Paired and Unpaired Image to Image Translation using Generative Adversarial Networks

Image to image translation is an active area of research in the field of computer vision, enabling the generation of new images with different styles, textures, or resolutions while preserving their characteristic properties. Recent architectures leverage Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to transform input images from one domain to another. In this work, we focus on the study of both paired and unpaired image translation across multiple image domains. For the paired task, we used a conditional GAN model, and for the unpaired task, we trained it using cycle consistency loss. We experimented with different types of loss functions, multiple Patch-GAN sizes, and model architectures. New quantitative metrics - precision, recall, and FID score - were used for analysis. In addition, a qualitative study of the results of different experiments was conducted.

Training Free Stylized Abstraction

Stylized abstraction synthesizes visually exaggerated yet semantically faithful representations of subjects, balancing recognizability with perceptual distortion. Unlike image-to-image translation, which prioritizes structural fidelity, stylized abstraction demands selective retention of identity cues while embracing stylistic divergence, especially challenging for out-of-distribution individuals. We propose a training-free framework that generates stylized abstractions from a single image using inference-time scaling in vision-language models (VLLMs) to extract identity-relevant features, and a novel cross-domain rectified flow inversion strategy that reconstructs structure based on style-dependent priors. Our method adapts structural restoration dynamically through style-aware temporal scheduling, enabling high-fidelity reconstructions that honor both subject and style. It supports multi-round abstraction-aware generation without fine-tuning. To evaluate this task, we introduce StyleBench, a GPT-based human-aligned metric suited for abstract styles where pixel-level similarity fails. Experiments across diverse abstraction (e.g., LEGO, knitted dolls, South Park) show strong generalization to unseen identities and styles in a fully open-source setup.

CaMMT: Benchmarking Culturally Aware Multimodal Machine Translation

Cultural content poses challenges for machine translation systems due to the differences in conceptualizations between cultures, where language alone may fail to convey sufficient context to capture region-specific meanings. In this work, we investigate whether images can act as cultural context in multimodal translation. We introduce CaMMT, a human-curated benchmark of over 5,800 triples of images along with parallel captions in English and regional languages. Using this dataset, we evaluate five Vision Language Models (VLMs) in text-only and text+image settings. Through automatic and human evaluations, we find that visual context generally improves translation quality, especially in handling Culturally-Specific Items (CSIs), disambiguation, and correct gender usage. By releasing CaMMT, we aim to support broader efforts in building and evaluating multimodal translation systems that are better aligned with cultural nuance and regional variation.

MT$^{3}$: Scaling MLLM-based Text Image Machine Translation via Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Text Image Machine Translation (TIMT)-the task of translating textual content embedded in images-is critical for applications in accessibility, cross-lingual information access, and real-world document understanding. However, TIMT remains a complex challenge due to the need for accurate optical character recognition (OCR), robust visual-text reasoning, and high-quality translation, often requiring cascading multi-stage pipelines. Recent advances in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) have improved reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), but their application to end-to-end TIMT is still underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce MT$^{3}$, the first framework to apply Multi-Task RL to MLLMs for end-to-end TIMT. MT$^{3}$ adopts a multi-task optimization paradigm targeting three key sub-skills: text recognition, context-aware reasoning, and translation. It is trained using a novel multi-mixed reward mechanism that adapts rule-based RL strategies to TIMT's intricacies, offering fine-grained, non-binary feedback across tasks. Furthermore, to facilitate the evaluation of TIMT in authentic cross-cultural and real-world social media contexts, we introduced XHSPost, the first social media TIMT benchmark. Our MT$^{3}$-7B-Zero achieves state-of-the-art results on the latest in-domain MIT-10M benchmark, outperforming strong baselines such as Qwen2.5-VL-72B and InternVL2.5-78B by notable margins across multiple metrics. Additionally, the model shows strong generalization to out-of-distribution language pairs and datasets. In-depth analyses reveal how multi-task synergy, reinforcement learning initialization, curriculum design, and reward formulation contribute to advancing MLLM-driven TIMT.

Multimodal Spatial Language Maps for Robot Navigation and Manipulation

Grounding language to a navigating agent's observations can leverage pretrained multimodal foundation models to match perceptions to object or event descriptions. However, previous approaches remain disconnected from environment mapping, lack the spatial precision of geometric maps, or neglect additional modality information beyond vision. To address this, we propose multimodal spatial language maps as a spatial map representation that fuses pretrained multimodal features with a 3D reconstruction of the environment. We build these maps autonomously using standard exploration. We present two instances of our maps, which are visual-language maps (VLMaps) and their extension to audio-visual-language maps (AVLMaps) obtained by adding audio information. When combined with large language models (LLMs), VLMaps can (i) translate natural language commands into open-vocabulary spatial goals (e.g., "in between the sofa and TV") directly localized in the map, and (ii) be shared across different robot embodiments to generate tailored obstacle maps on demand. Building upon the capabilities above, AVLMaps extend VLMaps by introducing a unified 3D spatial representation integrating audio, visual, and language cues through the fusion of features from pretrained multimodal foundation models. This enables robots to ground multimodal goal queries (e.g., text, images, or audio snippets) to spatial locations for navigation. Additionally, the incorporation of diverse sensory inputs significantly enhances goal disambiguation in ambiguous environments. Experiments in simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our multimodal spatial language maps enable zero-shot spatial and multimodal goal navigation and improve recall by 50% in ambiguous scenarios. These capabilities extend to mobile robots and tabletop manipulators, supporting navigation and interaction guided by visual, audio, and spatial cues.

Image-to-Image Translation with Diffusion Transformers and CLIP-Based Image Conditioning

Image-to-image translation aims to learn a mapping between a source and a target domain, enabling tasks such as style transfer, appearance transformation, and domain adaptation. In this work, we explore a diffusion-based framework for image-to-image translation by adapting Diffusion Transformers (DiT), which combine the denoising capabilities of diffusion models with the global modeling power of transformers. To guide the translation process, we condition the model on image embeddings extracted from a pre-trained CLIP encoder, allowing for fine-grained and structurally consistent translations without relying on text or class labels. We incorporate both a CLIP similarity loss to enforce semantic consistency and an LPIPS perceptual loss to enhance visual fidelity during training. We validate our approach on two benchmark datasets: face2comics, which translates real human faces to comic-style illustrations, and edges2shoes, which translates edge maps to realistic shoe images. Experimental results demonstrate that DiT, combined with CLIP-based conditioning and perceptual similarity objectives, achieves high-quality, semantically faithful translations, offering a promising alternative to GAN-based models for paired image-to-image translation tasks.

A Culturally-diverse Multilingual Multimodal Video Benchmark & Model

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have recently gained attention due to their effectiveness to understand and generate descriptions of visual content. Most existing LMMs are in English language. While few recent works explore multilingual image LMMs, to the best of our knowledge, moving beyond the English language for cultural and linguistic inclusivity is yet to be investigated in the context of video LMMs. In pursuit of more inclusive video LMMs, we introduce a multilingual Video LMM benchmark, named ViMUL-Bench, to evaluate Video LMMs across 14 languages, including both low- and high-resource languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Bengali, Urdu, Sinhala, Tamil, Swedish, and Japanese. Our ViMUL-Bench is designed to rigorously test video LMMs across 15 categories including eight culturally diverse categories, ranging from lifestyles and festivals to foods and rituals and from local landmarks to prominent cultural personalities. ViMUL-Bench comprises both open-ended (short and long-form) and multiple-choice questions spanning various video durations (short, medium, and long) with 8k samples that are manually verified by native language speakers. In addition, we also introduce a machine translated multilingual video training set comprising 1.2 million samples and develop a simple multilingual video LMM, named ViMUL, that is shown to provide a better tradeoff between high-and low-resource languages for video understanding. We hope our ViMUL-Bench and multilingual video LMM along with a large-scale multilingual video training set will help ease future research in developing cultural and linguistic inclusive multilingual video LMMs. Our proposed benchmark, video LMM and training data will be publicly released at https://mbzuai-oryx.github.io/ViMUL/.

Exploring In-Image Machine Translation with Real-World Background

In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to translate texts within images from one language to another. Previous research on IIMT was primarily conducted on simplified scenarios such as images of one-line text with black font in white backgrounds, which is far from reality and impractical for applications in the real world. To make IIMT research practically valuable, it is essential to consider a complex scenario where the text backgrounds are derived from real-world images. To facilitate research of complex scenario IIMT, we design an IIMT dataset that includes subtitle text with real-world background. However previous IIMT models perform inadequately in complex scenarios. To address the issue, we propose the DebackX model, which separates the background and text-image from the source image, performs translation on text-image directly, and fuses the translated text-image with the background, to generate the target image. Experimental results show that our model achieves improvements in both translation quality and visual effect.

Document-Level Text Generation with Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding using Optimal Transport

Document-level text generation tasks are known to be more difficult than sentence-level text generation tasks as they require the understanding of longer context to generate high-quality texts. In this paper, we investigate the adaption of Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding for document-level text generation tasks. MBR decoding makes use of a utility function to estimate the output with the highest expected utility from a set of candidate outputs. Although MBR decoding is shown to be effective in a wide range of sentence-level text generation tasks, its performance on document-level text generation tasks is limited as many of the utility functions are designed for evaluating the utility of sentences. To this end, we propose MBR-OT, a variant of MBR decoding using Wasserstein distance to compute the utility of a document using a sentence-level utility function. The experimental result shows that the performance of MBR-OT outperforms that of the standard MBR in document-level machine translation, text simplification, and dense image captioning tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/jinnaiyuu/mbr-optimal-transport

Rotation-Equivariant Self-Supervised Method in Image Denoising

Self-supervised image denoising methods have garnered significant research attention in recent years, for this kind of method reduces the requirement of large training datasets. Compared to supervised methods, self-supervised methods rely more on the prior embedded in deep networks themselves. As a result, most of the self-supervised methods are designed with Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) architectures, which well capture one of the most important image prior, translation equivariant prior. Inspired by the great success achieved by the introduction of translational equivariance, in this paper, we explore the way to further incorporate another important image prior. Specifically, we first apply high-accuracy rotation equivariant convolution to self-supervised image denoising. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we have proved that simply replacing all the convolution layers with rotation equivariant convolution layers would modify the network into its rotation equivariant version. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that rotation equivariant image prior is introduced to self-supervised image denoising at the network architecture level with a comprehensive theoretical analysis of equivariance errors, which offers a new perspective to the field of self-supervised image denoising. Moreover, to further improve the performance, we design a new mask mechanism to fusion the output of rotation equivariant network and vanilla CNN-based network, and construct an adaptive rotation equivariant framework. Through extensive experiments on three typical methods, we have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.