. To address this limitation, we propose Function-Space Joint-Embedding Predictive Learning (FS-JEPA) for medical image segmentation. Our FS-JEPA framework moves predictive learning into the pre-aggregation function space of KANs. A masked online branch predicts structured signatures of sampled KAN edge functions generated by a full-context exponential moving average target branch, while shared edge indices preserve correspondence between predictions and targets. Rather than predicting an isolated edge response, we represent each sampled edge function using a multi-radius signature composed of function evaluations around its input anchor. This structured representation captures local functional variations that cannot be characterized by a single response and provides a more informative predictive target. The function-space objective is jointly optimized with the segmentation loss during training, while the predictive branch is removed at inference. Experiments on five medical image segmentation benchmarks show that our FS-JEPA achieves the best average Dice and outperforms the strongest competing KAN-based method by +2.25 percentage points.

SegDem: Segmentation helps Demosaicing

Image demosaicing reconstructs a full-color image from incomplete color measurements produced by a sensor covered with a color filter array (CFA). Most existing methods formulate demosaicing as pixel-level reconstruction and mainly rely on local textures, cross-channel correlations, and low-level image statistics. Our core insight is that reconstruction and visual understanding can be viewed as complementary views of shared scene structure: both are grounded in the same underlying physical world, and therefore the structural and physical information inferred from an image should remain consistent across the two tasks. We instantiate this idea with instance segmentation and propose \emph{SegDem}, a cross-task decoder representation transfer framework for demosaicing. SegDem first learns region- and boundary-aware representations through instance-aware structural pretraining and then transfers the decoder to RAW-conditioned reconstruction. Segmentation- and demosaicing-conditioned features are further anchored to a shared frozen DINOv2 representation space to preserve structural organization across tasks. We instantiate SegDem with convolutional, Transformer-based, and state-space backbones for unified Single- and Quad-Bayer demosaicing. Extensive experiments on synthetic, external, and challenging datasets demonstrate consistent improvements across different architectures and CFA layouts.

Structural Guidance for Unified Joint Demosaicing and Denoising

Joint demosaicing and denoising is a fundamental step in camera image signal processing, yet remains challenging because different Bayer-like color filter arrays (CFAs) and sensor noise jointly corrupt both color sampling and image content. Existing unified restoration networks explicitly model CFA geometry but are still driven primarily by pixel-level supervision, making them prone to structural degradation around edges, repetitive textures, and moiré patterns where local evidence is unreliable. We attribute this limitation partly to the absence of explicit structural guidance beyond pixel-level reconstruction supervision. Motivated by this observation, we propose a structural-guided unified restoration framework that injects pretrained structural knowledge into CFA-aware image restoration. Our model receives a unified five-channel observation consisting of the raw mosaic, CFA masks, and a noise-level map. A SwinIR restoration branch reconstructs pixel details under CFA-conditioned modulation, while a parallel structural reasoning branch extracts complementary structural cues from a sparse pseudo-RGB observation. To bridge the substantial domain gap between sparse noisy sensor data and the natural-image pretraining domain of the structural encoder, we introduce a lightweight trainable adapter before residually fusing structural and restoration features. A shared decoder jointly predicts the restored RGB image and an auxiliary clean mosaic, providing supervision in both image and sensor domains. Extensive experiments across multiple CFA patterns and noise levels demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art unified and CFA-specific methods, indicating that adapted structural priors can enhance robust camera image restoration. The source codes and dataset are provided in the supplementary material.

The Second LoViF 2026 Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration: Methods and Results

This paper presents a review of the second LoViF Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration. The challenge aims to advance unified image restoration under diverse real-world degradation conditions, including blur, low-light, haze, rain, and snow. It provides a common benchmark for evaluating the restoration accuracy, robustness, and generalization capability of models across multiple degradation categories within a unified framework. The competition attracted 158 registered participants, and 20 teams were included in the final ranking after their submitted results were successfully reproduced and verified. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the submitted solutions and corresponding results, highlighting recent advances in real-world all-in-one image restoration. The summarized methods and empirical findings reveal effective design strategies and establish an updated benchmark for future research in real-world low-level vision.

Decoupling Language Guidance from Backbones for Text-Guided Medical Segmentation

Text-guided medical image segmentation leverages clinical semantics to improve lesion delineation, yet many existing models bind cross-modal fusion, supervision, and decoder design into a task-specific architecture. Such tight coupling makes it difficult to reuse language guidance modules across heterogeneous vision and text backbones, and often requires redesigning the network when the encoder pair changes. This paper presents BTHA, a backbone-transferable hierarchical adapter framework for text-guided medical image segmentation. BTHA is built around a stable feature-level interface: given multi-scale visual features and a text representation, it injects semantic guidance through shape-preserving adapters while maintaining the decoder-side tensor contract. To make this interface effective, we introduce a Hierarchical Coarse-to-Fine Supervision Strategy that decomposes learning into global image-text alignment, multi-scale auxiliary localization, and boundary-aware final mask refinement. We further design a Scale-Adaptive Gated Semantic Guidance (SAGSG) adapter, where resolution-specific gates adaptively control textual injection and channel recalibration suppresses redundant cross-modal responses. Evaluations across diverse vision and text backbones show that the same adapter and supervision design remains effective across convolutional and transformer-based visual encoders as well as different language encoders. Experiments on four public datasets further demonstrate that BTHA improves strong text-guided baselines with modest computational overhead.

Differential Unfolding: Efficient Unfolding Reconstruction for Video Snapshot Compressive Imaging

While Deep Unfolding Networks (DUNs) dominate video Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI), they remain constrained by a uniform design philosophy. Existing methods repeatedly stack high-complexity priors with identical structures, ignoring the fact that optimization trajectories converge toward static states. This results in representation stagnation, where high-cost computations are wasted on minimal feature updates. To address this inefficiency, we present Differential Unfolding (DU), a heterogeneous framework that replaces uniform repetition with dynamic evolution. Central to DU is the Differential Evolutionary Framework (DEF), which partitions the unfolding process into two complementary roles: structural anchoring and differential evolution. In this scheme, high-parameter general stages are sparsely deployed to generate high-fidelity feature foundations. Complementing these, lightweight differential stages employ a Differential Representation Prior (DRP) to propagate and refine these foundational features through a differential mechanism. By integrating Differential Representation Attention (DRA) for evolving attention maps and a Differential Modulated FFN (DM-FFN) for feature rectification, DRP effectively models cross-stage variations with minimal overhead. By focusing computational resources on dynamic evolution rather than static redundancy, DU achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments verify that our method establishes new state-of-the-art results while significantly slashing computational overhead. https://github.com/Muyuan-Zhang/DU

Agentic Flow Steering and Parallel Rollout Search for Spatially Grounded Text-to-Image Generation

Precise Text-to-Image (T2I) generation has achieved great success but is hindered by the limited relational reasoning of static text encoders and the error accumulation in open-loop sampling. Without real-time feedback, initial semantic ambiguities during the Ordinary Differential Equation trajectory inevitably escalate into stochastic deviations from spatial constraints. To bridge this gap, we introduce AFS-Search (Agentic Flow Steering and Parallel Rollout Search), a training-free closed-loop framework built upon FLUX.1-dev. AFS-Search incorporates a training-free closed-loop parallel rollout search and flow steering mechanism, which leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) as a semantic critic to diagnose intermediate latents and dynamically steer the velocity field via precise spatial grounding. Complementarily, we formulate T2I generation as a sequential decision-making process, exploring multiple trajectories through lookahead simulations and selecting the optimal path based on VLM-guided rewards. Further, we provide AFS-Search-Pro for higher performance and AFS-Search-Fast for quicker generation. Experimental results show that our AFS-Search-Pro greatly boosts the performance of the original FLUX.1-dev, achieving state-of-the-art results across three different benchmarks. Meanwhile, AFS-Search-Fast also significantly enhances performance while maintaining fast generation speed.

HSI-VAR: Rethinking Hyperspectral Restoration through Spatial-Spectral Visual Autoregression

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) capture richer spatial-spectral information beyond RGB, yet real-world HSIs often suffer from a composite mix of degradations, such as noise, blur, and missing bands. Existing generative approaches for HSI restoration like diffusion models require hundreds of iterative steps, making them computationally impractical for high-dimensional HSIs. While regression models tend to produce oversmoothed results, failing to preserve critical structural details. We break this impasse by introducing HSI-VAR, rethinking HSI restoration as an autoregressive generation problem, where spectral and spatial dependencies can be progressively modeled rather than globally reconstructed. HSI-VAR incorporates three key innovations: (1) Latent-condition alignment, which couples semantic consistency between latent priors and conditional embeddings for precise reconstruction; (2) Degradation-aware guidance, which uniquely encodes mixed degradations as linear combinations in the embedding space for automatic control, remarkably achieving a nearly $50\%$ reduction in computational cost at inference; (3) A spatial-spectral adaptation module that refines details across both domains in the decoding phase. Extensive experiments on nine all-in-one HSI restoration benchmarks confirm HSI-VAR's state-of-the-art performance, achieving a 3.77 dB PSNR improvement on \textbf{\textit{ICVL}} and offering superior structure preservation with an inference speed-up of up to $95.5 \times$ compared with diffusion-based methods, making it a highly practical solution for real-world HSI restoration.

Vision-Language Controlled Deep Unfolding for Joint Medical Image Restoration and Segmentation

We propose VL-DUN, a principled framework for joint All-in-One Medical Image Restoration and Segmentation (AiOMIRS) that bridges the gap between low-level signal recovery and high-level semantic understanding. While standard pipelines treat these tasks in isolation, our core insight is that they are fundamentally synergistic: restoration provides clean anatomical structures to improve segmentation, while semantic priors regularize the restoration process. VL-DUN resolves the sub-optimality of sequential processing through two primary innovations. (1) We formulate AiOMIRS as a unified optimization problem, deriving an interpretable joint unfolding mechanism where restoration and segmentation are mathematically coupled for mutual refinement. (2) We introduce a frequency-aware Mamba mechanism to capture long-range dependencies for global segmentation while preserving the high-frequency textures necessary for restoration. This allows for efficient global context modeling with linear complexity, effectively mitigating the spectral bias of standard architectures. As a pioneering work in the AiOMIRS task, VL-DUN establishes a new state-of-the-art across multi-modal benchmarks, improving PSNR by 0.92 dB and the Dice coefficient by 9.76\%. Our results demonstrate that joint collaborative learning offers a superior, more robust solution for complex clinical workflows compared to isolated task processing. The codes are provided in https://github.com/cipi666/VLDUN.

Binarized Mamba-Transformer for Lightweight Quad Bayer HybridEVS Demosaicing

Quad Bayer demosaicing is the central challenge for enabling the widespread application of Hybrid Event-based Vision Sensors (HybridEVS). Although existing learning-based methods that leverage long-range dependency modeling have achieved promising results, their complexity severely limits deployment on mobile devices for real-world applications. To address these limitations, we propose a lightweight Mamba-based binary neural network designed for efficient and high-performing demosaicing of HybridEVS RAW images. First, to effectively capture both global and local dependencies, we introduce a hybrid Binarized Mamba-Transformer architecture that combines the strengths of the Mamba and Swin Transformer architectures. Next, to significantly reduce computational complexity, we propose a binarized Mamba (Bi-Mamba), which binarizes all projections while retaining the core Selective Scan in full precision. Bi-Mamba also incorporates additional global visual information to enhance global context and mitigate precision loss. We conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of BMTNet in both performance and computational efficiency, providing a lightweight demosaicing solution suited for real-world edge devices. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/Clausy9/BMTNet.