Adding Thermal Awareness to Visual Systems in Real-Time via Distilled Diffusion Models

Purely RGB-based vision models often fail to provide reliable cues in challenging scenarios such as nighttime and fog, leading to degraded performance and safety risks. Infrared imaging captures heat-emitting sources and provides critical complementary information, but existing high-fidelity fusion methods suffer from prohibitive latency, rendering them impractical for real-time edge deployment. To address this, we propose FusionProxy, a real-time image fusion module designed as a fully independent, plug-and-play component with diffusion level quality. FusionProxy exploits two complementary statistics of a teacher sample ensemble: per-pixel variance in raw image space, used to weight pixel-level supervision, and per-pixel variance inside frozen foundation backbones, used to route feature-level alignment spatially. Once trained, FusionProxy can be directly integrated into any visual perception system without joint optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on static recognition tasks and significantly enhances robustness in dynamic tasks, including closed-loop autonomous driving. Crucially, FusionProxy achieves real-time inference speeds on diverse platforms, from high-end GPUs to commodity hardware, providing a flexible and generalizable solution for all-day perception.

LumiVideo: An Intelligent Agentic System for Video Color Grading

Video color grading is a critical post-production process that transforms flat, log-encoded raw footage into emotionally resonant cinematic visuals. Existing automated methods act as static, black-box executors that directly output edited pixels, lacking both interpretability and the iterative control required by professionals. We introduce LumiVideo, an agentic system that mimics the cognitive workflow of professional colorists through four stages: Perception, Reasoning, Execution, and Reflection. Given only raw log video, LumiVideo autonomously produces a cinematic base grade by analyzing the scene's physical lighting and semantic content. Its Reasoning engine synergizes an LLM's internalized cinematic knowledge with a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework via a Tree of Thoughts (ToT) search to navigate the non-linear color parameter space. Rather than generating pixels, the system compiles the deduced parameters into industry-standard ASC-CDL configurations and a globally consistent 3D LUT, analytically guaranteeing temporal consistency. An optional Reflection loop then allows creators to refine the result via natural language feedback. We further introduce LumiGrade, the first log-encoded video benchmark for evaluating automated grading. Experiments show that LumiVideo approaches human expert quality in fully automatic mode while enabling precise iterative control when directed.