Reasoning to Edit: Hypothetical Instruction-Based Image Editing with Visual Reasoning

Instruction-based image editing (IIE) has advanced rapidly with the success of diffusion models. However, existing efforts primarily focus on simple and explicit instructions to execute editing operations such as adding, deleting, moving, or swapping objects. They struggle to handle more complex implicit hypothetical instructions that require deeper reasoning to infer plausible visual changes and user intent. Additionally, current datasets provide limited support for training and evaluating reasoning-aware editing capabilities. Architecturally, these methods also lack mechanisms for fine-grained detail extraction that support such reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose Reason50K, a large-scale dataset specifically curated for training and evaluating hypothetical instruction reasoning image editing, along with ReasonBrain, a novel framework designed to reason over and execute implicit hypothetical instructions across diverse scenarios. Reason50K includes over 50K samples spanning four key reasoning scenarios: Physical, Temporal, Causal, and Story reasoning. ReasonBrain leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for editing guidance generation and a diffusion model for image synthesis, incorporating a Fine-grained Reasoning Cue Extraction (FRCE) module to capture detailed visual and textual semantics essential for supporting instruction reasoning. To mitigate the semantic loss, we further introduce a Cross-Modal Enhancer (CME) that enables rich interactions between the fine-grained cues and MLLM-derived features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReasonBrain consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on reasoning scenarios while exhibiting strong zero-shot generalization to conventional IIE tasks. Our dataset and code will be released publicly.

Identity-Preserving Text-to-Image Generation via Dual-Level Feature Decoupling and Expert-Guided Fusion

Recent advances in large-scale text-to-image generation models have led to a surge in subject-driven text-to-image generation, which aims to produce customized images that align with textual descriptions while preserving the identity of specific subjects. Despite significant progress, current methods struggle to disentangle identity-relevant information from identity-irrelevant details in the input images, resulting in overfitting or failure to maintain subject identity. In this work, we propose a novel framework that improves the separation of identity-related and identity-unrelated features and introduces an innovative feature fusion mechanism to improve the quality and text alignment of generated images. Our framework consists of two key components: an Implicit-Explicit foreground-background Decoupling Module (IEDM) and a Feature Fusion Module (FFM) based on a Mixture of Experts (MoE). IEDM combines learnable adapters for implicit decoupling at the feature level with inpainting techniques for explicit foreground-background separation at the image level. FFM dynamically integrates identity-irrelevant features with identity-related features, enabling refined feature representations even in cases of incomplete decoupling. In addition, we introduce three complementary loss functions to guide the decoupling process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in enhancing image generation quality, improving flexibility in scene adaptation, and increasing the diversity of generated outputs across various textual descriptions.

Align and Surpass Human Camouflaged Perception: Visual Refocus Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

Current multi-modal models exhibit a notable misalignment with the human visual system when identifying objects that are visually assimilated into the background. Our observations reveal that these multi-modal models cannot distinguish concealed objects, demonstrating an inability to emulate human cognitive processes which effectively utilize foreground-background similarity principles for visual analysis. To analyze this hidden human-model visual thinking discrepancy, we build a visual system that mimicks human visual camouflaged perception to progressively and iteratively `refocus' visual concealed content. The refocus is a progressive guidance mechanism enabling models to logically localize objects in visual images through stepwise reasoning. The localization process of concealed objects requires hierarchical attention shifting with dynamic adjustment and refinement of prior cognitive knowledge. In this paper, we propose a visual refocus reinforcement framework via the policy optimization algorithm to encourage multi-modal models to think and refocus more before answering, and achieve excellent reasoning abilities to align and even surpass human camouflaged perception systems. Our extensive experiments on camouflaged perception successfully demonstrate the emergence of refocus visual phenomena, characterized by multiple reasoning tokens and dynamic adjustment of the detection box. Besides, experimental results on both camouflaged object classification and detection tasks exhibit significantly superior performance compared to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) baselines.

Disentangle Identity, Cooperate Emotion: Correlation-Aware Emotional Talking Portrait Generation

Recent advances in Talking Head Generation (THG) have achieved impressive lip synchronization and visual quality through diffusion models; yet existing methods struggle to generate emotionally expressive portraits while preserving speaker identity. We identify three critical limitations in current emotional talking head generation: insufficient utilization of audio's inherent emotional cues, identity leakage in emotion representations, and isolated learning of emotion correlations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework dubbed as DICE-Talk, following the idea of disentangling identity with emotion, and then cooperating emotions with similar characteristics. First, we develop a disentangled emotion embedder that jointly models audio-visual emotional cues through cross-modal attention, representing emotions as identity-agnostic Gaussian distributions. Second, we introduce a correlation-enhanced emotion conditioning module with learnable Emotion Banks that explicitly capture inter-emotion relationships through vector quantization and attention-based feature aggregation. Third, we design an emotion discrimination objective that enforces affective consistency during the diffusion process through latent-space classification. Extensive experiments on MEAD and HDTF datasets demonstrate our method's superiority, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in emotion accuracy while maintaining competitive lip-sync performance. Qualitative results and user studies further confirm our method's ability to generate identity-preserving portraits with rich, correlated emotional expressions that naturally adapt to unseen identities.

DVHGNN: Multi-Scale Dilated Vision HGNN for Efficient Vision Recognition

Recently, Vision Graph Neural Network (ViG) has gained considerable attention in computer vision. Despite its groundbreaking innovation, Vision Graph Neural Network encounters key issues including the quadratic computational complexity caused by its K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) graph construction and the limitation of pairwise relations of normal graphs. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a novel vision architecture, termed Dilated Vision HyperGraph Neural Network (DVHGNN), which is designed to leverage multi-scale hypergraph to efficiently capture high-order correlations among objects. Specifically, the proposed method tailors Clustering and Dilated HyperGraph Construction (DHGC) to adaptively capture multi-scale dependencies among the data samples. Furthermore, a dynamic hypergraph convolution mechanism is proposed to facilitate adaptive feature exchange and fusion at the hypergraph level. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the benchmark image datasets demonstrate that the proposed DVHGNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art vision backbones. For instance, our DVHGNN-S achieves an impressive top-1 accuracy of 83.1% on ImageNet-1K, surpassing ViG-S by +1.0% and ViHGNN-S by +0.6%.

UniCombine: Unified Multi-Conditional Combination with Diffusion Transformer

With the rapid development of diffusion models in image generation, the demand for more powerful and flexible controllable frameworks is increasing. Although existing methods can guide generation beyond text prompts, the challenge of effectively combining multiple conditional inputs while maintaining consistency with all of them remains unsolved. To address this, we introduce UniCombine, a DiT-based multi-conditional controllable generative framework capable of handling any combination of conditions, including but not limited to text prompts, spatial maps, and subject images. Specifically, we introduce a novel Conditional MMDiT Attention mechanism and incorporate a trainable LoRA module to build both the training-free and training-based versions. Additionally, we propose a new pipeline to construct SubjectSpatial200K, the first dataset designed for multi-conditional generative tasks covering both the subject-driven and spatially-aligned conditions. Extensive experimental results on multi-conditional generation demonstrate the outstanding universality and powerful capability of our approach with state-of-the-art performance.

CrossVTON: Mimicking the Logic Reasoning on Cross-category Virtual Try-on guided by Tri-zone Priors

Despite remarkable progress in image-based virtual try-on systems, generating realistic and robust fitting images for cross-category virtual try-on remains a challenging task. The primary difficulty arises from the absence of human-like reasoning, which involves addressing size mismatches between garments and models while recognizing and leveraging the distinct functionalities of various regions within the model images. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from human cognitive processes and disentangle the complex reasoning required for cross-category try-on into a structured framework. This framework systematically decomposes the model image into three distinct regions: try-on, reconstruction, and imagination zones. Each zone plays a specific role in accommodating the garment and facilitating realistic synthesis. To endow the model with robust reasoning capabilities for cross-category scenarios, we propose an iterative data constructor. This constructor encompasses diverse scenarios, including intra-category try-on, any-to-dress transformations (replacing any garment category with a dress), and dress-to-any transformations (replacing a dress with another garment category). Utilizing the generated dataset, we introduce a tri-zone priors generator that intelligently predicts the try-on, reconstruction, and imagination zones by analyzing how the input garment is expected to align with the model image. Guided by these tri-zone priors, our proposed method, CrossVTON, achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing existing baselines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Notably, it demonstrates superior capability in handling cross-category virtual try-on, meeting the complex demands of real-world applications.

Image Inversion: A Survey from GANs to Diffusion and Beyond

Image inversion is a fundamental task in generative models, aiming to map images back to their latent representations to enable downstream applications such as editing, restoration, and style transfer. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in image inversion techniques, focusing on two main paradigms: Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) inversion and diffusion model inversion. We categorize these techniques based on their optimization methods. For GAN inversion, we systematically classify existing methods into encoder-based approaches, latent optimization approaches, and hybrid approaches, analyzing their theoretical foundations, technical innovations, and practical trade-offs. For diffusion model inversion, we explore training-free strategies, fine-tuning methods, and the design of additional trainable modules, highlighting their unique advantages and limitations. Additionally, we discuss several popular downstream applications and emerging applications beyond image tasks, identifying current challenges and future research directions. By synthesizing the latest developments, this paper aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a valuable reference resource, promoting further advancements in the field of image inversion. We keep track of the latest works at https://github.com/RyanChenYN/ImageInversion

RWKV-UNet: Improving UNet with Long-Range Cooperation for Effective Medical Image Segmentation

In recent years, there have been significant advancements in deep learning for medical image analysis, especially with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformer models. However, CNNs face limitations in capturing long-range dependencies while transformers suffer high computational complexities. To address this, we propose RWKV-UNet, a novel model that integrates the RWKV (Receptance Weighted Key Value) structure into the U-Net architecture. This integration enhances the model's ability to capture long-range dependencies and improve contextual understanding, which is crucial for accurate medical image segmentation. We build a strong encoder with developed inverted residual RWKV (IR-RWKV) blocks combining CNNs and RWKVs. We also propose a Cross-Channel Mix (CCM) module to improve skip connections with multi-scale feature fusion, achieving global channel information integration. Experiments on benchmark datasets, including Synapse, ACDC, BUSI, CVC-ClinicDB, CVC-ColonDB, Kvasir-SEG, ISIC 2017 and GLAS show that RWKV-UNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on various types of medical image segmentation. Additionally, smaller variants, RWKV-UNet-S and RWKV-UNet-T, balance accuracy and computational efficiency, making them suitable for broader clinical applications.

SVFR: A Unified Framework for Generalized Video Face Restoration

Face Restoration (FR) is a crucial area within image and video processing, focusing on reconstructing high-quality portraits from degraded inputs. Despite advancements in image FR, video FR remains relatively under-explored, primarily due to challenges related to temporal consistency, motion artifacts, and the limited availability of high-quality video data. Moreover, traditional face restoration typically prioritizes enhancing resolution and may not give as much consideration to related tasks such as facial colorization and inpainting. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the Generalized Video Face Restoration (GVFR) task, which integrates video BFR, inpainting, and colorization tasks that we empirically show to benefit each other. We present a unified framework, termed as stable video face restoration (SVFR), which leverages the generative and motion priors of Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) and incorporates task-specific information through a unified face restoration framework. A learnable task embedding is introduced to enhance task identification. Meanwhile, a novel Unified Latent Regularization (ULR) is employed to encourage the shared feature representation learning among different subtasks. To further enhance the restoration quality and temporal stability, we introduce the facial prior learning and the self-referred refinement as auxiliary strategies used for both training and inference. The proposed framework effectively combines the complementary strengths of these tasks, enhancing temporal coherence and achieving superior restoration quality. This work advances the state-of-the-art in video FR and establishes a new paradigm for generalized video face restoration. Code and video demo are available at https://github.com/wangzhiyaoo/SVFR.git.