Revisiting Shadow Detection from a Vision-Language Perspective

Shadow detection is commonly formulated as a vision-driven dense prediction problem, where models rely primarily on pixel-wise visual supervision to distinguish shadows from non-shadow regions. However, this formulation can become unreliable in visually ambiguous cases, where similar dark regions may correspond either to cast shadows or to intrinsically dark surfaces, making visual evidence alone insufficient for establishing a stable decision rule. In this work, we revisit shadow detection from a vision--language perspective and argue that robust prediction benefits from an explicit semantic reference beyond visual cues alone. We propose SVL, a Shadow Vision--Language framework that uses language as an explicit semantic reference to disambiguate shadows from visually similar dark regions. SVL aligns the global image representation with shadow-related text embeddings through a scene-level shadow ratio regression objective, thereby providing image-level guidance on the overall extent of shadows. To transfer this global guidance to dense inference, SVL introduces a global-to-local coupling mechanism that enforces consistency between image-level guidance and patch-level predictions. In parallel, SVL applies local patch-level constraints with text embeddings to improve fine-grained discrimination under challenging appearance conditions. Built on a frozen DINOv3 image encoder, the framework learns only lightweight projection and decoding modules, yielding a parameter-efficient design with less than $1\%$ trainable parameters. Extensive experiments on multiple shadow detection benchmarks, including dedicated hard-case evaluations, suggest strong overall performance and improved robustness under visually ambiguous conditions.

Chronicles-OCR: A Cross-Temporal Perception Benchmark for the Evolutionary Trajectory of Chinese Characters

Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in modern text-rich visual understanding. However, their perceptual robustness in the face of the continuous morphological evolution of historical writing systems remains largely unexplored. Existing ancient text datasets typically focus on isolated historical periods, failing to capture the systematic visual distribution shifts spanning thousands of years. To bridge this gap and empower Digital Humanities, we introduce Chronicles-OCR, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the cross-temporal visual perception capabilities of VLLMs across the complete evolutionary trajectory of Chinese characters, known as the Seven Chinese Scripts. Curated in collaboration with top-tier institutional domain experts, the dataset comprises 2,800 strictly balanced images encompassing highly diverse physical media, ranging from tortoise shells to paper-based calligraphy. To accommodate the drastic morphological and topological variations across different historical stages, we propose a novel Stage-Adaptive Annotation Paradigm. Based on this, Chronicles-OCR formulates four rigorous quantitative tasks: cross-period character spotting, fine-grained archaic character recognition via visual referring, ancient text parsing, and script classification. By isolating visual perception from semantic reasoning, Chronicles-OCR provides an authoritative platform to expose the limitations of current VLLMs, paving the way for robust, evolution-aware historical text perception. Chronicles-OCR is publicly available at https://github.com/VirtualLUOUCAS/Chronicles-OCR.

A Constrained RL Approach for Cost-Efficient Delivery of Latency-Sensitive Applications

Next-generation networks aim to provide performance guarantees to real-time interactive services that require timely and cost-efficient packet delivery. In this context, the goal is to reliably deliver packets with strict deadlines imposed by the application while minimizing overall resource allocation cost. A large body of work has leveraged stochastic optimization techniques to design efficient dynamic routing and scheduling solutions under average delay constraints; however, these methods fall short when faced with strict per-packet delay requirements. We formulate the minimum-cost delay-constrained network control problem as a constrained Markov decision process and utilize constrained deep reinforcement learning (CDRL) techniques to effectively minimize total resource allocation cost while maintaining timely throughput above a target reliability level. Results indicate that the proposed CDRL-based solution can ensure timely packet delivery even when existing baselines fall short, and it achieves lower cost compared to other throughput-maximizing methods.

TextPecker: Rewarding Structural Anomaly Quantification for Enhancing Visual Text Rendering

Visual Text Rendering (VTR) remains a critical challenge in text-to-image generation, where even advanced models frequently produce text with structural anomalies such as distortion, blurriness, and misalignment. However, we find that leading MLLMs and specialist OCR models largely fail to perceive these structural anomalies, creating a critical bottleneck for both VTR evaluation and RL-based optimization. As a result, even state-of-the-art generators (e.g., Seedream4.0, Qwen-Image) still struggle to render structurally faithful text. To address this, we propose TextPecker, a plug-and-play structural anomaly perceptive RL strategy that mitigates noisy reward signals and works with any textto-image generator. To enable this capability, we construct a recognition dataset with character-level structural-anomaly annotations and develop a stroke-editing synthesis engine to expand structural-error coverage. Experiments show that TextPecker consistently improves diverse text-to-image models; even on the well-optimized Qwen-Image, it significantly yields average gains of 4% in structural fidelity and 8.7% in semantic alignment for Chinese text rendering, establishing a new state-of-the-art in high-fidelity VTR. Our work fills a gap in VTR optimization, providing a foundational step towards reliable and structural faithful visual text generation.

Dolphin-v2: Universal Document Parsing via Scalable Anchor Prompting

Document parsing has garnered widespread attention as vision-language models (VLMs) advance OCR capabilities. However, the field remains fragmented across dozens of specialized models with varying strengths, forcing users to navigate complex model selection and limiting system scalability. Moreover, existing two-stage approaches depend on axis-aligned bounding boxes for layout detection, failing to handle distorted or photographed documents effectively. To this end, we present Dolphin-v2, a two-stage document image parsing model that substantially improves upon the original Dolphin. In the first stage, Dolphin-v2 jointly performs document type classification (digital-born versus photographed) alongside layout analysis. For digital-born documents, it conducts finer-grained element detection with reading order prediction. In the second stage, we employ a hybrid parsing strategy: photographed documents are parsed holistically as complete pages to handle geometric distortions, while digital-born documents undergo element-wise parallel parsing guided by the detected layout anchors, enabling efficient content extraction. Compared with the original Dolphin, Dolphin-v2 introduces several crucial enhancements: (1) robust parsing of photographed documents via holistic page-level understanding, (2) finer-grained element detection (21 categories) with semantic attribute extraction such as author information and document metadata, and (3) code block recognition with indentation preservation, which existing systems typically lack. Comprehensive evaluations are conducted on DocPTBench, OmniDocBench, and our self-constructed RealDoc-160 benchmark. The results demonstrate substantial improvements: +14.78 points overall on the challenging OmniDocBench and 91% error reduction on photographed documents, while maintaining efficient inference through parallel processing.

BookNet: Book Image Rectification via Cross-Page Attention Network

Book image rectification presents unique challenges in document image processing due to complex geometric distortions from binding constraints, where left and right pages exhibit distinctly asymmetric curvature patterns. However, existing single-page document image rectification methods fail to capture the coupled geometric relationships between adjacent pages in books. In this work, we introduce BookNet, the first end-to-end deep learning framework specifically designed for dual-page book image rectification. BookNet adopts a dual-branch architecture with cross-page attention mechanisms, enabling it to estimate warping flows for both individual pages and the complete book spread, explicitly modeling how left and right pages influence each other. Moreover, to address the absence of specialized datasets, we present Book3D, a large-scale synthetic dataset for training, and Book100, a comprehensive real-world benchmark for evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BookNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on book image rectification. Code and dataset will be made publicly available.

WOD-E2E: Waymo Open Dataset for End-to-End Driving in Challenging Long-tail Scenarios

Vision-based end-to-end (E2E) driving has garnered significant interest in the research community due to its scalability and synergy with multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current E2E driving benchmarks primarily feature nominal scenarios, failing to adequately test the true potential of these systems. Furthermore, existing open-loop evaluation metrics often fall short in capturing the multi-modal nature of driving or effectively evaluating performance in long-tail scenarios. To address these gaps, we introduce the Waymo Open Dataset for End-to-End Driving (WOD-E2E). WOD-E2E contains 4,021 driving segments (approximately 12 hours), specifically curated for challenging long-tail scenarios that that are rare in daily life with an occurring frequency of less than 0.03%. Concretely, each segment in WOD-E2E includes the high-level routing information, ego states, and 360-degree camera views from 8 surrounding cameras. To evaluate the E2E driving performance on these long-tail situations, we propose a novel open-loop evaluation metric: Rater Feedback Score (RFS). Unlike conventional metrics that measure the distance between predicted way points and the logs, RFS measures how closely the predicted trajectory matches rater-annotated trajectory preference labels. We have released rater preference labels for all WOD-E2E validation set segments, while the held out test set labels have been used for the 2025 WOD-E2E Challenge. Through our work, we aim to foster state of the art research into generalizable, robust, and safe end-to-end autonomous driving agents capable of handling complex real-world situations.

TRIDE: A Text-assisted Radar-Image weather-aware fusion network for Depth Estimation

Depth estimation, essential for autonomous driving, seeks to interpret the 3D environment surrounding vehicles. The development of radar sensors, known for their cost-efficiency and robustness, has spurred interest in radar-camera fusion-based solutions. However, existing algorithms fuse features from these modalities without accounting for weather conditions, despite radars being known to be more robust than cameras under adverse weather. Additionally, while Vision-Language models have seen rapid advancement, utilizing language descriptions alongside other modalities for depth estimation remains an open challenge. This paper first introduces a text-generation strategy along with feature extraction and fusion techniques that can assist monocular depth estimation pipelines, leading to improved accuracy across different algorithms on the KITTI dataset. Building on this, we propose TRIDE, a radar-camera fusion algorithm that enhances text feature extraction by incorporating radar point information. To address the impact of weather on sensor performance, we introduce a weather-aware fusion block that adaptively adjusts radar weighting based on current weather conditions. Our method, benchmarked on the nuScenes dataset, demonstrates performance gains over the state-of-the-art, achieving a 12.87% improvement in MAE and a 9.08% improvement in RMSE. Code: https://github.com/harborsarah/TRIDE

Post-Completion Learning for Language Models

Current language model training paradigms typically terminate learning upon reaching the end-of-sequence (<eos>}) token, overlooking the potential learning opportunities in the post-completion space. We propose Post-Completion Learning (PCL), a novel training framework that systematically utilizes the sequence space after model output completion, to enhance both the reasoning and self-evaluation abilities. PCL enables models to continue generating self-assessments and reward predictions during training, while maintaining efficient inference by stopping at the completion point. To fully utilize this post-completion space, we design a white-box reinforcement learning method: let the model evaluate the output content according to the reward rules, then calculate and align the score with the reward functions for supervision. We implement dual-track SFT to optimize both reasoning and evaluation capabilities, and mixed it with RL training to achieve multi-objective hybrid optimization. Experimental results on different datasets and models demonstrate consistent improvements over traditional SFT and RL methods. Our method provides a new technical path for language model training that enhances output quality while preserving deployment efficiency.

Fast and Accurate Power Load Data Completion via Regularization-optimized Low-Rank Factorization

Low-rank representation learning has emerged as a powerful tool for recovering missing values in power load data due to its ability to exploit the inherent low-dimensional structures of spatiotemporal measurements. Among various techniques, low-rank factorization models are favoured for their efficiency and interpretability. However, their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of regularization parameters, which are typically fixed or manually tuned, resulting in limited generalization capability or slow convergence in practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose a Regularization-optimized Low-Rank Factorization, which introduces a Proportional-Integral-Derivative controller to adaptively adjust the regularization coefficient. Furthermore, we provide a detailed algorithmic complexity analysis, showing that our method preserves the computational efficiency of stochastic gradient descent while improving adaptivity. Experimental results on real-world power load datasets validate the superiority of our method in both imputation accuracy and training efficiency compared to existing baselines.