Multi-modality Image Fusion under Adverse Weather: Mask-Guided Feature Restoration and Interaction

Multi-modality image fusion (MMIF) enhances scene representation by exploiting complementary cues from different modalities. Adverse weather, however, causes significant image degradation, disrupting feature representation and requiring simultaneous feature restoration and cross-modal complementarity. Existing methods often struggle with effective representation learning under such conditions, limiting their practical performance. To address these challenges, we propose a mask-guided MMIF method that integrates feature restoration and interaction. We first introduce "Pseudo Ground Truth" to simplify training, promoting faster and more effective feature learning. Then, we design a mask generation mechanism based on the mapping relationship between the fused result and the source images, quantifying the relative contribution of each modality during the fusion process. By incorporating the proposed mask-guided cross-modal cross-attention mechanism, the network is encouraged to selectively attend to informative features during modality interaction, mitigating the risk of overfitting to the static distribution of the "Pseudo Ground Truth". Additionally, we propose a mask-guided learning strategy and a task-coupled degradation-aware learning strategy to balance feature restoration and interaction. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in visual quality, quantitative metrics, and downstream tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/ixilai/AMG-Fuse.

One Stone, Three Birds: Self-adaptive Optimal Transport for Multi-VLM Selection, Adaptation, and Ensembling

Vision-language models (VLMs) enable visual recognition from semantic class descriptions, which makes them attractive when target annotations are scarce or unavailable. Most deployment pipelines, however, first choose a single VLM and then adapt that model to the unlabeled target set. This single-backbone paradigm hides a critical assumption: the selected VLM is already compatible with the target domain. In realistic cross-domain deployment, several general-purpose and domain-specialized VLMs may be plausible, yet no instance-level target labels are available to identify the reliable ones. Deployment therefore requires a coupled solution for model selection, target adaptation, and prediction integration. We revisit this problem from a system-level multi-VLM perspective. Our central observation is that the three decisions above depend on the same latent object: a trustworthy sample-class structure in the target set. Different VLMs may encode different transfer biases and produce conflicting predictions, but their outputs can still provide complementary evidence for estimating this structure. We propose One Stone, Three Birds, a training-free framework based on self-adaptive optimal transport. Given a pool of frozen candidate VLMs, OSTB estimates a consensus sample-to-class transport plan without updating VLM parameters. The learned transport structure is then reused for all deployment objectives: model selection is performed by ranking the combined semantic and visual reliability induced by the consensus plan; target adaptation is obtained by fitting transport-conditioned visual classifiers; and ensembling is implemented through reliability-aware probabilistic integration. Extensive experiments on natural-image, remote-sensing, and medical-pathology benchmarks show that OSTB improves model ranking, adaptation stability, and ensemble robustness under heterogeneous candidate pools.

Geometry-Preserving Unsupervised Alignment for Heterogeneous Foundation Models

Foundation models have driven rapid progress in computer vision, yet the two dominant paradigms, vision-language foundation models (VLMs) and vision-only foundation models (VFMs), remain only partially compatible. VLMs offer language-grounded semantic alignment but are often visually coarse, while VFMs learn discriminative perceptual geometry but lack semantic grounding. We propose GPUA (Geometry-Preserving Unsupervised Alignment), a framework that integrates the complementary strengths of VFMs and VLMs. Inspired by cross-lingual alignment, GPUA treats VFM features as a visual language and learns an orthogonal mapping that translates the VFM space into the VLM semantic space, preserving geometry and narrowing the modality gap without labels or model parameter updates. GPUA is task-agnostic and requires only feature-level access to pretrained models. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate improved cross-model compatibility and strong gains in downstream zero-shot recognition and segmentation with negligible overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/Yuteam14/GPUA

[CLS] is Not Enough: Multi-Label Recognition via Patch-Level Inference and Adaptive Aggregation

Vision-Language Models such as CLIP exhibit strong zero-shot recognition capability by aligning images with textual concepts, yet they often underperform on multi-label recognition where multiple objects co-exist. A key bottleneck is that the [CLS] token, as a single global visual representation, is insufficient to faithfully encode diverse targets with varying scales, contexts, and co-occurrence patterns. To address this limitation, we present a new multi-label image recognition framework, termed PIAA, which formulates prediction as Patch-level Inference followed by Adaptive Aggregation. Specifically, we first enhance patch-wise predictions from two complementary perspectives: (i) mitigating semantic entanglement in the visual encoder to obtain more discriminative patch representations, and (ii) learning an unsupervised visual classifier to narrow the vision-language modality gap. We then introduce an adaptive aggregation module that consolidates patch-level scores into the final multi-label prediction. Notably, the entire pipeline is fully training-free, requiring no gradient updates or parameter fine-tuning. Experiments show that our method achieves strong improvements with minimal extra computation, exceeding a 6% mAP gain on the challenging NUS-WIDE benchmark over representative baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/akang-wang/PIAA.

Breaking Degradation Coupling: A Structural Entropy Guided Decoupled Framework and Benchmark for Infrared Enhancement

Thermal infrared image enhancement aims to restore high-quality images from complex compound degradations. Existing all-in-one approaches typically employ a single shared backbone to handle diverse degradations, which causes gradient interference and parameter competition. To address this, we propose a Structural Entropy-Guided Decoupled (SEGD) Framework. Unlike unified modeling paradigms, SEGD decomposes compound degradations into independent sub-processes and models them in a divide-and-conquer manner through Degradation-Specific Residual Modules (DRMs). Each DRM focuses on residual estimation for a specific degradation, enabling task decoupling while remaining jointly trainable, which mitigates parameter contention. A Degradation-Aware Evidential Network further estimates degradation type and intensity, providing priors that adaptively regulate DRM restoration strength. To handle compound cases, DRMs are composed in varying orders to form multiple restoration paths, from which the most informative features are aggregated under a structural-entropy criterion, yielding decoder-ready representations with structural fidelity and degradation awareness. Integrating divide-and-conquer restoration, evidential perception, and entropy-guided adaptation, SEGD achieves fine-grained and interpretable enhancement. We also construct a nighttime TIR benchmark for evaluation under real low-light conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that SEGD surpasses state-of-the-art methods while achieving higher efficiency with fewer parameters.

Customized Fusion: A Closed-Loop Dynamic Network for Adaptive Multi-Task-Aware Infrared-Visible Image Fusion

Infrared-visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary information for robust visual understanding, but existing fusion methods struggle with simultaneously adapting to multiple downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose a Closed-Loop Dynamic Network (CLDyN) that can adaptively respond to the semantic requirements of diverse downstream tasks for task-customized image fusion. Specifically, CLDyN introduces a closed-loop optimization mechanism that establishes a semantic transmission chain to achieve explicit feedback from downstream tasks to the fusion network through a Requirement-driven Semantic Compensation (RSC) module. The RSC module leverages a Basis Vector Bank (BVB) and an Architecture-Adaptive Semantic Injection (A2SI) block to customize the network architecture according to task requirements, thereby enabling task-specific semantic compensation and allowing the fusion network to actively adapt to diverse tasks without retraining. To promote semantic compensation, a reward-penalty strategy is introduced to reward or penalize the RSC module based on task performance variations. Experiments on the M3FD, FMB, and VT5000 datasets demonstrate that CLDyN not only maintains high fusion quality but also exhibits strong multi-task adaptability. The code is available at https://github.com/YR0211/CLDyN.

Degradation-Robust Fusion: An Efficient Degradation-Aware Diffusion Framework for Multimodal Image Fusion in Arbitrary Degradation Scenarios

Complex degradations like noise, blur, and low resolution are typical challenges in real world image fusion tasks, limiting the performance and practicality of existing methods. End to end neural network based approaches are generally simple to design and highly efficient in inference, but their black-box nature leads to limited interpretability. Diffusion based methods alleviate this to some extent by providing powerful generative priors and a more structured inference process. However, they are trained to learn a single domain target distribution, whereas fusion lacks natural fused data and relies on modeling complementary information from multiple sources, making diffusion hard to apply directly in practice. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient degradation aware diffusion framework for image fusion under arbitrary degradation scenarios. Specifically, instead of explicitly predicting noise as in conventional diffusion models, our method performs implicit denoising by directly regressing the fused image, enabling flexible adaptation to diverse fusion tasks under complex degradations with limited steps. Moreover, we design a joint observation model correction mechanism that simultaneously imposes degradation and fusion constraints during sampling to ensure high reconstruction accuracy. Experiments on diverse fusion tasks and degradation configurations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method under complex degradation scenarios.

MAVFusion: Efficient Infrared and Visible Video Fusion via Motion-Aware Sparse Interaction

Infrared and visible video fusion combines the object saliency from infrared images with the texture details from visible images to produce semantically rich fusion results. However, most existing methods are designed for static image fusion and cannot effectively handle frame-to-frame motion in videos. Current video fusion methods improve temporal consistency by introducing interactions across frames, but they often require high computational cost. To mitigate these challenges, we propose MAVFusion, an end-to-end video fusion framework featuring a motion-aware sparse interaction mechanism that enhances efficiency while maintaining superior fusion quality. Specifically, we leverage optical flow to identify dynamic regions in multi-modal sequences, adaptively allocating computationally intensive cross-modal attention to these sparse areas to capture salient transitions and facilitate inter-modal information exchange. For static background regions, a lightweight weak interaction module is employed to maintain structural and appearance integrity. By decoupling the processing of dynamic and static regions, MAVFusion simultaneously preserves temporal consistency and fine-grained details while significantly accelerating inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAVFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple infrared and visible video benchmarks, achieving a speed of 14.16\,FPS at $640 \times 480$ resolution. The source code will be available at https://github.com/ixilai/MAVFusion.

Missing No More: Dictionary-Guided Cross-Modal Image Fusion under Missing Infrared

Infrared-visible (IR-VIS) image fusion is vital for perception and security, yet most methods rely on the availability of both modalities during training and inference. When the infrared modality is absent, pixel-space generative substitutes become hard to control and inherently lack interpretability. We address missing-IR fusion by proposing a dictionary-guided, coefficient-domain framework built upon a shared convolutional dictionary. The pipeline comprises three key components: (1) Joint Shared-dictionary Representation Learning (JSRL) learns a unified and interpretable atom space shared by both IR and VIS modalities; (2) VIS-Guided IR Inference (VGII) transfers VIS coefficients to pseudo-IR coefficients in the coefficient domain and performs a one-step closed-loop refinement guided by a frozen large language model as a weak semantic prior; and (3) Adaptive Fusion via Representation Inference (AFRI) merges VIS structures and inferred IR cues at the atom level through window attention and convolutional mixing, followed by reconstruction with the shared dictionary. This encode-transfer-fuse-reconstruct pipeline avoids uncontrolled pixel-space generation while ensuring prior preservation within interpretable dictionary-coefficient representation. Experiments under missing-IR settings demonstrate consistent improvements in perceptual quality and downstream detection performance. To our knowledge, this represents the first framework that jointly learns a shared dictionary and performs coefficient-domain inference-fusion to tackle missing-IR fusion. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/harukiv/DCMIF.

Adaptive Dynamic Dehazing via Instruction-Driven and Task-Feedback Closed-Loop Optimization for Diverse Downstream Task Adaptation

In real-world vision systems,haze removal is required not only to enhance image visibility but also to meet the specific needs of diverse downstream tasks.To address this challenge,we propose a novel adaptive dynamic dehazing framework that incorporates a closed-loop optimization mechanism.It enables feedback-driven refinement based on downstream task performance and user instruction-guided adjustment during inference,allowing the model to satisfy the specific requirements of multiple downstream tasks without retraining.Technically,our framework integrates two complementary and innovative mechanisms: (1)a task feedback loop that dynamically modulates dehazing outputs based on performance across multiple downstream tasks,and (2) a text instruction interface that allows users to specify high-level task preferences.This dual-guidance strategy enables the model to adapt its dehazing behavior after training,tailoring outputs in real time to the evolving needs of multiple tasks.Extensive experiments across various vision tasks demonstrate the strong effectiveness,robustness,and generalizability of our approach.These results establish a new paradigm for interactive,task-adaptive dehazing that actively collaborates with downstream applications.