Hi-Light: A Path to high-fidelity, high-resolution video relighting with a Novel Evaluation Paradigm

Video relighting offers immense creative potential and commercial value but is hindered by challenges, including the absence of an adequate evaluation metric, severe light flickering, and the degradation of fine-grained details during editing. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Hi-Light, a novel, training-free framework for high-fidelity, high-resolution, robust video relighting. Our approach introduces three technical innovations: lightness prior anchored guided relighting diffusion that stabilises intermediate relit video, a Hybrid Motion-Adaptive Lighting Smoothing Filter that leverages optical flow to ensure temporal stability without introducing motion blur, and a LAB-based Detail Fusion module that preserves high-frequency detail information from the original video. Furthermore, to address the critical gap in evaluation, we propose the Light Stability Score, the first quantitative metric designed to specifically measure lighting consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hi-Light significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons, producing stable, highly detailed relit videos.

Domain Expansion: A Latent Space Construction Framework for Multi-Task Learning

Training a single network with multiple objectives often leads to conflicting gradients that degrade shared representations, forcing them into a compromised state that is suboptimal for any single task--a problem we term latent representation collapse. We introduce Domain Expansion, a framework that prevents these conflicts by restructuring the latent space itself. Our framework uses a novel orthogonal pooling mechanism to construct a latent space where each objective is assigned to a mutually orthogonal subspace. We validate our approach across diverse benchmarks--including ShapeNet, MPIIGaze, and Rotated MNIST--on challenging multi-objective problems combining classification with pose and gaze estimation. Our experiments demonstrate that this structure not only prevents collapse but also yields an explicit, interpretable, and compositional latent space where concepts can be directly manipulated.

eSkiTB: A Synthetic Event-based Dataset for Tracking Skiers

Tracking skiers in RGB broadcast footage is challenging due to motion blur, static overlays, and clutter that obscure the fast-moving athlete. Event cameras, with their asynchronous contrast sensing, offer natural robustness to such artifacts, yet a controlled benchmark for winter-sport tracking has been missing. We introduce event SkiTB (eSkiTB), a synthetic event-based ski tracking dataset generated from SkiTB using direct video-to-event conversion without neural interpolation, enabling an iso-informational comparison between RGB and event modalities. Benchmarking SDTrack (spiking transformer) against STARK (RGB transformer), we find that event-based tracking is substantially resilient to broadcast clutter in scenes dominated by static overlays, achieving 0.685 IoU, outperforming RGB by +20.0 points. Across the dataset, SDTrack attains a mean IoU of 0.711, demonstrating that temporal contrast is a reliable cue for tracking ballistic motion in visually congested environments. eSkiTB establishes the first controlled setting for event-based tracking in winter sports and highlights the promise of event cameras for ski tracking. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/eventbasedvision/eSkiTB.

CounterVid: Counterfactual Video Generation for Mitigating Action and Temporal Hallucinations in Video-Language Models

Video-language models (VLMs) achieve strong multimodal understanding but remain prone to hallucinations, especially when reasoning about actions and temporal order. Existing mitigation strategies, such as textual filtering or random video perturbations, often fail to address the root cause: over-reliance on language priors rather than fine-grained visual dynamics. We propose a scalable framework for counterfactual video generation that synthesizes videos differing only in actions or temporal structure while preserving scene context. Our pipeline combines multimodal LLMs for action proposal and editing guidance with diffusion-based image and video models to generate semantic hard negatives at scale. Using this framework, we build CounterVid, a synthetic dataset of ~26k preference pairs targeting action recognition and temporal reasoning. We further introduce MixDPO, a unified Direct Preference Optimization approach that jointly leverages textual and visual preferences. Fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL with MixDPO yields consistent improvements, notably in temporal ordering, and transfers effectively to standard video hallucination benchmarks. Code and models will be made publicly available.

Stable Cinemetrics : Structured Taxonomy and Evaluation for Professional Video Generation

Recent advances in video generation have enabled high-fidelity video synthesis from user provided prompts. However, existing models and benchmarks fail to capture the complexity and requirements of professional video generation. Towards that goal, we introduce Stable Cinemetrics, a structured evaluation framework that formalizes filmmaking controls into four disentangled, hierarchical taxonomies: Setup, Event, Lighting, and Camera. Together, these taxonomies define 76 fine-grained control nodes grounded in industry practices. Using these taxonomies, we construct a benchmark of prompts aligned with professional use cases and develop an automated pipeline for prompt categorization and question generation, enabling independent evaluation of each control dimension. We conduct a large-scale human study spanning 10+ models and 20K videos, annotated by a pool of 80+ film professionals. Our analysis, both coarse and fine-grained reveal that even the strongest current models exhibit significant gaps, particularly in Events and Camera-related controls. To enable scalable evaluation, we train an automatic evaluator, a vision-language model aligned with expert annotations that outperforms existing zero-shot baselines. SCINE is the first approach to situate professional video generation within the landscape of video generative models, introducing taxonomies centered around cinematic controls and supporting them with structured evaluation pipelines and detailed analyses to guide future research.

AcT2I: Evaluating and Improving Action Depiction in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-Image (T2I) models have recently achieved remarkable success in generating images from textual descriptions. However, challenges still persist in accurately rendering complex scenes where actions and interactions form the primary semantic focus. Our key observation in this work is that T2I models frequently struggle to capture nuanced and often implicit attributes inherent in action depiction, leading to generating images that lack key contextual details. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce AcT2I, a benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of T2I models in generating images from action-centric prompts. We experimentally validate that leading T2I models do not fare well on AcT2I. We further hypothesize that this shortcoming arises from the incomplete representation of the inherent attributes and contextual dependencies in the training corpora of existing T2I models. We build upon this by developing a training-free, knowledge distillation technique utilizing Large Language Models to address this limitation. Specifically, we enhance prompts by incorporating dense information across three dimensions, observing that injecting prompts with temporal details significantly improves image generation accuracy, with our best model achieving an increase of 72%. Our findings highlight the limitations of current T2I methods in generating images that require complex reasoning and demonstrate that integrating linguistic knowledge in a systematic way can notably advance the generation of nuanced and contextually accurate images.

SEPose: A Synthetic Event-based Human Pose Estimation Dataset for Pedestrian Monitoring

Event-based sensors have emerged as a promising solution for addressing challenging conditions in pedestrian and traffic monitoring systems. Their low-latency and high dynamic range allow for improved response time in safety-critical situations caused by distracted walking or other unusual movements. However, the availability of data covering such scenarios remains limited. To address this gap, we present SEPose -- a comprehensive synthetic event-based human pose estimation dataset for fixed pedestrian perception generated using dynamic vision sensors in the CARLA simulator. With nearly 350K annotated pedestrians with body pose keypoints from the perspective of fixed traffic cameras, SEPose is a comprehensive synthetic multi-person pose estimation dataset that spans busy and light crowds and traffic across diverse lighting and weather conditions in 4-way intersections in urban, suburban, and rural environments. We train existing state-of-the-art models such as RVT and YOLOv8 on our dataset and evaluate them on real event-based data to demonstrate the sim-to-real generalization capabilities of the proposed dataset.

DeepShade: Enable Shade Simulation by Text-conditioned Image Generation

Heatwaves pose a significant threat to public health, especially as global warming intensifies. However, current routing systems (e.g., online maps) fail to incorporate shade information due to the difficulty of estimating shades directly from noisy satellite imagery and the limited availability of training data for generative models. In this paper, we address these challenges through two main contributions. First, we build an extensive dataset covering diverse longitude-latitude regions, varying levels of building density, and different urban layouts. Leveraging Blender-based 3D simulations alongside building outlines, we capture building shadows under various solar zenith angles throughout the year and at different times of day. These simulated shadows are aligned with satellite images, providing a rich resource for learning shade patterns. Second, we propose the DeepShade, a diffusion-based model designed to learn and synthesize shade variations over time. It emphasizes the nuance of edge features by jointly considering RGB with the Canny edge layer, and incorporates contrastive learning to capture the temporal change rules of shade. Then, by conditioning on textual descriptions of known conditions (e.g., time of day, solar angles), our framework provides improved performance in generating shade images. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by using our shade predictions to calculate shade ratios for real-world route planning in Tempe, Arizona. We believe this work will benefit society by providing a reference for urban planning in extreme heat weather and its potential practical applications in the environment.

Guiding Diffusion with Deep Geometric Moments: Balancing Fidelity and Variation

Text-to-image generation models have achieved remarkable capabilities in synthesizing images, but often struggle to provide fine-grained control over the output. Existing guidance approaches, such as segmentation maps and depth maps, introduce spatial rigidity that restricts the inherent diversity of diffusion models. In this work, we introduce Deep Geometric Moments (DGM) as a novel form of guidance that encapsulates the subject's visual features and nuances through a learned geometric prior. DGMs focus specifically on the subject itself compared to DINO or CLIP features, which suffer from overemphasis on global image features or semantics. Unlike ResNets, which are sensitive to pixel-wise perturbations, DGMs rely on robust geometric moments. Our experiments demonstrate that DGM effectively balance control and diversity in diffusion-based image generation, allowing a flexible control mechanism for steering the diffusion process.

Event Quality Score (EQS): Assessing the Realism of Simulated Event Camera Streams via Distances in Latent Space

Event cameras promise a paradigm shift in vision sensing with their low latency, high dynamic range, and asynchronous nature of events. Unfortunately, the scarcity of high-quality labeled datasets hinders their widespread adoption in deep learning-driven computer vision. To mitigate this, several simulators have been proposed to generate synthetic event data for training models for detection and estimation tasks. However, the fundamentally different sensor design of event cameras compared to traditional frame-based cameras poses a challenge for accurate simulation. As a result, most simulated data fail to mimic data captured by real event cameras. Inspired by existing work on using deep features for image comparison, we introduce event quality score (EQS), a quality metric that utilizes activations of the RVT architecture. Through sim-to-real experiments on the DSEC driving dataset, it is shown that a higher EQS implies improved generalization to real-world data after training on simulated events. Thus, optimizing for EQS can lead to developing more realistic event camera simulators, effectively reducing the simulation gap. EQS is available at https://github.com/eventbasedvision/EQS.