Persistent Story World Simulation with Continuous Character Customization

Story visualization has gained increasing attention in computer vision. However, current methods often fail to achieve a synergy between accurate character customization, semantic alignment, and continuous integration of new identities. To tackle this challenge, in this paper we present EverTale, a story world simulator for continuous story character customization. We first propose an All-in-One-World Character Integrator to achieve continuous character adaptation within unified LoRA module, eliminating the need for per-character optimization modules of previous methods. Then, we incorporate a Character Quality Gate via MLLM-as-Judge to ensure the fidelity of each character adaptation process through chain-of-thought reasoning, determining whether the model can proceed to the next character or require additional training on the current one. We also introduce a Character-Aware Region-Focus Sampling strategy to address the identity degradation and layout conflicts in existing multi-character visual storytelling, ensuring natural multi-character generation by harmonizing local character-specific details with global scene context with higher efficiency. Experimental results show that our EverTale achieves superior performance against a wider range of compared methods on both single- and multi-character story visualization. Codes will be available.

FIND: A Simple yet Effective Baseline for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection

The remarkable realism of images generated by diffusion models poses critical detection challenges. Current methods utilize reconstruction error as a discriminative feature, exploiting the observation that real images exhibit higher reconstruction errors when processed through diffusion models. However, these approaches require costly reconstruction computations and depend on specific diffusion models, making their performance highly model-dependent. We identify a fundamental difference: real images are more difficult to fit with Gaussian distributions compared to synthetic ones. In this paper, we propose Forgery Identification via Noise Disturbance (FIND), a novel method that requires only a simple binary classifier. It eliminates reconstruction by directly targeting the core distributional difference between real and synthetic images. Our key operation is to add Gaussian noise to real images during training and label these noisy versions as synthetic. This step allows the classifier to focus on the statistical patterns that distinguish real from synthetic images. We theoretically prove that the noise-augmented real images resemble diffusion-generated images in their ease of Gaussian fitting. Furthermore, simply by adding noise, they still retain visual similarity to the original images, highlighting the most discriminative distribution-related features. The proposed FIND improves performance by 11.7% on the GenImage benchmark while running 126x faster than existing methods. By removing the need for auxiliary diffusion models and reconstruction, it offers a practical, efficient, and generalizable way to detect diffusion-generated content.

3D-DRES: Detailed 3D Referring Expression Segmentation

Current 3D visual grounding tasks only process sentence level detection or segmentation, which critically fails to leverage the rich compositional contextual reasonings within natural language expressions. To address this challenge, we introduce Detailed 3D Referring Expression Segmentation (3D-DRES), a new task that provides a phrase to 3D instance mapping, aiming at enhancing fine-grained 3D vision language understanding. To support 3D-DRES, we present DetailRefer, a new dataset comprising 54,432 descriptions spanning 11,054 distinct objects. Unlike previous datasets, DetailRefer implements a pioneering phrase-instance annotation paradigm where each referenced noun phrase is explicitly mapped to its corresponding 3D elements. Additionally, we introduce DetailBase, a purposefully streamlined yet effective baseline architecture that supports dual-mode segmentation at both sentence and phrase levels. Our experimental results demonstrate that models trained on DetailRefer not only excel at phrase-level segmentation but also show surprising improvements on traditional 3D-RES benchmarks.

Wavelet-based Frame Selection by Detecting Semantic Boundary for Long Video Understanding

Frame selection is crucial due to high frame redundancy and limited context windows when applying Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to long videos. Current methods typically select frames with high relevance to a given query, resulting in a disjointed set of frames that disregard the narrative structure of video. In this paper, we introduce Wavelet-based Frame Selection by Detecting Semantic Boundary (WFS-SB), a training-free framework that presents a new perspective: effective video understanding hinges not only on high relevance but, more importantly, on capturing semantic shifts - pivotal moments of narrative change that are essential to comprehending the holistic storyline of video. However, direct detection of abrupt changes in the query-frame similarity signal is often unreliable due to high-frequency noise arising from model uncertainty and transient visual variations. To address this, we leverage the wavelet transform, which provides an ideal solution through its multi-resolution analysis in both time and frequency domains. By applying this transform, we decompose the noisy signal into multiple scales and extract a clean semantic change signal from the coarsest scale. We identify the local extrema of this signal as semantic boundaries, which segment the video into coherent clips. Building on this, WFS-SB comprises a two-stage strategy: first, adaptively allocating a frame budget to each clip based on a composite importance score; and second, within each clip, employing the Maximal Marginal Relevance approach to select a diverse yet relevant set of frames. Extensive experiments show that WFS-SB significantly boosts LVLM performance, e.g., improving accuracy by 5.5% on VideoMME, 9.5% on MLVU, and 6.2% on LongVideoBench, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

MICON-Bench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multi-Image Context Image Generation in Unified Multimodal Models

Recent advancements in Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have enabled remarkable image understanding and generation capabilities. However, while models like Gemini-2.5-Flash-Image show emerging abilities to reason over multiple related images, existing benchmarks rarely address the challenges of multi-image context generation, focusing mainly on text-to-image or single-image editing tasks. In this work, we introduce \textbf{MICON-Bench}, a comprehensive benchmark covering six tasks that evaluate cross-image composition, contextual reasoning, and identity preservation. We further propose an MLLM-driven Evaluation-by-Checkpoint framework for automatic verification of semantic and visual consistency, where multimodal large language model (MLLM) serves as a verifier. Additionally, we present \textbf{Dynamic Attention Rebalancing (DAR)}, a training-free, plug-and-play mechanism that dynamically adjusts attention during inference to enhance coherence and reduce hallucinations. Extensive experiments on various state-of-the-art open-source models demonstrate both the rigor of MICON-Bench in exposing multi-image reasoning challenges and the efficacy of DAR in improving generation quality and cross-image coherence. Github: https://github.com/Angusliuuu/MICON-Bench.

Test-Time Computing for Referring Multimodal Large Language Models

We propose ControlMLLM++, a novel test-time adaptation framework that injects learnable visual prompts into frozen multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to enable fine-grained region-based visual reasoning without any model retraining or fine-tuning. Leveraging the insight that cross-modal attention maps intrinsically encode semantic correspondences between textual tokens and visual regions, ControlMLLM++ optimizes a latent visual token modifier during inference via a task-specific energy function to steer model attention towards user-specified areas. To enhance optimization stability and mitigate language prompt biases, ControlMLLM++ incorporates an improved optimization strategy (Optim++) and a prompt debiasing mechanism (PromptDebias). Supporting diverse visual prompt types including bounding boxes, masks, scribbles, and points, our method demonstrates strong out-of-domain generalization and interpretability. The code is available at https://github.com/mrwu-mac/ControlMLLM.

SafeNeuron: Neuron-Level Safety Alignment for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs are typically safety-aligned before release to prevent harmful content generation. However, recent studies show that safety behaviors are concentrated in a small subset of parameters, making alignment brittle and easily bypassed through neuron-level attacks. Moreover, most existing alignment methods operate at the behavioral level, offering limited control over the model's internal safety mechanisms. In this work, we propose SafeNeuron, a neuron-level safety alignment framework that improves robustness by redistributing safety representations across the network. SafeNeuron first identifies safety-related neurons, then freezes these neurons during preference optimization to prevent reliance on sparse safety pathways and force the model to construct redundant safety representations. Extensive experiments across models and modalities demonstrate that SafeNeuron significantly improves robustness against neuron pruning attacks, reduces the risk of open-source models being repurposed as red-team generators, and preserves general capabilities. Furthermore, our layer-wise analysis reveals that safety behaviors are governed by stable and shared internal representations. Overall, SafeNeuron provides an interpretable and robust perspective for model alignment.

MVGGT: Multimodal Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer for Multiview 3D Referring Expression Segmentation

Most existing 3D referring expression segmentation (3DRES) methods rely on dense, high-quality point clouds, while real-world agents such as robots and mobile phones operate with only a few sparse RGB views and strict latency constraints. We introduce Multi-view 3D Referring Expression Segmentation (MV-3DRES), where the model must recover scene structure and segment the referred object directly from sparse multi-view images. Traditional two-stage pipelines, which first reconstruct a point cloud and then perform segmentation, often yield low-quality geometry, produce coarse or degraded target regions, and run slowly. We propose the Multimodal Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (MVGGT), an efficient end-to-end framework that integrates language information into sparse-view geometric reasoning through a dual-branch design. Training in this setting exposes a critical optimization barrier, termed Foreground Gradient Dilution (FGD), where sparse 3D signals lead to weak supervision. To resolve this, we introduce Per-view No-target Suppression Optimization (PVSO), which provides stronger and more balanced gradients across views, enabling stable and efficient learning. To support consistent evaluation, we build MVRefer, a benchmark that defines standardized settings and metrics for MV-3DRES. Experiments show that MVGGT establishes the first strong baseline and achieves both high accuracy and fast inference, outperforming existing alternatives. Code and models are publicly available at https://mvggt.github.io.

CSMCIR: CoT-Enhanced Symmetric Alignment with Memory Bank for Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) enables users to search for target images using both a reference image and manipulation text, offering substantial advantages over single-modality retrieval systems. However, existing CIR methods suffer from representation space fragmentation: queries and targets comprise heterogeneous modalities and are processed by distinct encoders, forcing models to bridge misaligned representation spaces only through post-hoc alignment, which fundamentally limits retrieval performance. This architectural asymmetry manifests as three distinct, well-separated clusters in the feature space, directly demonstrating how heterogeneous modalities create fundamentally misaligned representation spaces from initialization. In this work, we propose CSMCIR, a unified representation framework that achieves efficient query-target alignment through three synergistic components. First, we introduce a Multi-level Chain-of-Thought (MCoT) prompting strategy that guides Multimodal Large Language Models to generate discriminative, semantically compatible captions for target images, establishing modal symmetry. Building upon this, we design a symmetric dual-tower architecture where both query and target sides utilize the identical shared-parameter Q-Former for cross-modal encoding, ensuring consistent feature representations and further reducing the alignment gap. Finally, this architectural symmetry enables an entropy-based, temporally dynamic Memory Bank strategy that provides high-quality negative samples while maintaining consistency with the evolving model state. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our CSMCIR achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior training efficiency. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each proposed component.

Evolving, Not Training: Zero-Shot Reasoning Segmentation via Evolutionary Prompting

Reasoning Segmentation requires models to interpret complex, context-dependent linguistic queries to achieve pixel-level localization. Current dominant approaches rely heavily on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, SFT suffers from catastrophic forgetting and domain dependency, while RL is often hindered by training instability and rigid reliance on predefined reward functions. Although recent training-free methods circumvent these training burdens, they are fundamentally limited by a static inference paradigm. These methods typically rely on a single-pass "generate-then-segment" chain, which suffers from insufficient reasoning depth and lacks the capability to self-correct linguistic hallucinations or spatial misinterpretations. In this paper, we challenge these limitations and propose EVOL-SAM3, a novel zero-shot framework that reformulates reasoning segmentation as an inference-time evolutionary search process. Instead of relying on a fixed prompt, EVOL-SAM3 maintains a population of prompt hypotheses and iteratively refines them through a "Generate-Evaluate-Evolve" loop. We introduce a Visual Arena to assess prompt fitness via reference-free pairwise tournaments, and a Semantic Mutation operator to inject diversity and correct semantic errors. Furthermore, a Heterogeneous Arena module integrates geometric priors with semantic reasoning to ensure robust final selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVOL-SAM3 not only substantially outperforms static baselines but also significantly surpasses fully supervised state-of-the-art methods on the challenging ReasonSeg benchmark in a zero-shot setting. The code is available at https://github.com/AHideoKuzeA/Evol-SAM3.