Spatial-Temporal Graph Mamba for Music-Guided Dance Video Synthesis

We propose a novel spatial-temporal graph Mamba (STG-Mamba) for the music-guided dance video synthesis task, i.e., to translate the input music to a dance video. STG-Mamba consists of two translation mappings: music-to-skeleton translation and skeleton-to-video translation. In the music-to-skeleton translation, we introduce a novel spatial-temporal graph Mamba (STGM) block to effectively construct skeleton sequences from the input music, capturing dependencies between joints in both the spatial and temporal dimensions. For the skeleton-to-video translation, we propose a novel self-supervised regularization network to translate the generated skeletons, along with a conditional image, into a dance video. Lastly, we collect a new skeleton-to-video translation dataset from the Internet, containing 54,944 video clips. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STG-Mamba achieves significantly better results than existing methods.

EC-Flow: Enabling Versatile Robotic Manipulation from Action-Unlabeled Videos via Embodiment-Centric Flow

Current language-guided robotic manipulation systems often require low-level action-labeled datasets for imitation learning. While object-centric flow prediction methods mitigate this issue, they remain limited to scenarios involving rigid objects with clear displacement and minimal occlusion. In this work, we present Embodiment-Centric Flow (EC-Flow), a framework that directly learns manipulation from action-unlabeled videos by predicting embodiment-centric flow. Our key insight is that incorporating the embodiment's inherent kinematics significantly enhances generalization to versatile manipulation scenarios, including deformable object handling, occlusions, and non-object-displacement tasks. To connect the EC-Flow with language instructions and object interactions, we further introduce a goal-alignment module by jointly optimizing movement consistency and goal-image prediction. Moreover, translating EC-Flow to executable robot actions only requires a standard robot URDF (Unified Robot Description Format) file to specify kinematic constraints across joints, which makes it easy to use in practice. We validate EC-Flow on both simulation (Meta-World) and real-world tasks, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance in occluded object handling (62% improvement), deformable object manipulation (45% improvement), and non-object-displacement tasks (80% improvement) than prior state-of-the-art object-centric flow methods. For more information, see our project website at https://ec-flow1.github.io .

NeoBabel: A Multilingual Open Tower for Visual Generation

Text-to-image generation advancements have been predominantly English-centric, creating barriers for non-English speakers and perpetuating digital inequities. While existing systems rely on translation pipelines, these introduce semantic drift, computational overhead, and cultural misalignment. We introduce NeoBabel, a novel multilingual image generation framework that sets a new Pareto frontier in performance, efficiency and inclusivity, supporting six languages: English, Chinese, Dutch, French, Hindi, and Persian. The model is trained using a combination of large-scale multilingual pretraining and high-resolution instruction tuning. To evaluate its capabilities, we expand two English-only benchmarks to multilingual equivalents: m-GenEval and m-DPG. NeoBabel achieves state-of-the-art multilingual performance while retaining strong English capability, scoring 0.75 on m-GenEval and 0.68 on m-DPG. Notably, it performs on par with leading models on English tasks while outperforming them by +0.11 and +0.09 on multilingual benchmarks, even though these models are built on multilingual base LLMs. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our targeted alignment training for preserving and extending crosslingual generalization. We further introduce two new metrics to rigorously assess multilingual alignment and robustness to code-mixed prompts. Notably, NeoBabel matches or exceeds English-only models while being 2-4x smaller. We release an open toolkit, including all code, model checkpoints, a curated dataset of 124M multilingual text-image pairs, and standardized multilingual evaluation protocols, to advance inclusive AI research. Our work demonstrates that multilingual capability is not a trade-off but a catalyst for improved robustness, efficiency, and cultural fidelity in generative AI.

BronchoGAN: Anatomically consistent and domain-agnostic image-to-image translation for video bronchoscopy

The limited availability of bronchoscopy images makes image synthesis particularly interesting for training deep learning models. Robust image translation across different domains -- virtual bronchoscopy, phantom as well as in-vivo and ex-vivo image data -- is pivotal for clinical applications. This paper proposes BronchoGAN introducing anatomical constraints for image-to-image translation being integrated into a conditional GAN. In particular, we force bronchial orifices to match across input and output images. We further propose to use foundation model-generated depth images as intermediate representation ensuring robustness across a variety of input domains establishing models with substantially less reliance on individual training datasets. Moreover our intermediate depth image representation allows to easily construct paired image data for training. Our experiments showed that input images from different domains (e.g. virtual bronchoscopy, phantoms) can be successfully translated to images mimicking realistic human airway appearance. We demonstrated that anatomical settings (i.e. bronchial orifices) can be robustly preserved with our approach which is shown qualitatively and quantitatively by means of improved FID, SSIM and dice coefficients scores. Our anatomical constraints enabled an improvement in the Dice coefficient of up to 0.43 for synthetic images. Through foundation models for intermediate depth representations, bronchial orifice segmentation integrated as anatomical constraints into conditional GANs we are able to robustly translate images from different bronchoscopy input domains. BronchoGAN allows to incorporate public CT scan data (virtual bronchoscopy) in order to generate large-scale bronchoscopy image datasets with realistic appearance. BronchoGAN enables to bridge the gap of missing public bronchoscopy images.

DocShaDiffusion: Diffusion Model in Latent Space for Document Image Shadow Removal

Document shadow removal is a crucial task in the field of document image enhancement. However, existing methods tend to remove shadows with constant color background and ignore color shadows. In this paper, we first design a diffusion model in latent space for document image shadow removal, called DocShaDiffusion. It translates shadow images from pixel space to latent space, enabling the model to more easily capture essential features. To address the issue of color shadows, we design a shadow soft-mask generation module (SSGM). It is able to produce accurate shadow mask and add noise into shadow regions specially. Guided by the shadow mask, a shadow mask-aware guided diffusion module (SMGDM) is proposed to remove shadows from document images by supervising the diffusion and denoising process. We also propose a shadow-robust perceptual feature loss to preserve details and structures in document images. Moreover, we develop a large-scale synthetic document color shadow removal dataset (SDCSRD). It simulates the distribution of realistic color shadows and provides powerful supports for the training of models. Experiments on three public datasets validate the proposed method's superiority over state-of-the-art. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.

SafePTR: Token-Level Jailbreak Defense in Multimodal LLMs via Prune-then-Restore Mechanism

By incorporating visual inputs, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) extend LLMs to support visual reasoning. However, this integration also introduces new vulnerabilities, making MLLMs susceptible to multimodal jailbreak attacks and hindering their safe deployment.Existing defense methods, including Image-to-Text Translation, Safe Prompting, and Multimodal Safety Tuning, attempt to address this by aligning multimodal inputs with LLMs' built-in safeguards.Yet, they fall short in uncovering root causes of multimodal vulnerabilities, particularly how harmful multimodal tokens trigger jailbreak in MLLMs? Consequently, they remain vulnerable to text-driven multimodal jailbreaks, often exhibiting overdefensive behaviors and imposing heavy training overhead.To bridge this gap, we present an comprehensive analysis of where, how and which harmful multimodal tokens bypass safeguards in MLLMs. Surprisingly, we find that less than 1% tokens in early-middle layers are responsible for inducing unsafe behaviors, highlighting the potential of precisely removing a small subset of harmful tokens, without requiring safety tuning, can still effectively improve safety against jailbreaks. Motivated by this, we propose Safe Prune-then-Restore (SafePTR), an training-free defense framework that selectively prunes harmful tokens at vulnerable layers while restoring benign features at subsequent layers.Without incurring additional computational overhead, SafePTR significantly enhances the safety of MLLMs while preserving efficiency. Extensive evaluations across three MLLMs and five benchmarks demonstrate SafePTR's state-of-the-art performance in mitigating jailbreak risks without compromising utility.

SpecCLIP: Aligning and Translating Spectroscopic Measurements for Stars

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language understanding through vast datasets and large-scale parameterization. Inspired by this success, we present SpecCLIP, a foundation model framework that extends LLM-inspired methodologies to stellar spectral analysis. Stellar spectra, akin to structured language, encode rich physical and chemical information about stars. By training foundation models on large-scale spectral datasets, our goal is to learn robust and informative embeddings that support diverse downstream applications. As a proof of concept, SpecCLIP involves pre-training on two spectral types--LAMOST low-resolution and Gaia XP--followed by contrastive alignment using the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) framework, adapted to associate spectra from different instruments. This alignment is complemented by auxiliary decoders that preserve spectrum-specific information and enable translation (prediction) between spectral types, with the former achieved by maximizing mutual information between embeddings and input spectra. The result is a cross-spectrum framework enabling intrinsic calibration and flexible applications across instruments. We demonstrate that fine-tuning these models on moderate-sized labeled datasets improves adaptability to tasks such as stellar-parameter estimation and chemical-abundance determination. SpecCLIP also enhances the accuracy and precision of parameter estimates benchmarked against external survey data. Additionally, its similarity search and cross-spectrum prediction capabilities offer potential for anomaly detection. Our results suggest that contrastively trained foundation models enriched with spectrum-aware decoders can advance precision stellar spectroscopy.

ShapeEmbed: a self-supervised learning framework for 2D contour quantification

The shape of objects is an important source of visual information in a wide range of applications. One of the core challenges of shape quantification is to ensure that the extracted measurements remain invariant to transformations that preserve an object's intrinsic geometry, such as changing its size, orientation, and position in the image. In this work, we introduce ShapeEmbed, a self-supervised representation learning framework designed to encode the contour of objects in 2D images, represented as a Euclidean distance matrix, into a shape descriptor that is invariant to translation, scaling, rotation, reflection, and point indexing. Our approach overcomes the limitations of traditional shape descriptors while improving upon existing state-of-the-art autoencoder-based approaches. We demonstrate that the descriptors learned by our framework outperform their competitors in shape classification tasks on natural and biological images. We envision our approach to be of particular relevance to biological imaging applications.

How Well Does GPT-4o Understand Vision? Evaluating Multimodal Foundation Models on Standard Computer Vision Tasks

Multimodal foundation models, such as GPT-4o, have recently made remarkable progress, but it is not clear where exactly these models stand in terms of understanding vision. In this paper, we benchmark the performance of popular multimodal foundation models (GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen2-VL, Llama 3.2) on standard computer vision tasks (semantic segmentation, object detection, image classification, depth and surface normal prediction) using established datasets (e.g., COCO, ImageNet and its variants, etc). The main challenges to performing this are: 1) most models are trained to output text and cannot natively express versatile domains, such as segments or 3D geometry, and 2) many leading models are proprietary and accessible only at an API level, i.e., there is no weight access to adapt them. We address these challenges by translating standard vision tasks into equivalent text-promptable and API-compatible tasks via prompt chaining to create a standardized benchmarking framework. We observe that 1) the models are not close to the state-of-the-art specialist models at any task. However, 2) they are respectable generalists; this is remarkable as they are presumably trained on primarily image-text-based tasks. 3) They perform semantic tasks notably better than geometric ones. 4) While the prompt-chaining techniques affect performance, better models exhibit less sensitivity to prompt variations. 5) GPT-4o performs the best among non-reasoning models, securing the top position in 4 out of 6 tasks, 6) reasoning models, e.g. o3, show improvements in geometric tasks, and 7) a preliminary analysis of models with native image generation, like the latest GPT-4o, shows they exhibit quirks like hallucinations and spatial misalignments.

ThermalDiffusion: Visual-to-Thermal Image-to-Image Translation for Autonomous Navigation

Autonomous systems rely on sensors to estimate the environment around them. However, cameras, LiDARs, and RADARs have their own limitations. In nighttime or degraded environments such as fog, mist, or dust, thermal cameras can provide valuable information regarding the presence of objects of interest due to their heat signature. They make it easy to identify humans and vehicles that are usually at higher temperatures compared to their surroundings. In this paper, we focus on the adaptation of thermal cameras for robotics and automation, where the biggest hurdle is the lack of data. Several multi-modal datasets are available for driving robotics research in tasks such as scene segmentation, object detection, and depth estimation, which are the cornerstone of autonomous systems. However, they are found to be lacking in thermal imagery. Our paper proposes a solution to augment these datasets with synthetic thermal data to enable widespread and rapid adaptation of thermal cameras. We explore the use of conditional diffusion models to convert existing RGB images to thermal images using self-attention to learn the thermal properties of real-world objects.