PolarAPP: Beyond Polarization Demosaicking for Polarimetric Applications

Polarimetric imaging enables advanced vision applications such as normal estimation and de-reflection by capturing unique surface-material interactions. However, existing applications (alternatively called downstream tasks) rely on datasets constructed by naively regrouping raw measurements from division-of-focal-plane sensors, where pixels of the same polarization angle are extracted and aligned into sparse images without proper demosaicking. This reconstruction strategy results in suboptimal, incomplete targets that limit downstream performance. Moreover, current demosaicking methods are task-agnostic, optimizing only for photometric fidelity rather than utility in downstream tasks. Towards this end, we propose PolarAPP, the first framework to jointly optimize demosaicking and its downstream tasks. PolarAPP introduces a feature alignment mechanism that semantically aligns the representations of demosaicking and downstream networks via meta-learning, guiding the reconstruction to be task-aware. It further employs an equivalent imaging constraint for demosaicking training, enabling direct regression to physically meaningful outputs without relying on rearranged data. Finally, a task-refinement stage fine-tunes the task network using the stable demosaicking front-end to further enhance accuracy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PolarAPP outperforms existing methods in both demosaicking quality and downstream performance. Code is available upon acceptance.

AIMER: Calibration-Free Task-Agnostic MoE Pruning

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models increase parameter capacity without proportional per-token compute, but the deployment still requires storing all experts, making expert pruning important for reducing memory and serving overhead. Existing task-agnostic expert pruning methods are typically calibration-dependent: they estimate expert importance from routing or activation statistics on a calibration set, which makes pruning outcomes sensitive to the choice of calibration set and adds substantial preprocessing cost. We introduce AIMER (\textbf{A}bsolute mean over root mean square \textbf{IM}portance for \textbf{E}xpert \textbf{R}anking), a simple calibration-free criterion that yields clear within-layer score separation and distinct expert stratification. Across 7B to 30B MoE language models at 25\% and 50\% pruning ratios over 16 benchmarks, AIMER consistently delivers competitive or stronger overall performance against state-of-the-art calibration-based expert pruning baselines with only 0.22--1.27 seconds for scoring the experts.

Eleven Primitives and Three Gates: The Universal Structure of Computational Imaging

Computational imaging systems -- from coded-aperture cameras to cryo-electron microscopes -- span five carrier families yet share a hidden structural simplicity. We prove that every imaging forward model decomposes into a directed acyclic graph over exactly 11 physically typed primitives (Finite Primitive Basis Theorem) -- a sufficient and minimal basis that provides a compositional language for designing any imaging modality. We further prove that every reconstruction failure has exactly three independent root causes: information deficiency, carrier noise, and operator mismatch (Triad Decomposition). The three gates map to the system lifecycle: Gates 1 and 2 guide design (sampling geometry, carrier selection); Gate 3 governs deployment-stage calibration and drift correction. Validation across 12 modalities and all five carrier families confirms both results, with +0.8 to +13.9 dB recovery on deployed instruments. Together, the 11 primitives and 3 gates establish the first universal grammar for designing, diagnosing, and correcting computational imaging systems.

Diff-ES: Stage-wise Structural Diffusion Pruning via Evolutionary Search

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in high-fidelity image generation but remain computationally demanding due to their multi-step denoising process and large model sizes. Although prior work improves efficiency either by reducing sampling steps or by compressing model parameters, existing structured pruning approaches still struggle to balance real acceleration and image quality preservation. In particular, prior methods such as MosaicDiff rely on heuristic, manually tuned stage-wise sparsity schedules and stitch multiple independently pruned models during inference, which increases memory overhead. However, the importance of diffusion steps is highly non-uniform and model-dependent. As a result, schedules derived from simple heuristics or empirical observations often fail to generalize and may lead to suboptimal performance. To this end, we introduce \textbf{Diff-ES}, a stage-wise structural \textbf{Diff}usion pruning framework via \textbf{E}volutionary \textbf{S}earch, which optimizes the stage-wise sparsity schedule and executes it through memory-efficient weight routing without model duplication. Diff-ES divides the diffusion trajectory into multiple stages, automatically discovers an optimal stage-wise sparsity schedule via evolutionary search, and activates stage-conditioned weights dynamically without duplicating model parameters. Our framework naturally integrates with existing structured pruning methods for diffusion models including depth and width pruning. Extensive experiments on DiT and SDXL demonstrate that Diff-ES consistently achieves wall-clock speedups while incurring minimal degradation in generation quality, establishing state-of-the-art performance for structured diffusion model pruning.

InverseNet: Benchmarking Operator Mismatch and Calibration Across Compressive Imaging Modalities

State-of-the-art EfficientSCI loses 20.58 dB when its assumed forward operator deviates from physical reality in just eight parameters, yet no existing benchmark quantifies operator mismatch, the default condition in deployed compressive imaging systems. We introduce InverseNet, the first cross-modality benchmark for operator mismatch, spanning CASSI, CACTI, and single-pixel cameras. Evaluating 12 methods under a four-scenario protocol (ideal, mismatched, oracle-corrected, blind calibration) across 27 simulated scenes and 9 real hardware captures, we find: (1) deep learning methods lose 10-21 dB under mismatch, eliminating their advantage over classical baselines; (2) performance and robustness are inversely correlated across modalities (Spearman r_s = -0.71, p < 0.01); (3) mask-oblivious architectures recover 0% of mismatch losses regardless of calibration quality, while operator-conditioned methods recover 41-90%; (4) blind grid-search calibration recovers 85-100% of the oracle bound without ground truth. Real hardware experiments confirm that simulation trends transfer to physical data. Code will be released upon acceptance.

From Calibration to Refinement: Seeking Certainty via Probabilistic Evidence Propagation for Noisy-Label Person Re-Identification

With the increasing demand for robust person Re-ID in unconstrained environments, learning from datasets with noisy labels and sparse per-identity samples remains a critical challenge. Existing noise-robust person Re-ID methods primarily rely on loss-correction or sample-selection strategies using softmax outputs. However, these methods suffer from two key limitations: 1) Softmax exhibits translation invariance, leading to over-confident and unreliable predictions on corrupted labels. 2) Conventional sample selection based on small-loss criteria often discards valuable hard positives that are crucial for learning discriminative features. To overcome these issues, we propose the CAlibration-to-REfinement (CARE) method, a two-stage framework that seeks certainty through probabilistic evidence propagation from calibration to refinement. In the calibration stage, we propose the probabilistic evidence calibration (PEC) that dismantles softmax translation invariance by injecting adaptive learnable parameters into the similarity function, and employs an evidential calibration loss to mitigate overconfidence on mislabeled samples. In the refinement stage, we design the evidence propagation refinement (EPR) that can more accurately distinguish between clean and noisy samples. Specifically, the EPR contains two steps: Firstly, the composite angular margin (CAM) metric is proposed to precisely distinguish clean but hard-to-learn positive samples from mislabeled ones in a hyperspherical space; Secondly, the certainty-oriented sphere weighting (COSW) is developed to dynamically allocate the importance of samples according to CAM, ensuring clean instances drive model updates. Extensive experimental results on Market1501, DukeMTMC-ReID, and CUHK03 datasets under both random and patterned noises show that CARE achieves competitive performance.

Beyond Seen Bounds: Class-Centric Polarization for Single-Domain Generalized Deep Metric Learning

Single-domain generalized deep metric learning (SDG-DML) faces the dual challenge of both category and domain shifts during testing, limiting real-world applications. Therefore, aiming to learn better generalization ability on both unseen categories and domains is a realistic goal for the SDG-DML task. To deliver the aspiration, existing SDG-DML methods employ the domain expansion-equalization strategy to expand the source data and generate out-of-distribution samples. However, these methods rely on proxy-based expansion, which tends to generate samples clustered near class proxies, failing to simulate the broad and distant domain shifts encountered in practice. To alleviate the problem, we propose CenterPolar, a novel SDG-DML framework that dynamically expands and constrains domain distributions to learn a generalizable DML model for wider target domain distributions. Specifically, \textbf{CenterPolar} contains two collaborative class-centric polarization phases: (1) Class-Centric Centrifugal Expansion ($C^3E$) and (2) Class-Centric Centripetal Constraint ($C^4$). In the first phase, $C^3E$ drives the source domain distribution by shifting the source data away from class centroids using centrifugal expansion to generalize to more unseen domains. In the second phase, to consolidate domain-invariant class information for the generalization ability to unseen categories, $C^4$ pulls all seen and unseen samples toward their class centroids while enforcing inter-class separation via centripetal constraint. Extensive experimental results on widely used CUB-200-2011 Ext., Cars196 Ext., DomainNet, PACS, and Office-Home datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our CenterPolar over existing state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released after acceptance.

PrivGemo: Privacy-Preserving Dual-Tower Graph Retrieval for Empowering LLM Reasoning with Memory Augmentation

Knowledge graphs (KGs) provide structured evidence that can ground large language model (LLM) reasoning for knowledge-intensive question answering. However, many practical KGs are private, and sending retrieved triples or exploration traces to closed-source LLM APIs introduces leakage risk. Existing privacy treatments focus on masking entity names, but they still face four limitations: structural leakage under semantic masking, uncontrollable remote interaction, fragile multi-hop and multi-entity reasoning, and limited experience reuse for stability and efficiency. To address these issues, we propose PrivGemo, a privacy-preserving retrieval-augmented framework for KG-grounded reasoning with memory-guided exposure control. PrivGemo uses a dual-tower design to keep raw KG knowledge local while enabling remote reasoning over an anonymized view that goes beyond name masking to limit both semantic and structural exposure. PrivGemo supports multi-hop, multi-entity reasoning by retrieving anonymized long-hop paths that connect all topic entities, while keeping grounding and verification on the local KG. A hierarchical controller and a privacy-aware experience memory further reduce unnecessary exploration and remote interactions. Comprehensive experiments on six benchmarks show that PrivGemo achieves overall state-of-the-art results, outperforming the strongest baseline by up to 17.1%. Furthermore, PrivGemo enables smaller models (e.g., Qwen3-4B) to achieve reasoning performance comparable to that of GPT-4-Turbo.

3One2: One-step Regression Plus One-step Diffusion for One-hot Modulation in Dual-path Video Snapshot Compressive Imaging

Video snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) captures dynamic scene sequences through a two-dimensional (2D) snapshot, fundamentally relying on optical modulation for hardware compression and the corresponding software reconstruction. While mainstream video SCI using random binary modulation has demonstrated success, it inevitably results in temporal aliasing during compression. One-hot modulation, activating only one sub-frame per pixel, provides a promising solution for achieving perfect temporal decoupling, thereby alleviating issues associated with aliasing. However, no algorithms currently exist to fully exploit this potential. To bridge this gap, we propose an algorithm specifically designed for one-hot masks. First, leveraging the decoupling properties of one-hot modulation, we transform the reconstruction task into a generative video inpainting problem and introduce a stochastic differential equation (SDE) of the forward process that aligns with the hardware compression process. Next, we identify limitations of the pure diffusion method for video SCI and propose a novel framework that combines one-step regression initialization with one-step diffusion refinement. Furthermore, to mitigate the spatial degradation caused by one-hot modulation, we implement a dual optical path at the hardware level, utilizing complementary information from another path to enhance the inpainted video. To our knowledge, this is the first work integrating diffusion into video SCI reconstruction. Experiments conducted on synthetic datasets and real scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

SLCFormer: Spectral-Local Context Transformer with Physics-Grounded Flare Synthesis for Nighttime Flare Removal

Lens flare is a common nighttime artifact caused by strong light sources scattering within camera lenses, leading to hazy streaks, halos, and glare that degrade visual quality. However, existing methods usually fail to effectively address nonuniform scattered flares, which severely reduces their applicability to complex real-world scenarios with diverse lighting conditions. To address this issue, we propose SLCFormer, a novel spectral-local context transformer framework for effective nighttime lens flare removal. SLCFormer integrates two key modules: the Frequency Fourier and Excitation Module (FFEM), which captures efficient global contextual representations in the frequency domain to model flare characteristics, and the Directionally-Enhanced Spatial Module (DESM) for local structural enhancement and directional features in the spatial domain for precise flare removal. Furthermore, we introduce a ZernikeVAE-based scatter flare generation pipeline to synthesize physically realistic scatter flares with spatially varying PSFs, bridging optical physics and data-driven training. Extensive experiments on the Flare7K++ dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing approaches in both quantitative metrics and perceptual visual quality, and generalizing robustly to real nighttime scenes with complex flare artifacts.