SCALE: Semantic- and Confidence-Aware Conditional Variational Autoencoder for Zero-shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition (ZSAR) aims to recognize action classes without any training skeletons from those classes, relying instead on auxiliary semantics from text. Existing approaches frequently depend on explicit skeleton-text alignment, which can be brittle when action names underspecify fine-grained dynamics and when unseen classes are semantically confusable. We propose SCALE, a lightweight and deterministic Semantic- and Confidence-Aware Listwise Energy-based framework that formulates ZSAR as class-conditional energy ranking. SCALE builds a text-conditioned Conditional Variational Autoencoder where frozen text representations parameterize both the latent prior and the decoder, enabling likelihood-based evaluation for unseen classes without generating samples at test time. To separate competing hypotheses, we introduce a semantic- and confidence-aware listwise energy loss that emphasizes semantically similar hard negatives and incorporates posterior uncertainty to adapt decision margins and reweight ambiguous training instances. Additionally, we utilize a latent prototype contrast objective to align posterior means with text-derived latent prototypes, improving semantic organization and class separability without direct feature matching. Experiments on NTU-60 and NTU-120 datasets show that SCALE consistently improves over prior VAE- and alignment-based baselines while remaining competitive with diffusion-based methods.

Lightweight Prompt-Guided CLIP Adaptation for Monocular Depth Estimation

Leveraging the rich semantic features of vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP for monocular depth estimation tasks is a promising direction, yet often requires extensive fine-tuning or lacks geometric precision. We present a parameter-efficient framework, named MoA-DepthCLIP, that adapts pretrained CLIP representations for monocular depth estimation with minimal supervision. Our method integrates a lightweight Mixture-of-Adapters (MoA) module into the pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT-B/32) backbone combined with selective fine-tuning of the final layers. This design enables spatially-aware adaptation, guided by a global semantic context vector and a hybrid prediction architecture that synergizes depth bin classification with direct regression. To enhance structural accuracy, we employ a composite loss function that enforces geometric constraints. On the NYU Depth V2 benchmark, MoA-DepthCLIP achieves competitive results, significantly outperforming the DepthCLIP baseline by improving the $δ_1$ accuracy from 0.390 to 0.745 and reducing the RMSE from 1.176 to 0.520. These results are achieved while requiring substantially few trainable parameters, demonstrating that lightweight, prompt-guided MoA is a highly effective strategy for transferring VLM knowledge to fine-grained monocular depth estimation tasks.

It Takes Two: A Duet of Periodicity and Directionality for Burst Flicker Removal

Flicker artifacts, arising from unstable illumination and row-wise exposure inconsistencies, pose a significant challenge in short-exposure photography, severely degrading image quality. Unlike typical artifacts, e.g., noise and low-light, flicker is a structured degradation with specific spatial-temporal patterns, which are not accounted for in current generic restoration frameworks, leading to suboptimal flicker suppression and ghosting artifacts. In this work, we reveal that flicker artifacts exhibit two intrinsic characteristics, periodicity and directionality, and propose Flickerformer, a transformer-based architecture that effectively removes flicker without introducing ghosting. Specifically, Flickerformer comprises three key components: a phase-based fusion module (PFM), an autocorrelation feed-forward network (AFFN), and a wavelet-based directional attention module (WDAM). Based on the periodicity, PFM performs inter-frame phase correlation to adaptively aggregate burst features, while AFFN exploits intra-frame structural regularities through autocorrelation, jointly enhancing the network's ability to perceive spatially recurring patterns. Moreover, motivated by the directionality of flicker artifacts, WDAM leverages high-frequency variations in the wavelet domain to guide the restoration of low-frequency dark regions, yielding precise localization of flicker artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Flickerformer outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. The source code is available at https://github.com/qulishen/Flickerformer.

Intrinsic Geometry-Appearance Consistency Optimization for Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting

3D human reconstruction from a single image is a challenging problem and has been exclusively studied in the literature. Recently, some methods have resorted to diffusion models for guidance, optimizing a 3D representation via Score Distillation Sampling(SDS) or generating a back-view image for facilitating reconstruction. However, these methods tend to produce unsatisfactory artifacts (\textit{e.g.} flattened human structure or over-smoothing results caused by inconsistent priors from multiple views) and struggle with real-world generalization in the wild. In this work, we present \emph{MVD-HuGaS}, enabling free-view 3D human rendering from a single image via a multi-view human diffusion model. We first generate multi-view images from the single reference image with an enhanced multi-view diffusion model, which is well fine-tuned on high-quality 3D human datasets to incorporate 3D geometry priors and human structure priors. To infer accurate camera poses from the sparse generated multi-view images for reconstruction, an alignment module is introduced to facilitate joint optimization of 3D Gaussians and camera poses. Furthermore, we propose a depth-based Facial Distortion Mitigation module to refine the generated facial regions, thereby improving the overall fidelity of the reconstruction. Finally, leveraging the refined multi-view images, along with their accurate camera poses, MVD-HuGaS optimizes the 3D Gaussians of the target human for high-fidelity free-view renderings. Extensive experiments on Thuman2.0 and 2K2K datasets show that the proposed MVD-HuGaS achieves state-of-the-art performance on single-view 3D human rendering.

LSTC-MDA: A Unified Framework for Long-Short Term Temporal Convolution and Mixed Data Augmentation in Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition faces two longstanding challenges: the scarcity of labeled training samples and difficulty modeling short- and long-range temporal dependencies. To address these issues, we propose a unified framework, LSTC-MDA, which simultaneously improves temporal modeling and data diversity. We introduce a novel Long-Short Term Temporal Convolution (LSTC) module with parallel short- and long-term branches, these two feature branches are then aligned and fused adaptively using learned similarity weights to preserve critical long-range cues lost by conventional stride-2 temporal convolutions. We also extend Joint Mixing Data Augmentation (JMDA) with an Additive Mixup at the input level, diversifying training samples and restricting mixup operations to the same camera view to avoid distribution shifts. Ablation studies confirm each component contributes. LSTC-MDA achieves state-of-the-art results: 94.1% and 97.5% on NTU 60 (X-Sub and X-View), 90.4% and 92.0% on NTU 120 (X-Sub and X-Set),97.2% on NW-UCLA. Code: https://github.com/xiaobaoxia/LSTC-MDA.

LocalDyGS: Multi-view Global Dynamic Scene Modeling via Adaptive Local Implicit Feature Decoupling

Due to the complex and highly dynamic motions in the real world, synthesizing dynamic videos from multi-view inputs for arbitrary viewpoints is challenging. Previous works based on neural radiance field or 3D Gaussian splatting are limited to modeling fine-scale motion, greatly restricting their application. In this paper, we introduce LocalDyGS, which consists of two parts to adapt our method to both large-scale and fine-scale motion scenes: 1) We decompose a complex dynamic scene into streamlined local spaces defined by seeds, enabling global modeling by capturing motion within each local space. 2) We decouple static and dynamic features for local space motion modeling. A static feature shared across time steps captures static information, while a dynamic residual field provides time-specific features. These are combined and decoded to generate Temporal Gaussians, modeling motion within each local space. As a result, we propose a novel dynamic scene reconstruction framework to model highly dynamic real-world scenes more realistically. Our method not only demonstrates competitive performance on various fine-scale datasets compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, but also represents the first attempt to model larger and more complex highly dynamic scenes. Project page: https://wujh2001.github.io/LocalDyGS/.

VisualQuality-R1: Reasoning-Induced Image Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning to Rank

DeepSeek-R1 has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in incentivizing reasoning and generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through reinforcement learning. Nevertheless, the potential of reasoning-induced computational modeling has not been thoroughly explored in the context of image quality assessment (IQA), a task critically dependent on visual reasoning. In this paper, we introduce VisualQuality-R1, a reasoning-induced no-reference IQA (NR-IQA) model, and we train it with reinforcement learning to rank, a learning algorithm tailored to the intrinsically relative nature of visual quality. Specifically, for a pair of images, we employ group relative policy optimization to generate multiple quality scores for each image. These estimates are then used to compute comparative probabilities of one image having higher quality than the other under the Thurstone model. Rewards for each quality estimate are defined using continuous fidelity measures rather than discretized binary labels. Extensive experiments show that the proposed VisualQuality-R1 consistently outperforms discriminative deep learning-based NR-IQA models as well as a recent reasoning-induced quality regression method. Moreover, VisualQuality-R1 is capable of generating contextually rich, human-aligned quality descriptions, and supports multi-dataset training without requiring perceptual scale realignment. These features make VisualQuality-R1 especially well-suited for reliably measuring progress in a wide range of image processing tasks like super-resolution and image generation.

3DM-WeConvene: Learned Image Compression with 3D Multi-Level Wavelet-Domain Convolution and Entropy Model

Learned image compression (LIC) has recently made significant progress, surpassing traditional methods. However, most LIC approaches operate mainly in the spatial domain and lack mechanisms for reducing frequency-domain correlations. To address this, we propose a novel framework that integrates low-complexity 3D multi-level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) into convolutional layers and entropy coding, reducing both spatial and channel correlations to improve frequency selectivity and rate-distortion (R-D) performance. Our proposed 3D multi-level wavelet-domain convolution (3DM-WeConv) layer first applies 3D multi-level DWT (e.g., 5/3 and 9/7 wavelets from JPEG 2000) to transform data into the wavelet domain. Then, different-sized convolutions are applied to different frequency subbands, followed by inverse 3D DWT to restore the spatial domain. The 3DM-WeConv layer can be flexibly used within existing CNN-based LIC models. We also introduce a 3D wavelet-domain channel-wise autoregressive entropy model (3DWeChARM), which performs slice-based entropy coding in the 3D DWT domain. Low-frequency (LF) slices are encoded first to provide priors for high-frequency (HF) slices. A two-step training strategy is adopted: first balancing LF and HF rates, then fine-tuning with separate weights. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CNN-based LIC methods in R-D performance and computational complexity, with larger gains for high-resolution images. On the Kodak, Tecnick 100, and CLIC test sets, our method achieves BD-Rate reductions of -12.24%, -15.51%, and -12.97%, respectively, compared to H.266/VVC.

SELIC: Semantic-Enhanced Learned Image Compression via High-Level Textual Guidance

Learned image compression (LIC) techniques have achieved remarkable progress; however, effectively integrating high-level semantic information remains challenging. In this work, we present a \underline{S}emantic-\underline{E}nhanced \underline{L}earned \underline{I}mage \underline{C}ompression framework, termed \textbf{SELIC}, which leverages high-level textual guidance to improve rate-distortion performance. Specifically, \textbf{SELIC} employs a text encoder to extract rich semantic descriptions from the input image. These textual features are transformed into fixed-dimension tensors and seamlessly fused with the image-derived latent representation. By embedding the \textbf{SELIC} tensor directly into the compression pipeline, our approach enriches the bitstream without requiring additional inputs at the decoder, thereby maintaining fast and efficient decoding. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets (e.g., Kodak) demonstrate that integrating semantic information substantially enhances compression quality. Our \textbf{SELIC}-guided method outperforms a baseline LIC model without semantic integration by approximately 0.1-0.15 dB across a wide range of bit rates in PSNR and achieves a 4.9\% BD-rate improvement over VVC. Moreover, this improvement comes with minimal computational overhead, making the proposed \textbf{SELIC} framework a practical solution for advanced image compression applications.

FEDS: Feature and Entropy-Based Distillation Strategy for Efficient Learned Image Compression

Learned image compression (LIC) methods have recently outperformed traditional codecs such as VVC in rate-distortion performance. However, their large models and high computational costs have limited their practical adoption. In this paper, we first construct a high-capacity teacher model by integrating Swin-Transformer V2-based attention modules, additional residual blocks, and expanded latent channels, thus achieving enhanced compression performance. Building on this foundation, we propose a \underline{F}eature and \underline{E}ntropy-based \underline{D}istillation \underline{S}trategy (\textbf{FEDS}) that transfers key knowledge from the teacher to a lightweight student model. Specifically, we align intermediate feature representations and emphasize the most informative latent channels through an entropy-based loss. A staged training scheme refines this transfer in three phases: feature alignment, channel-level distillation, and final fine-tuning. Our student model nearly matches the teacher across Kodak (1.24\% BD-Rate increase), Tecnick (1.17\%), and CLIC (0.55\%) while cutting parameters by about 63\% and accelerating encoding/decoding by around 73\%. Moreover, ablation studies indicate that FEDS generalizes effectively to transformer-based networks. The experimental results demonstrate our approach strikes a compelling balance among compression performance, speed, and model parameters, making it well-suited for real-time or resource-limited scenarios.