A^3: Towards Advertising Aesthetic Assessment

Advertising images significantly impact commercial conversion rates and brand equity, yet current evaluation methods rely on subjective judgments, lacking scalability, standardized criteria, and interpretability. To address these challenges, we present A^3 (Advertising Aesthetic Assessment), a comprehensive framework encompassing four components: a paradigm (A^3-Law), a dataset (A^3-Dataset), a multimodal large language model (A^3-Align), and a benchmark (A^3-Bench). Central to A^3 is a theory-driven paradigm, A^3-Law, comprising three hierarchical stages: (1) Perceptual Attention, evaluating perceptual image signals for their ability to attract attention; (2) Formal Interest, assessing formal composition of image color and spatial layout in evoking interest; and (3) Desire Impact, measuring desire evocation from images and their persuasive impact. Building on A^3-Law, we construct A^3-Dataset with 120K instruction-response pairs from 30K advertising images, each richly annotated with multi-dimensional labels and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales. We further develop A^3-Align, trained under A^3-Law with CoT-guided learning on A^3-Dataset. Extensive experiments on A^3-Bench demonstrate that A^3-Align achieves superior alignment with A^3-Law compared to existing models, and this alignment generalizes well to quality advertisement selection and prescriptive advertisement critique, indicating its potential for broader deployment. Dataset, code, and models can be found at: https://github.com/euleryuan/A3-Align.

Learning to Wander: Improving the Global Image Geolocation Ability of LMMs via Actionable Reasoning

Geolocation, the task of identifying the geographic location of an image, requires abundant world knowledge and complex reasoning abilities. Though advanced large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown superior aforementioned capabilities, their performance on the geolocation task remains unexplored. To this end, we introduce \textbf{WanderBench}, the first open access global geolocation benchmark designed for actionable geolocation reasoning in embodied scenarios. WanderBench contains over 32K panoramas across six continents, organized as navigable graphs that enable physical actions such as rotation and movement, transforming geolocation from static recognition into interactive exploration. Building on this foundation, we propose \textbf{GeoAoT} (Action of Thought), a \underline{Geo}location framework with \underline{A}ction of \underline{T}hough, which couples reasoning with embodied actions. Instead of generating textual reasoning chains, GeoAoT produces actionable plans such as, approaching landmarks or adjusting viewpoints, to actively reduce uncertainty. We further establish an evaluation protocol that jointly measures geolocation accuracy and difficulty-aware geolocation questioning ability. Experiments on 19 large multimodal models show that GeoAoT achieves superior fine-grained localization and stronger generalization in dynamic environments. WanderBench and GeoAoT define a new paradigm for actionable, reasoning driven geolocation in embodied visual understanding.

GeoX-Bench: Benchmarking Cross-View Geo-Localization and Pose Estimation Capabilities of Large Multimodal Models

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, however their knowledge and abilities in the cross-view geo-localization and pose estimation domains remain unexplored, despite potential benefits for navigation, autonomous driving, outdoor robotics, \textit{etc}. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{GeoX-Bench}, a comprehensive \underline{Bench}mark designed to explore and evaluate the capabilities of LMMs in \underline{cross}-view \underline{Geo}-localization and pose estimation. Specifically, GeoX-Bench contains 10,859 panoramic-satellite image pairs spanning 128 cities in 49 countries, along with corresponding 755,976 question-answering (QA) pairs. Among these, 42,900 QA pairs are designated for benchmarking, while the remaining are intended to enhance the capabilities of LMMs. Based on GeoX-Bench, we evaluate the capabilities of 25 state-of-the-art LMMs on cross-view geo-localization and pose estimation tasks, and further explore the empowered capabilities of instruction-tuning. Our benchmark demonstrate that while current LMMs achieve impressive performance in geo-localization tasks, their effectiveness declines significantly on the more complex pose estimation tasks, highlighting a critical area for future improvement, and instruction-tuning LMMs on the training data of GeoX-Bench can significantly improve the cross-view geo-sense abilities. The GeoX-Bench is available at \textcolor{magenta}{https://github.com/IntMeGroup/GeoX-Bench}.

Learning Hazing to Dehazing: Towards Realistic Haze Generation for Real-World Image Dehazing

Existing real-world image dehazing methods primarily attempt to fine-tune pre-trained models or adapt their inference procedures, thus heavily relying on the pre-trained models and associated training data. Moreover, restoring heavily distorted information under dense haze requires generative diffusion models, whose potential in dehazing remains underutilized partly due to their lengthy sampling processes. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel hazing-dehazing pipeline consisting of a Realistic Hazy Image Generation framework (HazeGen) and a Diffusion-based Dehazing framework (DiffDehaze). Specifically, HazeGen harnesses robust generative diffusion priors of real-world hazy images embedded in a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. By employing specialized hybrid training and blended sampling strategies, HazeGen produces realistic and diverse hazy images as high-quality training data for DiffDehaze. To alleviate the inefficiency and fidelity concerns associated with diffusion-based methods, DiffDehaze adopts an Accelerated Fidelity-Preserving Sampling process (AccSamp). The core of AccSamp is the Tiled Statistical Alignment Operation (AlignOp), which can provide a clean and faithful dehazing estimate within a small fraction of sampling steps to reduce complexity and enable effective fidelity guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior dehazing performance and visual quality of our approach over existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ruiyi-w/Learning-Hazing-to-Dehazing.