Anti-I2V: Safeguarding your photos from malicious image-to-video generation

Advances in diffusion-based video generation models, while significantly improving human animation, poses threats of misuse through the creation of fake videos from a specific person's photo and text prompts. Recent efforts have focused on adversarial attacks that introduce crafted perturbations to protect images from diffusion-based models. However, most existing approaches target image generation, while relatively few explicitly address image-to-video diffusion models (VDMs), and most primarily focus on UNet-based architectures. Hence, their effectiveness against Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models remains largely under-explored, as these models demonstrate improved feature retention, and stronger temporal consistency due to larger capacity and advanced attention mechanisms. In this work, we introduce Anti-I2V, a novel defense against malicious human image-to-video generation, applicable across diverse diffusion backbones. Instead of restricting noise updates to the RGB space, Anti-I2V operates in both the $L$*$a$*$b$* and frequency domains, improving robustness and concentrating on salient pixels. We then identify the network layers that capture the most distinct semantic features during the denoising process to design appropriate training objectives that maximize degradation of temporal coherence and generation fidelity. Through extensive validation, Anti-I2V demonstrates state-of-the-art defense performance against diverse video diffusion models, offering an effective solution to the problem.

Combi-CAM: A Novel Multi-Layer Approach for Explainable Image Geolocalization

Planet-scale photo geolocalization involves the intricate task of estimating the geographic location depicted in an image purely based on its visual features. While deep learning models, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have significantly advanced this field, understanding the reasoning behind their predictions remains challenging. In this paper, we present Combi-CAM, a novel method that enhances the explainability of CNN-based geolocalization models by combining gradient-weighted class activation maps obtained from several layers of the network architecture, rather than using only information from the deepest layer as is typically done. This approach provides a more detailed understanding of how different image features contribute to the model's decisions, offering deeper insights than the traditional approaches.

DP^2-VL: Private Photo Dataset Protection by Data Poisoning for Vision-Language Models

Recent advances in visual-language alignment have endowed vision-language models (VLMs) with fine-grained image understanding capabilities. However, this progress also introduces new privacy risks. This paper first proposes a novel privacy threat model named identity-affiliation learning: an attacker fine-tunes a VLM using only a few private photos of a target individual, thereby embedding associations between the target facial identity and their private property and social relationships into the model's internal representations. Once deployed via public APIs, this model enables unauthorized exposure of the target user's private information upon input of their photos. To benchmark VLMs' susceptibility to such identity-affiliation leakage, we introduce the first identity-affiliation dataset comprising seven typical scenarios appearing in private photos. Each scenario is instantiated with multiple identity-centered photo-description pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that mainstream VLMs like LLaVA, Qwen-VL, and MiniGPT-v2, can recognize facial identities and infer identity-affiliation relationships by fine-tuning on small-scale private photographic dataset, and even on synthetically generated datasets. To mitigate this privacy risk, we propose DP2-VL, the first Dataset Protection framework for private photos that leverages Data Poisoning. Though optimizing imperceptible perturbations by pushing the original representations toward an antithetical region, DP2-VL induces a dataset-level shift in the embedding space of VLMs'encoders. This shift separates protected images from clean inference images, causing fine-tuning on the protected set to overfit. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DP2-VL achieves strong generalization across models, robustness to diverse post-processing operations, and consistent effectiveness across varying protection ratios.

SOUPLE: Enhancing Audio-Visual Localization and Segmentation with Learnable Prompt Contexts

Large-scale pre-trained image-text models exhibit robust multimodal representations, yet applying the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to audio-visual localization remains challenging. Replacing the classification token ([CLS]) with an audio-embedded token ([V_A]) struggles to capture semantic cues, and the prompt "a photo of a [V_A]" fails to establish meaningful connections between audio embeddings and context tokens. To address these issues, we propose Sound-aware Prompt Learning (SOUPLE), which replaces fixed prompts with learnable context tokens. These tokens incorporate visual features to generate conditional context for a mask decoder, effectively bridging semantic correspondence between audio and visual inputs. Experiments on VGGSound, SoundNet, and AVSBench demonstrate that SOUPLE improves localization and segmentation performance.

Dress-ED: Instruction-Guided Editing for Virtual Try-On and Try-Off

Recent advances in Virtual Try-On (VTON) and Virtual Try-Off (VTOFF) have greatly improved photo-realistic fashion synthesis and garment reconstruction. However, existing datasets remain static, lacking instruction-driven editing for controllable and interactive fashion generation. In this work, we introduce the Dress Editing Dataset (Dress-ED), the first large-scale benchmark that unifies VTON, VTOFF, and text-guided garment editing within a single framework. Each sample in Dress-ED includes an in-shop garment image, the corresponding person image wearing the garment, their edited counterparts, and a natural-language instruction of the desired modification. Built through a fully automated multimodal pipeline that integrates MLLM-based garment understanding, diffusion-based editing, and LLM-guided verification, Dress-ED comprises over 146k verified quadruplets spanning three garment categories and seven edit types, including both appearance (e.g., color, pattern, material) and structural (e.g., sleeve length, neckline) modifications. Based on this benchmark, we further propose a unified multimodal diffusion framework that jointly reasons over linguistic instructions and visual garment cues, serving as a strong baseline for instruction-driven VTON and VTOFF. Dataset and code will be made publicly available.

The Role and Relationship of Initialization and Densification in 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become the method of choice for photo-realistic 3D reconstruction of scenes, due to being able to efficiently and accurately recover the scene appearance and geometry from images. 3DGS represents the scene through a set of 3D Gaussians, parameterized by their position, spatial extent, and view-dependent color. Starting from an initial point cloud, 3DGS refines the Gaussians' parameters as to reconstruct a set of training images as accurately as possible. Typically, a sparse Structure-from-Motion point cloud is used as initialization. In order to obtain dense Gaussian clouds, 3DGS methods thus rely on a densification stage. In this paper, we systematically study the relation between densification and initialization. Proposing a new benchmark, we study combinations of different types of initializations (dense laser scans, dense (multi-view) stereo point clouds, dense monocular depth estimates, sparse SfM point clouds) and different densification schemes. We show that current densification approaches are not able to take full advantage of dense initialization as they are often unable to (significantly) improve over sparse SfM-based initialization. We will make our benchmark publicly available.

Benchmarking Efficient & Effective Camera Pose Estimation Strategies for Novel View Synthesis

Novel view synthesis (NVS) approaches such as NeRFs or 3DGS can produce photo-realistic 3D scene representation from a set of images with known extrinsic and intrinsic parameters. The necessary camera poses and calibrations are typically obtained from the images via Structure-from-Motion (SfM). Classical SfM approaches rely on local feature matches between the images to estimate both the poses and a sparse 3D model of the scene, using bundle adjustment to refine initial pose, intrinsics, and geometry estimates. In order to increase run-time efficiency, recent SfM systems forgo optimization via bundle adjustment. Instead, they train feed-forward (transformer-based) neural networks to directly regress camera parameters and the 3D structure. While orders of magnitude more efficient, such recent works produce significantly less accurate estimates. To stimulate research on developing SfM approaches that are both efficient \emph{and} effective, this paper develops a benchmark focused on SfM for novel view synthesis. Using existing datasets and two simple strategies for making the reconstruction process more efficient, we show that: (1) simply using fewer features already significantly accelerates classical SfM methods while maintaining high pose accuracy. (2) using feed-forward networks to obtain initial estimates and refining them using classical SfM techniques leads to the best efficiency-effectiveness trade-off. We will make our benchmark and code publicly available.

MeInTime: Bridging Age Gap in Identity-Preserving Face Restoration

To better preserve an individual's identity, face restoration has evolved from reference-free to reference-based approaches, which leverage high-quality reference images of the same identity to enhance identity fidelity in the restored outputs. However, most existing methods implicitly assume that the reference and degraded input are age-aligned, limiting their effectiveness in real-world scenarios where only cross-age references are available, such as historical photo restoration. This paper proposes MeInTime, a diffusion-based face restoration method that extends reference-based restoration from same-age to cross-age settings. Given one or few reference images along with an age prompt corresponding to the degraded input, MeInTime achieves faithful restoration with both identity fidelity and age consistency. Specifically, we decouple the modeling of identity and age conditions. During training, we focus solely on effectively injecting identity features through a newly introduced attention mechanism and introduce Gated Residual Fusion modules to facilitate the integration between degraded features and identity representations. At inference, we propose Age-Aware Gradient Guidance, a training-free sampling strategy, using an age-driven direction to iteratively nudge the identity-aware denoising latent toward the desired age semantic manifold. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MeInTime outperforms existing face restoration methods in both identity preservation and age consistency. Our code is available at: https://github.com/teer4/MeInTime

Compact Optical Single-axis Joint Torque Sensor Using Redundant Photo-Reflectors and Quadratic-Programming Calibration

This study proposes a non-contact photo-reflector-based joint torque sensor for precise joint-level torque control and safe physical interaction. Current-sensor-based torque estimation in many collaborative robots suffers from poor low-torque accuracy due to gearbox stiction/friction and current-torque nonlinearity, especially near static conditions. The proposed sensor optically measures micro-deformation of an elastic structure and employs a redundant array of photo-reflectors arranged in four directions to improve sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio. We further present a quadratic-programming-based calibration method that exploits redundancy to suppress noise and enhance resolution compared to least-squares calibration. The sensor is implemented in a compact form factor (96 mm diameter, 12 mm thickness). Experiments demonstrate a maximum error of 0.083%FS and an RMS error of 0.0266 Nm for z-axis torque measurement. Calibration tests show that the proposed calibration achieves a 3 sigma resolution of 0.0224 Nm at 1 kHz without filtering, corresponding to a 2.14 times improvement over the least-squares baseline. Temperature chamber characterization and rational fitting based compensation mitigate zero drift induced by MCU self heating and motor heat. Motor-level validation via torque control and admittance control confirms improved low torque tracking and disturbance robustness relative to current-sensor-based control.

Trajectory-Diversity-Driven Robust Vision-and-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to navigate photo-realistic environments following natural language instructions. Current methods predominantly rely on imitation learning, which suffers from limited generalization and poor robustness to execution perturbations. We present NavGRPO, a reinforcement learning framework that learns goal-directed navigation policies through Group Relative Policy Optimization. By exploring diverse trajectories and optimizing via within-group performance comparisons, our method enables agents to distinguish effective strategies beyond expert paths without requiring additional value networks. Built on ScaleVLN, NavGRPO achieves superior robustness on R2R and REVERIE benchmarks with +3.0% and +1.71% SPL improvements in unseen environments. Under extreme early-stage perturbations, we demonstrate +14.89% SPL gain over the baseline, confirming that goal-directed RL training builds substantially more robust navigation policies. Code and models will be released.