LVLM-Aided Alignment of Task-Specific Vision Models

In high-stakes domains, small task-specific vision models are crucial due to their low computational requirements and the availability of numerous methods to explain their results. However, these explanations often reveal that the models do not align well with human domain knowledge, relying instead on spurious correlations. This might result in brittle behavior once deployed in the real-world. To address this issue, we introduce a novel and efficient method for aligning small task-specific vision models with human domain knowledge by leveraging the generalization capabilities of a Large Vision Language Model (LVLM). Our LVLM-Aided Visual Alignment (LVLM-VA) method provides a bidirectional interface that translates model behavior into natural language and maps human class-level specifications to image-level critiques, enabling effective interaction between domain experts and the model. Our method demonstrates substantial improvement in aligning model behavior with human specifications, as validated on both synthetic and real-world datasets. We show that it effectively reduces the model's dependence on spurious features and on group-specific biases, without requiring fine-grained feedback.

Seeing Justice Clearly: Handwritten Legal Document Translation with OCR and Vision-Language Models

Handwritten text recognition (HTR) and machine translation continue to pose significant challenges, particularly for low-resource languages like Marathi, which lack large digitized corpora and exhibit high variability in handwriting styles. The conventional approach to address this involves a two-stage pipeline: an OCR system extracts text from handwritten images, which is then translated into the target language using a machine translation model. In this work, we explore and compare the performance of traditional OCR-MT pipelines with Vision Large Language Models that aim to unify these stages and directly translate handwritten text images in a single, end-to-end step. Our motivation is grounded in the urgent need for scalable, accurate translation systems to digitize legal records such as FIRs, charge sheets, and witness statements in India's district and high courts. We evaluate both approaches on a curated dataset of handwritten Marathi legal documents, with the goal of enabling efficient legal document processing, even in low-resource environments. Our findings offer actionable insights toward building robust, edge-deployable solutions that enhance access to legal information for non-native speakers and legal professionals alike.

Rotterdam artery-vein segmentation (RAV) dataset

Purpose: To provide a diverse, high-quality dataset of color fundus images (CFIs) with detailed artery-vein (A/V) segmentation annotations, supporting the development and evaluation of machine learning algorithms for vascular analysis in ophthalmology. Methods: CFIs were sampled from the longitudinal Rotterdam Study (RS), encompassing a wide range of ages, devices, and capture conditions. Images were annotated using a custom interface that allowed graders to label arteries, veins, and unknown vessels on separate layers, starting from an initial vessel segmentation mask. Connectivity was explicitly verified and corrected using connected component visualization tools. Results: The dataset includes 1024x1024-pixel PNG images in three modalities: original RGB fundus images, contrast-enhanced versions, and RGB-encoded A/V masks. Image quality varied widely, including challenging samples typically excluded by automated quality assessment systems, but judged to contain valuable vascular information. Conclusion: This dataset offers a rich and heterogeneous source of CFIs with high-quality segmentations. It supports robust benchmarking and training of machine learning models under real-world variability in image quality and acquisition settings. Translational Relevance: By including connectivity-validated A/V masks and diverse image conditions, this dataset enables the development of clinically applicable, generalizable machine learning tools for retinal vascular analysis, potentially improving automated screening and diagnosis of systemic and ocular diseases.

Two-Step Data Augmentation for Masked Face Detection and Recognition: Turning Fake Masks to Real

Data scarcity and distribution shift pose major challenges for masked face detection and recognition. We propose a two-step generative data augmentation framework that combines rule-based mask warping with unpaired image-to-image translation using GANs, enabling the generation of realistic masked-face samples beyond purely synthetic transformations. Compared to rule-based warping alone, the proposed approach yields consistent qualitative improvements and complements existing GAN-based masked face generation methods such as IAMGAN. We introduce a non-mask preservation loss and stochastic noise injection to stabilize training and enhance sample diversity. Experimental observations highlight the effectiveness of the proposed components and suggest directions for future improvements in data-centric augmentation for face recognition tasks.

MatE: Material Extraction from Single-Image via Geometric Prior

The creation of high-fidelity, physically-based rendering (PBR) materials remains a bottleneck in many graphics pipelines, typically requiring specialized equipment and expert-driven post-processing. To democratize this process, we present MatE, a novel method for generating tileable PBR materials from a single image taken under unconstrained, real-world conditions. Given an image and a user-provided mask, MatE first performs coarse rectification using an estimated depth map as a geometric prior, and then employs a dual-branch diffusion model. Leveraging a learned consistency from rotation-aligned and scale-aligned training data, this model further rectify residual distortions from the coarse result and translate it into a complete set of material maps, including albedo, normal, roughness and height. Our framework achieves invariance to the unknown illumination and perspective of the input image, allowing for the recovery of intrinsic material properties from casual captures. Through comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of our approach, enabling users to create realistic materials from real-world image.

Pixel Super-Resolved Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Using Deep Learning

Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) is a powerful quantitative technique that provides metabolic and molecular contrast, offering strong translational potential for label-free, real-time diagnostics. However, its clinical adoption remains limited by long pixel dwell times and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which impose a stricter resolution-speed trade-off than conventional optical imaging approaches. Here, we introduce FLIM_PSR_k, a deep learning-based multi-channel pixel super-resolution (PSR) framework that reconstructs high-resolution FLIM images from data acquired with up to a 5-fold increased pixel size. The model is trained using the conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) framework, which, compared to diffusion model-based alternatives, delivers a more robust PSR reconstruction with substantially shorter inference times, a crucial advantage for practical deployment. FLIM_PSR_k not only enables faster image acquisition but can also alleviate SNR limitations in autofluorescence-based FLIM. Blind testing on held-out patient-derived tumor tissue samples demonstrates that FLIM_PSR_k reliably achieves a super-resolution factor of k = 5, resulting in a 25-fold increase in the space-bandwidth product of the output images and revealing fine architectural features lost in lower-resolution inputs, with statistically significant improvements across various image quality metrics. By increasing FLIM's effective spatial resolution, FLIM_PSR_k advances lifetime imaging toward faster, higher-resolution, and hardware-flexible implementations compatible with low-numerical-aperture and miniaturized platforms, better positioning FLIM for translational applications.

FrameDiffuser: G-Buffer-Conditioned Diffusion for Neural Forward Frame Rendering

Neural rendering for interactive applications requires translating geometric and material properties (G-buffer) to photorealistic images with realistic lighting on a frame-by-frame basis. While recent diffusion-based approaches show promise for G-buffer-conditioned image synthesis, they face critical limitations: single-image models like RGBX generate frames independently without temporal consistency, while video models like DiffusionRenderer are too computationally expensive for most consumer gaming sets ups and require complete sequences upfront, making them unsuitable for interactive applications where future frames depend on user input. We introduce FrameDiffuser, an autoregressive neural rendering framework that generates temporally consistent, photorealistic frames by conditioning on G-buffer data and the models own previous output. After an initial frame, FrameDiffuser operates purely on incoming G-buffer data, comprising geometry, materials, and surface properties, while using its previously generated frame for temporal guidance, maintaining stable, temporal consistent generation over hundreds to thousands of frames. Our dual-conditioning architecture combines ControlNet for structural guidance with ControlLoRA for temporal coherence. A three-stage training strategy enables stable autoregressive generation. We specialize our model to individual environments, prioritizing consistency and inference speed over broad generalization, demonstrating that environment-specific training achieves superior photorealistic quality with accurate lighting, shadows, and reflections compared to generalized approaches.

IF-Bench: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs for Infrared Images with Generative Visual Prompting

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have led to impressive progress across various benchmarks. However, their capability in understanding infrared images remains unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce IF-Bench, the first high-quality benchmark designed for evaluating multimodal understanding of infrared images. IF-Bench consists of 499 images sourced from 23 infrared datasets and 680 carefully curated visual question-answer pairs, covering 10 essential dimensions of image understanding. Based on this benchmark, we systematically evaluate over 40 open-source and closed-source MLLMs, employing cyclic evaluation, bilingual assessment, and hybrid judgment strategies to enhance the reliability of the results. Our analysis reveals how model scale, architecture, and inference paradigms affect infrared image comprehension, providing valuable insights for this area. Furthermore, we propose a training-free generative visual prompting (GenViP) method, which leverages advanced image editing models to translate infrared images into semantically and spatially aligned RGB counterparts, thereby mitigating domain distribution shifts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently yields significant performance improvements across a wide range of MLLMs. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/casiatao/IF-Bench.

VASA-3D: Lifelike Audio-Driven Gaussian Head Avatars from a Single Image

We propose VASA-3D, an audio-driven, single-shot 3D head avatar generator. This research tackles two major challenges: capturing the subtle expression details present in real human faces, and reconstructing an intricate 3D head avatar from a single portrait image. To accurately model expression details, VASA-3D leverages the motion latent of VASA-1, a method that yields exceptional realism and vividness in 2D talking heads. A critical element of our work is translating this motion latent to 3D, which is accomplished by devising a 3D head model that is conditioned on the motion latent. Customization of this model to a single image is achieved through an optimization framework that employs numerous video frames of the reference head synthesized from the input image. The optimization takes various training losses robust to artifacts and limited pose coverage in the generated training data. Our experiment shows that VASA-3D produces realistic 3D talking heads that cannot be achieved by prior art, and it supports the online generation of 512x512 free-viewpoint videos at up to 75 FPS, facilitating more immersive engagements with lifelike 3D avatars.

SAMM2D: Scale-Aware Multi-Modal 2D Dual-Encoder for High-Sensitivity Intracrania Aneurysm Screening

Effective aneurysm detection is essential to avert life-threatening hemorrhages, but it remains challenging due to the subtle morphology of the aneurysm, pronounced class imbalance, and the scarcity of annotated data. We introduce SAMM2D, a dual-encoder framework that achieves an AUC of 0.686 on the RSNA intracranial aneurysm dataset; an improvement of 32% over the clinical baseline. In a comprehensive ablation across six augmentation regimes, we made a striking discovery: any form of data augmentation degraded performance when coupled with a strong pretrained backbone. Our unaugmented baseline model outperformed all augmented variants by 1.75--2.23 percentage points (p < 0.01), overturning the assumption that "more augmentation is always better" in low-data medical settings. We hypothesize that ImageNet-pretrained features already capture robust invariances, rendering additional augmentations both redundant and disruptive to the learned feature manifold. By calibrating the decision threshold, SAMM2D reaches 95% sensitivity, surpassing average radiologist performance, and translates to a projected \$13.9M in savings per 1,000 patients in screening applications. Grad-CAM visualizations confirm that 85% of true positives attend to relevant vascular regions (62% IoU with expert annotations), demonstrating the model's clinically meaningful focus. Our results suggest that future medical imaging workflows could benefit more from strong pretraining than from increasingly complex augmentation pipelines.