FaceRefiner: High-Fidelity Facial Texture Refinement with Differentiable Rendering-based Style Transfer

Recent facial texture generation methods prefer to use deep networks to synthesize image content and then fill in the UV map, thus generating a compelling full texture from a single image. Nevertheless, the synthesized texture UV map usually comes from a space constructed by the training data or the 2D face generator, which limits the methods' generalization ability for in-the-wild input images. Consequently, their facial details, structures and identity may not be consistent with the input. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a style transfer-based facial texture refinement method named FaceRefiner. FaceRefiner treats the 3D sampled texture as style and the output of a texture generation method as content. The photo-realistic style is then expected to be transferred from the style image to the content image. Different from current style transfer methods that only transfer high and middle level information to the result, our style transfer method integrates differentiable rendering to also transfer low level (or pixel level) information in the visible face regions. The main benefit of such multi-level information transfer is that, the details, structures and semantics in the input can thus be well preserved. The extensive experiments on Multi-PIE, CelebA and FFHQ datasets demonstrate that our refinement method can improve the texture quality and the face identity preserving ability, compared with state-of-the-arts.

DreamLoop: Controllable Cinemagraph Generation from a Single Photograph

Cinemagraphs, which combine static photographs with selective, looping motion, offer unique artistic appeal. Generating them from a single photograph in a controllable manner is particularly challenging. Existing image-animation techniques are restricted to simple, low-frequency motions and operate only in narrow domains with repetitive textures like water and smoke. In contrast, large-scale video diffusion models are not tailored for cinemagraph constraints and lack the specialized data required to generate seamless, controlled loops. We present DreamLoop, a controllable video synthesis framework dedicated to generating cinemagraphs from a single photo without requiring any cinemagraph training data. Our key idea is to adapt a general video diffusion model by training it on two objectives: temporal bridging and motion conditioning. This strategy enables flexible cinemagraph generation. During inference, by using the input image as both the first- and last- frame condition, we enforce a seamless loop. By conditioning on static tracks, we maintain a static background. Finally, by providing a user-specified motion path for a target object, our method provides intuitive control over the animation's trajectory and timing. To our knowledge, DreamLoop is the first method to enable cinemagraph generation for general scenes with flexible and intuitive controls. We demonstrate that our method produces high-quality, complex cinemagraphs that align with user intent, outperforming existing approaches.

VisuoTactile 6D Pose Estimation of an In-Hand Object using Vision and Tactile Sensor Data

Knowledge of the 6D pose of an object can benefit in-hand object manipulation. In-hand 6D object pose estimation is challenging because of heavy occlusion produced by the robot's grippers, which can have an adverse effect on methods that rely on vision data only. Many robots are equipped with tactile sensors at their fingertips that could be used to complement vision data. In this paper, we present a method that uses both tactile and vision data to estimate the pose of an object grasped in a robot's hand. To address challenges like lack of standard representation for tactile data and sensor fusion, we propose the use of point clouds to represent object surfaces in contact with the tactile sensor and present a network architecture based on pixel-wise dense fusion. We also extend NVIDIA's Deep Learning Dataset Synthesizer to produce synthetic photo-realistic vision data and corresponding tactile point clouds. Results suggest that using tactile data in addition to vision data improves the 6D pose estimate, and our network generalizes successfully from synthetic training to real physical robots.

SPoRC-VIST: A Benchmark for Evaluating Generative Natural Narrative in Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in descriptive tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering (VQA). However, their ability to generate engaging, long-form narratives -- specifically multi-speaker podcast dialogues -- remains under-explored and difficult to evaluate. Standard metrics like BLEU and ROUGE fail to capture the nuances of conversational naturalness, personality, and narrative flow, often rewarding safe, repetitive outputs over engaging storytelling. In this work, we present a novel pipeline for end-to-end visual podcast generation, and fine-tune a Qwen3-VL-32B model on a curated dataset of 4,000 image-dialogue pairs. Crucially, we use a synthetic-to-real training strategy: we train on high-quality podcast dialogues from the Structured Podcast Research Corpus (SPoRC) paired with synthetically generated imagery, and evaluate on real-world photo sequences from the Visual Storytelling Dataset (VIST). This rigorous setup tests the model's ability to generalize from synthetic training data to real-world visual domains. We propose a comprehensive evaluation framework that moves beyond textual overlap, and use AI-as-a-judge (Gemini 3 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5, GPT 5.2) and novel style metrics (average turn length, speaker switch rate) to assess quality. Our experiments demonstrate that our fine-tuned 32B model significantly outperforms a 235B base model in conversational naturalness ($>$80\% win rate) and narrative depth (+50\% turn length), while maintaining identical visual grounding capabilities (CLIPScore: 20.39).

Fixed-Threshold Evaluation of a Hybrid CNN-ViT for AI-Generated Image Detection Across Photos and Art

AI image generators create both photorealistic images and stylized art, necessitating robust detectors that maintain performance under common post-processing transformations (JPEG compression, blur, downscaling). Existing methods optimize single metrics without addressing deployment-critical factors such as operating point selection and fixed-threshold robustness. This work addresses misleading robustness estimates by introducing a fixed-threshold evaluation protocol that holds decision thresholds, selected once on clean validation data, fixed across all post-processing transformations. Traditional methods retune thresholds per condition, artificially inflating robustness estimates and masking deployment failures. We report deployment-relevant performance at three operating points (Low-FPR, ROC-optimal, Best-F1) under systematic degradation testing using a lightweight CNN-ViT hybrid with gated fusion and optional frequency enhancement. Our evaluation exposes a statistically validated forensic-semantic spectrum: frequency-aided CNNs excel on pristine photos but collapse under compression (93.33% to 61.49%), whereas ViTs degrade minimally (92.86% to 88.36%) through robust semantic pattern recognition. Multi-seed experiments demonstrate that all architectures achieve 15% higher AUROC on artistic content (0.901-0.907) versus photorealistic images (0.747-0.759), confirming that semantic patterns provide fundamentally more reliable detection cues than forensic artifacts. Our hybrid approach achieves balanced cross-domain performance: 91.4% accuracy on tiny-genimage photos, 89.7% on AiArtData art/graphics, and 98.3% (competitive) on CIFAKE. Fixed-threshold evaluation eliminates retuning inflation, reveals genuine robustness gaps, and yields actionable deployment guidance: prefer CNNs for clean photo verification, ViTs for compressed content, and hybrids for art/graphics screening.

Pro-Pose: Unpaired Full-Body Portrait Synthesis via Canonical UV Maps

Photographs of people taken by professional photographers typically present the person in beautiful lighting, with an interesting pose, and flattering quality. This is unlike common photos people can take of themselves. In this paper, we explore how to create a ``professional'' version of a person's photograph, i.e., in a chosen pose, in a simple environment, with good lighting, and standard black top/bottom clothing. A key challenge is to preserve the person's unique identity, face and body features while transforming the photo. If there would exist a large paired dataset of the same person photographed both ``in the wild'' and by a professional photographer, the problem would potentially be easier to solve. However, such data does not exist, especially for a large variety of identities. To that end, we propose two key insights: 1) Our method transforms the input photo and person's face to a canonical UV space, which is further coupled with reposing methodology to model occlusions and novel view synthesis. Operating in UV space allows us to leverage existing unpaired datasets. 2) We personalize the output photo via multi image finetuning. Our approach yields high-quality, reposed portraits and achieves strong qualitative and quantitative performance on real-world imagery.

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.