OmniMap: A General Mapping Framework Integrating Optics, Geometry, and Semantics

Robotic systems demand accurate and comprehensive 3D environment perception, requiring simultaneous capture of photo-realistic appearance (optical), precise layout shape (geometric), and open-vocabulary scene understanding (semantic). Existing methods typically achieve only partial fulfillment of these requirements while exhibiting optical blurring, geometric irregularities, and semantic ambiguities. To address these challenges, we propose OmniMap. Overall, OmniMap represents the first online mapping framework that simultaneously captures optical, geometric, and semantic scene attributes while maintaining real-time performance and model compactness. At the architectural level, OmniMap employs a tightly coupled 3DGS-Voxel hybrid representation that combines fine-grained modeling with structural stability. At the implementation level, OmniMap identifies key challenges across different modalities and introduces several innovations: adaptive camera modeling for motion blur and exposure compensation, hybrid incremental representation with normal constraints, and probabilistic fusion for robust instance-level understanding. Extensive experiments show OmniMap's superior performance in rendering fidelity, geometric accuracy, and zero-shot semantic segmentation compared to state-of-the-art methods across diverse scenes. The framework's versatility is further evidenced through a variety of downstream applications, including multi-domain scene Q&A, interactive editing, perception-guided manipulation, and map-assisted navigation.

Quadrotor Navigation using Reinforcement Learning with Privileged Information

This paper presents a reinforcement learning-based quadrotor navigation method that leverages efficient differentiable simulation, novel loss functions, and privileged information to navigate around large obstacles. Prior learning-based methods perform well in scenes that exhibit narrow obstacles, but struggle when the goal location is blocked by large walls or terrain. In contrast, the proposed method utilizes time-of-arrival (ToA) maps as privileged information and a yaw alignment loss to guide the robot around large obstacles. The policy is evaluated in photo-realistic simulation environments containing large obstacles, sharp corners, and dead-ends. Our approach achieves an 86% success rate and outperforms baseline strategies by 34%. We deploy the policy onboard a custom quadrotor in outdoor cluttered environments both during the day and night. The policy is validated across 20 flights, covering 589 meters without collisions at speeds up to 4 m/s.

A Multidimensional AI-powered Framework for Analyzing Tourist Perception in Historic Urban Quarters: A Case Study in Shanghai

Historic urban quarters play a vital role in preserving cultural heritage while serving as vibrant spaces for tourism and everyday life. Understanding how tourists perceive these environments is essential for sustainable, human-centered urban planning. This study proposes a multidimensional AI-powered framework for analyzing tourist perception in historic urban quarters using multimodal data from social media. Applied to twelve historic quarters in central Shanghai, the framework integrates focal point extraction, color theme analysis, and sentiment mining. Visual focus areas are identified from tourist-shared photos using a fine-tuned semantic segmentation model. To assess aesthetic preferences, dominant colors are extracted using a clustering method, and their spatial distribution across quarters is analyzed. Color themes are further compared between social media photos and real-world street views, revealing notable shifts. This divergence highlights potential gaps between visual expectations and the built environment, reflecting both stylistic preferences and perceptual bias. Tourist reviews are evaluated through a hybrid sentiment analysis approach combining a rule-based method and a multi-task BERT model. Satisfaction is assessed across four dimensions: tourist activities, built environment, service facilities, and business formats. The results reveal spatial variations in aesthetic appeal and emotional response. Rather than focusing on a single technical innovation, this framework offers an integrated, data-driven approach to decoding tourist perception and contributes to informed decision-making in tourism, heritage conservation, and the design of aesthetically engaging public spaces.

Assessing the Geolocation Capabilities, Limitations and Societal Risks of Generative Vision-Language Models

Geo-localization is the task of identifying the location of an image using visual cues alone. It has beneficial applications, such as improving disaster response, enhancing navigation, and geography education. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly demonstrating capabilities as accurate image geo-locators. This brings significant privacy risks, including those related to stalking and surveillance, considering the widespread uses of AI models and sharing of photos on social media. The precision of these models is likely to improve in the future. Despite these risks, there is little work on systematically evaluating the geolocation precision of Generative VLMs, their limits and potential for unintended inferences. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive assessment of the geolocation capabilities of 25 state-of-the-art VLMs on four benchmark image datasets captured in diverse environments. Our results offer insight into the internal reasoning of VLMs and highlight their strengths, limitations, and potential societal risks. Our findings indicate that current VLMs perform poorly on generic street-level images yet achieve notably high accuracy (61\%) on images resembling social media content, raising significant and urgent privacy concerns.

Synthetic Image Detection via Spectral Gaps of QC-RBIM Nishimori Bethe-Hessian Operators

The rapid advance of deep generative models such as GANs and diffusion networks now produces images that are virtually indistinguishable from genuine photographs, undermining media forensics and biometric security. Supervised detectors quickly lose effectiveness on unseen generators or after adversarial post-processing, while existing unsupervised methods that rely on low-level statistical cues remain fragile. We introduce a physics-inspired, model-agnostic detector that treats synthetic-image identification as a community-detection problem on a sparse weighted graph. Image features are first extracted with pretrained CNNs and reduced to 32 dimensions, each feature vector becomes a node of a Multi-Edge Type QC-LDPC graph. Pairwise similarities are transformed into edge couplings calibrated at the Nishimori temperature, producing a Random Bond Ising Model (RBIM) whose Bethe-Hessian spectrum exhibits a characteristic gap when genuine community structure (real images) is present. Synthetic images violate the Nishimori symmetry and therefore lack such gaps. We validate the approach on binary tasks cat versus dog and male versus female using real photos from Flickr-Faces-HQ and CelebA and synthetic counterparts generated by GANs and diffusion models. Without any labeled synthetic data or retraining of the feature extractor, the detector achieves over 94% accuracy. Spectral analysis shows multiple well separated gaps for real image sets and a collapsed spectrum for generated ones. Our contributions are threefold: a novel LDPC graph construction that embeds deep image features, an analytical link between Nishimori temperature RBIM and the Bethe-Hessian spectrum providing a Bayes optimal detection criterion; and a practical, unsupervised synthetic image detector robust to new generative architectures. Future work will extend the framework to video streams and multi-class anomaly detection.

RDDM: Practicing RAW Domain Diffusion Model for Real-world Image Restoration

We present the RAW domain diffusion model (RDDM), an end-to-end diffusion model that restores photo-realistic images directly from the sensor RAW data. While recent sRGB-domain diffusion methods achieve impressive results, they are caught in a dilemma between high fidelity and realistic generation. As these models process lossy sRGB inputs and neglect the accessibility of the sensor RAW images in many scenarios, e.g., in image and video capturing in edge devices, resulting in sub-optimal performance. RDDM bypasses this limitation by directly restoring images in the RAW domain, replacing the conventional two-stage image signal processing (ISP) + IR pipeline. However, a simple adaptation of pre-trained diffusion models to the RAW domain confronts the out-of-distribution (OOD) issues. To this end, we propose: (1) a RAW-domain VAE (RVAE) learning optimal latent representations, (2) a differentiable Post Tone Processing (PTP) module enabling joint RAW and sRGB space optimization. To compensate for the deficiency in the dataset, we develop a scalable degradation pipeline synthesizing RAW LQ-HQ pairs from existing sRGB datasets for large-scale training. Furthermore, we devise a configurable multi-bayer (CMB) LoRA module handling diverse RAW patterns such as RGGB, BGGR, etc. Extensive experiments demonstrate RDDM's superiority over state-of-the-art sRGB diffusion methods, yielding higher fidelity results with fewer artifacts.

MoCHA-former: Moiré-Conditioned Hybrid Adaptive Transformer for Video Demoiréing

Recent advances in portable imaging have made camera-based screen capture ubiquitous. Unfortunately, frequency aliasing between the camera's color filter array (CFA) and the display's sub-pixels induces moir\'e patterns that severely degrade captured photos and videos. Although various demoir\'eing models have been proposed to remove such moir\'e patterns, these approaches still suffer from several limitations: (i) spatially varying artifact strength within a frame, (ii) large-scale and globally spreading structures, (iii) channel-dependent statistics and (iv) rapid temporal fluctuations across frames. We address these issues with the Moir\'e Conditioned Hybrid Adaptive Transformer (MoCHA-former), which comprises two key components: Decoupled Moir\'e Adaptive Demoir\'eing (DMAD) and Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Demoir\'eing (STAD). DMAD separates moir\'e and content via a Moir\'e Decoupling Block (MDB) and a Detail Decoupling Block (DDB), then produces moir\'e-adaptive features using a Moir\'e Conditioning Block (MCB) for targeted restoration. STAD introduces a Spatial Fusion Block (SFB) with window attention to capture large-scale structures, and a Feature Channel Attention (FCA) to model channel dependence in RAW frames. To ensure temporal consistency, MoCHA-former performs implicit frame alignment without any explicit alignment module. We analyze moir\'e characteristics through qualitative and quantitative studies, and evaluate on two video datasets covering RAW and sRGB domains. MoCHA-former consistently surpasses prior methods across PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS.

Structure-preserving Feature Alignment for Old Photo Colorization

Deep learning techniques have made significant advancements in reference-based colorization by training on large-scale datasets. However, directly applying these methods to the task of colorizing old photos is challenging due to the lack of ground truth and the notorious domain gap between natural gray images and old photos. To address this issue, we propose a novel CNN-based algorithm called SFAC, i.e., Structure-preserving Feature Alignment Colorizer. SFAC is trained on only two images for old photo colorization, eliminating the reliance on big data and allowing direct processing of the old photo itself to overcome the domain gap problem. Our primary objective is to establish semantic correspondence between the two images, ensuring that semantically related objects have similar colors. We achieve this through a feature distribution alignment loss that remains robust to different metric choices. However, utilizing robust semantic correspondence to transfer color from the reference to the old photo can result in inevitable structure distortions. To mitigate this, we introduce a structure-preserving mechanism that incorporates a perceptual constraint at the feature level and a frozen-updated pyramid at the pixel level. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for old photo colorization, as confirmed by qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Communication Efficient Robotic Mixed Reality with Gaussian Splatting Cross-Layer Optimization

Realizing low-cost communication in robotic mixed reality (RoboMR) systems presents a challenge, due to the necessity of uploading high-resolution images through wireless channels. This paper proposes Gaussian splatting (GS) RoboMR (GSMR), which enables the simulator to opportunistically render a photo-realistic view from the robot's pose by calling ``memory'' from a GS model, thus reducing the need for excessive image uploads. However, the GS model may involve discrepancies compared to the actual environments. To this end, a GS cross-layer optimization (GSCLO) framework is further proposed, which jointly optimizes content switching (i.e., deciding whether to upload image or not) and power allocation (i.e., adjusting to content profiles) across different frames by minimizing a newly derived GSMR loss function. The GSCLO problem is addressed by an accelerated penalty optimization (APO) algorithm that reduces computational complexity by over $10$x compared to traditional branch-and-bound and search algorithms. Moreover, variants of GSCLO are presented to achieve robust, low-power, and multi-robot GSMR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed GSMR paradigm and GSCLO method achieve significant improvements over existing benchmarks on both wheeled and legged robots in terms of diverse metrics in various scenarios. For the first time, it is found that RoboMR can be achieved with ultra-low communication costs, and mixture of data is useful for enhancing GS performance in dynamic scenarios.

TechOps: Technical Documentation Templates for the AI Act

Operationalizing the EU AI Act requires clear technical documentation to ensure AI systems are transparent, traceable, and accountable. Existing documentation templates for AI systems do not fully cover the entire AI lifecycle while meeting the technical documentation requirements of the AI Act. This paper addresses those shortcomings by introducing open-source templates and examples for documenting data, models, and applications to provide sufficient documentation for certifying compliance with the AI Act. These templates track the system status over the entire AI lifecycle, ensuring traceability, reproducibility, and compliance with the AI Act. They also promote discoverability and collaboration, reduce risks, and align with best practices in AI documentation and governance. The templates are evaluated and refined based on user feedback to enable insights into their usability and implementability. We then validate the approach on real-world scenarios, providing examples that further guide their implementation: the data template is followed to document a skin tones dataset created to support fairness evaluations of downstream computer vision models and human-centric applications; the model template is followed to document a neural network for segmenting human silhouettes in photos. The application template is tested on a system deployed for construction site safety using real-time video analytics and sensor data. Our results show that TechOps can serve as a practical tool to enable oversight for regulatory compliance and responsible AI development.