SmartAvatar: Text- and Image-Guided Human Avatar Generation with VLM AI Agents

SmartAvatar is a vision-language-agent-driven framework for generating fully rigged, animation-ready 3D human avatars from a single photo or textual prompt. While diffusion-based methods have made progress in general 3D object generation, they continue to struggle with precise control over human identity, body shape, and animation readiness. In contrast, SmartAvatar leverages the commonsense reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (VLMs) in combination with off-the-shelf parametric human generators to deliver high-quality, customizable avatars. A key innovation is an autonomous verification loop, where the agent renders draft avatars, evaluates facial similarity, anatomical plausibility, and prompt alignment, and iteratively adjusts generation parameters for convergence. This interactive, AI-guided refinement process promotes fine-grained control over both facial and body features, enabling users to iteratively refine their avatars via natural-language conversations. Unlike diffusion models that rely on static pre-trained datasets and offer limited flexibility, SmartAvatar brings users into the modeling loop and ensures continuous improvement through an LLM-driven procedural generation and verification system. The generated avatars are fully rigged and support pose manipulation with consistent identity and appearance, making them suitable for downstream animation and interactive applications. Quantitative benchmarks and user studies demonstrate that SmartAvatar outperforms recent text- and image-driven avatar generation systems in terms of reconstructed mesh quality, identity fidelity, attribute accuracy, and animation readiness, making it a versatile tool for realistic, customizable avatar creation on consumer-grade hardware.

Can Vision Language Models Infer Human Gaze Direction? A Controlled Study

Gaze-referential inference--the ability to infer what others are looking at--is a critical component of a theory of mind that underpins natural human-AI interaction. In a controlled study, we evaluated this skill across 111 Vision Language Models (VLMs) using photos taken with manipulated difficulty and variability, comparing performance with that of human participants (N = 65), and analyzed behaviors using mixed-effects models. We found that 94 of the 111 VLMs failed to do better than random guessing, while humans achieved near-ceiling accuracy. VLMs even respond with each choice almost equally frequently. Are they randomly guessing? Although most VLMs struggle, when we zoom in on five of the top-tier VLMs with above-chance performance, we find that their performance declined with increasing task difficulty but varied only slightly across different prompts and scene objects. These behavioral features cannot be explained by considering them as random guessers. Instead, they likely use a combination of heuristics and guessing such that their performance is subject to the task difficulty but robust to perceptual variations. This suggests that VLMs, lacking gaze inference capability, have yet to become technologies that can naturally interact with humans, but the potential remains.

Leveraging Intermediate Features of Vision Transformer for Face Anti-Spoofing

Face recognition systems are designed to be robust against changes in head pose, illumination, and blurring during image capture. If a malicious person presents a face photo of the registered user, they may bypass the authentication process illegally. Such spoofing attacks need to be detected before face recognition. In this paper, we propose a spoofing attack detection method based on Vision Transformer (ViT) to detect minute differences between live and spoofed face images. The proposed method utilizes the intermediate features of ViT, which have a good balance between local and global features that are important for spoofing attack detection, for calculating loss in training and score in inference. The proposed method also introduces two data augmentation methods: face anti-spoofing data augmentation and patch-wise data augmentation, to improve the accuracy of spoofing attack detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through experiments using the OULU-NPU and SiW datasets.

Dynamic Malware Classification of Windows PE Files using CNNs and Greyscale Images Derived from Runtime API Call Argument Conversion

Malware detection and classification remains a topic of concern for cybersecurity, since it is becoming common for attackers to use advanced obfuscation on their malware to stay undetected. Conventional static analysis is not effective against polymorphic and metamorphic malware as these change their appearance without modifying their behavior, thus defying the analysis by code structure alone. This makes it important to use dynamic detection that monitors malware behavior at runtime. In this paper, we present a dynamic malware categorization framework that extracts API argument calls at the runtime execution of Windows Portable Executable (PE) files. Extracting and encoding the dynamic features of API names, argument return values, and other relative features, we convert raw behavioral data to temporal patterns. To enhance feature portrayal, the generated patterns are subsequently converted into grayscale pictures using a magma colormap. These improved photos are used to teach a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model discriminative features, which allows for reliable and accurate malware classification. Results from experiments indicate that our method, with an average accuracy of 98.36% is effective in classifying different classes of malware and benign by integrating dynamic analysis and deep learning. It not only achieves high classification accuracy but also demonstrates significant resilience against typical evasion strategies.

PhotoArtAgent: Intelligent Photo Retouching with Language Model-Based Artist Agents

Photo retouching is integral to photographic art, extending far beyond simple technical fixes to heighten emotional expression and narrative depth. While artists leverage expertise to create unique visual effects through deliberate adjustments, non-professional users often rely on automated tools that produce visually pleasing results but lack interpretative depth and interactive transparency. In this paper, we introduce PhotoArtAgent, an intelligent system that combines Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with advanced natural language reasoning to emulate the creative process of a professional artist. The agent performs explicit artistic analysis, plans retouching strategies, and outputs precise parameters to Lightroom through an API. It then evaluates the resulting images and iteratively refines them until the desired artistic vision is achieved. Throughout this process, PhotoArtAgent provides transparent, text-based explanations of its creative rationale, fostering meaningful interaction and user control. Experimental results show that PhotoArtAgent not only surpasses existing automated tools in user studies but also achieves results comparable to those of professional human artists.

Sketch Down the FLOPs: Towards Efficient Networks for Human Sketch

As sketch research has collectively matured over time, its adaptation for at-mass commercialisation emerges on the immediate horizon. Despite an already mature research endeavour for photos, there is no research on the efficient inference specifically designed for sketch data. In this paper, we first demonstrate existing state-of-the-art efficient light-weight models designed for photos do not work on sketches. We then propose two sketch-specific components which work in a plug-n-play manner on any photo efficient network to adapt them to work on sketch data. We specifically chose fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) as a demonstrator as the most recognised sketch problem with immediate commercial value. Technically speaking, we first propose a cross-modal knowledge distillation network to transfer existing photo efficient networks to be compatible with sketch, which brings down number of FLOPs and model parameters by 97.96% percent and 84.89% respectively. We then exploit the abstract trait of sketch to introduce a RL-based canvas selector that dynamically adjusts to the abstraction level which further cuts down number of FLOPs by two thirds. The end result is an overall reduction of 99.37% of FLOPs (from 40.18G to 0.254G) when compared with a full network, while retaining the accuracy (33.03% vs 32.77%) -- finally making an efficient network for the sparse sketch data that exhibit even fewer FLOPs than the best photo counterpart.

Generating Fit Check Videos with a Handheld Camera

Self-captured full-body videos are popular, but most deployments require mounted cameras, carefully-framed shots, and repeated practice. We propose a more convenient solution that enables full-body video capture using handheld mobile devices. Our approach takes as input two static photos (front and back) of you in a mirror, along with an IMU motion reference that you perform while holding your mobile phone, and synthesizes a realistic video of you performing a similar target motion. We enable rendering into a new scene, with consistent illumination and shadows. We propose a novel video diffusion-based model to achieve this. Specifically, we propose a parameter-free frame generation strategy, as well as a multi-reference attention mechanism, that effectively integrate appearance information from both the front and back selfies into the video diffusion model. Additionally, we introduce an image-based fine-tuning strategy to enhance frame sharpness and improve the generation of shadows and reflections, achieving a more realistic human-scene composition.

DarkDiff: Advancing Low-Light Raw Enhancement by Retasking Diffusion Models for Camera ISP

High-quality photography in extreme low-light conditions is challenging but impactful for digital cameras. With advanced computing hardware, traditional camera image signal processor (ISP) algorithms are gradually being replaced by efficient deep networks that enhance noisy raw images more intelligently. However, existing regression-based models often minimize pixel errors and result in oversmoothing of low-light photos or deep shadows. Recent work has attempted to address this limitation by training a diffusion model from scratch, yet those models still struggle to recover sharp image details and accurate colors. We introduce a novel framework to enhance low-light raw images by retasking pre-trained generative diffusion models with the camera ISP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in perceptual quality across three challenging low-light raw image benchmarks.

PS4PRO: Pixel-to-pixel Supervision for Photorealistic Rendering and Optimization

Neural rendering methods have gained significant attention for their ability to reconstruct 3D scenes from 2D images. The core idea is to take multiple views as input and optimize the reconstructed scene by minimizing the uncertainty in geometry and appearance across the views. However, the reconstruction quality is limited by the number of input views. This limitation is further pronounced in complex and dynamic scenes, where certain angles of objects are never seen. In this paper, we propose to use video frame interpolation as the data augmentation method for neural rendering. Furthermore, we design a lightweight yet high-quality video frame interpolation model, PS4PRO (Pixel-to-pixel Supervision for Photorealistic Rendering and Optimization). PS4PRO is trained on diverse video datasets, implicitly modeling camera movement as well as real-world 3D geometry. Our model performs as an implicit world prior, enriching the photo supervision for 3D reconstruction. By leveraging the proposed method, we effectively augment existing datasets for neural rendering methods. Our experimental results indicate that our method improves the reconstruction performance on both static and dynamic scenes.

Guess the Age of Photos: An Interactive Web Platform for Historical Image Age Estimation

This paper introduces Guess the Age of Photos, a web platform engaging users in estimating the years of historical photographs through two gamified modes: Guess the Year (predicting a single image's year) and Timeline Challenge (comparing two images to identify the older). Built with Python, Flask, Bootstrap, and PostgreSQL, it uses a 10,150-image subset of the Date Estimation in the Wild dataset (1930-1999). Features like dynamic scoring and leaderboards boost engagement. Evaluated with 113 users and 15,473 gameplays, the platform earned a 4.25/5 satisfaction rating. Users excelled in relative comparisons (65.9% accuracy) over absolute year guesses (25.6% accuracy), with older decades easier to identify. The platform serves as an educational tool, fostering historical awareness and analytical skills via interactive exploration of visual heritage. Furthermore, the platform provides a valuable resource for studying human perception of temporal cues in images and could be used to generate annotated data for training and evaluating computer vision models.