Vision-Language Model Guided Image Restoration

Many image restoration (IR) tasks require both pixel-level fidelity and high-level semantic understanding to recover realistic photos with fine-grained details. However, previous approaches often struggle to effectively leverage both the visual and linguistic knowledge. Recent efforts have attempted to incorporate Vision-language models (VLMs), which excel at aligning visual and textual features, into universal IR. Nevertheless, these methods fail to utilize the linguistic priors to ensure semantic coherence during the restoration process. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose the Vision-Language Model Guided Image Restoration (VLMIR) framework, which leverages the rich vision-language priors of VLMs, such as CLIP, to enhance IR performance through improved visual perception and semantic understanding. Our approach consists of two stages: VLM-based feature extraction and diffusion-based image restoration. In the first stage, we extract complementary visual and linguistic representations of input images by condensing the visual perception and high-level semantic priors through VLMs. Specifically, we align the embeddings of captions from low-quality and high-quality images using a cosine similarity loss with LoRA fine-tuning, and employ a degradation predictor to decompose degradation and clean image content embeddings. These complementary visual and textual embeddings are then integrated into a diffusion-based model via cross-attention mechanisms for enhanced restoration. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that VLMIR achieves superior performance across both universal and degradation-specific IR tasks, underscoring the critical role of integrated visual and linguistic knowledge from VLMs in advancing image restoration capabilities.

Selective, Controlled and Domain-Agnostic Unlearning in Pretrained CLIP: A Training- and Data-Free Approach

Pretrained models like CLIP have demonstrated impressive zero-shot classification capabilities across diverse visual domains, spanning natural images, artistic renderings, and abstract representations. However, real-world applications often demand the removal (or "unlearning") of specific object classes without requiring additional data or retraining, or affecting the model's performance on unrelated tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel training- and data-free unlearning framework that enables three distinct forgetting paradigms: (1) global unlearning of selected objects across all domains, (2) domain-specific knowledge removal (e.g., eliminating sketch representations while preserving photo recognition), and (3) complete unlearning in selective domains. By leveraging a multimodal nullspace through synergistic integration of text prompts and synthesized visual prototypes derived from CLIP's joint embedding space, our method efficiently removes undesired class information while preserving the remaining knowledge. This approach overcomes the limitations of existing retraining-based methods and offers a flexible and computationally efficient solution for controlled model forgetting.

FoodLogAthl-218: Constructing a Real-World Food Image Dataset Using Dietary Management Applications

Food image classification models are crucial for dietary management applications because they reduce the burden of manual meal logging. However, most publicly available datasets for training such models rely on web-crawled images, which often differ from users' real-world meal photos. In this work, we present FoodLogAthl-218, a food image dataset constructed from real-world meal records collected through the dietary management application FoodLog Athl. The dataset contains 6,925 images across 218 food categories, with a total of 14,349 bounding boxes. Rich metadata, including meal date and time, anonymized user IDs, and meal-level context, accompany each image. Unlike conventional datasets-where a predefined class set guides web-based image collection-our data begins with user-submitted photos, and labels are applied afterward. This yields greater intra-class diversity, a natural frequency distribution of meal types, and casual, unfiltered images intended for personal use rather than public sharing. In addition to (1) a standard classification benchmark, we introduce two FoodLog-specific tasks: (2) an incremental fine-tuning protocol that follows the temporal stream of users' logs, and (3) a context-aware classification task where each image contains multiple dishes, and the model must classify each dish by leveraging the overall meal context. We evaluate these tasks using large multimodal models (LMMs). The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/FoodLog/FoodLogAthl-218.

SCAdapter: Content-Style Disentanglement for Diffusion Style Transfer

Diffusion models have emerged as the leading approach for style transfer, yet they struggle with photo-realistic transfers, often producing painting-like results or missing detailed stylistic elements. Current methods inadequately address unwanted influence from original content styles and style reference content features. We introduce SCAdapter, a novel technique leveraging CLIP image space to effectively separate and integrate content and style features. Our key innovation systematically extracts pure content from content images and style elements from style references, ensuring authentic transfers. This approach is enhanced through three components: Controllable Style Adaptive Instance Normalization (CSAdaIN) for precise multi-style blending, KVS Injection for targeted style integration, and a style transfer consistency objective maintaining process coherence. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate SCAdapter significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both conventional and diffusion-based baselines. By eliminating DDIM inversion and inference-stage optimization, our method achieves at least $2\times$ faster inference than other diffusion-based approaches, making it both more effective and efficient for practical applications.

Navigation Around Unknown Space Objects Using Visible-Thermal Image Fusion

As the popularity of on-orbit operations grows, so does the need for precise navigation around unknown resident space objects (RSOs) such as other spacecraft, orbital debris, and asteroids. The use of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms is often studied as a method to map out the surface of an RSO and find the inspector's relative pose using a lidar or conventional camera. However, conventional cameras struggle during eclipse or shadowed periods, and lidar, though robust to lighting conditions, tends to be heavier, bulkier, and more power-intensive. Thermal-infrared cameras can track the target RSO throughout difficult illumination conditions without these limitations. While useful, thermal-infrared imagery lacks the resolution and feature-richness of visible cameras. In this work, images of a target satellite in low Earth orbit are photo-realistically simulated in both visible and thermal-infrared bands. Pixel-level fusion methods are used to create visible/thermal-infrared composites that leverage the best aspects of each camera. Navigation errors from a monocular SLAM algorithm are compared between visible, thermal-infrared, and fused imagery in various lighting and trajectories. Fused imagery yields substantially improved navigation performance over visible-only and thermal-only methods.

Perception-Inspired Color Space Design for Photo White Balance Editing

White balance (WB) is a key step in the image signal processor (ISP) pipeline that mitigates color casts caused by varying illumination and restores the scene's true colors. Currently, sRGB-based WB editing for post-ISP WB correction is widely used to address color constancy failures in the ISP pipeline when the original camera RAW is unavailable. However, additive color models (e.g., sRGB) are inherently limited by fixed nonlinear transformations and entangled color channels, which often impede their generalization to complex lighting conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for WB correction that leverages a perception-inspired Learnable HSI (LHSI) color space. Built upon a cylindrical color model that naturally separates luminance from chromatic components, our framework further introduces dedicated parameters to enhance this disentanglement and learnable mapping to adaptively refine the flexibility. Moreover, a new Mamba-based network is introduced, which is tailored to the characteristics of the proposed LHSI color space. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, highlighting the potential of perception-inspired color space design in computational photography. The source code is available at https://github.com/YangCheng58/WB_Color_Space.

Relightable and Dynamic Gaussian Avatar Reconstruction from Monocular Video

Modeling relightable and animatable human avatars from monocular video is a long-standing and challenging task. Recently, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods have been employed to reconstruct the avatars. However, they often produce unsatisfactory photo-realistic results because of insufficient geometrical details related to body motion, such as clothing wrinkles. In this paper, we propose a 3DGS-based human avatar modeling framework, termed as Relightable and Dynamic Gaussian Avatar (RnD-Avatar), that presents accurate pose-variant deformation for high-fidelity geometrical details. To achieve this, we introduce dynamic skinning weights that define the human avatar's articulation based on pose while also learning additional deformations induced by body motion. We also introduce a novel regularization to capture fine geometric details under sparse visual cues. Furthermore, we present a new multi-view dataset with varied lighting conditions to evaluate relight. Our framework enables realistic rendering of novel poses and views while supporting photo-realistic lighting effects under arbitrary lighting conditions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in novel view synthesis, novel pose rendering, and relighting.

mmWEAVER: Environment-Specific mmWave Signal Synthesis from a Photo and Activity Description

Realistic signal generation and dataset augmentation are essential for advancing mmWave radar applications such as activity recognition and pose estimation, which rely heavily on diverse, and environment-specific signal datasets. However, mmWave signals are inherently complex, sparse, and high-dimensional, making physical simulation computationally expensive. This paper presents mmWeaver, a novel framework that synthesizes realistic, environment-specific complex mmWave signals by modeling them as continuous functions using Implicit Neural Representations (INRs), achieving up to 49-fold compression. mmWeaver incorporates hypernetworks that dynamically generate INR parameters based on environmental context (extracted from RGB-D images) and human motion features (derived from text-to-pose generation via MotionGPT), enabling efficient and adaptive signal synthesis. By conditioning on these semantic and geometric priors, mmWeaver generates diverse I/Q signals at multiple resolutions, preserving phase information critical for downstream tasks such as point cloud estimation and activity classification. Extensive experiments show that mmWeaver achieves a complex SSIM of 0.88 and a PSNR of 35 dB, outperforming existing methods in signal realism while improving activity recognition accuracy by up to 7% and reducing human pose estimation error by up to 15%, all while operating 6-35 times faster than simulation-based approaches.

ViTA-Seg: Vision Transformer for Amodal Segmentation in Robotics

Occlusions in robotic bin picking compromise accurate and reliable grasp planning. We present ViTA-Seg, a class-agnostic Vision Transformer framework for real-time amodal segmentation that leverages global attention to recover complete object masks, including hidden regions. We proposte two architectures: a) Single-Head for amodal mask prediction; b) Dual-Head for amodal and occluded mask prediction. We also introduce ViTA-SimData, a photo-realistic synthetic dataset tailored to industrial bin-picking scenario. Extensive experiments on two amodal benchmarks, COOCA and KINS, demonstrate that ViTA-Seg Dual Head achieves strong amodal and occlusion segmentation accuracy with computational efficiency, enabling robust, real-time robotic manipulation.

Detection of Digital Facial Retouching utilizing Face Beauty Information

Facial retouching to beautify images is widely spread in social media, advertisements, and it is even applied in professional photo studios to let individuals appear younger, remove wrinkles and skin impurities. Generally speaking, this is done to enhance beauty. This is not a problem itself, but when retouched images are used as biometric samples and enrolled in a biometric system, it is one. Since previous work has proven facial retouching to be a challenge for face recognition systems,the detection of facial retouching becomes increasingly necessary. This work proposes to study and analyze changes in beauty assessment algorithms of retouched images, assesses different feature extraction methods based on artificial intelligence in order to improve retouching detection, and evaluates whether face beauty can be exploited to enhance the detection rate. In a scenario where the attacking retouching algorithm is unknown, this work achieved 1.1% D-EER on single image detection.