CAP-CoT: Cycle Adversarial Prompt for Improving Chain of Thoughts in LLM Reasoning

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a simple and effective way to elicit step-by-step solutions from large language models (LLMs). However, CoT reasoning can be unstable across runs on long, multi-step problems, leading to inconsistent answers for unchanged task. Most prior work focuses on improving the forward reasoning chain within a single pass, with less attention to iterative and contrastive correction. To address this gap, we propose CAP-CoT, a Cycle Adversarial Prompt optimization framework designed to improve both CoT reasoning accuracy and stability of a single deployed solver. In each cycle, a forward solver generates candidate reasoning chains, an adversarial challenger constructs plausible but deliberately flawed chains using targeted error strategies, and a feedback agent contrasts the two chains and produces step-aligned structured feedback. This feedback closes the optimization loop in two directions, including updating the solver prompt based on errors exposed by the challenger, and updating the challenger prompt to generate increasingly targeted errors in subsequent cycles. Unlike safety-oriented adversarial prompting such as jailbreak or prompt-injection attacks, our adversarial component is task-semantic and aims to expose logical vulnerabilities in reasoning chains. Experiments across six benchmarks and four LLM backbones demonstrate that within two to three adversarial prompt optimization cycles, CAP-CoT consistently reduces variability across runs while improving reasoning accuracy and robustness to prompt perturbations.

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

This paper presents a review for the LoViF Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration. The challenge aimed to advance research on real-world all-in-one image restoration under diverse real-world degradation conditions, including blur, low-light, haze, rain, and snow. It provided a unified benchmark to evaluate the robustness and generalization ability of restoration models across multiple degradation categories within a common framework. The competition attracted 124 registered participants and received 9 valid final submissions with corresponding fact sheets, significantly contributing to the progress of real-world all-in-one image restoration. This report provides a detailed analysis of the submitted methods and corresponding results, emphasizing recent progress in unified real-world image restoration. The analysis highlights effective approaches and establishes a benchmark for future research in real-world low-level vision.

ORSIFlow: Saliency-Guided Rectified Flow for Optical Remote Sensing Salient Object Detection

Optical Remote Sensing Image Salient Object Detection (ORSI-SOD) remains challenging due to complex backgrounds, low contrast, irregular object shapes, and large variations in object scale. Existing discriminative methods directly regress saliency maps, while recent diffusion-based generative approaches suffer from stochastic sampling and high computational cost. In this paper, we propose ORSIFlow, a saliency-guided rectified flow framework that reformulates ORSI-SOD as a deterministic latent flow generation problem. ORSIFlow performs saliency mask generation in a compact latent space constructed by a frozen variational autoencoder, enabling efficient inference with only a few steps. To enhance saliency awareness, we design a Salient Feature Discriminator for global semantic discrimination and a Salient Feature Calibrator for precise boundary refinement. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks show that ORSIFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved efficiency. Codes are available at: https://github.com/Ch3nSir/ORSIFlow.

Rethinking Input Domains in Physics-Informed Neural Networks via Geometric Compactification Mappings

Several complex physical systems are governed by multi-scale partial differential equations (PDEs) that exhibit both smooth low-frequency components and localized high-frequency structures. Existing physics-informed neural network (PINN) methods typically train with fixed coordinate system inputs, where geometric misalignment with these structures induces gradient stiffness and ill-conditioning that hinder convergence. To address this issue, we introduce a mapping paradigm that reshapes the input coordinates through differentiable geometric compactification mappings and couples the geometric structure of PDEs with the spectral properties of residual operators. Based on this paradigm, we propose Geometric Compactification (GC)-PINN, a framework that introduces three mapping strategies for periodic boundaries, far-field scale expansion, and localized singular structures in the input domain without modifying the underlying PINN architecture. Extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that this approach yields more uniform residual distributions and higher solution accuracy on representative 1D and 2D PDEs, while improving training stability and convergence speed.

Optimizing Soft Prompt Tuning via Structural Evolution

Soft prompt tuning leverages continuous embeddings to capture task-specific information in large pre-trained language models (LLMs), achieving competitive performance in few-shot settings. However, soft prompts rely on high-dimensional, implicit representations and lack explicit semantics and traceable training behaviors, which limits their interpretability. To address this limitation, we propose a soft prompt tuning optimization method based on topological morphological evolution. Specifically, we employ persistent homology from topological data analysis (TDA) to quantify the structural representations of soft prompts in continuous parameter space and their training process evolution. Quantitative analysis shows that topologically stable and compact soft prompts achieve better downstream performance. Based on this empirical observation, we construct a loss function for optimizing soft prompt tuning, termed Topological Soft Prompt Loss (TSLoss). TSLoss guides the model to learn structurally stable adaptations by quantifying inter-parameter connectivity and redundancy. Extensive experiments show that training with TSLoss accelerates convergence and improves tuning performance, providing an interpretable method to understand and optimize soft prompt tuning from structural and topological perspectives.

AgentIF-OneDay: A Task-level Instruction-Following Benchmark for General AI Agents in Daily Scenarios

The capacity of AI agents to effectively handle tasks of increasing duration and complexity continues to grow, demonstrating exceptional performance in coding, deep research, and complex problem-solving evaluations. However, in daily scenarios, the perception of these advanced AI capabilities among general users remains limited. We argue that current evaluations prioritize increasing task difficulty without sufficiently addressing the diversity of agentic tasks necessary to cover the daily work, life, and learning activities of a broad demographic. To address this, we propose AgentIF-OneDay, aimed at determining whether general users can utilize natural language instructions and AI agents to complete a diverse array of daily tasks. These tasks require not only solving problems through dialogue but also understanding various attachment types and delivering tangible file-based results. The benchmark is structured around three user-centric categories: Open Workflow Execution, which assesses adherence to explicit and complex workflows; Latent Instruction, which requires agents to infer implicit instructions from attachments; and Iterative Refinement, which involves modifying or expanding upon ongoing work. We employ instance-level rubrics and a refined evaluation pipeline that aligns LLM-based verification with human judgment, achieving an 80.1% agreement rate using Gemini-3-Pro. AgentIF-OneDay comprises 104 tasks covering 767 scoring points. We benchmarked four leading general AI agents and found that agent products built based on APIs and ChatGPT agents based on agent RL remain in the first tier simultaneously. Leading LLM APIs and open-source models have internalized agentic capabilities, enabling AI application teams to develop cutting-edge Agent products.

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. This challenge received a wide range of impressive solutions, which are developed and evaluated using our collected real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset. Unlike existing deraining datasets, our Raindrop Clarity dataset is more diverse and challenging in degradation types and contents, which includes day raindrop-focused, day background-focused, night raindrop-focused, and night background-focused degradations. This dataset is divided into three subsets for competition: 14,139 images for training, 240 images for validation, and 731 images for testing. The primary objective of this challenge is to establish a new and powerful benchmark for the task of removing raindrops under varying lighting and focus conditions. There are a total of 361 participants in the competition, and 32 teams submitting valid solutions and fact sheets for the final testing phase. These submissions achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset. The project can be found at https://lixinustc.github.io/CVPR-NTIRE2025-RainDrop-Competition.github.io/.

UbiHR: Resource-efficient Long-range Heart Rate Sensing on Ubiquitous Devices

Ubiquitous on-device heart rate sensing is vital for high-stress individuals and chronic patients. Non-contact sensing, compared to contact-based tools, allows for natural user monitoring, potentially enabling more accurate and holistic data collection. However, in open and uncontrolled mobile environments, user movement and lighting introduce. Existing methods, such as curve-based or short-range deep learning recognition based on adjacent frames, strike the optimal balance between real-time performance and accuracy, especially under limited device resources. In this paper, we present UbiHR, a ubiquitous device-based heart rate sensing system. Key to UbiHR is a real-time long-range spatio-temporal model enabling noise-independent heart rate recognition and display on commodity mobile devices, along with a set of mechanisms for prompt and energy-efficient sampling and preprocessing. Diverse experiments and user studies involving four devices, four tasks, and 80 participants demonstrate UbiHR's superior performance, enhancing accuracy by up to 74.2\% and reducing latency by 51.2\%.