Toward Real-World High-Precision Image Matting and Segmentation

High-precision scene parsing tasks, including image matting and dichotomous segmentation, aim to accurately predict masks with extremely fine details (such as hair). Most existing methods focus on salient, single foreground objects. While interactive methods allow for target adjustment, their class-agnostic design restricts generalization across different categories. Furthermore, the scarcity of high-quality annotation has led to a reliance on inharmonious synthetic data, resulting in poor generalization to real-world scenarios. To this end, we propose a Foreground Consistent Learning model, dubbed as FCLM, to address the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we first introduce a Depth-Aware Distillation strategy where we transfer the depth-related knowledge for better foreground representation. Considering the data dilemma, we term the processing of synthetic data as domain adaptation problem where we propose a domain-invariant learning strategy to focus on foreground learning. To support interactive prediction, we contribute an Object-Oriented Decoder that can receive both visual and language prompts to predict the referring target. Experimental results show that our method quantitatively and qualitatively outperforms SOTA methods.

VQ-Seg: Vector-Quantized Token Perturbation for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Consistency learning with feature perturbation is a widely used strategy in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. However, many existing perturbation methods rely on dropout, and thus require a careful manual tuning of the dropout rate, which is a sensitive hyperparameter and often difficult to optimize and may lead to suboptimal regularization. To overcome this limitation, we propose VQ-Seg, the first approach to employ vector quantization (VQ) to discretize the feature space and introduce a novel and controllable Quantized Perturbation Module (QPM) that replaces dropout. Our QPM perturbs discrete representations by shuffling the spatial locations of codebook indices, enabling effective and controllable regularization. To mitigate potential information loss caused by quantization, we design a dual-branch architecture where the post-quantization feature space is shared by both image reconstruction and segmentation tasks. Moreover, we introduce a Post-VQ Feature Adapter (PFA) to incorporate guidance from a foundation model (FM), supplementing the high-level semantic information lost during quantization. Furthermore, we collect a large-scale Lung Cancer (LC) dataset comprising 828 CT scans annotated for central-type lung carcinoma. Extensive experiments on the LC dataset and other public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Code available at: https://github.com/script-Yang/VQ-Seg.

Real-Time Lane Detection via Efficient Feature Alignment and Covariance Optimization for Low-Power Embedded Systems

Real-time lane detection in embedded systems encounters significant challenges due to subtle and sparse visual signals in RGB images, often constrained by limited computational resources and power consumption. Although deep learning models for lane detection categorized into segmentation-based, anchor-based, and curve-based methods there remains a scarcity of universally applicable optimization techniques tailored for low-power embedded environments. To overcome this, we propose an innovative Covariance Distribution Optimization (CDO) module specifically designed for efficient, real-time applications. The CDO module aligns lane feature distributions closely with ground-truth labels, significantly enhancing detection accuracy without increasing computational complexity. Evaluations were conducted on six diverse models across all three method categories, including two optimized for real-time applications and four state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, tested comprehensively on three major datasets: CULane, TuSimple, and LLAMAS. Experimental results demonstrate accuracy improvements ranging from 0.01% to 1.5%. The proposed CDO module is characterized by ease of integration into existing systems without structural modifications and utilizes existing model parameters to facilitate ongoing training, thus offering substantial benefits in performance, power efficiency, and operational flexibility in embedded systems.

MANGO:Natural Multi-speaker 3D Talking Head Generation via 2D-Lifted Enhancement

Current audio-driven 3D head generation methods mainly focus on single-speaker scenarios, lacking natural, bidirectional listen-and-speak interaction. Achieving seamless conversational behavior, where speaking and listening states transition fluidly remains a key challenge. Existing 3D conversational avatar approaches rely on error-prone pseudo-3D labels that fail to capture fine-grained facial dynamics. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel two-stage framework MANGO, which leveraging pure image-level supervision by alternately training to mitigate the noise introduced by pseudo-3D labels, thereby achieving better alignment with real-world conversational behaviors. Specifically, in the first stage, a diffusion-based transformer with a dual-audio interaction module models natural 3D motion from multi-speaker audio. In the second stage, we use a fast 3D Gaussian Renderer to generate high-fidelity images and provide 2D-level photometric supervision for the 3D motions through alternate training. Additionally, we introduce MANGO-Dialog, a high-quality dataset with over 50 hours of aligned 2D-3D conversational data across 500+ identities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves exceptional accuracy and realism in modeling two-person 3D dialogue motion, significantly advancing the fidelity and controllability of audio-driven talking heads.

More than Segmentation: Benchmarking SAM 3 for Segmentation, 3D Perception, and Reconstruction in Robotic Surgery

The recent SAM 3 and SAM 3D have introduced significant advancements over the predecessor, SAM 2, particularly with the integration of language-based segmentation and enhanced 3D perception capabilities. SAM 3 supports zero-shot segmentation across a wide range of prompts, including point, bounding box, and language-based prompts, allowing for more flexible and intuitive interactions with the model. In this empirical evaluation, we assess the performance of SAM 3 in robot-assisted surgery, benchmarking its zero-shot segmentation with point and bounding box prompts and exploring its effectiveness in dynamic video tracking, alongside its newly introduced language prompt segmentation. While language prompts show potential, their performance in the surgical domain is currently suboptimal, highlighting the need for further domain-specific training. Additionally, we investigate SAM 3D's depth reconstruction abilities, demonstrating its capacity to process surgical scene data and reconstruct 3D anatomical structures from 2D images. Through comprehensive testing on the MICCAI EndoVis 2017 and EndoVis 2018 benchmarks, SAM 3 shows clear improvements over SAM and SAM 2 in both image and video segmentation under spatial prompts, while the zero-shot evaluations of SAM 3D on SCARED, StereoMIS, and EndoNeRF indicate strong monocular depth estimation and realistic 3D instrument reconstruction, yet also reveal remaining limitations in complex, highly dynamic surgical scenes.

AdaTok: Adaptive Token Compression with Object-Aware Representations for Efficient Multimodal LLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated substantial value in unified text-image understanding and reasoning, primarily by converting images into sequences of patch-level tokens that align with their architectural paradigm. However, patch-level tokenization leads to a quadratic growth in image tokens, burdening MLLMs' understanding and reasoning with enormous computation and memory. Additionally, the traditional patch-wise scanning tokenization workflow misaligns with the human vision cognition system, further leading to hallucination and computational redundancy. To address this issue, we propose an object-level token merging strategy for Adaptive Token compression, revealing the consistency with human vision system. The experiments are conducted on multiple comprehensive benchmarks, which show that our approach averagely, utilizes only 10% tokens while achieving almost 96% of the vanilla model's performance. More extensive experimental results in comparison with relevant works demonstrate the superiority of our method in balancing compression ratio and performance. Our code will be available.

MTR-DuplexBench: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Round Conversations for Full-Duplex Speech Language Models

Full-Duplex Speech Language Models (FD-SLMs) enable real-time, overlapping conversational interactions, offering a more dynamic user experience compared to traditional half-duplex models. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating single-round interactions and conversational features, neglecting the complexities of multi-round communication and critical capabilities such as instruction following and safety. Evaluating FD-SLMs in multi-round settings poses significant challenges, including blurred turn boundaries in communication and context inconsistency during model inference. To address these gaps, we introduce MTR-DuplexBench, a novel benchmark that segments continuous full-duplex dialogues into discrete turns, enabling comprehensive, turn-by-turn evaluation of FD-SLMs across dialogue quality, conversational dynamics, instruction following, and safety. Experimental results reveal that current FD-SLMs face difficulties in maintaining consistent performance across multiple rounds and evaluation dimensions, highlighting the necessity and effectiveness of our proposed benchmark. The benchmark and code will be available in the future.

K-Stain: Keypoint-Driven Correspondence for H&E-to-IHC Virtual Staining

Virtual staining offers a promising method for converting Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) images into Immunohistochemical (IHC) images, eliminating the need for costly chemical processes. However, existing methods often struggle to utilize spatial information effectively due to misalignment in tissue slices. To overcome this challenge, we leverage keypoints as robust indicators of spatial correspondence, enabling more precise alignment and integration of structural details in synthesized IHC images. We introduce K-Stain, a novel framework that employs keypoint-based spatial and semantic relationships to enhance synthesized IHC image fidelity. K-Stain comprises three main components: (1) a Hierarchical Spatial Keypoint Detector (HSKD) for identifying keypoints in stain images, (2) a Keypoint-aware Enhancement Generator (KEG) that integrates these keypoints during image generation, and (3) a Keypoint Guided Discriminator (KGD) that improves the discriminator's sensitivity to spatial details. Our approach leverages contextual information from adjacent slices, resulting in more accurate and visually consistent IHC images. Extensive experiments show that K-Stain outperforms state-of-the-art methods in quantitative metrics and visual quality.

LucidFlux: Caption-Free Universal Image Restoration via a Large-Scale Diffusion Transformer

Universal image restoration (UIR) aims to recover images degraded by unknown mixtures while preserving semantics -- conditions under which discriminative restorers and UNet-based diffusion priors often oversmooth, hallucinate, or drift. We present LucidFlux, a caption-free UIR framework that adapts a large diffusion transformer (Flux.1) without image captions. LucidFlux introduces a lightweight dual-branch conditioner that injects signals from the degraded input and a lightly restored proxy to respectively anchor geometry and suppress artifacts. Then, a timestep- and layer-adaptive modulation schedule is designed to route these cues across the backbone's hierarchy, in order to yield coarse-to-fine and context-aware updates that protect the global structure while recovering texture. After that, to avoid the latency and instability of text prompts or MLLM captions, we enforce caption-free semantic alignment via SigLIP features extracted from the proxy. A scalable curation pipeline further filters large-scale data for structure-rich supervision. Across synthetic and in-the-wild benchmarks, LucidFlux consistently outperforms strong open-source and commercial baselines, and ablation studies verify the necessity of each component. LucidFlux shows that, for large DiTs, when, where, and what to condition on -- rather than adding parameters or relying on text prompts -- is the governing lever for robust and caption-free universal image restoration in the wild.

Toward Medical Deepfake Detection: A Comprehensive Dataset and Novel Method

The rapid advancement of generative AI in medical imaging has introduced both significant opportunities and serious challenges, especially the risk that fake medical images could undermine healthcare systems. These synthetic images pose serious risks, such as diagnostic deception, financial fraud, and misinformation. However, research on medical forensics to counter these threats remains limited, and there is a critical lack of comprehensive datasets specifically tailored for this field. Additionally, existing media forensic methods, which are primarily designed for natural or facial images, are inadequate for capturing the distinct characteristics and subtle artifacts of AI-generated medical images. To tackle these challenges, we introduce \textbf{MedForensics}, a large-scale medical forensics dataset encompassing six medical modalities and twelve state-of-the-art medical generative models. We also propose \textbf{DSKI}, a novel \textbf{D}ual-\textbf{S}tage \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{I}nfusing detector that constructs a vision-language feature space tailored for the detection of AI-generated medical images. DSKI comprises two core components: 1) a cross-domain fine-trace adapter (CDFA) for extracting subtle forgery clues from both spatial and noise domains during training, and 2) a medical forensic retrieval module (MFRM) that boosts detection accuracy through few-shot retrieval during testing. Experimental results demonstrate that DSKI significantly outperforms both existing methods and human experts, achieving superior accuracy across multiple medical modalities.