NumerosityVLM: A Cognitively Inspired Benchmark for Interpreting Numerosity Representations in Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on high-level multimodal tasks, yet numerosity perception, a cognitive ability that emerges in human infants before language acquisition, remains poorly understood in current models, as existing counting benchmarks entangle numerosity with correlated visual factors. We introduce a cognitively inspired diagnostic benchmark, NumerosityVLM, comprising 10,800 synthetic images across six controlled conditions. The benchmark orthogonally manipulates object size, spatial arrangement, and numerosity, while progressively ablating texture, shape, and color. Evaluating seven VLMs in a zero-shot setting, multi-factor analysis reveals that model architecture explains the largest proportion of performance variance (partial $ω^{2}=0.325$), far exceeding visual conditions. Layer-wise probing further shows that linearly separable numerosity signals consistently emerge at early stages of the vision encoder, while performance differences across evaluated models are primarily associated with the language model component. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/fuy3/NumerosityVLM-Benchmark, and https://huggingface.co/datasets/fuy3/NumerosityVLM.

CogSENet: Blind Image Deblurring with Blur-Conditioned Semantic Routing and Explicit Frequency Fusion

Blind image deblurring demands the recovery of high-fidelity details and coherent structures from complex, unknown degradations. Current blind image deblurring methods struggle with real-world, spatially varying degradations, and lack the semantic awareness necessary to reliably differentiate valid textures from artifacts. To bridge this gap, we propose CogSENet, a dynamic, semantic-aligned reconstruction framework inspired by the eagle's visual system. By mimicking the eagle's active saccadic scanning, we devise a Semantic-Driven State Space Module (SDSSM) with semantic-aware token regrouping via differentiable routing, enabling prompt-conditioned long-range dependency modeling. To ensure physically interpretable recovery of textures and structures, a BiFreqFusionBlock (BFFB) mirrors functional differentiation of the eagle's retina by decomposing features into high and low frequencies using wavelet transforms. Finally, we estimate a continuous Blur Field (CBF) from blur image and fuse it with CLIP semantic priors to modulate the deepest latent features, emulating focal adaptation and enabling adaptive restoration under spatially non-uniform blur. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CogSENetoutperforms state-of-the-art deblurring methods in both visual quality and structural fidelity with fewer parameters, while also performing favorably on dehazing, deraining, and denoising tasks.

SEAL: Synergistic Co-Evolution of Agents and Learning Environments

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly improved through interaction, yet most self-evolution methods adapt either the policy or the learning environment in isolation. We identify this structural gap as \emph{Agent-Environment Misalignment}: the agent's capability frontier changes during training, while the environment that provides supervision remains static or only weakly coupled to the agent's revealed failures. We propose SEAL, a closed-loop co-evolution framework for interactive tool-use agents. SEAL collects on-policy trajectories under executable verification, diagnoses failed rollouts into turn-level failure labels, and uses these diagnoses as a shared signal for both environment-side adaptation and model-side policy optimization. The environment evolves its training-time learning interface by exposing clearer tool affordance cues, constraint information, and recovery-oriented feedback, while the policy is updated with diagnosis-guided advantage reweighting. Extensive experiments across in-distribution and out-of-distribution multi-turn tool-use evaluations show that SEAL improves low-resource agent learning: with only 400 training samples, it yields +8.25 to +26.25 average-point gains across three backbones and exhibits positive out-of-distribution transfer. These results demonstrate the value of jointly adapting the learner and its training-time learning substrate for robust self-improving LLM agents.

CFSR: Geometry-Conditioned Shadow Removal via Physical Disentanglement

Traditional shadow removal networks often treat image restoration as an unconstrained mapping, lacking the physical interpretability required to balance localized texture recovery with global illumination consistency. To address this, we propose CFSR, a multi-modal prior-driven framework that reframes shadow removal as a physics-constrained restoration process. By seamlessly integrating 3D geometric cues with large-scale foundation model semantics, CFSR effectively bridges the 2D-3D domain gap. Specifically, we first map observations into a custom HVI color space to suppress shadow-induced noise and robustly fuse RGB data with estimated depth priors. At its core, our Geometric & Semantic Dual Explicit Guided Attention mechanism utilizes DINO features and 3D surface normals to directly modulate the attention affinity matrix, structurally enforcing physical lighting constraints. To recover severely degraded regions, we inject holistic priors via a frozen CLIP encoder. Finally, our Frequency Collaborative Reconstruction Module (FCRM) achieves an optimal synthesis by decoupling the decoding process. Conditioned on geometric priors, FCRM seamlessly harmonizes the reconstruction of sharp high-frequency occlusion boundaries with the restoration of low-frequency global illumination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CFSR achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple challenging benchmarks.