Daily Papers

Existing codecs are designed to eliminate intrinsic redundancies to create a compact representation for compression. However, strong external priors from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have not been explicitly explored in video compression. Herein, we introduce a unified paradigm for Cross-Modality Video Coding (CMVC), which is a pioneering approach to explore multimodality representation and video generative models in video coding. Specifically, on the encoder side, we disentangle a video into spatial content and motion components, which are subsequently transformed into distinct modalities to achieve very compact representation by leveraging MLLMs. During decoding, previously encoded components and video generation models are leveraged to create multiple encoding-decoding modes that optimize video reconstruction quality for specific decoding requirements, including Text-Text-to-Video (TT2V) mode to ensure high-quality semantic information and Image-Text-to-Video (IT2V) mode to achieve superb perceptual consistency. In addition, we propose an efficient frame interpolation model for IT2V mode via Low-Rank Adaption (LoRA) tuning to guarantee perceptual quality, which allows the generated motion cues to behave smoothly. Experiments on benchmarks indicate that TT2V achieves effective semantic reconstruction, while IT2V exhibits competitive perceptual consistency. These results highlight potential directions for future research in video coding.

Recent advances in latent diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in high-fidelity RGB image synthesis by leveraging pretrained VAEs to compress and reconstruct pixel data at low computational cost. However, the generation of transparent or layered content (RGBA image) remains largely unexplored, due to the lack of large-scale benchmarks. In this work, we propose ALPHA, the first comprehensive RGBA benchmark that adapts standard RGB metrics to four-channel images via alpha blending over canonical backgrounds. We further introduce ALPHAVAE, a unified end-to-end RGBA VAE that extends a pretrained RGB VAE by incorporating a dedicated alpha channel. The model is trained with a composite objective that combines alpha-blended pixel reconstruction, patch-level fidelity, perceptual consistency, and dual KL divergence constraints to ensure latent fidelity across both RGB and alpha representations. Our RGBA VAE, trained on only 8K images in contrast to 1M used by prior methods, achieves a +4.9 dB improvement in PSNR and a +3.2% increase in SSIM over LayerDiffuse in reconstruction. It also enables superior transparent image generation when fine-tuned within a latent diffusion framework. Our code, data, and models are released on https://github.com/o0o0o00o0/AlphaVAE for reproducibility.

Stochastic restoration algorithms allow to explore the space of solutions that correspond to the degraded input. In this paper we reveal additional fundamental advantages of stochastic methods over deterministic ones, which further motivate their use. First, we prove that any restoration algorithm that attains perfect perceptual quality and whose outputs are consistent with the input must be a posterior sampler, and is thus required to be stochastic. Second, we illustrate that while deterministic restoration algorithms may attain high perceptual quality, this can be achieved only by filling up the space of all possible source images using an extremely sensitive mapping, which makes them highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Indeed, we show that enforcing deterministic models to be robust to such attacks profoundly hinders their perceptual quality, while robustifying stochastic models hardly influences their perceptual quality, and improves their output variability. These findings provide a motivation to foster progress in stochastic restoration methods, paving the way to better recovery algorithms.

Recently, a myriad of conditional image generation and editing models have been developed to serve different downstream tasks, including text-to-image generation, text-guided image editing, subject-driven image generation, control-guided image generation, etc. However, we observe huge inconsistencies in experimental conditions: datasets, inference, and evaluation metrics - render fair comparisons difficult. This paper proposes ImagenHub, which is a one-stop library to standardize the inference and evaluation of all the conditional image generation models. Firstly, we define seven prominent tasks and curate high-quality evaluation datasets for them. Secondly, we built a unified inference pipeline to ensure fair comparison. Thirdly, we design two human evaluation scores, i.e. Semantic Consistency and Perceptual Quality, along with comprehensive guidelines to evaluate generated images. We train expert raters to evaluate the model outputs based on the proposed metrics. Our human evaluation achieves a high inter-worker agreement of Krippendorff's alpha on 76% models with a value higher than 0.4. We comprehensively evaluated a total of around 30 models and observed three key takeaways: (1) the existing models' performance is generally unsatisfying except for Text-guided Image Generation and Subject-driven Image Generation, with 74% models achieving an overall score lower than 0.5. (2) we examined the claims from published papers and found 83% of them hold with a few exceptions. (3) None of the existing automatic metrics has a Spearman's correlation higher than 0.2 except subject-driven image generation. Moving forward, we will continue our efforts to evaluate newly published models and update our leaderboard to keep track of the progress in conditional image generation.

Gaze redirection is the task of changing the gaze to a desired direction for a given monocular eye patch image. Many applications such as videoconferencing, films, games, and generation of training data for gaze estimation require redirecting the gaze, without distorting the appearance of the area surrounding the eye and while producing photo-realistic images. Existing methods lack the ability to generate perceptually plausible images. In this work, we present a novel method to alleviate this problem by leveraging generative adversarial training to synthesize an eye image conditioned on a target gaze direction. Our method ensures perceptual similarity and consistency of synthesized images to the real images. Furthermore, a gaze estimation loss is used to control the gaze direction accurately. To attain high-quality images, we incorporate perceptual and cycle consistency losses into our architecture. In extensive evaluations we show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both image quality and redirection precision. Finally, we show that generated images can bring significant improvement for the gaze estimation task if used to augment real training data.

Generating realistic talking-head videos remains challenging due to persistent issues such as imperfect lip synchronization, unnatural motion, and evaluation metrics that correlate poorly with human perception. We propose FlowPortrait, a reinforcement-learning framework for audio-driven portrait animation built on a multimodal backbone for autoregressive audio-to-video generation. FlowPortrait introduces a human-aligned evaluation system based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to assess lip-sync accuracy, expressiveness, and motion quality. These signals are combined with perceptual and temporal consistency regularizers to form a stable composite reward, which is used to post-train the generator via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Extensive experiments, including both automatic evaluations and human preference studies, demonstrate that FlowPortrait consistently produces higher-quality talking-head videos, highlighting the effectiveness of reinforcement learning for portrait animation.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential for extending vision-language reasoning to professional tool-based image editing, enabling intuitive and creative editing. A promising direction is to use reinforcement learning (RL) to enable MLLMs to reason about and execute optimal tool-use plans within professional image-editing software. However, training remains challenging due to the lack of reliable, verifiable reward signals that can reflect the inherently subjective nature of creative editing. In this work, we introduce RetouchIQ, a framework that performs instruction-based executable image editing through MLLM agents guided by a generalist reward model. RetouchIQ interprets user-specified editing intentions and generates corresponding, executable image adjustments, bridging high-level aesthetic goals with precise parameter control. To move beyond conventional, rule-based rewards that compute similarity against a fixed reference image using handcrafted metrics, we propose a generalist reward model, an RL fine-tuned MLLM that evaluates edited results through a set of generated metrics on a case-by-case basis. Then, the reward model provides scalar feedback through multimodal reasoning, enabling reinforcement learning with high-quality, instruction-consistent gradients. We curate an extended dataset with 190k instruction-reasoning pairs and establish a new benchmark for instruction-based image editing. Experiments show that RetouchIQ substantially improves both semantic consistency and perceptual quality over previous MLLM-based and diffusion-based editing systems. Our findings demonstrate the potential of generalist reward-driven MLLM agents as flexible, explainable, and executable assistants for professional image editing.

Video-to-Audio (V2A) generation requires balancing four critical perceptual dimensions: semantic consistency, audio-visual temporal synchrony, aesthetic quality, and spatial accuracy; yet existing methods suffer from objective entanglement that conflates competing goals in single loss functions and lack human preference alignment. We introduce PrismAudio, the first framework to integrate Reinforcement Learning into V2A generation with specialized Chain-of-Thought (CoT) planning. Our approach decomposes monolithic reasoning into four specialized CoT modules (Semantic, Temporal, Aesthetic, and Spatial CoT), each paired with targeted reward functions. This CoT-reward correspondence enables multidimensional RL optimization that guides the model to jointly generate better reasoning across all perspectives, solving the objective entanglement problem while preserving interpretability. To make this optimization computationally practical, we propose Fast-GRPO, which employs hybrid ODE-SDE sampling that dramatically reduces the training overhead compared to existing GRPO implementations. We also introduce AudioCanvas, a rigorous benchmark that is more distributionally balanced and covers more realistically diverse and challenging scenarios than existing datasets, with 300 single-event classes and 501 multi-event samples. Experimental results demonstrate that PrismAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance across all four perceptual dimensions on both the in-domain VGGSound test set and out-of-domain AudioCanvas benchmark. The project page is available at https://PrismAudio-Project.github.io.

We study the behavior of deterministic methods for solving inverse problems in imaging. These methods are commonly designed to achieve two goals: (1) attaining high perceptual quality, and (2) generating reconstructions that are consistent with the measurements. We provide a rigorous proof that the better a predictor satisfies these two requirements, the larger its Lipschitz constant must be, regardless of the nature of the degradation involved. In particular, to approach perfect perceptual quality and perfect consistency, the Lipschitz constant of the model must grow to infinity. This implies that such methods are necessarily more susceptible to adversarial attacks. We demonstrate our theory on single image super-resolution algorithms, addressing both noisy and noiseless settings. We also show how this undesired behavior can be leveraged to explore the posterior distribution, thereby allowing the deterministic model to imitate stochastic methods.

Owing to the robust priors of diffusion models, recent approaches have shown promise in addressing real-world super-resolution (Real-SR). However, achieving semantic consistency and perceptual naturalness to meet human perception demands remains difficult, especially under conditions of heavy degradation and varied input complexities. To tackle this, we propose Hero-SR, a one-step diffusion-based SR framework explicitly designed with human perception priors. Hero-SR consists of two novel modules: the Dynamic Time-Step Module (DTSM), which adaptively selects optimal diffusion steps for flexibly meeting human perceptual standards, and the Open-World Multi-modality Supervision (OWMS), which integrates guidance from both image and text domains through CLIP to improve semantic consistency and perceptual naturalness. Through these modules, Hero-SR generates high-resolution images that not only preserve intricate details but also reflect human perceptual preferences. Extensive experiments validate that Hero-SR achieves state-of-the-art performance in Real-SR. The code will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.

In recent years there have been remarkable breakthroughs in image-to-video generation. However, the 3D consistency and camera controllability of generated frames have remained unsolved. Recent studies have attempted to incorporate camera control into the generation process, but their results are often limited to simple trajectories or lack the ability to generate consistent videos from multiple distinct camera paths for the same scene. To address these limitations, we introduce Cavia, a novel framework for camera-controllable, multi-view video generation, capable of converting an input image into multiple spatiotemporally consistent videos. Our framework extends the spatial and temporal attention modules into view-integrated attention modules, improving both viewpoint and temporal consistency. This flexible design allows for joint training with diverse curated data sources, including scene-level static videos, object-level synthetic multi-view dynamic videos, and real-world monocular dynamic videos. To our best knowledge, Cavia is the first of its kind that allows the user to precisely specify camera motion while obtaining object motion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Cavia surpasses state-of-the-art methods in terms of geometric consistency and perceptual quality. Project Page: https://ir1d.github.io/Cavia/

Instruction-guided image editing offers an intuitive way for users to edit images with natural language. However, diffusion-based editing models often struggle to accurately interpret complex user instructions, especially those involving compositional relationships, contextual cues, or referring expressions, leading to edits that drift semantically or fail to reflect the intended changes. We tackle this problem by proposing MIRA (Multimodal Iterative Reasoning Agent), a lightweight, plug-and-play multimodal reasoning agent that performs editing through an iterative perception-reasoning-action loop, effectively simulating multi-turn human-model interaction processes. Instead of issuing a single prompt or static plan, MIRA predicts atomic edit instructions step by step, using visual feedback to make its decisions. Our 150K multimodal tool-use dataset, MIRA-Editing, combined with a two-stage SFT + GRPO training pipeline, enables MIRA to perform reasoning and editing over complex editing instructions. When paired with open-source image editing models such as Flux.1-Kontext, Step1X-Edit, and Qwen-Image-Edit, MIRA significantly improves both semantic consistency and perceptual quality, achieving performance comparable to or exceeding proprietary systems such as GPT-Image and Nano-Banana.

We present UniFuture, a simple yet effective driving world model that seamlessly integrates future scene generation and perception within a single framework. Unlike existing models focusing solely on pixel-level future prediction or geometric reasoning, our approach jointly models future appearance (i.e., RGB image) and geometry (i.e., depth), ensuring coherent predictions. Specifically, during the training, we first introduce a Dual-Latent Sharing scheme, which transfers image and depth sequence in a shared latent space, allowing both modalities to benefit from shared feature learning. Additionally, we propose a Multi-scale Latent Interaction mechanism, which facilitates bidirectional refinement between image and depth features at multiple spatial scales, effectively enhancing geometry consistency and perceptual alignment. During testing, our UniFuture can easily predict high-consistency future image-depth pairs by only using the current image as input. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that UniFuture outperforms specialized models on future generation and perception tasks, highlighting the advantages of a unified, structurally-aware world model. The project page is at https://github.com/dk-liang/UniFuture.

The deployment of pre-trained perception models in novel environments often leads to performance degradation due to distributional shifts. Although recent artificial intelligence approaches for metacognition use logical rules to characterize and filter model errors, improving precision often comes at the cost of reduced recall. This paper addresses the hypothesis that leveraging multiple pre-trained models can mitigate this recall reduction. We formulate the challenge of identifying and managing conflicting predictions from various models as a consistency-based abduction problem. The input predictions and the learned error detection rules derived from each model are encoded in a logic program. We then seek an abductive explanation--a subset of model predictions--that maximizes prediction coverage while ensuring the rate of logical inconsistencies (derived from domain constraints) remains below a specified threshold. We propose two algorithms for this knowledge representation task: an exact method based on Integer Programming (IP) and an efficient Heuristic Search (HS). Through extensive experiments on a simulated aerial imagery dataset featuring controlled, complex distributional shifts, we demonstrate that our abduction-based framework outperforms individual models and standard ensemble baselines, achieving, for instance, average relative improvements of approximately 13.6% in F1-score and 16.6% in accuracy across 15 diverse test datasets when compared to the best individual model. Our results validate the use of consistency-based abduction as an effective mechanism to robustly integrate knowledge from multiple imperfect reasoners in challenging, novel scenarios.

Hands are dexterous and highly versatile manipulators that are central to how humans interact with objects and their environment. Consequently, modeling realistic hand-object interactions, including the subtle motion of individual fingers, is critical for applications in computer graphics, computer vision, and mixed reality. Prior work on capturing and modeling humans interacting with objects in 3D focuses on the body and object motion, often ignoring hand pose. In contrast, we introduce GRIP, a learning-based method that takes, as input, the 3D motion of the body and the object, and synthesizes realistic motion for both hands before, during, and after object interaction. As a preliminary step before synthesizing the hand motion, we first use a network, ANet, to denoise the arm motion. Then, we leverage the spatio-temporal relationship between the body and the object to extract two types of novel temporal interaction cues, and use them in a two-stage inference pipeline to generate the hand motion. In the first stage, we introduce a new approach to enforce motion temporal consistency in the latent space (LTC), and generate consistent interaction motions. In the second stage, GRIP generates refined hand poses to avoid hand-object penetrations. Given sequences of noisy body and object motion, GRIP upgrades them to include hand-object interaction. Quantitative experiments and perceptual studies demonstrate that GRIP outperforms baseline methods and generalizes to unseen objects and motions from different motion-capture datasets.

In this paper, we address the problem of enhancing perceptual quality in video super-resolution (VSR) using Diffusion Models (DMs) while ensuring temporal consistency among frames. We present StableVSR, a VSR method based on DMs that can significantly enhance the perceptual quality of upscaled videos by synthesizing realistic and temporally-consistent details. We introduce the Temporal Conditioning Module (TCM) into a pre-trained DM for single image super-resolution to turn it into a VSR method. TCM uses the novel Temporal Texture Guidance, which provides it with spatially-aligned and detail-rich texture information synthesized in adjacent frames. This guides the generative process of the current frame toward high-quality and temporally-consistent results. In addition, we introduce the novel Frame-wise Bidirectional Sampling strategy to encourage the use of information from past to future and vice-versa. This strategy improves the perceptual quality of the results and the temporal consistency across frames. We demonstrate the effectiveness of StableVSR in enhancing the perceptual quality of upscaled videos while achieving better temporal consistency compared to existing state-of-the-art methods for VSR. The project page is available at https://github.com/claudiom4sir/StableVSR.

Perceptual optimization is primarily driven by the fidelity objective, which enforces both semantic consistency and overall visual realism, while the adversarial objective provides complementary refinement by enhancing perceptual sharpness and fine-grained detail. Despite their central role, the correlation between their effectiveness as optimization objectives and their capability as image quality assessment (IQA) metrics remains underexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis and reveal an unanticipated asymmetry between perceptual optimization and assessment: fidelity metrics that excel in IQA are not necessarily effective for perceptual optimization, with this misalignment emerging more distinctly under adversarial training. In addition, while discriminators effectively suppress artifacts during optimization, their learned representations offer only limited benefits when reused as backbone initializations for IQA models. Beyond this asymmetry, our findings further demonstrate that discriminator design plays a decisive role in shaping optimization, with patch-level and convolutional architectures providing more faithful detail reconstruction than vanilla or Transformer-based alternatives. These insights advance the understanding of loss function design and its connection to IQA transferability, paving the way for more principled approaches to perceptual optimization.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) often benefit from intermediate visual cues, either injected via external tools or generated as latent visual tokens during reasoning, but these mechanisms still overlook fine-grained visual evidence (e.g., polylines in charts), generalize poorly across domains, and incur high inference-time cost. In this paper, we propose Bi-directional Perceptual Shaping (BiPS), which transforms question-conditioned masked views into bidirectional where-to-look signals that shape perception during training. BiPS first applies a KL-consistency constraint between the original image and an evidence-preserving view that keeps only question-relevant regions, encouraging coarse but complete coverage of supporting pixels. It then applies a KL-separation constraint between the original and an evidence-ablated view where critical pixels are masked so the image no longer supports the original answer, discouraging text-only shortcuts (i.e., answering from text alone) and enforcing fine-grained visual reliance. Across eight benchmarks, BiPS boosts Qwen2.5-VL-7B by 8.2% on average and shows strong out-of-domain generalization to unseen datasets and image types.

Diffusion priors have been used for blind face restoration (BFR) by fine-tuning diffusion models (DMs) on restoration datasets to recover low-quality images. However, the naive application of DMs presents several key limitations. (i) The diffusion prior has inferior semantic consistency (e.g., ID, structure and color.), increasing the difficulty of optimizing the BFR model; (ii) reliance on hundreds of denoising iterations, preventing the effective cooperation with perceptual losses, which is crucial for faithful restoration. Observing that the latent consistency model (LCM) learns consistency noise-to-data mappings on the ODE-trajectory and therefore shows more semantic consistency in the subject identity, structural information and color preservation, we propose InterLCM to leverage the LCM for its superior semantic consistency and efficiency to counter the above issues. Treating low-quality images as the intermediate state of LCM, InterLCM achieves a balance between fidelity and quality by starting from earlier LCM steps. LCM also allows the integration of perceptual loss during training, leading to improved restoration quality, particularly in real-world scenarios. To mitigate structural and semantic uncertainties, InterLCM incorporates a Visual Module to extract visual features and a Spatial Encoder to capture spatial details, enhancing the fidelity of restored images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InterLCM outperforms existing approaches in both synthetic and real-world datasets while also achieving faster inference speed.

Object detection, a quintessential task in the realm of perceptual computing, can be tackled using a generative methodology. In the present study, we introduce a novel framework designed to articulate object detection as a denoising diffusion process, which operates on perturbed bounding boxes of annotated entities. This framework, termed ConsistencyDet, leverages an innovative denoising concept known as the Consistency Model. The hallmark of this model is its self-consistency feature, which empowers the model to map distorted information from any temporal stage back to its pristine state, thereby realizing a ``one-step denoising'' mechanism. Such an attribute markedly elevates the operational efficiency of the model, setting it apart from the conventional Diffusion Model. Throughout the training phase, ConsistencyDet initiates the diffusion sequence with noise-infused boxes derived from the ground-truth annotations and conditions the model to perform the denoising task. Subsequently, in the inference stage, the model employs a denoising sampling strategy that commences with bounding boxes randomly sampled from a normal distribution. Through iterative refinement, the model transforms an assortment of arbitrarily generated boxes into the definitive detections. Comprehensive evaluations employing standard benchmarks, such as MS-COCO and LVIS, corroborate that ConsistencyDet surpasses other leading-edge detectors in performance metrics.

Computational imaging methods increasingly rely on powerful generative diffusion models to tackle challenging image restoration tasks. In particular, state-of-the-art zero-shot image inverse solvers leverage distilled text-to-image latent diffusion models (LDMs) to achieve unprecedented accuracy and perceptual quality with high computational efficiency. However, extending these advances to high-definition video restoration remains a significant challenge, due to the need to recover fine spatial detail while capturing subtle temporal dependencies. Consequently, methods that naively apply image-based LDM priors on a frame-by-frame basis often result in temporally inconsistent reconstructions. We address this challenge by leveraging recent advances in Video Consistency Models (VCMs), which distill video latent diffusion models into fast generators that explicitly capture temporal causality. Building on this foundation, we propose LVTINO, the first zero-shot or plug-and-play inverse solver for high definition video restoration with priors encoded by VCMs. Our conditioning mechanism bypasses the need for automatic differentiation and achieves state-of-the-art video reconstruction quality with only a few neural function evaluations, while ensuring strong measurement consistency and smooth temporal transitions across frames. Extensive experiments on a diverse set of video inverse problems show significant perceptual improvements over current state-of-the-art methods that apply image LDMs frame by frame, establishing a new benchmark in both reconstruction fidelity and computational efficiency.

JPEG is arguably the most popular image coding format, achieving high compression ratios via lossy quantization that may create visual artifacts degradation. Numerous attempts to remove these artifacts were conceived over the years, and common to most of these is the use of deterministic post-processing algorithms that optimize some distortion measure (e.g., PSNR, SSIM). In this paper we propose a different paradigm for JPEG artifact correction: Our method is stochastic, and the objective we target is high perceptual quality -- striving to obtain sharp, detailed and visually pleasing reconstructed images, while being consistent with the compressed input. These goals are achieved by training a stochastic conditional generator (conditioned on the compressed input), accompanied by a theoretically well-founded loss term, resulting in a sampler from the posterior distribution. Our solution offers a diverse set of plausible and fast reconstructions for a given input with perfect consistency. We demonstrate our scheme's unique properties and its superiority to a variety of alternative methods on the FFHQ and ImageNet datasets.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have made significant progress in enhancing the quality of image synthesis. Recent methods frequently leverage pretrained networks to calculate perceptual losses or utilize pretrained feature spaces. In this paper, we extend the capabilities of pretrained networks by incorporating innovative self-supervised learning techniques and enforcing consistency between discriminators during GAN training. Our proposed method, named HP-GAN, effectively exploits neural network priors through two primary strategies: FakeTwins and discriminator consistency. FakeTwins leverages pretrained networks as encoders to compute a self-supervised loss and applies this through the generated images to train the generator, thereby enabling the generation of more diverse and high quality images. Additionally, we introduce a consistency mechanism between discriminators that evaluate feature maps extracted from Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT) feature networks. Discriminator consistency promotes coherent learning among discriminators and enhances training robustness by aligning their assessments of image quality. Our extensive evaluation across seventeen datasets-including scenarios with large, small, and limited data, and covering a variety of image domains-demonstrates that HP-GAN consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in terms of Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), achieving significant improvements in image diversity and quality. Code is available at: https://github.com/higun2/HP-GAN.

Recently, textual prompt tuning has shown inspirational performance in adapting Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models to natural image quality assessment. However, such uni-modal prompt learning method only tunes the language branch of CLIP models. This is not enough for adapting CLIP models to AI generated image quality assessment (AGIQA) since AGIs visually differ from natural images. In addition, the consistency between AGIs and user input text prompts, which correlates with the perceptual quality of AGIs, is not investigated to guide AGIQA. In this letter, we propose vision-language consistency guided multi-modal prompt learning for blind AGIQA, dubbed CLIP-AGIQA. Specifically, we introduce learnable textual and visual prompts in language and vision branches of CLIP models, respectively. Moreover, we design a text-to-image alignment quality prediction task, whose learned vision-language consistency knowledge is used to guide the optimization of the above multi-modal prompts. Experimental results on two public AGIQA datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art quality assessment models. The source code is available at https://github.com/JunFu1995/CLIP-AGIQA.

With diffusion and flow matching models achieving state-of-the-art generating performance, the interest of the community now turned to reducing the inference time without sacrificing sample quality. Consistency Models (CMs), which are trained to be consistent on diffusion or probability flow ordinary differential equation (PF-ODE) trajectories, enable one or two-step flow or diffusion sampling. However, CMs typically require prolonged training with large batch sizes to obtain competitive sample quality. In this paper, we examine the training dynamics of CMs near convergence and discover that CM tangents -- CM output update directions -- are quite oscillatory, in the sense that they move parallel to the data manifold, not towards the manifold. To mitigate oscillatory tangents, we propose a new loss function, called the manifold feature distance (MFD), which provides manifold-aligned tangents that point toward the data manifold. Consequently, our method -- dubbed Align Your Tangent (AYT) -- can accelerate CM training by orders of magnitude and even out-perform the learned perceptual image patch similarity metric (LPIPS). Furthermore, we find that our loss enables training with extremely small batch sizes without compromising sample quality. Code: https://github.com/1202kbs/AYT

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have emerged as a popular approach for novel view synthesis. While NeRFs are quickly being adapted for a wider set of applications, intuitively editing NeRF scenes is still an open challenge. One important editing task is the removal of unwanted objects from a 3D scene, such that the replaced region is visually plausible and consistent with its context. We refer to this task as 3D inpainting. In 3D, solutions must be both consistent across multiple views and geometrically valid. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D inpainting method that addresses these challenges. Given a small set of posed images and sparse annotations in a single input image, our framework first rapidly obtains a 3D segmentation mask for a target object. Using the mask, a perceptual optimizationbased approach is then introduced that leverages learned 2D image inpainters, distilling their information into 3D space, while ensuring view consistency. We also address the lack of a diverse benchmark for evaluating 3D scene inpainting methods by introducing a dataset comprised of challenging real-world scenes. In particular, our dataset contains views of the same scene with and without a target object, enabling more principled benchmarking of the 3D inpainting task. We first demonstrate the superiority of our approach on multiview segmentation, comparing to NeRFbased methods and 2D segmentation approaches. We then evaluate on the task of 3D inpainting, establishing state-ofthe-art performance against other NeRF manipulation algorithms, as well as a strong 2D image inpainter baseline. Project Page: https://spinnerf3d.github.io

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle to ground reasoning in perceptual evidence. We present a systematic study of perception strategies-explicit, implicit, visual, and textual-across four multimodal benchmarks and two MLLMs. Our findings show that explicit perception, especially when paired with textual cues, consistently yields the best improvements, particularly for smaller models. Based on this insight, we propose VTPerception-R1, a unified two-stage framework that decouples perception from reasoning. Stage 1 introduces perception-augmented fine-tuning, and Stage 2 applies perception-aware reinforcement learning with novel visual, textual, and consistency rewards. Experiments demonstrate that VTPerception-R1 significantly improves reasoning accuracy and robustness across diverse tasks, offering a scalable and auditable solution for perception-grounded multimodal reasoning. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yizhuoDi/VTPerceprion-R1.

Can we turn a video prediction model into a robot policy? Videos, including those of humans or teleoperated robots, capture rich physical interactions. However, most of them lack labeled actions, which limits their use in robot learning. We present Video Prediction for Robot Actions (ViPRA), a simple pretraining-finetuning framework that learns continuous robot control from these actionless videos. Instead of directly predicting actions, we train a video-language model to predict both future visual observations and motion-centric latent actions, which serve as intermediate representations of scene dynamics. We train these latent actions using perceptual losses and optical flow consistency to ensure they reflect physically grounded behavior. For downstream control, we introduce a chunked flow matching decoder that maps latent actions to robot-specific continuous action sequences, using only 100 to 200 teleoperated demonstrations. This approach avoids expensive action annotation, supports generalization across embodiments, and enables smooth, high-frequency continuous control upto 22 Hz via chunked action decoding. Unlike prior latent action works that treat pretraining as autoregressive policy learning, explicitly models both what changes and how. Our method outperforms strong baselines, with a 16% gain on the SIMPLER benchmark and a 13% improvement across real world manipulation tasks. We will release models and code at https://vipra-project.github.io

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in document understanding, a rapidly growing research area with significant industrial demand in recent years. As a multimodal task, document understanding requires models to possess both perceptual and cognitive abilities. However, current MLLMs often face conflicts between perception and cognition. Taking a document VQA task (cognition) as an example, an MLLM might generate answers that do not match the corresponding visual content identified by its OCR (perception). This conflict suggests that the MLLM might struggle to establish an intrinsic connection between the information it "sees" and what it "understands." Such conflicts challenge the intuitive notion that cognition is consistent with perception, hindering the performance and explainability of MLLMs. In this paper, we define the conflicts between cognition and perception as Cognition and Perception (C&P) knowledge conflicts, a form of multimodal knowledge conflicts, and systematically assess them with a focus on document understanding. Our analysis reveals that even GPT-4o, a leading MLLM, achieves only 68.6% C&P consistency. To mitigate the C&P knowledge conflicts, we propose a novel method called Multimodal Knowledge Consistency Fine-tuning. This method first ensures task-specific consistency and then connects the cognitive and perceptual knowledge. Our method significantly reduces C&P knowledge conflicts across all tested MLLMs and enhances their performance in both cognitive and perceptual tasks in most scenarios.

We present a novel method for constructing Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Instead of using pixel-by-pixel loss, we enforce deep feature consistency between the input and the output of a VAE, which ensures the VAE's output to preserve the spatial correlation characteristics of the input, thus leading the output to have a more natural visual appearance and better perceptual quality. Based on recent deep learning works such as style transfer, we employ a pre-trained deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and use its hidden features to define a feature perceptual loss for VAE training. Evaluated on the CelebA face dataset, we show that our model produces better results than other methods in the literature. We also show that our method can produce latent vectors that can capture the semantic information of face expressions and can be used to achieve state-of-the-art performance in facial attribute prediction.

Egocentric interactive world models are essential for augmented reality and embodied AI, where visual generation must respond to user input with low latency, geometric consistency, and long-term stability. We study egocentric interaction generation from a single scene image under free-space hand gestures, aiming to synthesize photorealistic videos in which hands enter the scene, interact with objects, and induce plausible world dynamics under head motion. This setting introduces fundamental challenges, including distribution shift between free-space gestures and contact-heavy training data, ambiguity between hand motion and camera motion in monocular views, and the need for arbitrary-length video generation. We present Hand2World, a unified autoregressive framework that addresses these challenges through occlusion-invariant hand conditioning based on projected 3D hand meshes, allowing visibility and occlusion to be inferred from scene context rather than encoded in the control signal. To stabilize egocentric viewpoint changes, we inject explicit camera geometry via per-pixel Plücker-ray embeddings, disentangling camera motion from hand motion and preventing background drift. We further develop a fully automated monocular annotation pipeline and distill a bidirectional diffusion model into a causal generator, enabling arbitrary-length synthesis. Experiments on three egocentric interaction benchmarks show substantial improvements in perceptual quality and 3D consistency while supporting camera control and long-horizon interactive generation.

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.

We introduce StereoSpace, a diffusion-based framework for monocular-to-stereo synthesis that models geometry purely through viewpoint conditioning, without explicit depth or warping. A canonical rectified space and the conditioning guide the generator to infer correspondences and fill disocclusions end-to-end. To ensure fair and leakage-free evaluation, we introduce an end-to-end protocol that excludes any ground truth or proxy geometry estimates at test time. The protocol emphasizes metrics reflecting downstream relevance: iSQoE for perceptual comfort and MEt3R for geometric consistency. StereoSpace surpasses other methods from the warp & inpaint, latent-warping, and warped-conditioning categories, achieving sharp parallax and strong robustness on layered and non-Lambertian scenes. This establishes viewpoint-conditioned diffusion as a scalable, depth-free solution for stereo generation.

Generative world models have shown promise for simulating dynamic environments, yet egocentric video remains challenging due to rapid viewpoint changes, frequent hand-object interactions, and goal-directed procedures whose evolution depends on latent human intent. Existing approaches either focus on hand-centric instructional synthesis with limited scene evolution, perform static view translation without modeling action dynamics, or rely on dense supervision, such as camera trajectories, long video prefixes, synchronized multicamera capture, etc. In this work, we introduce EgoForge, an egocentric goal-directed world simulator that generates coherent, first-person video rollouts from minimal static inputs: a single egocentric image, a high-level instruction, and an optional auxiliary exocentric view. To improve intent alignment and temporal consistency, we propose VideoDiffusionNFT, a trajectory-level reward-guided refinement that optimizes goal completion, temporal causality, scene consistency, and perceptual fidelity during diffusion sampling. Extensive experiments show EgoForge achieves consistent gains in semantic alignment, geometric stability, and motion fidelity over strong baselines, and robust performance in real-world smart-glasses experiments.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a critical tool in modern medical diagnostics, yet its prolonged acquisition time remains a critical limitation, especially in time-sensitive clinical scenarios. While undersampling strategies can accelerate image acquisition, they often result in image artifacts and degraded quality. Recent diffusion models have shown promise for reconstructing high-fidelity images from undersampled data by learning powerful image priors; however, most existing approaches either (i) rely on unsupervised score functions without paired supervision or (ii) apply data consistency only as a post-processing step. In this work, we introduce a conditional denoising diffusion framework with iterative data-consistency correction, which differs from prior methods by embedding the measurement model directly into every reverse diffusion step and training the model on paired undersampled-ground truth data. This hybrid design bridges generative flexibility with explicit enforcement of MRI physics. Experiments on the fastMRI dataset demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art deep learning and diffusion-based methods in SSIM, PSNR, and LPIPS, with LPIPS capturing perceptual improvements more faithfully. These results demonstrate that integrating conditional supervision with iterative consistency updates yields substantial improvements in both pixel-level fidelity and perceptual realism, establishing a principled and practical advance toward robust, accelerated MRI reconstruction.

We present Pix2Gif, a motion-guided diffusion model for image-to-GIF (video) generation. We tackle this problem differently by formulating the task as an image translation problem steered by text and motion magnitude prompts, as shown in teaser fig. To ensure that the model adheres to motion guidance, we propose a new motion-guided warping module to spatially transform the features of the source image conditioned on the two types of prompts. Furthermore, we introduce a perceptual loss to ensure the transformed feature map remains within the same space as the target image, ensuring content consistency and coherence. In preparation for the model training, we meticulously curated data by extracting coherent image frames from the TGIF video-caption dataset, which provides rich information about the temporal changes of subjects. After pretraining, we apply our model in a zero-shot manner to a number of video datasets. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model -- it not only captures the semantic prompt from text but also the spatial ones from motion guidance. We train all our models using a single node of 16xV100 GPUs. Code, dataset and models are made public at: https://hiteshk03.github.io/Pix2Gif/.

Ultra-low bitrate image compression is a challenging and demanding topic. With the development of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), a Cross Modality Compression (CMC) paradigm of Image-Text-Image has emerged. Compared with traditional codecs, this semantic-level compression can reduce image data size to 0.1\% or even lower, which has strong potential applications. However, CMC has certain defects in consistency with the original image and perceptual quality. To address this problem, we introduce CMC-Bench, a benchmark of the cooperative performance of Image-to-Text (I2T) and Text-to-Image (T2I) models for image compression. This benchmark covers 18,000 and 40,000 images respectively to verify 6 mainstream I2T and 12 T2I models, including 160,000 subjective preference scores annotated by human experts. At ultra-low bitrates, this paper proves that the combination of some I2T and T2I models has surpassed the most advanced visual signal codecs; meanwhile, it highlights where LMMs can be further optimized toward the compression task. We encourage LMM developers to participate in this test to promote the evolution of visual signal codec protocols.

Multimodal emotion analysis is shifting from static classification to generative reasoning. Beyond simple label prediction, robust affective reasoning must synthesize fine-grained signals such as facial micro-expressions and prosodic which shifts to decode the latent causality within complex social contexts. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face significant limitations in fine-grained perception, primarily due to data scarcity and insufficient cross-modal fusion. As a result, these models often exhibit unimodal dominance which leads to hallucinations in complex multimodal interactions, particularly when visual and acoustic cues are subtle, ambiguous, or even contradictory (e.g., in sarcastic scenery). To address this, we introduce SABER-LLM, a framework designed for robust multimodal reasoning. First, we construct SABER, a large-scale emotion reasoning dataset comprising 600K video clips, annotated with a novel six-dimensional schema that jointly captures audiovisual cues and causal logic. Second, we propose the structured evidence decomposition paradigm, which enforces a "perceive-then-reason" separation between evidence extraction and reasoning to alleviate unimodal dominance. The ability to perceive complex scenes is further reinforced by consistency-aware direct preference optimization, which explicitly encourages alignment among modalities under ambiguous or conflicting perceptual conditions. Experiments on EMER, EmoBench-M, and SABER-Test demonstrate that SABER-LLM significantly outperforms open-source baselines and achieves robustness competitive with closed-source models in decoding complex emotional dynamics. The dataset and model are available at https://github.com/zxzhao0/SABER-LLM.

Video Face Enhancement (VFE) aims to restore high-quality facial regions from degraded video sequences, enabling a wide range of practical applications. Despite substantial progress in the field, current methods that primarily rely on video super-resolution and generative frameworks continue to face three fundamental challenges: (1) computational inefficiency caused by iterative multi-step denoising in diffusion models; (2) faithfully modeling intricate facial textures while preserving temporal consistency; and (3) limited model generalization due to the lack of high-quality face video training data. To address these challenges, we propose VividFace, a novel and efficient one-step diffusion framework for VFE. Built upon the pretrained WANX video generation model, VividFace reformulates the traditional multi-step diffusion process as a single-step flow matching paradigm that directly maps degraded inputs to high-quality outputs with significantly reduced inference time. To enhance facial detail recovery, we introduce a Joint Latent-Pixel Face-Focused Training strategy that constructs spatiotemporally aligned facial masks to guide optimization toward critical facial regions in both latent and pixel spaces. Furthermore, we develop an MLLM-driven automated filtering pipeline that produces MLLM-Face90, a meticulously curated high-quality face video dataset, ensuring models learn from photorealistic facial textures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VividFace achieves superior performance in perceptual quality, identity preservation, and temporal consistency across both synthetic and real-world benchmarks. We will publicly release our code, models, and dataset to support future research.

Generative video modeling has made significant strides, yet ensuring structural and temporal consistency over long sequences remains a challenge. Current methods predominantly rely on RGB signals, leading to accumulated errors in object structure and motion over extended durations. To address these issues, we introduce WorldWeaver, a robust framework for long video generation that jointly models RGB frames and perceptual conditions within a unified long-horizon modeling scheme. Our training framework offers three key advantages. First, by jointly predicting perceptual conditions and color information from a unified representation, it significantly enhances temporal consistency and motion dynamics. Second, by leveraging depth cues, which we observe to be more resistant to drift than RGB, we construct a memory bank that preserves clearer contextual information, improving quality in long-horizon video generation. Third, we employ segmented noise scheduling for training prediction groups, which further mitigates drift and reduces computational cost. Extensive experiments on both diffusion- and rectified flow-based models demonstrate the effectiveness of WorldWeaver in reducing temporal drift and improving the fidelity of generated videos.

Generating consistent ground-view images from satellite imagery is challenging, primarily due to the large discrepancies in viewing angles and resolution between satellite and ground-level domains. Previous efforts mainly concentrated on single-view generation, often resulting in inconsistencies across neighboring ground views. In this work, we propose a novel cross-view synthesis approach designed to overcome these challenges by ensuring consistency across ground-view images generated from satellite views. Our method, based on a fixed latent diffusion model, introduces two conditioning modules: satellite-guided denoising, which extracts high-level scene layout to guide the denoising process, and satellite-temporal denoising, which captures camera motion to maintain consistency across multiple generated views. We further contribute a large-scale satellite-ground dataset containing over 100,000 perspective pairs to facilitate extensive ground scene or video generation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods on perceptual and temporal metrics, achieving high photorealism and consistency in multi-view outputs.

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have spurred significant interest in continuous story image generation. In this paper, we introduce Storynizor, a model capable of generating coherent stories with strong inter-frame character consistency, effective foreground-background separation, and diverse pose variation. The core innovation of Storynizor lies in its key modules: ID-Synchronizer and ID-Injector. The ID-Synchronizer employs an auto-mask self-attention module and a mask perceptual loss across inter-frame images to improve the consistency of character generation, vividly representing their postures and backgrounds. The ID-Injector utilize a Shuffling Reference Strategy (SRS) to integrate ID features into specific locations, enhancing ID-based consistent character generation. Additionally, to facilitate the training of Storynizor, we have curated a novel dataset called StoryDB comprising 100, 000 images. This dataset contains single and multiple-character sets in diverse environments, layouts, and gestures with detailed descriptions. Experimental results indicate that Storynizor demonstrates superior coherent story generation with high-fidelity character consistency, flexible postures, and vivid backgrounds compared to other character-specific methods.

Real-world low-resolution (LR) videos have diverse and complex degradations, imposing great challenges on video super-resolution (VSR) algorithms to reproduce their high-resolution (HR) counterparts with high quality. Recently, the diffusion models have shown compelling performance in generating realistic details for image restoration tasks. However, the diffusion process has randomness, making it hard to control the contents of restored images. This issue becomes more serious when applying diffusion models to VSR tasks because temporal consistency is crucial to the perceptual quality of videos. In this paper, we propose an effective real-world VSR algorithm by leveraging the strength of pre-trained latent diffusion models. To ensure the content consistency among adjacent frames, we exploit the temporal dynamics in LR videos to guide the diffusion process by optimizing the latent sampling path with a motion-guided loss, ensuring that the generated HR video maintains a coherent and continuous visual flow. To further mitigate the discontinuity of generated details, we insert temporal module to the decoder and fine-tune it with an innovative sequence-oriented loss. The proposed motion-guided latent diffusion (MGLD) based VSR algorithm achieves significantly better perceptual quality than state-of-the-arts on real-world VSR benchmark datasets, validating the effectiveness of the proposed model design and training strategies.

The Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SRGAN) is a seminal work that is capable of generating realistic textures during single image super-resolution. However, the hallucinated details are often accompanied with unpleasant artifacts. To further enhance the visual quality, we thoroughly study three key components of SRGAN - network architecture, adversarial loss and perceptual loss, and improve each of them to derive an Enhanced SRGAN (ESRGAN). In particular, we introduce the Residual-in-Residual Dense Block (RRDB) without batch normalization as the basic network building unit. Moreover, we borrow the idea from relativistic GAN to let the discriminator predict relative realness instead of the absolute value. Finally, we improve the perceptual loss by using the features before activation, which could provide stronger supervision for brightness consistency and texture recovery. Benefiting from these improvements, the proposed ESRGAN achieves consistently better visual quality with more realistic and natural textures than SRGAN and won the first place in the PIRM2018-SR Challenge. The code is available at https://github.com/xinntao/ESRGAN .

Video foundation models generate visually realistic and temporally coherent content, but their reliability as world simulators depends on whether they capture physical, logical, and spatial constraints. Existing metrics such as Frechet Video Distance (FVD) emphasize perceptual quality and overlook reasoning failures, including violations of causality, physics, and global consistency. We introduce MMGR (Multi-Modal Generative Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmark), a principled evaluation framework based on five reasoning abilities: Physical, Logical, 3D Spatial, 2D Spatial, and Temporal. MMGR evaluates generative reasoning across three domains: Abstract Reasoning (ARC-AGI, Sudoku), Embodied Navigation (real-world 3D navigation and localization), and Physical Commonsense (sports and compositional interactions). MMGR applies fine-grained metrics that require holistic correctness across both video and image generation. We benchmark leading video models (Veo-3, Sora-2, Wan-2.2) and image models (Nano-banana, Nano-banana Pro, GPT-4o-image, Qwen-image), revealing strong performance gaps across domains. Models show moderate success on Physical Commonsense tasks but perform poorly on Abstract Reasoning (below 10 percent accuracy on ARC-AGI) and struggle with long-horizon spatial planning in embodied settings. Our analysis highlights key limitations in current models, including overreliance on perceptual data, weak global state consistency, and objectives that reward visual plausibility over causal correctness. MMGR offers a unified diagnostic benchmark and a path toward reasoning-aware generative world models.

Despite the remarkable success of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), their performance on a range of complex visual tasks is often hindered by a "visual processing bottleneck": a propensity to lose grounding in visual evidence and exhibit a deficit in contextualized visual experience during prolonged generation. Drawing inspiration from human cognitive memory theory, which distinguishes short-term visually-dominant memory and long-term semantically-dominant memory, we propose VisMem, a cognitively-aligned framework that equips VLMs with dynamic latent vision memories, a short-term module for fine-grained perceptual retention and a long-term module for abstract semantic consolidation. These memories are seamlessly invoked during inference, allowing VLMs to maintain both perceptual fidelity and semantic consistency across thinking and generation. Extensive experiments across diverse visual benchmarks for understanding, reasoning, and generation reveal that VisMem delivers a significant average performance boost of 11.8% relative to the vanilla model and outperforms all counterparts, establishing a new paradigm for latent-space memory enhancement. The code will be available: https://github.com/YU-deep/VisMem.git.

We introduce RewardFlow, an inversion-free framework that steers pretrained diffusion and flow-matching models at inference time through multi-reward Langevin dynamics. RewardFlow unifies complementary differentiable rewards for semantic alignment, perceptual fidelity, localized grounding, object consistency, and human preference, and further introduces a differentiable VQA-based reward that provides fine-grained semantic supervision through language-vision reasoning. To coordinate these heterogeneous objectives, we design a prompt-aware adaptive policy that extracts semantic primitives from the instruction, infers edit intent, and dynamically modulates reward weights and step sizes throughout sampling. Across several image editing and compositional generation benchmarks, RewardFlow delivers state-of-the-art edit fidelity and compositional alignment.

Generating long, coherent egocentric videos is difficult, as hand-object interactions and procedural tasks require reliable long-term memory. Existing autoregressive models suffer from content drift, where object identity and scene semantics degrade over time. To address this challenge, we introduce EgoLCD, an end-to-end framework for egocentric long-context video generation that treats long video synthesis as a problem of efficient and stable memory management. EgoLCD combines a Long-Term Sparse KV Cache for stable global context with an attention-based short-term memory, extended by LoRA for local adaptation. A Memory Regulation Loss enforces consistent memory usage, and Structured Narrative Prompting provides explicit temporal guidance. Extensive experiments on the EgoVid-5M benchmark demonstrate that EgoLCD achieves state-of-the-art performance in both perceptual quality and temporal consistency, effectively mitigating generative forgetting and representing a significant step toward building scalable world models for embodied AI. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/EgoLCD. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/EgoLCD.

Recent advances in video generation have produced vivid content that are often indistinguishable from real videos, making AI-generated video detection an emerging societal challenge. Prior AIGC detection benchmarks mostly evaluate video without audio, target broad narrative domains, and focus on classification solely. Yet it remains unclear whether state-of-the-art video generation models can produce immersive, audio-paired videos that reliably deceive humans and VLMs. To this end, we introduce Video Reality Test, an ASMR-sourced video benchmark suite for testing perceptual realism under tight audio-visual coupling, featuring the following dimensions: (i) Immersive ASMR video-audio sources. Built on carefully curated real ASMR videos, the benchmark targets fine-grained action-object interactions with diversity across objects, actions, and backgrounds. (ii) Peer-Review evaluation. An adversarial creator-reviewer protocol where video generation models act as creators aiming to fool reviewers, while VLMs serve as reviewers seeking to identify fakeness. Our experimental findings show: The best creator Veo3.1-Fast even fools most VLMs: the strongest reviewer (Gemini 2.5-Pro) achieves only 56\% accuracy (random 50\%), far below that of human experts (81.25\%). Adding audio improves real-fake discrimination, yet superficial cues such as watermarks can still significantly mislead models. These findings delineate the current boundary of video generation realism and expose limitations of VLMs in perceptual fidelity and audio-visual consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/video-reality-test/video-reality-test.

Consistent image generation requires faithfully preserving identities, styles, and logical coherence across multiple images, which is essential for applications such as storytelling and character design. Supervised training approaches struggle with this task due to the lack of large-scale datasets capturing visual consistency and the complexity of modeling human perceptual preferences. In this paper, we argue that reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising alternative by enabling models to learn complex and subjective visual criteria in a data-free manner. To achieve this, we introduce PaCo-RL, a comprehensive framework that combines a specialized consistency reward model with an efficient RL algorithm. The first component, PaCo-Reward, is a pairwise consistency evaluator trained on a large-scale dataset constructed via automated sub-figure pairing. It evaluates consistency through a generative, autoregressive scoring mechanism enhanced by task-aware instructions and CoT reasons. The second component, PaCo-GRPO, leverages a novel resolution-decoupled optimization strategy to substantially reduce RL cost, alongside a log-tamed multi-reward aggregation mechanism that ensures balanced and stable reward optimization. Extensive experiments across the two representative subtasks show that PaCo-Reward significantly improves alignment with human perceptions of visual consistency, and PaCo-GRPO achieves state-of-the-art consistency performance with improved training efficiency and stability. Together, these results highlight the promise of PaCo-RL as a practical and scalable solution for consistent image generation. The project page is available at https://x-gengroup.github.io/HomePage_PaCo-RL/.

Accurate future video prediction requires both high visual fidelity and consistent scene semantics, particularly in complex dynamic environments such as autonomous driving. We present Re2Pix, a hierarchical video prediction framework that decomposes forecasting into two stages: semantic representation prediction and representation-guided visual synthesis. Instead of directly predicting future RGB frames, our approach first forecasts future scene structure in the feature space of a frozen vision foundation model, and then conditions a latent diffusion model on these predicted representations to render photorealistic frames. This decomposition enables the model to focus first on scene dynamics and then on appearance generation. A key challenge arises from the train-test mismatch between ground-truth representations available during training and predicted ones used at inference. To address this, we introduce two conditioning strategies, nested dropout and mixed supervision, that improve robustness to imperfect autoregressive predictions. Experiments on challenging driving benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed semantics-first design significantly improves temporal semantic consistency, perceptual quality, and training efficiency compared to strong diffusion baselines. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/Sta8is/Re2Pix

Human motion understanding and generation are crucial for vision and robotics but remain limited in reasoning capability and test-time planning. We propose MoRL, a unified multimodal motion model trained with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Our task-specific reward design combines semantic alignment and reasoning coherence for understanding with physical plausibility and text-motion consistency for generation, improving both logical reasoning and perceptual realism. To further enhance inference, we introduce Chain-of-Motion (CoM), a test-time reasoning method that enables step-by-step planning and reflection. We also construct two large-scale CoT datasets, MoUnd-CoT-140K and MoGen-CoT-140K, to align motion sequences with reasoning traces and action descriptions. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML show that MoRL achieves significant gains over state-of-the-art baselines. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/MoRL. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/MoRL.

This paper introduces V2A-DPO, a novel Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) framework tailored for flow-based video-to-audio generation (V2A) models, incorporating key adaptations to effectively align generated audio with human preferences. Our approach incorporates three core innovations: (1) AudioScore-a comprehensive human preference-aligned scoring system for assessing semantic consistency, temporal alignment, and perceptual quality of synthesized audio; (2) an automated AudioScore-driven pipeline for generating large-scale preference pair data for DPO optimization; (3) a curriculum learning-empowered DPO optimization strategy specifically tailored for flow-based generative models. Experiments on benchmark VGGSound dataset demonstrate that human-preference aligned Frieren and MMAudio using V2A-DPO outperform their counterparts optimized using Denoising Diffusion Policy Optimization (DDPO) as well as pre-trained baselines. Furthermore, our DPO-optimized MMAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple metrics, surpassing published V2A models.

Although recent 3D-native generators have made great progress in synthesizing reliable geometry, they still fall short in achieving realistic appearances. A key obstacle lies in the lack of diverse and high-quality real-world 3D assets with rich texture details, since capturing such data is intrinsically difficult due to the diverse scales of scenes, non-rigid motions of objects, and the limited precision of 3D scanners. We introduce Photo3D, a framework for advancing photorealistic 3D generation, which is driven by the image data generated by the GPT-4o-Image model. Considering that the generated images can distort 3D structures due to their lack of multi-view consistency, we design a structure-aligned multi-view synthesis pipeline and construct a detail-enhanced multi-view dataset paired with 3D geometry. Building on it, we present a realistic detail enhancement scheme that leverages perceptual feature adaptation and semantic structure matching to enforce appearance consistency with realistic details while preserving the structural consistency with the 3D-native geometry. Our scheme is general to different 3D-native generators, and we present dedicated training strategies to facilitate the optimization of geometry-texture coupled and decoupled 3D-native generation paradigms. Experiments demonstrate that Photo3D generalizes well across diverse 3D-native generation paradigms and achieves state-of-the-art photorealistic 3D generation performance.

Reconstruction of static visual stimuli from non-invasion brain activity fMRI achieves great success, owning to advanced deep learning models such as CLIP and Stable Diffusion. However, the research on fMRI-to-video reconstruction remains limited since decoding the spatiotemporal perception of continuous visual experiences is formidably challenging. We contend that the key to addressing these challenges lies in accurately decoding both high-level semantics and low-level perception flows, as perceived by the brain in response to video stimuli. To the end, we propose NeuroClips, an innovative framework to decode high-fidelity and smooth video from fMRI. NeuroClips utilizes a semantics reconstructor to reconstruct video keyframes, guiding semantic accuracy and consistency, and employs a perception reconstructor to capture low-level perceptual details, ensuring video smoothness. During inference, it adopts a pre-trained T2V diffusion model injected with both keyframes and low-level perception flows for video reconstruction. Evaluated on a publicly available fMRI-video dataset, NeuroClips achieves smooth high-fidelity video reconstruction of up to 6s at 8FPS, gaining significant improvements over state-of-the-art models in various metrics, e.g., a 128% improvement in SSIM and an 81% improvement in spatiotemporal metrics. Our project is available at https://github.com/gongzix/NeuroClips.

Understanding perspective is fundamental to human visual perception, yet the extent to which multimodal large language models (MLLMs) internalize perspective geometry remains unclear. We introduce MMPerspective, the first benchmark specifically designed to systematically evaluate MLLMs' understanding of perspective through 10 carefully crafted tasks across three complementary dimensions: Perspective Perception, Reasoning, and Robustness. Our benchmark comprises 2,711 real-world and synthetic image instances with 5,083 question-answer pairs that probe key capabilities, such as vanishing point perception and counting, perspective type reasoning, line relationship understanding in 3D space, invariance to perspective-preserving transformations, etc. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 43 state-of-the-art MLLMs, we uncover significant limitations: while models demonstrate competence on surface-level perceptual tasks, they struggle with compositional reasoning and maintaining spatial consistency under perturbations. Our analysis further reveals intriguing patterns between model architecture, scale, and perspective capabilities, highlighting both robustness bottlenecks and the benefits of chain-of-thought prompting. MMPerspective establishes a valuable testbed for diagnosing and advancing spatial understanding in vision-language systems. Resources available at: https://yunlong10.github.io/MMPerspective/

Diffusion-based editing has rapidly evolved from curated inpainting tools into general-purpose editors spanning text-guided instruction following, mask-localized edits, drag-based geometric manipulation, exemplar transfer, and training-free composition systems. Despite strong empirical progress, the field lacks a unified treatment of core desiderata that govern practical usability: controllability (how precisely and continuously the user can specify an edit), faithfulness to user intent (semantic alignment to instructions), semantic consistency (preservation of identity and non-target content), locality (containment of changes), and perceptual quality (artifact suppression and detail retention). This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of general diffusion-based image editing, connecting diverse paradigms through a common view of editing as guided transport on a learned image manifold. We first formalize editing as an operator induced by a conditional reverse-time generative process and define task-agnostic metrics capturing instruction adherence, region preservation, semantic consistency, and stability under repeated edits. We then develop theory describing edit dynamics under (i) noise-injection and denoising transport, (ii) inversion-and-edit pipelines and the propagation of inversion errors, and (iii) locality constraints implemented via masked guidance or hard constraints. Under mild Lipschitz assumptions on the learned score or flow field, we derive bounds connecting guidance strength and inversion error to measurable deviations in non-target regions, and we characterize accumulation effects under iterative multi-turn editing. Empirically, we benchmark representative paradigms.

World Generation Models are emerging as a cornerstone of next-generation multimodal intelligence systems. Unlike traditional 2D visual generation, World Models aim to construct realistic, dynamic, and physically consistent 3D/4D worlds from images, videos, or text. These models not only need to produce high-fidelity visual content but also maintain coherence across space, time, physics, and instruction control, enabling applications in virtual reality, autonomous driving, embodied intelligence, and content creation. However, prior benchmarks emphasize different evaluation dimensions and lack a unified assessment of world-realism capability. To systematically evaluate World Models, we introduce the 4DWorldBench, which measures models across four key dimensions: Perceptual Quality, Condition-4D Alignment, Physical Realism, and 4D Consistency. The benchmark covers tasks such as Image-to-3D/4D, Video-to-4D, Text-to-3D/4D. Beyond these, we innovatively introduce adaptive conditioning across multiple modalities, which not only integrates but also extends traditional evaluation paradigms. To accommodate different modality-conditioned inputs, we map all modality conditions into a unified textual space during evaluation, and further integrate LLM-as-judge, MLLM-as-judge, and traditional network-based methods. This unified and adaptive design enables more comprehensive and consistent evaluation of alignment, physical realism, and cross-modal coherence. Preliminary human studies further demonstrate that our adaptive tool selection achieves closer agreement with subjective human judgments. We hope this benchmark will serve as a foundation for objective comparisons and improvements, accelerating the transition from "visual generation" to "world generation." Our project can be found at https://yeppp27.github.io/4DWorldBench.github.io/.

Synthetic medical data offers a scalable solution for training robust models, but significant domain gaps limit its generalizability to real-world clinical settings. This paper addresses the challenge of cross-domain translation between synthetic and real X-ray images of the head, focusing on bridging discrepancies in attenuation behavior, noise characteristics, and soft tissue representation. We propose MedShift, a unified class-conditional generative model based on Flow Matching and Schrodinger Bridges, which enables high-fidelity, unpaired image translation across multiple domains. Unlike prior approaches that require domain-specific training or rely on paired data, MedShift learns a shared domain-agnostic latent space and supports seamless translation between any pair of domains seen during training. We introduce X-DigiSkull, a new dataset comprising aligned synthetic and real skull X-rays under varying radiation doses, to benchmark domain translation models. Experimental results demonstrate that, despite its smaller model size compared to diffusion-based approaches, MedShift offers strong performance and remains flexible at inference time, as it can be tuned to prioritize either perceptual fidelity or structural consistency, making it a scalable and generalizable solution for domain adaptation in medical imaging. The code and dataset are available at https://caetas.github.io/medshift.html

The long-standing theory that a colour-naming system evolves under dual pressure of efficient communication and perceptual mechanism is supported by more and more linguistic studies, including analysing four decades of diachronic data from the Nafaanra language. This inspires us to explore whether machine learning could evolve and discover a similar colour-naming system via optimising the communication efficiency represented by high-level recognition performance. Here, we propose a novel colour quantisation transformer, CQFormer, that quantises colour space while maintaining the accuracy of machine recognition on the quantised images. Given an RGB image, Annotation Branch maps it into an index map before generating the quantised image with a colour palette; meanwhile the Palette Branch utilises a key-point detection way to find proper colours in the palette among the whole colour space. By interacting with colour annotation, CQFormer is able to balance both the machine vision accuracy and colour perceptual structure such as distinct and stable colour distribution for discovered colour system. Very interestingly, we even observe the consistent evolution pattern between our artificial colour system and basic colour terms across human languages. Besides, our colour quantisation method also offers an efficient quantisation method that effectively compresses the image storage while maintaining high performance in high-level recognition tasks such as classification and detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method with extremely low bit-rate colours, showing potential to integrate into quantisation network to quantities from image to network activation. The source code is available at https://github.com/ryeocthiv/CQFormer

An automatic pitch correction system typically includes several stages, such as pitch extraction, deviation estimation, pitch shift processing, and cross-fade smoothing. However, designing these components with strategies often requires domain expertise and they are likely to fail on corner cases. In this paper, we present KaraTuner, an end-to-end neural architecture that predicts pitch curve and resynthesizes the singing voice directly from the tuned pitch and vocal spectrum extracted from the original recordings. Several vital technical points have been introduced in KaraTuner to ensure pitch accuracy, pitch naturalness, timbre consistency, and sound quality. A feed-forward Transformer is employed in the pitch predictor to capture longterm dependencies in the vocal spectrum and musical note. We also develop a pitch-controllable vocoder based on a novel source-filter block and the Fre-GAN architecture. KaraTuner obtains a higher preference than the rule-based pitch correction approach through A/B tests, and perceptual experiments show that the proposed vocoder achieves significant advantages in timbre consistency and sound quality compared with the parametric WORLD vocoder, phase vocoder and CLPC vocoder.

Single-shot low-light image enhancement (SLLIE) remains challenging due to the limited availability of diverse, real-world paired datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Low-Light Smartphone Dataset (LSD), a large-scale, high-resolution (4K+) dataset collected in the wild across a wide range of challenging lighting conditions (0.1 to 200 lux). LSD contains 6,425 precisely aligned low and normal-light image pairs, selected from over 8,000 dynamic indoor and outdoor scenes through multi-frame acquisition and expert evaluation. To evaluate generalization and aesthetic quality, we collect 2,117 unpaired low-light images from previously unseen devices. To fully exploit LSD, we propose TFFormer, a hybrid model that encodes luminance and chrominance (LC) separately to reduce color-structure entanglement. We further propose a cross-attention-driven joint decoder for context-aware fusion of LC representations, along with LC refinement and LC-guided supervision to significantly enhance perceptual fidelity and structural consistency. TFFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on LSD (+2.45 dB PSNR) and substantially improves downstream vision tasks, such as low-light object detection (+6.80 mAP on ExDark).

We address the problem of detecting and erasing furniture from a wide angle photograph of a room. Inpainting large regions of an indoor scene often results in geometric inconsistencies of background elements within the inpaint mask. To address this problem, we utilize perceptual information (e.g. instance segmentation, and room layout) to produce a geometrically consistent empty version of a room. We share important details to make this system viable, such as per-plane inpainting, automatic rectification, and texture refinement. We provide detailed ablation along with qualitative examples, justifying our design choices. We show an application of our system by removing real furniture from a room and redecorating it with virtual furniture.

The rapid advancement of vision-language models has catalyzed the emergence of GUI agents, which hold immense potential for automating complex tasks, from online shopping to flight booking, thereby alleviating the burden of repetitive digital workflows. As a foundational capability, GUI grounding is typically established as a prerequisite for end-to-end task execution. It enables models to precisely locate interface elements, such as text and icons, to perform accurate operations like clicking and typing. Unlike prior works that fine-tune models already possessing strong spatial awareness (e.g., Qwen3-VL), we aim to master the full technical pipeline by starting from a base model with minimal grounding ability, such as POINTS-1.5. We introduce POINTS-GUI-G-8B, which achieves state-of-the-art performance with scores of 59.9 on ScreenSpot-Pro, 66.0 on OSWorld-G, 95.7 on ScreenSpot-v2, and 49.9 on UI-Vision. Our model's success is driven by three key factors: (1) Refined Data Engineering, involving the unification of diverse open-source datasets format alongside sophisticated strategies for augmentation, filtering, and difficulty grading; (2) Improved Training Strategies, including continuous fine-tuning of the vision encoder to enhance perceptual accuracy and maintaining resolution consistency between training and inference; and (3) Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Verifiable Rewards. While RL is traditionally used to bolster reasoning, we demonstrate that it significantly improves precision in the perception-intensive GUI grounding task. Furthermore, GUI grounding provides a natural advantage for RL, as rewards are easily verifiable and highly accurate.

Perceptual constancy is the ability to maintain stable perceptions of objects despite changes in sensory input, such as variations in distance, angle, or lighting. This ability is crucial for recognizing visual information in a dynamic world, making it essential for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, whether VLMs are currently and theoretically capable of mastering this ability remains underexplored. In this study, we evaluated 33 VLMs using 253 experiments across three domains: color, size, and shape constancy. The experiments included single-image and video adaptations of classic cognitive tasks, along with novel tasks in in-the-wild conditions, to evaluate the models' recognition of object properties under varying conditions. We found significant variability in VLM performance, with models performance in shape constancy clearly dissociated from that of color and size constancy.

Perception is often viewed as a process that transforms physical variables, external to an observer, into internal psychological variables. Such a process can be modeled by a function coined perceptual scale. The perceptual scale can be deduced from psychophysical measurements that consist in comparing the relative differences between stimuli (i.e. difference scaling experiments). However, this approach is often overlooked by the modeling and experimentation communities. Here, we demonstrate the value of measuring the perceptual scale of classical (spatial frequency, orientation) and less classical physical variables (interpolation between textures) by embedding it in recent probabilistic modeling of perception. First, we show that the assumption that an observer has an internal representation of univariate parameters such as spatial frequency or orientation while stimuli are high-dimensional does not lead to contradictory predictions when following the theoretical framework. Second, we show that the measured perceptual scale corresponds to the transduction function hypothesized in this framework. In particular, we demonstrate that it is related to the Fisher information of the generative model that underlies perception and we test the predictions given by the generative model of different stimuli in a set a of difference scaling experiments. Our main conclusion is that the perceptual scale is mostly driven by the stimulus power spectrum. Finally, we propose that this measure of perceptual scale is a way to push further the notion of perceptual distances by estimating the perceptual geometry of images i.e. the path between images instead of simply the distance between those.

As general purpose vision models get increasingly effective at a wide set of tasks, it is imperative that they be consistent across the tasks they support. Inconsistent AI models are considered brittle and untrustworthy by human users and are more challenging to incorporate into larger systems that take dependencies on their outputs. Measuring consistency between very heterogeneous tasks that might include outputs in different modalities is challenging since it is difficult to determine if the predictions are consistent with one another. As a solution, we introduce a benchmark dataset, COCOCON, where we use contrast sets created by modifying test instances for multiple tasks in small but semantically meaningful ways to change the gold label, and outline metrics for measuring if a model is consistent by ranking the original and perturbed instances across tasks. We find that state-of-the-art systems suffer from a surprisingly high degree of inconsistent behavior across tasks, especially for more heterogeneous tasks. Finally, we propose using a rank correlation-based auxiliary objective computed over large automatically created cross-task contrast sets to improve the multi-task consistency of large unified models, while retaining their original accuracy on downstream tasks. Project website available at https://adymaharana.github.io/cococon/

While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on ImageNet classification has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new dataset of human perceptual similarity judgments. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by large margins on our dataset. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.

Existing perceptual similarity metrics assume an image and its reference are well aligned. As a result, these metrics are often sensitive to a small alignment error that is imperceptible to the human eyes. This paper studies the effect of small misalignment, specifically a small shift between the input and reference image, on existing metrics, and accordingly develops a shift-tolerant similarity metric. This paper builds upon LPIPS, a widely used learned perceptual similarity metric, and explores architectural design considerations to make it robust against imperceptible misalignment. Specifically, we study a wide spectrum of neural network elements, such as anti-aliasing filtering, pooling, striding, padding, and skip connection, and discuss their roles in making a robust metric. Based on our studies, we develop a new deep neural network-based perceptual similarity metric. Our experiments show that our metric is tolerant to imperceptible shifts while being consistent with the human similarity judgment.

Large vision language models have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in addressing challenges related to both textual and visual content. Nevertheless, these models are susceptible to various hallucinations. In this paper, we focus on a new form of hallucination, specifically termed as number hallucination, which denotes instances where models fail to accurately identify the quantity of objects in an image. We establish a dataset and employ evaluation metrics to assess number hallucination, revealing a pronounced prevalence of this issue across mainstream large vision language models (LVLMs). Additionally, we delve into a thorough analysis of number hallucination, examining inner and outer inconsistency problem from two related perspectives. We assert that this inconsistency is one cause of number hallucination and propose a consistency training method as a means to alleviate such hallucination, which achieves an average improvement of 8\% compared with direct finetuning method.

Recently, the introduction of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has largely improved the generation ability of unified models. However, it is observed that the current thinking process during generation mainly focuses on the text consistency with the text prompt, ignoring the visual context consistency with the visual reference images during the multi-modal generation, e.g., multi-reference generation. The lack of such consistency results in the failure in maintaining key visual features (like human ID, object attribute, style). To this end, we integrate the visual context consistency into the reasoning of unified models, explicitly motivating the model to sustain such consistency by 1) Adaptive Visual Planning: generating structured visual check list to figure out the visual element of needed consistency keeping, and 2) Iterative Visual Correction: performing self-reflection with the guidance of check lists and refining the generated result in an iterative manner. To achieve this, we use supervised finetuning to teach the model how to plan the visual checking, conduct self-reflection and self-refinement, and use flow-GRPO to further enhance the visual consistency through a customized visual checking reward. The experiments show that our method outperforms both zero-shot unified models and those with text CoTs in multi-modal generation, demonstrating higher visual context consistency.

Human perception of similarity across uni- and multimodal inputs is highly complex, making it challenging to develop automated metrics that accurately mimic it. General purpose vision-language models, such as CLIP and large multi-modal models (LMMs), can be applied as zero-shot perceptual metrics, and several recent works have developed models specialized in narrow perceptual tasks. However, the extent to which existing perceptual metrics align with human perception remains unclear. To investigate this question, we introduce UniSim-Bench, a benchmark encompassing 7 multi-modal perceptual similarity tasks, with a total of 25 datasets. Our evaluation reveals that while general-purpose models perform reasonably well on average, they often lag behind specialized models on individual tasks. Conversely, metrics fine-tuned for specific tasks fail to generalize well to unseen, though related, tasks. As a first step towards a unified multi-task perceptual similarity metric, we fine-tune both encoder-based and generative vision-language models on a subset of the UniSim-Bench tasks. This approach yields the highest average performance, and in some cases, even surpasses taskspecific models. Nevertheless, these models still struggle with generalization to unseen tasks, highlighting the ongoing challenge of learning a robust, unified perceptual similarity metric capable of capturing the human notion of similarity. The code and models are available at https://github.com/SaraGhazanfari/UniSim.

Large language models (LLMs) are expected to respond accurately but often exhibit deficient reasoning or generate hallucinatory content. To address these, studies prefixed with ``Self-'' such as Self-Consistency, Self-Improve, and Self-Refine have been initiated. They share a commonality: involving LLMs evaluating and updating itself to mitigate the issues. Nonetheless, these efforts lack a unified perspective on summarization, as existing surveys predominantly focus on categorization without examining the motivations behind these works. In this paper, we summarize a theoretical framework, termed Internal Consistency, which offers unified explanations for phenomena such as the lack of reasoning and the presence of hallucinations. Internal Consistency assesses the coherence among LLMs' latent layer, decoding layer, and response layer based on sampling methodologies. Expanding upon the Internal Consistency framework, we introduce a streamlined yet effective theoretical framework capable of mining Internal Consistency, named Self-Feedback. The Self-Feedback framework consists of two modules: Self-Evaluation and Self-Update. This framework has been employed in numerous studies. We systematically classify these studies by tasks and lines of work; summarize relevant evaluation methods and benchmarks; and delve into the concern, ``Does Self-Feedback Really Work?'' We propose several critical viewpoints, including the ``Hourglass Evolution of Internal Consistency'', ``Consistency Is (Almost) Correctness'' hypothesis, and ``The Paradox of Latent and Explicit Reasoning''. Furthermore, we outline promising directions for future research. We have open-sourced the experimental code, reference list, and statistical data, available at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/ICSFSurvey.

A fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience is what shapes visual perception: the external world's structure or the brain's internal architecture. Although some perceptual variability can be traced to individual differences, brain responses to naturalistic stimuli evoke similar activity patterns across individuals, suggesting a convergent representational principle. Here, we test if this stimulus-driven convergence follows a common trajectory across people and deep neural networks (DNNs) during its transformation from sensory to high-level internal representations. We introduce a unified framework that traces representational flow by combining inter-subject similarity with alignment to model hierarchies. Applying this framework to three independent fMRI datasets of visual scene perception, we reveal a cortex-wide network, conserved across individuals, organized into two pathways: a medial-ventral stream for scene structure and a lateral-dorsal stream tuned for social and biological content. This functional organization is captured by the hierarchies of vision DNNs but not language models, reinforcing the specificity of the visual-to-semantic transformation. These findings show a convergent computational solution for visual encoding in both human and artificial vision, driven by the structure of the external world.

Current perceptual similarity metrics operate at the level of pixels and patches. These metrics compare images in terms of their low-level colors and textures, but fail to capture mid-level similarities and differences in image layout, object pose, and semantic content. In this paper, we develop a perceptual metric that assesses images holistically. Our first step is to collect a new dataset of human similarity judgments over image pairs that are alike in diverse ways. Critical to this dataset is that judgments are nearly automatic and shared by all observers. To achieve this we use recent text-to-image models to create synthetic pairs that are perturbed along various dimensions. We observe that popular perceptual metrics fall short of explaining our new data, and we introduce a new metric, DreamSim, tuned to better align with human perception. We analyze how our metric is affected by different visual attributes, and find that it focuses heavily on foreground objects and semantic content while also being sensitive to color and layout. Notably, despite being trained on synthetic data, our metric generalizes to real images, giving strong results on retrieval and reconstruction tasks. Furthermore, our metric outperforms both prior learned metrics and recent large vision models on these tasks.

Can our brain signals faithfully reflect the original visual stimuli, even including high-frequency details? Although human perceptual and cognitive capacities enable us to process and remember visual information, these abilities are constrained by several factors, such as limited attentional resources and the finite capacity of visual memory. When visual stimuli are processed by human visual system into brain signals, some information is inevitably lost, leading to a discrepancy known as the System GAP. Additionally, perceptual and cognitive dynamics, along with technical noise in signal acquisition, degrade the fidelity of brain signals relative to the visual stimuli, known as the Random GAP. When encoded brain representations are directly aligned with the corresponding pretrained image features, the System GAP and Random GAP between paired data challenge the model, requiring it to bridge these gaps. However, in the context of limited paired data, these gaps are difficult for the model to learn, leading to overfitting and poor generalization to new data. To address these GAPs, we propose a simple yet effective approach called the Uncertainty-aware Blur Prior (UBP). It estimates the uncertainty within the paired data, reflecting the mismatch between brain signals and visual stimuli. Based on this uncertainty, UBP dynamically blurs the high-frequency details of the original images, reducing the impact of the mismatch and improving alignment. Our method achieves a top-1 accuracy of 50.9\% and a top-5 accuracy of 79.7\% on the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by margins of 13.7\% and 9.8\%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/HaitaoWuTJU/Uncertainty-aware-Blur-Prior{GitHub}.

We study the perception of color illusions by vision-language models. Color illusion, where a person's visual system perceives color differently from actual color, is well-studied in human vision. However, it remains underexplored whether vision-language models (VLMs), trained on large-scale human data, exhibit similar perceptual biases when confronted with such color illusions. We propose an automated framework for generating color illusion images, resulting in RCID (Realistic Color Illusion Dataset), a dataset of 19,000 realistic illusion images. Our experiments show that all studied VLMs exhibit perceptual biases similar human vision. Finally, we train a model to distinguish both human perception and actual pixel differences.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are typically evaluated with Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks which assess a model's understanding of scenes. Good VQA performance is taken as evidence that the model will perform well on a broader range of tasks that require both visual and language inputs. However, scene-aware VQA does not fully capture input biases or assess hallucinations caused by a misalignment between modalities. To address this, we propose a Cross-modal Alignment Similarity Test (CAST) to probe VLMs for self-consistency across modalities. This test involves asking the models to identify similarities between two scenes through text-only, image-only, or both and then assess the truthfulness of the similarities they generate. Since there is no ground-truth to compare against, this evaluation does not focus on objective accuracy but rather on whether VLMs are internally consistent in their outputs. We argue that while not all self-consistent models are capable or accurate, all capable VLMs must be self-consistent.

Visual search is a ubiquitous and often challenging daily task, exemplified by looking for the car keys at home or a friend in a crowd. An intriguing property of some classical search tasks is an asymmetry such that finding a target A among distractors B can be easier than finding B among A. To elucidate the mechanisms responsible for asymmetry in visual search, we propose a computational model that takes a target and a search image as inputs and produces a sequence of eye movements until the target is found. The model integrates eccentricity-dependent visual recognition with target-dependent top-down cues. We compared the model against human behavior in six paradigmatic search tasks that show asymmetry in humans. Without prior exposure to the stimuli or task-specific training, the model provides a plausible mechanism for search asymmetry. We hypothesized that the polarity of search asymmetry arises from experience with the natural environment. We tested this hypothesis by training the model on augmented versions of ImageNet where the biases of natural images were either removed or reversed. The polarity of search asymmetry disappeared or was altered depending on the training protocol. This study highlights how classical perceptual properties can emerge in neural network models, without the need for task-specific training, but rather as a consequence of the statistical properties of the developmental diet fed to the model. All source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/kreimanlab/VisualSearchAsymmetry.

Many colour maps provided by vendors have highly uneven perceptual contrast over their range. It is not uncommon for colour maps to have perceptual flat spots that can hide a feature as large as one tenth of the total data range. Colour maps may also have perceptual discontinuities that induce the appearance of false features. Previous work in the design of perceptually uniform colour maps has mostly failed to recognise that CIELAB space is only designed to be perceptually uniform at very low spatial frequencies. The most important factor in designing a colour map is to ensure that the magnitude of the incremental change in perceptual lightness of the colours is uniform. The specific requirements for linear, diverging, rainbow and cyclic colour maps are developed in detail. To support this work two test images for evaluating colour maps are presented. The use of colour maps in combination with relief shading is considered and the conditions under which colour can enhance or disrupt relief shading are identified. Finally, a set of new basis colours for the construction of ternary images are presented. Unlike the RGB primaries these basis colours produce images whereby the salience of structures are consistent irrespective of the assignment of basis colours to data channels.

Contrast consistency, the ability of a model to make consistently correct predictions in the presence of perturbations, is an essential aspect in NLP. While studied in tasks such as sentiment analysis and reading comprehension, it remains unexplored in open-domain question answering (OpenQA) due to the difficulty of collecting perturbed questions that satisfy factuality requirements. In this work, we collect minimally edited questions as challenging contrast sets to evaluate OpenQA models. Our collection approach combines both human annotation and large language model generation. We find that the widely used dense passage retriever (DPR) performs poorly on our contrast sets, despite fitting the training set well and performing competitively on standard test sets. To address this issue, we introduce a simple and effective query-side contrastive loss with the aid of data augmentation to improve DPR training. Our experiments on the contrast sets demonstrate that DPR's contrast consistency is improved without sacrificing its accuracy on the standard test sets.

We propose Perceptual Taxonomy, a structured process of scene understanding that first recognizes objects and their spatial configurations, then infers task-relevant properties such as material, affordance, function, and physical attributes to support goal-directed reasoning. While this form of reasoning is fundamental to human cognition, current vision-language benchmarks lack comprehensive evaluation of this ability and instead focus on surface-level recognition or image-text alignment. To address this gap, we introduce Perceptual Taxonomy, a benchmark for physically grounded visual reasoning. We annotate 3173 objects with four property families covering 84 fine-grained attributes. Using these annotations, we construct a multiple-choice question benchmark with 5802 images across both synthetic and real domains. The benchmark contains 28033 template-based questions spanning four types (object description, spatial reasoning, property matching, and taxonomy reasoning), along with 50 expert-crafted questions designed to evaluate models across the full spectrum of perceptual taxonomy reasoning. Experimental results show that leading vision-language models perform well on recognition tasks but degrade by 10 to 20 percent on property-driven questions, especially those requiring multi-step reasoning over structured attributes. These findings highlight a persistent gap in structured visual understanding and the limitations of current models that rely heavily on pattern matching. We also show that providing in-context reasoning examples from simulated scenes improves performance on real-world and expert-curated questions, demonstrating the effectiveness of perceptual-taxonomy-guided prompting.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data captured by humans emulating our understanding of the world. However, known as visual illusions, human's perception of reality isn't always faithful to the physical world. This raises a key question: do VLMs have the similar kind of illusions as humans do, or do they faithfully learn to represent reality? To investigate this question, we build a dataset containing five types of visual illusions and formulate four tasks to examine visual illusions in state-of-the-art VLMs. Our findings have shown that although the overall alignment is low, larger models are closer to human perception and more susceptible to visual illusions. Our dataset and initial findings will promote a better understanding of visual illusions in humans and machines and provide a stepping stone for future computational models that can better align humans and machines in perceiving and communicating about the shared visual world. The code and data are available at https://github.com/vl-illusion/dataset.

Any-to-any generative models aim to enable seamless interpretation and generation across multiple modalities within a unified framework, yet their ability to preserve relationships across modalities remains uncertain. Do unified models truly achieve cross-modal coherence, or is this coherence merely perceived? To explore this, we introduce ACON, a dataset of 1,000 images (500 newly contributed) paired with captions, editing instructions, and Q&A pairs to evaluate cross-modal transfers rigorously. Using three consistency criteria-cyclic consistency, forward equivariance, and conjugated equivariance-our experiments reveal that any-to-any models do not consistently demonstrate greater cross-modal consistency than specialized models in pointwise evaluations such as cyclic consistency. However, equivariance evaluations uncover weak but observable consistency through structured analyses of the intermediate latent space enabled by multiple editing operations. We release our code and data at https://github.com/JiwanChung/ACON.

Machine learning advances in the last decade have relied significantly on large-scale datasets that continue to grow in size. Increasingly, those datasets also contain different data modalities. However, large multi-modal datasets are hard to annotate, and annotations may contain biases that we are often unaware of. Deep-net-based classifiers, in turn, are prone to exploit those biases and to find shortcuts. To study and quantify this concern, we introduce the perceptual score, a metric that assesses the degree to which a model relies on the different subsets of the input features, i.e., modalities. Using the perceptual score, we find a surprisingly consistent trend across four popular datasets: recent, more accurate state-of-the-art multi-modal models for visual question-answering or visual dialog tend to perceive the visual data less than their predecessors. This trend is concerning as answers are hence increasingly inferred from textual cues only. Using the perceptual score also helps to analyze model biases by decomposing the score into data subset contributions. We hope to spur a discussion on the perceptiveness of multi-modal models and also hope to encourage the community working on multi-modal classifiers to start quantifying perceptiveness via the proposed perceptual score.

Every day, humans perceive objects and communicate these perceptions through various channels. In this paper, we present a computational model designed to track and simulate the perception of objects, as well as their representations as conveyed in communication. We delineate two fundamental components of our internal representation, termed "observed" and "seen", which we correlate with established concepts in computer vision, namely encoding and decoding. These components are integrated into semiotic networks, which simulate perceptual inference of object perception and human communication. Our model of object perception by a person allows us to define object perception by {\em a network}. We demonstrate this with an example of an image baseline classifier by constructing a new network that includes the baseline classifier and an additional layer. This layer produces the images "perceived" by the entire network, transforming it into a perceptualized image classifier. This facilitates visualization of the acquired network. Within our network, the image representations become more efficient for classification tasks when they are assembled and randomized. In our experiments, the perceptualized network outperformed the baseline classifier on MNIST training databases consisting of a restricted number of images. Our model is not limited to persons and can be applied to any system featuring a loop involving the processing from "internal" to "external" representations.

Multimodal language models possess a remarkable ability to handle an open-vocabulary's worth of objects. Yet the best models still suffer from hallucinations when reasoning about scenes in the real world, revealing a gap between their seemingly strong performance on existing perception benchmarks that are saturating and their reasoning in the real world. To address this gap, we build a novel benchmark of in-the-wild scenes that we call Common-O. With more than 10.5k examples using exclusively new images not found in web training data to avoid contamination, Common-O goes beyond just perception, inspired by cognitive tests for humans, to probe reasoning across scenes by asking "what's in common?". We evaluate leading multimodal language models, including models specifically trained to perform chain-of-thought reasoning. We find that perceiving objects in single images is tractable for most models, yet reasoning across scenes is very challenging even for the best models, including reasoning models. Despite saturating many leaderboards focusing on perception, the best performing model only achieves 35% on Common-O -- and on Common-O Complex, consisting of more complex scenes, the best model achieves only 1%. Curiously, we find models are more prone to hallucinate when similar objects are present in the scene, suggesting models may be relying on object co-occurrence seen during training. Among the models we evaluated, we found scale can provide modest improvements while models explicitly trained with multi-image inputs show bigger improvements, suggesting scaled multi-image training may offer promise. We make our benchmark publicly available to spur research into the challenge of hallucination when reasoning across scenes.

Continual learning in visual understanding aims to deal with catastrophic forgetting in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). MLLMs deployed on devices have to continuously adapt to dynamic scenarios in downstream tasks, such as variations in background and perspective, to effectively perform complex visual tasks. To this end, we construct a multimodal visual understanding dataset (MSVQA) encompassing four different scenarios and perspectives including high altitude, underwater, low altitude and indoor, to investigate the catastrophic forgetting in MLLMs under the dynamics of scenario shifts in real-world data streams. Furthermore, we propose mUltimodal coNtInual learning with MLLMs From multi-scenarIo pERspectives (UNIFIER) to address visual discrepancies while learning different scenarios. Specifically, it decouples the visual information from different scenarios into distinct branches within each vision block and projects them into the same feature space. A consistency constraint is imposed on the features of each branch to maintain the stability of visual representations across scenarios. Extensive experiments on the MSVQA dataset demonstrate that UNIFIER effectively alleviates forgetting of cross-scenario tasks and achieves knowledge accumulation within the same scenario.

Evaluations of image compression performance which include human preferences have generally found that naive distortion functions such as MSE are insufficiently aligned to human perception. In order to align compression models to human perception, prior work has employed differentiable perceptual losses consisting of neural networks calibrated on large-scale datasets of human psycho-visual judgments. We show that, surprisingly, state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) can replicate binary human two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) judgments zero-shot when asked to reason about the differences between pairs of images. Motivated to exploit the powerful zero-shot visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs, we propose Vision-Language Models for Image Compression (VLIC), a diffusion-based image compression system designed to be post-trained with binary VLM judgments. VLIC leverages existing techniques for diffusion model post-training with preferences, rather than distilling the VLM judgments into a separate perceptual loss network. We show that calibrating this system on VLM judgments produces competitive or state-of-the-art performance on human-aligned visual compression depending on the dataset, according to perceptual metrics and large-scale user studies. We additionally conduct an extensive analysis of the VLM-based reward design and training procedure and share important insights. More visuals are available at https://kylesargent.github.io/vlic

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly pushed the boundaries of Visual Question Answering (VQA).However,high-resolution details can sometimes become noise that leads to hallucinations or reasoning errors. In this paper,we propose Degradation-Driven Prompting (DDP), a novel framework that improves VQA performance by strategically reducing image fidelity to force models to focus on essential structural information. We evaluate DDP across two distinct tasks. Physical attributes targets images prone to human misjudgment, where DDP employs a combination of 80p downsampling, structural visual aids (white background masks and orthometric lines), and In-Context Learning (ICL) to calibrate the model's focus. Perceptual phenomena addresses various machine-susceptible visual anomalies and illusions, including Visual Anomaly (VA), Color (CI), Motion(MI),Gestalt (GI), Geometric (GSI), and Visual Illusions (VI).For this task, DDP integrates a task-classification stage with specialized tools such as blur masks and contrast enhancement alongside downsampling. Our experimental results demonstrate that less is more: by intentionally degrading visual inputs and providing targeted structural prompts, DDP enables VLMs to bypass distracting textures and achieve superior reasoning accuracy on challenging visual benchmarks.

Building world models that accurately and comprehensively represent the real world is the utmost aspiration for conditional image generative models as it would enable their use as world simulators. For these models to be successful world models, they should not only excel at image quality and prompt-image consistency but also ensure high representation diversity. However, current research in generative models mostly focuses on creative applications that are predominantly concerned with human preferences of image quality and aesthetics. We note that generative models have inference time mechanisms - or knobs - that allow the control of generation consistency, quality, and diversity. In this paper, we use state-of-the-art text-to-image and image-and-text-to-image models and their knobs to draw consistency-diversity-realism Pareto fronts that provide a holistic view on consistency-diversity-realism multi-objective. Our experiments suggest that realism and consistency can both be improved simultaneously; however there exists a clear tradeoff between realism/consistency and diversity. By looking at Pareto optimal points, we note that earlier models are better at representation diversity and worse in consistency/realism, and more recent models excel in consistency/realism while decreasing significantly the representation diversity. By computing Pareto fronts on a geodiverse dataset, we find that the first version of latent diffusion models tends to perform better than more recent models in all axes of evaluation, and there exist pronounced consistency-diversity-realism disparities between geographical regions. Overall, our analysis clearly shows that there is no best model and the choice of model should be determined by the downstream application. With this analysis, we invite the research community to consider Pareto fronts as an analytical tool to measure progress towards world models.

Large-scale Vision Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly being applied to a wide range of real-world multimodal applications, involving complex visual and linguistic reasoning. As these models become more integrated into practical use, they are expected to handle complex aspects of human interaction. Among these, color perception is a fundamental yet highly variable aspect of visual understanding. It differs across individuals due to biological factors such as Color Vision Deficiencies (CVDs), as well as differences in culture and language. Despite its importance, perceptual diversity has received limited attention. In our study, we evaluate LVLMs' ability to account for individual level perceptual variation using the Ishihara Test, a widely used method for detecting CVDs. Our results show that LVLMs can explain CVDs in natural language, but they cannot simulate how people with CVDs perceive color in image based tasks. These findings highlight the need for multimodal systems that can account for color perceptual diversity and support broader discussions on perceptual inclusiveness and fairness in multimodal AI.

Continuous perception, the ability to integrate visual observations over time in a continuous stream fashion, is essential for robust real-world understanding, yet remains largely untested in current multimodal models. We introduce CP-Bench, a minimal and fully controlled benchmark designed to isolate this capability using an extremely simple task: counting identical cubes in a synthetic scene while the camera moves and only reveals subsets of objects at any moment. Despite the simplicity of the setting, we find that state-of-the-art open-source and commercial models, including Qwen-3-VL, InternVL3, GPT-5, and Gemini-3-Pro, fail dramatically. A static-camera control variant confirms that the failure arises not from object recognition but from an inability to accumulate evidence across time. Further experiments show that neither higher sampling FPS, perception- or spatial-enhanced models, nor finetuning with additional videos leads to meaningful cross-temporal generalization. Our results reveal a fundamental limitation in modern multimodal architectures and training paradigms. CP-Bench provides a simple yet powerful diagnostic tool and establishes a clean testbed for developing models capable of genuine time-consistent visual reasoning.

We introduce PerceptionComp, a manually annotated benchmark for complex, long-horizon, perception-centric video reasoning. PerceptionComp is designed so that no single moment is sufficient: answering each question requires multiple temporally separated pieces of visual evidence and compositional constraints under conjunctive and sequential logic, spanning perceptual subtasks such as objects, attributes, relations, locations, actions, and events, and requiring skills including semantic recognition, visual correspondence, temporal reasoning, and spatial reasoning. The benchmark contains 1,114 highly complex questions on 279 videos from diverse domains including city walk tours, indoor villa tours, video games, and extreme outdoor sports, with 100% manual annotation. Human studies show that PerceptionComp requires substantial test-time thinking and repeated perception steps: participants take much longer than on prior benchmarks, and accuracy drops to near chance (18.97%) when rewatching is disallowed. State-of-the-art MLLMs also perform substantially worse on PerceptionComp than on existing benchmarks: the best model in our evaluation, Gemini-3-Flash, reaches only 45.96% accuracy in the five-choice setting, while open-source models remain below 40%. These results suggest that perception-centric long-horizon video reasoning remains a major bottleneck, and we hope PerceptionComp will help drive progress in perceptual reasoning.

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that representations from neural networks are converging to a common statistical model of reality. We show that the existing metrics used to measure representational similarity are confounded by network scale: increasing model depth or width can systematically inflate representational similarity scores. To correct these effects, we introduce a permutation-based null-calibration framework that transforms any representational similarity metric into a calibrated score with statistical guarantees. We revisit the Platonic Representation Hypothesis with our calibration framework, which reveals a nuanced picture: the apparent convergence reported by global spectral measures largely disappears after calibration, while local neighborhood similarity, but not local distances, retains significant agreement across different modalities. Based on these findings, we propose the Aristotelian Representation Hypothesis: representations in neural networks are converging to shared local neighborhood relationships.

Perceptual similarity scores that align with human vision are critical for both training and evaluating computer vision models. Deep perceptual losses, such as LPIPS, achieve good alignment but rely on complex, highly non-linear discriminative features with unknown invariances, while hand-crafted measures like SSIM are interpretable but miss key perceptual properties. We introduce the Structured Uncertainty Similarity Score (SUSS); it models each image through a set of perceptual components, each represented by a structured multivariate Normal distribution. These are trained in a generative, self-supervised manner to assign high likelihood to human-imperceptible augmentations. The final score is a weighted sum of component log-probabilities with weights learned from human perceptual datasets. Unlike feature-based methods, SUSS learns image-specific linear transformations of residuals in pixel space, enabling transparent inspection through decorrelated residuals and sampling. SUSS aligns closely with human perceptual judgments, shows strong perceptual calibration across diverse distortion types, and provides localized, interpretable explanations of its similarity assessments. We further demonstrate stable optimization behavior and competitive performance when using SUSS as a perceptual loss for downstream imaging tasks.

Generative super-resolution (GSR) currently sets the state-of-the-art in terms of perceptual image quality, overcoming the "regression-to-the-mean" blur of prior non-generative models. However, from a human perspective, such models do not fully conform to the optimal balance between quality and fidelity. Instead, a different class of artifacts, in which generated details fail to perceptually match the low resolution image (LRI) or ground-truth image (GTI), is a critical but under studied issue in GSR, limiting its practical deployments. In this work, we focus on measuring, analyzing, and mitigating these artifacts (i.e., "hallucinations"). We observe that hallucinations are not well-characterized with existing image metrics or quality models, as they are orthogonal to both exact fidelity and no-reference quality. Instead, we take advantage of a multimodal large language model (MLLM) by constructing a prompt that assesses hallucinatory visual elements and generates a "Hallucination Score" (HS). We find that our HS is closely aligned with human evaluations, and also provides complementary insights to prior image metrics used for super-resolution (SR) models. In addition, we find certain deep feature distances have strong correlations with HS. We therefore propose to align the GSR models by using such features as differentiable reward functions to mitigate hallucinations.

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that neural networks trained on different modalities (e.g., text and images) align and eventually converge toward the same representation of reality. If true, this has significant implications for whether modality choice matters at all. We show that the experimental evidence for this hypothesis is fragile and depends critically on the evaluation regime. Alignment is measured using mutual nearest neighbors on small datasets (approx1K samples) and degrades substantially as the dataset is scaled to millions of samples. The alignment that remains between model representations reflects coarse semantic overlap rather than consistent fine-grained structure. Moreover, the evaluations in Huh et al. are done in a one-to-one image-caption setting, a constraint that breaks down in realistic many-to-many settings and further reduces alignment. We also find that the reported trend of stronger language models increasingly aligning with vision does not appear to hold for newer models. Overall, our findings suggest that the current evidence for cross-modal representational convergence is considerably weaker than subsequent works have taken it to be. Models trained on different modalities may learn equally rich representations of the world, just not the same one.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have yielded increasingly powerful models, yet their perceptual capacities remain poorly characterized. In practice, most model families scale language component while reusing nearly identical vision encoders (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL 3B/7B/72B), which raises pivotal concerns about whether progress reflects genuine visual grounding or reliance on internet-scale textual world knowledge. Existing evaluation methods emphasize end-task accuracy, overlooking robustness, attribution fidelity, and reasoning under controlled perturbations. We present The Perceptual Observatory, a framework that characterizes MLLMs across verticals like: (i) simple vision tasks, such as face matching and text-in-vision comprehension capabilities; (ii) local-to-global understanding, encompassing image matching, grid pointing game, and attribute localization, which tests general visual grounding. Each vertical is instantiated with ground-truth datasets of faces and words, systematically perturbed through pixel-based augmentations and diffusion-based stylized illusions. The Perceptual Observatory moves beyond leaderboard accuracy to yield insights into how MLLMs preserve perceptual grounding and relational structure under perturbations, providing a principled foundation for analyzing strengths and weaknesses of current and future models.

Perceptual similarity metrics have progressively become more correlated with human judgments on perceptual similarity; however, despite recent advances, the addition of an imperceptible distortion can still compromise these metrics. In our study, we systematically examine the robustness of these metrics to imperceptible adversarial perturbations. Following the two-alternative forced-choice experimental design with two distorted images and one reference image, we perturb the distorted image closer to the reference via an adversarial attack until the metric flips its judgment. We first show that all metrics in our study are susceptible to perturbations generated via common adversarial attacks such as FGSM, PGD, and the One-pixel attack. Next, we attack the widely adopted LPIPS metric using spatial-transformation-based adversarial perturbations (stAdv) in a white-box setting to craft adversarial examples that can effectively transfer to other similarity metrics in a black-box setting. We also combine the spatial attack stAdv with PGD (ell_infty-bounded) attack to increase transferability and use these adversarial examples to benchmark the robustness of both traditional and recently developed metrics. Our benchmark provides a good starting point for discussion and further research on the robustness of metrics to imperceptible adversarial perturbations.

We introduce two new benchmarks REST and REST+(Render-Equivalence Stress Tests) to enable systematic evaluation of cross-modal inconsistency in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). MLLMs are trained to represent vision and language in the same embedding space, yet they cannot perform the same tasks in both modalities. Our benchmarks contain samples with the same semantic information in three modalities (image, text, mixed) and we show that state-of-the-art MLLMs cannot consistently reason over these different modalities. We evaluate 15 MLLMs and find that the degree of modality inconsistency varies substantially, even when accounting for problems with text recognition (OCR). Neither rendering text as image nor rendering an image as text solves the inconsistency. Even if OCR is correct, we find that visual characteristics (text colour and resolution, but not font) and the number of vision tokens have an impact on model performance. Finally, we find that our consistency score correlates with the modality gap between text and images, highlighting a mechanistic interpretation of cross-modal inconsistent MLLMs.

Benefiting from pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) methods can synthesize rich and realistic details. However, due to the inherent stochasticity of T2I models, different noise inputs often lead to outputs with varying perceptual quality. Although this randomness is sometimes seen as a limitation, it also introduces a wider perceptual quality range, which can be exploited to improve Real-ISR performance. To this end, we introduce Direct Perceptual Preference Optimization for Real-ISR (DP^2O-SR), a framework that aligns generative models with perceptual preferences without requiring costly human annotations. We construct a hybrid reward signal by combining full-reference and no-reference image quality assessment (IQA) models trained on large-scale human preference datasets. This reward encourages both structural fidelity and natural appearance. To better utilize perceptual diversity, we move beyond the standard best-vs-worst selection and construct multiple preference pairs from outputs of the same model. Our analysis reveals that the optimal selection ratio depends on model capacity: smaller models benefit from broader coverage, while larger models respond better to stronger contrast in supervision. Furthermore, we propose hierarchical preference optimization, which adaptively weights training pairs based on intra-group reward gaps and inter-group diversity, enabling more efficient and stable learning. Extensive experiments across both diffusion- and flow-based T2I backbones demonstrate that DP^2O-SR significantly improves perceptual quality and generalizes well to real-world benchmarks.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency on general-purpose vision-language benchmarks, reaching or even exceeding human-level performance. However, these evaluations typically rely on standard in-distribution data, leaving the robustness of MLLMs largely unexamined when faced with scenarios that defy common-sense priors. To address this gap, we introduce VIA-Bench, a challenging benchmark designed to probe model performance on visual illusions and anomalies. It includes six core categories: color illusions, motion illusions, gestalt illusions, geometric and spatial illusions, general visual illusions, and visual anomalies. Through careful human-in-the-loop review, we construct over 1K high-quality question-answer pairs that require nuanced visual reasoning. Extensive evaluation of over 20 state-of-the-art MLLMs, including proprietary, open-source, and reasoning-enhanced models, uncovers significant vulnerabilities. Notably, we find that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning offers negligible robustness, often yielding ``brittle mirages'' where the model's logic collapses under illusory stimuli. Our findings reveal a fundamental divergence between machine and human perception, suggesting that resolving such perceptual bottlenecks is critical for the advancement of artificial general intelligence. The benchmark data and code will be released.

Diffusion models are relatively easy to train but require many steps to generate samples. Consistency models are far more difficult to train, but generate samples in a single step. In this paper we propose Multistep Consistency Models: A unification between Consistency Models (Song et al., 2023) and TRACT (Berthelot et al., 2023) that can interpolate between a consistency model and a diffusion model: a trade-off between sampling speed and sampling quality. Specifically, a 1-step consistency model is a conventional consistency model whereas we show that a infty-step consistency model is a diffusion model. Multistep Consistency Models work really well in practice. By increasing the sample budget from a single step to 2-8 steps, we can train models more easily that generate higher quality samples, while retaining much of the sampling speed benefits. Notable results are 1.4 FID on Imagenet 64 in 8 step and 2.1 FID on Imagenet128 in 8 steps with consistency distillation. We also show that our method scales to a text-to-image diffusion model, generating samples that are very close to the quality of the original model.

Consistency models are a nascent family of generative models that can sample high quality data in one step without the need for adversarial training. Current consistency models achieve optimal sample quality by distilling from pre-trained diffusion models and employing learned metrics such as LPIPS. However, distillation limits the quality of consistency models to that of the pre-trained diffusion model, and LPIPS causes undesirable bias in evaluation. To tackle these challenges, we present improved techniques for consistency training, where consistency models learn directly from data without distillation. We delve into the theory behind consistency training and identify a previously overlooked flaw, which we address by eliminating Exponential Moving Average from the teacher consistency model. To replace learned metrics like LPIPS, we adopt Pseudo-Huber losses from robust statistics. Additionally, we introduce a lognormal noise schedule for the consistency training objective, and propose to double total discretization steps every set number of training iterations. Combined with better hyperparameter tuning, these modifications enable consistency models to achieve FID scores of 2.51 and 3.25 on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet 64times 64 respectively in a single sampling step. These scores mark a 3.5times and 4times improvement compared to prior consistency training approaches. Through two-step sampling, we further reduce FID scores to 2.24 and 2.77 on these two datasets, surpassing those obtained via distillation in both one-step and two-step settings, while narrowing the gap between consistency models and other state-of-the-art generative models.

This paper presents Objectness SIMilarity (OSIM), a novel evaluation metric for 3D scenes that explicitly focuses on "objects," which are fundamental units of human visual perception. Existing metrics assess overall image quality, leading to discrepancies with human perception. Inspired by neuropsychological insights, we hypothesize that human recognition of 3D scenes fundamentally involves attention to individual objects. OSIM enables object-centric evaluations by leveraging an object detection model and its feature representations to quantify the "objectness" of each object in the scene. Our user study demonstrates that OSIM aligns more closely with human perception compared to existing metrics. We also analyze the characteristics of OSIM using various approaches. Moreover, we re-evaluate recent 3D reconstruction and generation models under a standardized experimental setup to clarify advancements in this field. The code is available at https://github.com/Objectness-Similarity/OSIM.

Computer vision foundation models, such as DINO or OpenCLIP, are trained in a self-supervised manner on large image datasets. Analogously, substantial evidence suggests that the human visual system (HVS) is influenced by the statistical distribution of colors and patterns in the natural world, characteristics also present in the training data of foundation models. The question we address in this paper is whether foundation models trained on natural images mimic some of the low-level characteristics of the human visual system, such as contrast detection, contrast masking, and contrast constancy. Specifically, we designed a protocol comprising nine test types to evaluate the image encoders of 45 foundation and generative models. Our results indicate that some foundation models (e.g., DINO, DINOv2, and OpenCLIP), share some of the characteristics of human vision, but other models show little resemblance. Foundation models tend to show smaller sensitivity to low contrast and rather irregular responses to contrast across frequencies. The foundation models show the best agreement with human data in terms of contrast masking. Our findings suggest that human vision and computer vision may take both similar and different paths when learning to interpret images of the real world. Overall, while differences remain, foundation models trained on vision tasks start to align with low-level human vision, with DINOv2 showing the closest resemblance.

Recent years have seen growing interest in developing and applying perceptual similarity metrics. Research has shown the superiority of perceptual metrics over pixel-wise metrics in aligning with human perception and serving as a proxy for the human visual system. On the other hand, as perceptual metrics rely on neural networks, there is a growing concern regarding their resilience, given the established vulnerability of neural networks to adversarial attacks. It is indeed logical to infer that perceptual metrics may inherit both the strengths and shortcomings of neural networks. In this work, we demonstrate the vulnerability of state-of-the-art perceptual similarity metrics based on an ensemble of ViT-based feature extractors to adversarial attacks. We then propose a framework to train a robust perceptual similarity metric called LipSim (Lipschitz Similarity Metric) with provable guarantees. By leveraging 1-Lipschitz neural networks as the backbone, LipSim provides guarded areas around each data point and certificates for all perturbations within an ell_2 ball. Finally, a comprehensive set of experiments shows the performance of LipSim in terms of natural and certified scores and on the image retrieval application. The code is available at https://github.com/SaraGhazanfari/LipSim.

Large diffusion models demonstrate remarkable zero-shot capabilities in novel view synthesis from a single image. However, these models often face challenges in maintaining consistency across novel and reference views. A crucial factor leading to this issue is the limited utilization of contextual information from reference views. Specifically, when there is an overlap in the viewing frustum between two views, it is essential to ensure that the corresponding regions maintain consistency in both geometry and appearance. This observation leads to a simple yet effective approach, where we propose to use epipolar geometry to locate and retrieve overlapping information from the input view. This information is then incorporated into the generation of target views, eliminating the need for training or fine-tuning, as the process requires no learnable parameters. Furthermore, to enhance the overall consistency of generated views, we extend the utilization of epipolar attention to a multi-view setting, allowing retrieval of overlapping information from the input view and other target views. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in significantly improving the consistency of synthesized views without the need for any fine-tuning. Moreover, This enhancement also boosts the performance of downstream applications such as 3D reconstruction. The code is available at https://github.com/botaoye/ConsisSyn.

While recent advancing image super-resolution (SR) techniques are continually improving the perceptual quality of their outputs, they can usually fail in quantitative evaluations. This inconsistency leads to a growing distrust in existing image metrics for SR evaluations. Though image evaluation depends on both the metric and the reference ground truth (GT), researchers typically do not inspect the role of GTs, as they are generally accepted as `perfect' references. However, due to the data being collected in the early years and the ignorance of controlling other types of distortions, we point out that GTs in existing SR datasets can exhibit relatively poor quality, which leads to biased evaluations. Following this observation, in this paper, we are interested in the following questions: Are GT images in existing SR datasets 100% trustworthy for model evaluations? How does GT quality affect this evaluation? And how to make fair evaluations if there exist imperfect GTs? To answer these questions, this paper presents two main contributions. First, by systematically analyzing seven state-of-the-art SR models across three real-world SR datasets, we show that SR performances can be consistently affected across models by low-quality GTs, and models can perform quite differently when GT quality is controlled. Second, we propose a novel perceptual quality metric, Relative Quality Index (RQI), that measures the relative quality discrepancy of image pairs, thus issuing the biased evaluations caused by unreliable GTs. Our proposed model achieves significantly better consistency with human opinions. We expect our work to provide insights for the SR community on how future datasets, models, and metrics should be developed.

We introduce a benchmark to directly evaluate the alignment between human observers and vision models on a 3D shape inference task. We leverage an experimental design from the cognitive sciences which requires zero-shot visual inferences about object shape: given a set of images, participants identify which contain the same/different objects, despite considerable viewpoint variation. We draw from a diverse range of images that include common objects (e.g., chairs) as well as abstract shapes (i.e., procedurally generated `nonsense' objects). After constructing over 2000 unique image sets, we administer these tasks to human participants, collecting 35K trials of behavioral data from over 500 participants. This includes explicit choice behaviors as well as intermediate measures, such as reaction time and gaze data. We then evaluate the performance of common vision models (e.g., DINOv2, MAE, CLIP). We find that humans outperform all models by a wide margin. Using a multi-scale evaluation approach, we identify underlying similarities and differences between models and humans: while human-model performance is correlated, humans allocate more time/processing on challenging trials. All images, data, and code can be accessed via our project page.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently achieved rapid progress, exhibiting great perception and reasoning abilities concerning visual information. However, when faced with prompts in different sizes of solution spaces, LVLMs fail to always give consistent answers regarding the same knowledge point. This inconsistency of answers between different solution spaces is prevalent in LVLMs and erodes trust. To this end, we provide a multi-modal benchmark ConBench, to intuitively analyze how LVLMs perform when the solution space of a prompt revolves around a knowledge point. Based on the ConBench tool, we are the first to reveal the tapestry and get the following findings: (1) In the discriminate realm, the larger the solution space of the prompt, the lower the accuracy of the answers. (2) Establish the relationship between the discriminative and generative realms: the accuracy of the discriminative question type exhibits a strong positive correlation with its Consistency with the caption. (3) Compared to open-source models, closed-source models exhibit a pronounced bias advantage in terms of Consistency. Eventually, we ameliorate the consistency of LVLMs by trigger-based diagnostic refinement, indirectly improving the performance of their caption. We hope this paper will accelerate the research community in better evaluating their models and encourage future advancements in the consistency domain. The project is available at https://github.com/foundation-multimodal-models/ConBench.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at complex visual tasks such as VQA and chart understanding, yet recent work suggests they struggle with simple perceptual tests. We present an evaluation of vision-language models' capacity for nonlocal visual reasoning: reasoning that requires chaining evidence collected from multiple, possibly distant regions of an image. We isolate three distinct forms of nonlocal vision: comparative perception, which demands holding two images in working memory and comparing them; saccadic search, which requires making discrete, evidence-driven jumps to locate successive targets; and smooth visual search, which involves following a continuous contour. Flagship models (e.g., GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4), even those that perform well on prior primitive-vision benchmarks, fail these tests and barely exceed random accuracy on two variants of our tasks that are trivial for humans. Our structured evaluation suite allows us to test whether VLMs can perform visual algorithms similar to those used by humans. Our findings show that despite gains in raw visual acuity, current models lack core visual reasoning capabilities.

Vision-language models often hallucinate details, generating non-existent objects or inaccurate attributes that compromise output reliability. Existing methods typically address these issues via extensive human annotations or external supervision from more powerful models. In this work, we present a novel framework that leverages the model's self-consistency between long responses and short answers to generate preference pairs for training. We observe that short binary questions tend to yield highly reliable responses, which can be used to query the target model to evaluate and rank its generated responses. Specifically, we design a self-reflection pipeline where detailed model responses are compared against concise binary answers, and inconsistency signals are utilized to automatically curate high-quality training data without human annotations or external model-based supervision. By relying solely on self-consistency rather than external supervision, our method offers a scalable and efficient solution that effectively reduces hallucinations using unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, i.e., AMBER, MultiObject-Hal (ROPE), Object HalBench, and MMHal-Bench, demonstrate significant improvements in factual grounding and reliability. Moreover, our approach maintains robust instruction-following ability, as evidenced by enhanced performance on LLaVA-Bench and MMBench.

Humans experience the world through constantly changing visual stimuli, where scenes can shift and move, change in appearance, and vary in distance. The dynamic nature of visual perception is a fundamental aspect of our daily lives, yet the large majority of research on object and scene processing, particularly using fMRI, has focused on static stimuli. While studies of static image perception are attractive due to their computational simplicity, they impose a strong non-naturalistic constraint on our investigation of human vision. In contrast, dynamic visual stimuli offer a more ecologically-valid approach but present new challenges due to the interplay between spatial and temporal information, making it difficult to disentangle the representations of stable image features and motion. To overcome this limitation -- given dynamic inputs, we explicitly decouple the modeling of static image representations and motion representations in the human brain. Three results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. First, we show that visual motion information as optical flow can be predicted (or decoded) from brain activity as measured by fMRI. Second, we show that this predicted motion can be used to realistically animate static images using a motion-conditioned video diffusion model (where the motion is driven by fMRI brain activity). Third, we show prediction in the reverse direction: existing video encoders can be fine-tuned to predict fMRI brain activity from video imagery, and can do so more effectively than image encoders. This foundational work offers a novel, extensible framework for interpreting how the human brain processes dynamic visual information.

Recently, "visual o1" began to enter people's vision, with expectations that this slow-thinking design can solve visual reasoning tasks, especially geometric math problems. However, the reality is that current LVLMs (Large Vision Language Models) can hardly even accurately copy a geometric figure, let alone truly understand the complex inherent logic and spatial relationships within geometric shapes. We believe accurate copying (strong perception) is the first step to visual o1. Accordingly, we introduce the concept of "slow perception" (SP), which guides the model to gradually perceive basic point-line combinations, as our humans, reconstruct complex geometric structures progressively. There are two-fold stages in SP: a) perception decomposition. Perception is not instantaneous. In this stage, complex geometric figures are broken down into basic simple units to unify geometry representation. b) perception flow, which acknowledges that accurately tracing a line is not an easy task. This stage aims to avoid "long visual jumps" in regressing line segments by using a proposed "perceptual ruler" to trace each line stroke-by-stroke. Surprisingly, such a human-like perception manner enjoys an inference time scaling law -- the slower, the better. Researchers strive to speed up the model's perception in the past, but we slow it down again, allowing the model to read the image step-by-step and carefully.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across tasks such as visual question answering and image captioning. Yet, the extent to which these models perform visual reasoning as opposed to relying on linguistic priors remains unclear. To address this, we introduce VisRes Bench, a benchmark designed to study visual reasoning in naturalistic settings without contextual language supervision. Analyzing model behavior across three levels of complexity, we uncover clear limitations in perceptual and relational visual reasoning capacities. VisRes isolates distinct reasoning abilities across its levels. Level 1 probes perceptual completion and global image matching under perturbations such as blur, texture changes, occlusion, and rotation; Level 2 tests rule-based inference over a single attribute (e.g., color, count, orientation); and Level 3 targets compositional reasoning that requires integrating multiple visual attributes. Across more than 19,000 controlled task images, we find that state-of-the-art VLMs perform near random under subtle perceptual perturbations, revealing limited abstraction beyond pattern recognition. We conclude by discussing how VisRes provides a unified framework for advancing abstract visual reasoning in multimodal research.

Humans do not just see attribute similarity -- we also see relational similarity. An apple is like a peach because both are reddish fruit, but the Earth is also like a peach: its crust, mantle, and core correspond to the peach's skin, flesh, and pit. This ability to perceive and recognize relational similarity, is arguable by cognitive scientist to be what distinguishes humans from other species. Yet, all widely used visual similarity metrics today (e.g., LPIPS, CLIP, DINO) focus solely on perceptual attribute similarity and fail to capture the rich, often surprising relational similarities that humans perceive. How can we go beyond the visible content of an image to capture its relational properties? How can we bring images with the same relational logic closer together in representation space? To answer these questions, we first formulate relational image similarity as a measurable problem: two images are relationally similar when their internal relations or functions among visual elements correspond, even if their visual attributes differ. We then curate 114k image-caption dataset in which the captions are anonymized -- describing the underlying relational logic of the scene rather than its surface content. Using this dataset, we finetune a Vision-Language model to measure the relational similarity between images. This model serves as the first step toward connecting images by their underlying relational structure rather than their visible appearance. Our study shows that while relational similarity has a lot of real-world applications, existing image similarity models fail to capture it -- revealing a critical gap in visual computing.

Visual perceptual tasks aim to predict human judgment of images (e.g., emotions invoked by images, image quality assessment). Unlike objective tasks such as object/scene recognition, perceptual tasks rely on subjective human assessments, making its data-labeling difficult. The scarcity of such human-annotated data results in small datasets leading to poor generalization. Typically, specialized models were designed for each perceptual task, tailored to its unique characteristics and its own training dataset. We propose a unified architectural framework for solving multiple different perceptual tasks leveraging CLIP as a prior. Our approach is based on recent cognitive findings which indicate that CLIP correlates well with human judgment. While CLIP was explicitly trained to align images and text, it implicitly also learned human inclinations. We attribute this to the inclusion of human-written image captions in CLIP's training data, which contain not only factual image descriptions, but inevitably also human sentiments and emotions. This makes CLIP a particularly strong prior for perceptual tasks. Accordingly, we suggest that minimal adaptation of CLIP suffices for solving a variety of perceptual tasks. Our simple unified framework employs a lightweight adaptation to fine-tune CLIP to each task, without requiring any task-specific architectural changes. We evaluate our approach on three tasks: (i) Image Memorability Prediction, (ii) No-reference Image Quality Assessment, and (iii) Visual Emotion Analysis. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on all three tasks, while demonstrating improved generalization across different datasets.

Understanding how people read city scenes can inform design and planning. We introduce a small benchmark for testing vision-language models (VLMs) on urban perception using 100 Montreal street images, evenly split between photographs and photorealistic synthetic scenes. Twelve participants from seven community groups supplied 230 annotation forms across 30 dimensions mixing physical attributes and subjective impressions. French responses were normalized to English. We evaluated seven VLMs in a zero-shot setup with a structured prompt and deterministic parser. We use accuracy for single-choice items and Jaccard overlap for multi-label items; human agreement uses Krippendorff's alpha and pairwise Jaccard. Results suggest stronger model alignment on visible, objective properties than subjective appraisals. The top system (claude-sonnet) reaches macro 0.31 and mean Jaccard 0.48 on multi-label items. Higher human agreement coincides with better model scores. Synthetic images slightly lower scores. We release the benchmark, prompts, and harness for reproducible, uncertainty-aware evaluation in participatory urban analysis.