Towards Perfection: Building Inter-component Mutual Correction for Retinex-based Low-light Image Enhancement

In low-light image enhancement, Retinex-based deep learning methods have garnered significant attention due to their exceptional interpretability. These methods decompose images into mutually independent illumination and reflectance components, allows each component to be enhanced separately. In fact, achieving perfect decomposition of illumination and reflectance components proves to be quite challenging, with some residuals still existing after decomposition. In this paper, we formally name these residuals as inter-component residuals (ICR), which has been largely underestimated by previous methods. In our investigation, ICR not only affects the accuracy of the decomposition but also causes enhanced components to deviate from the ideal outcome, ultimately reducing the final synthesized image quality. To address this issue, we propose a novel Inter-correction Retinex model (IRetinex) to alleviate ICR during the decomposition and enhancement stage. In the decomposition stage, we leverage inter-component residual reduction module to reduce the feature similarity between illumination and reflectance components. In the enhancement stage, we utilize the feature similarity between the two components to detect and mitigate the impact of ICR within each enhancement unit. Extensive experiments on three low-light benchmark datasets demonstrated that by reducing ICR, our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Correspondence as Video: Test-Time Adaption on SAM2 for Reference Segmentation in the Wild

Large vision models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibit significant limitations when applied to downstream tasks in the wild. Consequently, reference segmentation, which leverages reference images and their corresponding masks to impart novel knowledge to the model, emerges as a promising new direction for adapting vision models. However, existing reference segmentation approaches predominantly rely on meta-learning, which still necessitates an extensive meta-training process and brings massive data and computational cost. In this study, we propose a novel approach by representing the inherent correspondence between reference-target image pairs as a pseudo video. This perspective allows the latest version of SAM, known as SAM2, which is equipped with interactive video object segmentation (iVOS) capabilities, to be adapted to downstream tasks in a lightweight manner. We term this approach Correspondence As Video for SAM (CAV-SAM). CAV-SAM comprises two key modules: the Diffusion-Based Semantic Transition (DBST) module employs a diffusion model to construct a semantic transformation sequence, while the Test-Time Geometric Alignment (TTGA) module aligns the geometric changes within this sequence through test-time fine-tuning. We evaluated CAVSAM on widely-used datasets, achieving segmentation performance improvements exceeding 5% over SOTA methods. Implementation is provided in the supplementary materials.

Unsupervised Part Discovery via Descriptor-Based Masked Image Restoration with Optimized Constraints

Part-level features are crucial for image understanding, but few studies focus on them because of the lack of fine-grained labels. Although unsupervised part discovery can eliminate the reliance on labels, most of them cannot maintain robustness across various categories and scenarios, which restricts their application range. To overcome this limitation, we present a more effective paradigm for unsupervised part discovery, named Masked Part Autoencoder (MPAE). It first learns part descriptors as well as a feature map from the inputs and produces patch features from a masked version of the original images. Then, the masked regions are filled with the learned part descriptors based on the similarity between the local features and descriptors. By restoring these masked patches using the part descriptors, they become better aligned with their part shapes, guided by appearance features from unmasked patches. Finally, MPAE robustly discovers meaningful parts that closely match the actual object shapes, even in complex scenarios. Moreover, several looser yet more effective constraints are proposed to enable MPAE to identify the presence of parts across various scenarios and categories in an unsupervised manner. This provides the foundation for addressing challenges posed by occlusion and for exploring part similarity across multiple categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method robustly discovers meaningful parts across various categories and scenarios. The code is available at the project https://github.com/Jiahao-UTS/MPAE.

SWinMamba: Serpentine Window State Space Model for Vascular Segmentation

Vascular segmentation in medical images is crucial for disease diagnosis and surgical navigation. However, the segmented vascular structure is often discontinuous due to its slender nature and inadequate prior modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel Serpentine Window Mamba (SWinMamba) to achieve accurate vascular segmentation. The proposed SWinMamba innovatively models the continuity of slender vascular structures by incorporating serpentine window sequences into bidirectional state space models. The serpentine window sequences enable efficient feature capturing by adaptively guiding global visual context modeling to the vascular structure. Specifically, the Serpentine Window Tokenizer (SWToken) adaptively splits the input image using overlapping serpentine window sequences, enabling flexible receptive fields (RFs) for vascular structure modeling. The Bidirectional Aggregation Module (BAM) integrates coherent local features in the RFs for vascular continuity representation. In addition, dual-domain learning with Spatial-Frequency Fusion Unit (SFFU) is designed to enhance the feature representation of vascular structure. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed SWinMamba achieves superior performance with complete and connected vessels.

Pts3D-LLM: Studying the Impact of Token Structure for 3D Scene Understanding With Large Language Models

Effectively representing 3D scenes for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is crucial yet challenging. Existing approaches commonly only rely on 2D image features and use varied tokenization approaches. This work presents a rigorous study of 3D token structures, systematically comparing video-based and point-based representations while maintaining consistent model backbones and parameters. We propose a novel approach that enriches visual tokens by incorporating 3D point cloud features from a Sonata pretrained Point Transformer V3 encoder. Our experiments demonstrate that merging explicit 3D features significantly boosts performance. Furthermore, we show that point-based token structures can rival video-based ones when the points are cleverly sampled and ordered. Our best models from both structures achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple 3D understanding benchmarks. We emphasize our analysis of token structures as a key contribution, alongside transparent reporting of results averaged over multiple seeds, a practice we believe is vital for robust progress in the field.

AssetDropper: Asset Extraction via Diffusion Models with Reward-Driven Optimization

Recent research on generative models has primarily focused on creating product-ready visual outputs; however, designers often favor access to standardized asset libraries, a domain that has yet to be significantly enhanced by generative capabilities. Although open-world scenes provide ample raw materials for designers, efficiently extracting high-quality, standardized assets remains a challenge. To address this, we introduce AssetDropper, the first framework designed to extract assets from reference images, providing artists with an open-world asset palette. Our model adeptly extracts a front view of selected subjects from input images, effectively handling complex scenarios such as perspective distortion and subject occlusion. We establish a synthetic dataset of more than 200,000 image-subject pairs and a real-world benchmark with thousands more for evaluation, facilitating the exploration of future research in downstream tasks. Furthermore, to ensure precise asset extraction that aligns well with the image prompts, we employ a pre-trained reward model to fulfill a closed-loop with feedback. We design the reward model to perform an inverse task that pastes the extracted assets back into the reference sources, which assists training with additional consistency and mitigates hallucination. Extensive experiments show that, with the aid of reward-driven optimization, AssetDropper achieves the state-of-the-art results in asset extraction. Project page: AssetDropper.github.io.

Unleashing the Power of Intermediate Domains for Mixed Domain Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Both limited annotation and domain shift are prevalent challenges in medical image segmentation. Traditional semi-supervised segmentation and unsupervised domain adaptation methods address one of these issues separately. However, the coexistence of limited annotation and domain shift is quite common, which motivates us to introduce a novel and challenging scenario: Mixed Domain Semi-supervised medical image Segmentation (MiDSS), where limited labeled data from a single domain and a large amount of unlabeled data from multiple domains. To tackle this issue, we propose the UST-RUN framework, which fully leverages intermediate domain information to facilitate knowledge transfer. We employ Unified Copy-paste (UCP) to construct intermediate domains, and propose a Symmetric GuiDance training strategy (SymGD) to supervise unlabeled data by merging pseudo-labels from intermediate samples. Subsequently, we introduce a Training Process aware Random Amplitude MixUp (TP-RAM) to progressively incorporate style-transition components into intermediate samples. To generate more diverse intermediate samples, we further select reliable samples with high-quality pseudo-labels, which are then mixed with other unlabeled data. Additionally, we generate sophisticated intermediate samples with high-quality pseudo-labels for unreliable samples, ensuring effective knowledge transfer for them. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the superiority of UST-RUN. Notably, UST-RUN achieves a 12.94% improvement in Dice score on the Prostate dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/MQinghe/UST-RUN

LAFR: Efficient Diffusion-based Blind Face Restoration via Latent Codebook Alignment Adapter

Blind face restoration from low-quality (LQ) images is a challenging task that requires not only high-fidelity image reconstruction but also the preservation of facial identity. While diffusion models like Stable Diffusion have shown promise in generating high-quality (HQ) images, their VAE modules are typically trained only on HQ data, resulting in semantic misalignment when encoding LQ inputs. This mismatch significantly weakens the effectiveness of LQ conditions during the denoising process. Existing approaches often tackle this issue by retraining the VAE encoder, which is computationally expensive and memory-intensive. To address this limitation efficiently, we propose LAFR (Latent Alignment for Face Restoration), a novel codebook-based latent space adapter that aligns the latent distribution of LQ images with that of HQ counterparts, enabling semantically consistent diffusion sampling without altering the original VAE. To further enhance identity preservation, we introduce a multi-level restoration loss that combines constraints from identity embeddings and facial structural priors. Additionally, by leveraging the inherent structural regularity of facial images, we show that lightweight finetuning of diffusion prior on just 0.9% of FFHQ dataset is sufficient to achieve results comparable to state-of-the-art methods, reduce training time by 70%. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world face restoration benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of LAFR, achieving high-quality, identity-preserving face reconstruction from severely degraded inputs.

Robot Operation of Home Appliances by Reading User Manuals

Operating home appliances, among the most common tools in every household, is a critical capability for assistive home robots. This paper presents ApBot, a robot system that operates novel household appliances by "reading" their user manuals. ApBot faces multiple challenges: (i) infer goal-conditioned partial policies from their unstructured, textual descriptions in a user manual document, (ii) ground the policies to the appliance in the physical world, and (iii) execute the policies reliably over potentially many steps, despite compounding errors. To tackle these challenges, ApBot constructs a structured, symbolic model of an appliance from its manual, with the help of a large vision-language model (VLM). It grounds the symbolic actions visually to control panel elements. Finally, ApBot closes the loop by updating the model based on visual feedback. Our experiments show that across a wide range of simulated and real-world appliances, ApBot achieves consistent and statistically significant improvements in task success rate, compared with state-of-the-art large VLMs used directly as control policies. These results suggest that a structured internal representations plays an important role in robust robot operation of home appliances, especially, complex ones.

VLM-3R: Vision-Language Models Augmented with Instruction-Aligned 3D Reconstruction

The rapid advancement of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for 2D images and videos has motivated extending these models to understand 3D scenes, aiming for human-like visual-spatial intelligence. Nevertheless, achieving deep spatial understanding comparable to human capabilities poses significant challenges in model encoding and data acquisition. Existing methods frequently depend on external depth sensors for geometry capture or utilize off-the-shelf algorithms for pre-constructing 3D maps, thereby limiting their scalability, especially with prevalent monocular video inputs and for time-sensitive applications. In this work, we introduce VLM-3R, a unified framework for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that incorporates 3D Reconstructive instruction tuning. VLM-3R processes monocular video frames by employing a geometry encoder to derive implicit 3D tokens that represent spatial understanding. Leveraging our Spatial-Visual-View Fusion and over 200K curated 3D reconstructive instruction tuning question-answer (QA) pairs, VLM-3R effectively aligns real-world spatial context with language instructions. This enables monocular 3D spatial assistance and embodied reasoning. To facilitate the evaluation of temporal reasoning, we introduce the Vision-Spatial-Temporal Intelligence benchmark, featuring over 138.6K QA pairs across five distinct tasks focused on evolving spatial relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model, VLM-3R, not only facilitates robust visual-spatial reasoning but also enables the understanding of temporal 3D context changes, excelling in both accuracy and scalability.