Just Noticeable Difference Modeling for Deep Visual Features

Deep visual features are increasingly used as the interface in vision systems, motivating the need to describe feature characteristics and control feature quality for machine perception. Just noticeable difference (JND) characterizes the maximum imperceptible distortion for images under human or machine vision. Extending it to deep visual features naturally meets the above demand by providing a task-aligned tolerance boundary in feature space, offering a practical reference for controlling feature quality under constrained resources. We propose FeatJND, a task-aligned JND formulation that predicts the maximum tolerable per-feature perturbation map while preserving downstream task performance. We propose a FeatJND estimator at standardized split points and validate it across image classification, detection, and instance segmentation. Under matched distortion strength, FeatJND-based distortions consistently preserve higher task performance than unstructured Gaussian perturbations, and attribution visualizations suggest FeatJND can suppress non-critical feature regions. As an application, we further apply FeatJND to token-wise dynamic quantization and show that FeatJND-guided step-size allocation yields clear gains over random step-size permutation and global uniform step size under the same noise budget. Our code will be released after publication.

Seeing through Light and Darkness: Sensor-Physics Grounded Deblurring HDR NeRF from Single-Exposure Images and Events

Novel view synthesis from low dynamic range (LDR) blurry images, which are common in the wild, struggles to recover high dynamic range (HDR) and sharp 3D representations in extreme lighting conditions. Although existing methods employ event data to address this issue, they ignore the sensor-physics mismatches between the camera output and physical world radiance, resulting in suboptimal HDR and deblurring results. To cope with this problem, we propose a unified sensor-physics grounded NeRF framework for sharp HDR novel view synthesis from single-exposure blurry LDR images and corresponding events. We employ NeRF to directly represent the actual radiance of the 3D scene in the HDR domain and model raw HDR scene rays hitting the sensor pixels as in the physical world. A pixel-wise RGB mapping field is introduced to align the above rendered pixel values with the sensor-recorded LDR pixel values of the input images. A novel event mapping field is also designed to bridge the physical scene dynamics and actual event sensor output. The two mapping fields are jointly optimized with the NeRF network, leveraging the spatial and temporal dynamic information in events to enhance the sharp HDR 3D representation learning. Experiments on the collected and public datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art deblurring HDR novel view synthesis results with single-exposure blurry LDR images and corresponding events.

Decoupling Amplitude and Phase Attention in Frequency Domain for RGB-Event based Visual Object Tracking

Existing RGB-Event visual object tracking approaches primarily rely on conventional feature-level fusion, failing to fully exploit the unique advantages of event cameras. In particular, the high dynamic range and motion-sensitive nature of event cameras are often overlooked, while low-information regions are processed uniformly, leading to unnecessary computational overhead for the backbone network. To address these issues, we propose a novel tracking framework that performs early fusion in the frequency domain, enabling effective aggregation of high-frequency information from the event modality. Specifically, RGB and event modalities are transformed from the spatial domain to the frequency domain via the Fast Fourier Transform, with their amplitude and phase components decoupled. High-frequency event information is selectively fused into RGB modality through amplitude and phase attention, enhancing feature representation while substantially reducing backbone computation. In addition, a motion-guided spatial sparsification module leverages the motion-sensitive nature of event cameras to capture the relationship between target motion cues and spatial probability distribution, filtering out low-information regions and enhancing target-relevant features. Finally, a sparse set of target-relevant features is fed into the backbone network for learning, and the tracking head predicts the final target position. Extensive experiments on three widely used RGB-Event tracking benchmark datasets, including FE108, FELT, and COESOT, demonstrate the high performance and efficiency of our method. The source code of this paper will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenEvTracking

JoyVoice: Long-Context Conditioning for Anthropomorphic Multi-Speaker Conversational Synthesis

Large speech generation models are evolving from single-speaker, short sentence synthesis to multi-speaker, long conversation geneartion. Current long-form speech generation models are predominately constrained to dyadic, turn-based interactions. To address this, we introduce JoyVoice, a novel anthropomorphic foundation model designed for flexible, boundary-free synthesis of up to eight speakers. Unlike conventional cascaded systems, JoyVoice employs a unified E2E-Transformer-DiT architecture that utilizes autoregressive hidden representations directly for diffusion inputs, enabling holistic end-to-end optimization. We further propose a MM-Tokenizer operating at a low bitrate of 12.5 Hz, which integrates multitask semantic and MMSE losses to effectively model both semantic and acoustic information. Additionally, the model incorporates robust text front-end processing via large-scale data perturbation. Experiments show that JoyVoice achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual generation (Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean) and zero-shot voice cloning. JoyVoice achieves top-tier results on both the Seed-TTS-Eval Benchmark and multi-speaker long-form conversational voice cloning tasks, demonstrating superior audio quality and generalization. It achieves significant improvements in prosodic continuity for long-form speech, rhythm richness in multi-speaker conversations, paralinguistic naturalness, besides superior intelligibility. We encourage readers to listen to the demo at https://jea-speech.github.io/JoyVoice

Re-coding for Uncertainties: Edge-awareness Semantic Concordance for Resilient Event-RGB Segmentation

Semantic segmentation has achieved great success in ideal conditions. However, when facing extreme conditions (e.g., insufficient light, fierce camera motion), most existing methods suffer from significant information loss of RGB, severely damaging segmentation results. Several researches exploit the high-speed and high-dynamic event modality as a complement, but event and RGB are naturally heterogeneous, which leads to feature-level mismatch and inferior optimization of existing multi-modality methods. Different from these researches, we delve into the edge secret of both modalities for resilient fusion and propose a novel Edge-awareness Semantic Concordance framework to unify the multi-modality heterogeneous features with latent edge cues. In this framework, we first propose Edge-awareness Latent Re-coding, which obtains uncertainty indicators while realigning event-RGB features into unified semantic space guided by re-coded distribution, and transfers event-RGB distributions into re-coded features by utilizing a pre-established edge dictionary as clues. We then propose Re-coded Consolidation and Uncertainty Optimization, which utilize re-coded edge features and uncertainty indicators to solve the heterogeneous event-RGB fusion issues under extreme conditions. We establish two synthetic and one real-world event-RGB semantic segmentation datasets for extreme scenario comparisons. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by a 2.55% mIoU on our proposed DERS-XS, and possesses superior resilience under spatial occlusion. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/iCVTEAM/ESC.

Revealing Latent Information: A Physics-inspired Self-supervised Pre-training Framework for Noisy and Sparse Events

Event camera, a novel neuromorphic vision sensor, records data with high temporal resolution and wide dynamic range, offering new possibilities for accurate visual representation in challenging scenarios. However, event data is inherently sparse and noisy, mainly reflecting brightness changes, which complicates effective feature extraction. To address this, we propose a self-supervised pre-training framework to fully reveal latent information in event data, including edge information and texture cues. Our framework consists of three stages: Difference-guided Masked Modeling, inspired by the event physical sampling process, reconstructs temporal intensity difference maps to extract enhanced information from raw event data. Backbone-fixed Feature Transition contrasts event and image features without updating the backbone to preserve representations learned from masked modeling and stabilizing their effect on contrastive learning. Focus-aimed Contrastive Learning updates the entire model to improve semantic discrimination by focusing on high-value regions. Extensive experiments show our framework is robust and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on various downstream tasks, including object recognition, semantic segmentation, and optical flow estimation. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/BIT-Vision/EventPretrain.

ESTR-CoT: Towards Explainable and Accurate Event Stream based Scene Text Recognition with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Event stream based scene text recognition is a newly arising research topic in recent years which performs better than the widely used RGB cameras in extremely challenging scenarios, especially the low illumination, fast motion. Existing works either adopt end-to-end encoder-decoder framework or large language models for enhanced recognition, however, they are still limited by the challenges of insufficient interpretability and weak contextual logical reasoning. In this work, we propose a novel chain-of-thought reasoning based event stream scene text recognition framework, termed ESTR-CoT. Specifically, we first adopt the vision encoder EVA-CLIP (ViT-G/14) to transform the input event stream into tokens and utilize a Llama tokenizer to encode the given generation prompt. A Q-former is used to align the vision token to the pre-trained large language model Vicuna-7B and output both the answer and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning process simultaneously. Our framework can be optimized using supervised fine-tuning in an end-to-end manner. In addition, we also propose a large-scale CoT dataset to train our framework via a three stage processing (i.e., generation, polish, and expert verification). This dataset provides a solid data foundation for the development of subsequent reasoning-based large models. Extensive experiments on three event stream STR benchmark datasets (i.e., EventSTR, WordArt*, IC15*) fully validated the effectiveness and interpretability of our proposed framework. The source code and pre-trained models will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/ESTR-CoT.

Dynamic Graph Induced Contour-aware Heat Conduction Network for Event-based Object Detection

Event-based Vision Sensors (EVS) have demonstrated significant advantages over traditional RGB frame-based cameras in low-light conditions, high-speed motion capture, and low latency. Consequently, object detection based on EVS has attracted increasing attention from researchers. Current event stream object detection algorithms are typically built upon Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or Transformers, which either capture limited local features using convolutional filters or incur high computational costs due to the utilization of self-attention. Recently proposed vision heat conduction backbone networks have shown a good balance between efficiency and accuracy; however, these models are not specifically designed for event stream data. They exhibit weak capability in modeling object contour information and fail to exploit the benefits of multi-scale features. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel dynamic graph induced contour-aware heat conduction network for event stream based object detection, termed CvHeat-DET. The proposed model effectively leverages the clear contour information inherent in event streams to predict the thermal diffusivity coefficients within the heat conduction model, and integrates hierarchical structural graph features to enhance feature learning across multiple scales. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets for event stream-based object detection fully validated the effectiveness of the proposed model. The source code of this paper will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenEvDET.

Towards Low-Latency Event Stream-based Visual Object Tracking: A Slow-Fast Approach

Existing tracking algorithms typically rely on low-frame-rate RGB cameras coupled with computationally intensive deep neural network architectures to achieve effective tracking. However, such frame-based methods inherently face challenges in achieving low-latency performance and often fail in resource-constrained environments. Visual object tracking using bio-inspired event cameras has emerged as a promising research direction in recent years, offering distinct advantages for low-latency applications. In this paper, we propose a novel Slow-Fast Tracking paradigm that flexibly adapts to different operational requirements, termed SFTrack. The proposed framework supports two complementary modes, i.e., a high-precision slow tracker for scenarios with sufficient computational resources, and an efficient fast tracker tailored for latency-aware, resource-constrained environments. Specifically, our framework first performs graph-based representation learning from high-temporal-resolution event streams, and then integrates the learned graph-structured information into two FlashAttention-based vision backbones, yielding the slow and fast trackers, respectively. The fast tracker achieves low latency through a lightweight network design and by producing multiple bounding box outputs in a single forward pass. Finally, we seamlessly combine both trackers via supervised fine-tuning and further enhance the fast tracker's performance through a knowledge distillation strategy. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks, including FE240, COESOT, and EventVOT, demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method across different real-world scenarios. The source code has been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/SlowFast_Event_Track.

FairSHAP: Preprocessing for Fairness Through Attribution-Based Data Augmentation

Ensuring fairness in machine learning models is critical, particularly in high-stakes domains where biased decisions can lead to serious societal consequences. Existing preprocessing approaches generally lack transparent mechanisms for identifying which features or instances are responsible for unfairness. This obscures the rationale behind data modifications. We introduce FairSHAP, a novel pre-processing framework that leverages Shapley value attribution to improve both individual and group fairness. FairSHAP identifies fairness-critical instances in the training data using an interpretable measure of feature importance, and systematically modifies them through instance-level matching across sensitive groups. This process reduces discriminative risk - an individual fairness metric - while preserving data integrity and model accuracy. We demonstrate that FairSHAP significantly improves demographic parity and equality of opportunity across diverse tabular datasets, achieving fairness gains with minimal data perturbation and, in some cases, improved predictive performance. As a model-agnostic and transparent method, FairSHAP integrates seamlessly into existing machine learning pipelines and provides actionable insights into the sources of bias.Our code is on https://github.com/youlei202/FairSHAP.