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Jul 23

Thinking with Frames: Generative Video Distortion Evaluation via Frame Reward Model

Recent advances in video reward models and post-training strategies have improved text-to-video (T2V) generation. While these models typically assess visual quality, motion quality, and text alignment, they often overlook key structural distortions, such as abnormal object appearances and interactions, which can degrade the overall quality of the generative video. To address this gap, we introduce REACT, a frame-level reward model designed specifically for structural distortions evaluation in generative videos. REACT assigns point-wise scores and attribution labels by reasoning over video frames, focusing on recognizing distortions. To support this, we construct a large-scale human preference dataset, annotated based on our proposed taxonomy of structural distortions, and generate additional data using a efficient Chain-of-Thought (CoT) synthesis pipeline. REACT is trained with a two-stage framework: (1) supervised fine-tuning with masked loss for domain knowledge injection, followed by (2) reinforcement learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and pairwise rewards to enhance reasoning capability and align output scores with human preferences. During inference, a dynamic sampling mechanism is introduced to focus on frames most likely to exhibit distortion. We also present REACT-Bench, a benchmark for generative video distortion evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that REACT complements existing reward models in assessing structutal distortion, achieving both accurate quantitative evaluations and interpretable attribution analysis.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 7

LSTM-PINN for Steady-State Electrothermal Transport: Preserving Multi-Field Consis tency in Strongly Coupled Heat and Fluid Flow

Steady-state electrothermal systems involve strongly coupled heat transfer, fluid flow, and electric-potential transport, creating severe numerical challenges for standard physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) due to stark disparities in gradient scales and residual stiffnesses across the physical fields. To resolve these multiphysics bottlenecks, we introduce a Long Short-Term Memory PINN (LSTM-PINN) framework that utilizes a depth-recursive memory mechanism to preserve long-range spatial feature dependencies and maintain strict cross-field consistency. The proposed architecture is rigorously evaluated against conventional and attention-based networks across a unified five-field formulation encompassing four complex convective and drag regimes: Boussinesq electrothermal flow, drift-potential gauge-constrained transport, strong buoyancy-coupled convection, and Brinkman--Forchheimer drift. Quantitative and visual analyses demonstrate that LSTM-PINN successfully suppresses non-physical artifacts and structural distortions, yielding the highest thermodynamic fidelity and consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in global error metrics. Ultimately, this memory-enhanced approach provides a highly robust and accurate computational baseline for capturing localized boundary layers and complex energy-momentum feedback in advanced electrothermal energy systems.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 2

MuQ-Eval: An Open-Source Per-Sample Quality Metric for AI Music Generation Evaluation

Distributional metrics such as Fréchet Audio Distance cannot score individual music clips and correlate poorly with human judgments, while the only per-sample learned metric achieving high human correlation is closed-source. We introduce MUQ-EVAL, an open-source per-sample quality metric for AIgenerated music built by training lightweight prediction heads on frozen MuQ-310M features using MusicEval, a dataset of generated clips from 31 text-to-music systems with expert quality ratings. Our simplest model, frozen features with attention pooling and a two-layer MLP, achieves system-level SRCC = 0.957 and utterance-level SRCC = 0.838 with human mean opinion scores. A systematic ablation over training objectives and adaptation strategies shows that no addition meaningfully improves the frozen baseline, indicating that frozen MuQ representations already capture quality-relevant information. Encoder choice is the dominant design factor, outweighing all architectural and training decisions. LoRA-adapted models trained on as few as 150 clips already achieve usable correlation, enabling personalized quality evaluators from individual listener annotations. A controlled degradation analysis reveals selective sensitivity to signal-level artifacts but insensitivity to musical-structural distortions. Our metric, MUQ-EVAL, is fully open-source, outperforms existing open per-sample metrics, and runs in real time on a single consumer GPU. Code, model weights, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/dgtql/MuQ-Eval.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 23

Artifact-Bench: Evaluating MLLMs on Detecting and Assessing the Artifacts of AI-Generated Videos

Recent video generative models have greatly improved the realism of AI-generated videos, yet their outputs still exhibit artifacts such as temporal inconsistencies, structural distortions, and semantic incoherence. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong visual understanding capabilities, their ability to perceive and reason about such artifacts remains unclear. Existing benchmarks often lack systematic evaluation of artifact-aware perception and fine-grained diagnostic reasoning, especially across diverse AI-generated video domains beyond photorealistic content. To address this gap, we introduce Artifact-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating MLLMs on AI-generated video artifact detection and analysis. We first establish a three-level hierarchical taxonomy of realism artifacts, covering photorealistic, animated, and CG-style videos. Based on this taxonomy, Artifact-Bench defines three complementary tasks: real vs. AI-generated video classification, pairwise realism comparison, and fine-grained artifact identification. Experiments on 19 leading MLLMs reveal substantial limitations in artifact perception and reasoning, with many models approaching random or even below-random performance in challenging settings. We further observe significant misalignment between MLLM judgments and human perceptual preferences, highlighting their limited reliability as general evaluators for AI-generated video realism.

  • 24 authors
·
May 17 1

Semantic Item Graph Enhancement for Multimodal Recommendation

Multimodal recommendation systems have attracted increasing attention for their improved performance by leveraging items' multimodal information. Prior methods often build modality-specific item-item semantic graphs from raw modality features and use them as supplementary structures alongside the user-item interaction graph to enhance user preference learning. However, these semantic graphs suffer from semantic deficiencies, including (1) insufficient modeling of collaborative signals among items and (2) structural distortions introduced by noise in raw modality features, ultimately compromising performance. To address these issues, we first extract collaborative signals from the interaction graph and infuse them into each modality-specific item semantic graph to enhance semantic modeling. Then, we design a modulus-based personalized embedding perturbation mechanism that injects perturbations with modulus-guided personalized intensity into embeddings to generate contrastive views. This enables the model to learn noise-robust representations through contrastive learning, thereby reducing the effect of structural noise in semantic graphs. Besides, we propose a dual representation alignment mechanism that first aligns multiple semantic representations via a designed Anchor-based InfoNCE loss using behavior representations as anchors, and then aligns behavior representations with the fused semantics by standard InfoNCE, to ensure representation consistency. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 8, 2025

AGHI-QA: A Subjective-Aligned Dataset and Metric for AI-Generated Human Images

The rapid development of text-to-image (T2I) generation approaches has attracted extensive interest in evaluating the quality of generated images, leading to the development of various quality assessment methods for general-purpose T2I outputs. However, existing image quality assessment (IQA) methods are limited to providing global quality scores, failing to deliver fine-grained perceptual evaluations for structurally complex subjects like humans, which is a critical challenge considering the frequent anatomical and textural distortions in AI-generated human images (AGHIs). To address this gap, we introduce AGHI-QA, the first large-scale benchmark specifically designed for quality assessment of AGHIs. The dataset comprises 4,000 images generated from 400 carefully crafted text prompts using 10 state of-the-art T2I models. We conduct a systematic subjective study to collect multidimensional annotations, including perceptual quality scores, text-image correspondence scores, visible and distorted body part labels. Based on AGHI-QA, we evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of current T2I methods in generating human images from multiple dimensions. Furthermore, we propose AGHI-Assessor, a novel quality metric that integrates the large multimodal model (LMM) with domain-specific human features for precise quality prediction and identification of visible and distorted body parts in AGHIs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AGHI-Assessor showcases state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing IQA methods in multidimensional quality assessment and surpassing leading LMMs in detecting structural distortions in AGHIs.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 30, 2025

A Comprehensive Study of Multimodal Large Language Models for Image Quality Assessment

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced significant advancement in visual understanding and reasoning, their potential to serve as powerful, flexible, interpretable, and text-driven models for Image Quality Assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic study of prompting MLLMs for IQA. We first investigate nine prompting systems for MLLMs as the combinations of three standardized testing procedures in psychophysics (i.e., the single-stimulus, double-stimulus, and multiple-stimulus methods) and three popular prompting strategies in natural language processing (i.e., the standard, in-context, and chain-of-thought prompting). We then present a difficult sample selection procedure, taking into account sample diversity and uncertainty, to further challenge MLLMs equipped with the respective optimal prompting systems. We assess three open-source and one closed-source MLLMs on several visual attributes of image quality (e.g., structural and textural distortions, geometric transformations, and color differences) in both full-reference and no-reference scenarios. Experimental results show that only the closed-source GPT-4V provides a reasonable account for human perception of image quality, but is weak at discriminating fine-grained quality variations (e.g., color differences) and at comparing visual quality of multiple images, tasks humans can perform effortlessly.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 16, 2024

HATIR: Heat-Aware Diffusion for Turbulent Infrared Video Super-Resolution

Infrared video has been of great interest in visual tasks under challenging environments, but often suffers from severe atmospheric turbulence and compression degradation. Existing video super-resolution (VSR) methods either neglect the inherent modality gap between infrared and visible images or fail to restore turbulence-induced distortions. Directly cascading turbulence mitigation (TM) algorithms with VSR methods leads to error propagation and accumulation due to the decoupled modeling of degradation between turbulence and resolution. We introduce HATIR, a Heat-Aware Diffusion for Turbulent InfraRed Video Super-Resolution, which injects heat-aware deformation priors into the diffusion sampling path to jointly model the inverse process of turbulent degradation and structural detail loss. Specifically, HATIR constructs a Phasor-Guided Flow Estimator, rooted in the physical principle that thermally active regions exhibit consistent phasor responses over time, enabling reliable turbulence-aware flow to guide the reverse diffusion process. To ensure the fidelity of structural recovery under nonuniform distortions, a Turbulence-Aware Decoder is proposed to selectively suppress unstable temporal cues and enhance edge-aware feature aggregation via turbulence gating and structure-aware attention. We built FLIR-IVSR, the first dataset for turbulent infrared VSR, comprising paired LR-HR sequences from a FLIR T1050sc camera (1024 X 768) spanning 640 diverse scenes with varying camera and object motion conditions. This encourages future research in infrared VSR. Project page: https://github.com/JZ0606/HATIR

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 8

RT-DocLayout: Real-Time End-to-End Document Layout Analysis with Reading Order in the Wild

Accurate document layout analysis remains a critical bottleneck for document parsing systems, due to the intricate coupling among heterogeneous document layout elements, geometric distortions (\eg, paper warping and bending, perspective variations), and reading order within diverse layout structures. Existing approaches typically rely on fragmented multi-stage pipelines or computationally heavy generative Transformer architectures, leading to error propagation and limited efficiency. In this paper, we present RT-DocLayout, a highly efficient end-to-end framework for document layout analysis, designed as a front-end for document parsing tasks. The proposed model unifies classification, detection, pixel-level segmentation, and reading order prediction for layout elements within a single 33M-parameter architecture. Built upon the RT-DETR, our key contribution is a unified multi-task formulation within a single query-based decoder that simultaneously classifies, regresses bounding box, generates masks, and constructs relationship to reason reading order. By jointly learning geometric and structural representations, RT-DocLayout introduces multi-task optimization that substantially improves robustness under real-world document distortions. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in document layout analysis while maintaining real-time inference speed(132.1 FPS). When coupled with downstream OCR engines, RT-DocLayout significantly improves full-document reconstruction quality, providing a scalable and practical foundation for real-world document intelligence systems.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 21

ADOP: Approximate Differentiable One-Pixel Point Rendering

In this paper we present ADOP, a novel point-based, differentiable neural rendering pipeline. Like other neural renderers, our system takes as input calibrated camera images and a proxy geometry of the scene, in our case a point cloud. To generate a novel view, the point cloud is rasterized with learned feature vectors as colors and a deep neural network fills the remaining holes and shades each output pixel. The rasterizer renders points as one-pixel splats, which makes it very fast and allows us to compute gradients with respect to all relevant input parameters efficiently. Furthermore, our pipeline contains a fully differentiable physically-based photometric camera model, including exposure, white balance, and a camera response function. Following the idea of inverse rendering, we use our renderer to refine its input in order to reduce inconsistencies and optimize the quality of its output. In particular, we can optimize structural parameters like the camera pose, lens distortions, point positions and features, and a neural environment map, but also photometric parameters like camera response function, vignetting, and per-image exposure and white balance. Because our pipeline includes photometric parameters, e.g.~exposure and camera response function, our system can smoothly handle input images with varying exposure and white balance, and generates high-dynamic range output. We show that due to the improved input, we can achieve high render quality, also for difficult input, e.g. with imperfect camera calibrations, inaccurate proxy geometry, or varying exposure. As a result, a simpler and thus faster deep neural network is sufficient for reconstruction. In combination with the fast point rasterization, ADOP achieves real-time rendering rates even for models with well over 100M points. https://github.com/darglein/ADOP

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 13, 2021

SemAug: Semantically Meaningful Image Augmentations for Object Detection Through Language Grounding

Data augmentation is an essential technique in improving the generalization of deep neural networks. The majority of existing image-domain augmentations either rely on geometric and structural transformations, or apply different kinds of photometric distortions. In this paper, we propose an effective technique for image augmentation by injecting contextually meaningful knowledge into the scenes. Our method of semantically meaningful image augmentation for object detection via language grounding, SemAug, starts by calculating semantically appropriate new objects that can be placed into relevant locations in the image (the what and where problems). Then it embeds these objects into their relevant target locations, thereby promoting diversity of object instance distribution. Our method allows for introducing new object instances and categories that may not even exist in the training set. Furthermore, it does not require the additional overhead of training a context network, so it can be easily added to existing architectures. Our comprehensive set of evaluations showed that the proposed method is very effective in improving the generalization, while the overhead is negligible. In particular, for a wide range of model architectures, our method achieved ~2-4% and ~1-2% mAP improvements for the task of object detection on the Pascal VOC and COCO datasets, respectively.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 15, 2022

Towards Multi-View Consistent Style Transfer with One-Step Diffusion via Vision Conditioning

The stylization of 3D scenes is an increasingly attractive topic in 3D vision. Although image style transfer has been extensively researched with promising results, directly applying 2D style transfer methods to 3D scenes often fails to preserve the structural and multi-view properties of 3D environments, resulting in unpleasant distortions in images from different viewpoints. To address these issues, we leverage the remarkable generative prior of diffusion-based models and propose a novel style transfer method, OSDiffST, based on a pre-trained one-step diffusion model (i.e., SD-Turbo) for rendering diverse styles in multi-view images of 3D scenes. To efficiently adapt the pre-trained model for multi-view style transfer on small datasets, we introduce a vision condition module to extract style information from the reference style image to serve as conditional input for the diffusion model and employ LoRA in diffusion model for adaptation. Additionally, we consider color distribution alignment and structural similarity between the stylized and content images using two specific loss functions. As a result, our method effectively preserves the structural information and multi-view consistency in stylized images without any 3D information. Experiments show that our method surpasses other promising style transfer methods in synthesizing various styles for multi-view images of 3D scenes. Stylized images from different viewpoints generated by our method achieve superior visual quality, with better structural integrity and less distortion. The source code is available at https://github.com/YushenZuo/OSDiffST.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 15, 2024

AccDiffusion v2: Towards More Accurate Higher-Resolution Diffusion Extrapolation

Diffusion models suffer severe object repetition and local distortion when the inference resolution differs from its pre-trained resolution. We propose AccDiffusion v2, an accurate method for patch-wise higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation without training. Our in-depth analysis in this paper shows that using an identical text prompt for different patches leads to repetitive generation, while the absence of a prompt undermines image details. In response, our AccDiffusion v2 novelly decouples the vanilla image-content-aware prompt into a set of patch-content-aware prompts, each of which serves as a more precise description of a patch. Further analysis reveals that local distortion arises from inaccurate descriptions in prompts about the local structure of higher-resolution images. To address this issue, AccDiffusion v2, for the first time, introduces an auxiliary local structural information through ControlNet during higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation aiming to mitigate the local distortions. Finally, our analysis indicates that global semantic information is conducive to suppressing both repetitive generation and local distortion. Hence, our AccDiffusion v2 further proposes dilated sampling with window interaction for better global semantic information during higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation. We conduct extensive experiments, including both quantitative and qualitative comparisons, to demonstrate the efficacy of our AccDiffusion v2. The quantitative comparison shows that AccDiffusion v2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in image generation extrapolation without training. The qualitative comparison intuitively illustrates that AccDiffusion v2 effectively suppresses the issues of repetitive generation and local distortion in image generation extrapolation. Our code is available at https://github.com/lzhxmu/AccDiffusion_v2.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 2, 2024

Ferromagnetic ordering in mazelike stripe liquid of a dipolar six-state clock model

We present a comprehensive numerical study of a six-state clock model with a long-range dipolar type interaction. This model is motivated by the ferroelectric orders in the multiferroic hexagonal manganites. At low temperatures, trimerization of local atomic structures leads to six distinct but energetically degenerate structural distortion, which can be modeled by a six-state clock model. Moreover, the atomic displacements in the trimerized state further produce a local electric polarization whose sign depends on whether the clock variable is even or odd. These induced electric dipoles, which can be modeled by emergent Ising degrees of freedom, interact with each other via long-range dipolar interactions. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations are carried out to investigate low temperature phases resulting from the competing interactions. Upon lowering temperature, the system undergoes two Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transitions, characteristic of the standard six-state clock model in two dimensions. The dipolar interaction between emergent Ising spins induces a first-order transition into a ground state characterized by a three-fold degenerate stripe order. The intermediate phase between the discontinuous and the second BKT transition corresponds to a maze-like hexagonal liquid with short-range stripe ordering. Moreover, this intermediate phase also exhibits an unusual ferromagnetic order with two adjacent clock variables occupying the two types of stripes of the labyrinthine pattern.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 12, 2024

SECodec: Structural Entropy-based Compressive Speech Representation Codec for Speech Language Models

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), discrete speech representations have become crucial for integrating speech into LLMs. Existing methods for speech representation discretization rely on a predefined codebook size and Euclidean distance-based quantization. However, 1) the size of codebook is a critical parameter that affects both codec performance and downstream task training efficiency. 2) The Euclidean distance-based quantization may lead to audio distortion when the size of the codebook is controlled within a reasonable range. In fact, in the field of information compression, structural information and entropy guidance are crucial, but previous methods have largely overlooked these factors. Therefore, we address the above issues from an information-theoretic perspective, we present SECodec, a novel speech representation codec based on structural entropy (SE) for building speech language models. Specifically, we first model speech as a graph, clustering the speech features nodes within the graph and extracting the corresponding codebook by hierarchically and disentangledly minimizing 2D SE. Then, to address the issue of audio distortion, we propose a new quantization method. This method still adheres to the 2D SE minimization principle, adaptively selecting the most suitable token corresponding to the cluster for each incoming original speech node. Furthermore, we develop a Structural Entropy-based Speech Language Model (SESLM) that leverages SECodec. Experimental results demonstrate that SECodec performs comparably to EnCodec in speech reconstruction, and SESLM surpasses VALL-E in zero-shot text-to-speech tasks. Code, demo speeches, speech feature graph, SE codebook, and models are available at https://github.com/wlq2019/SECodec.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 15, 2024

SHAMISA: SHAped Modeling of Implicit Structural Associations for Self-supervised No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) aims to estimate perceptual quality without access to a reference image of pristine quality. Learning an NR-IQA model faces a fundamental bottleneck: its need for a large number of costly human perceptual labels. We propose SHAMISA, a non-contrastive self-supervised framework that learns from unlabeled distorted images by leveraging explicitly structured relational supervision. Unlike prior methods that impose rigid, binary similarity constraints, SHAMISA introduces implicit structural associations, defined as soft, controllable relations that are both distortion-aware and content-sensitive, inferred from synthetic metadata and intrinsic feature structure. A key innovation is our compositional distortion engine, which generates an uncountable family of degradations from continuous parameter spaces, grouped so that only one distortion factor varies at a time. This enables fine-grained control over representational similarity during training: images with shared distortion patterns are pulled together in the embedding space, while severity variations produce structured, predictable shifts. We integrate these insights via dual-source relation graphs that encode both known degradation profiles and emergent structural affinities to guide the learning process throughout training. A convolutional encoder is trained under this supervision and then frozen for inference, with quality prediction performed by a linear regressor on its features. Extensive experiments on synthetic, authentic, and cross-dataset NR-IQA benchmarks demonstrate that SHAMISA achieves strong overall performance with improved cross-dataset generalization and robustness, all without human quality annotations or contrastive losses.

The Test Oracle Problem in Synthetic LLM-as-Judge Corpora: Disappearance, Distortion and a Validation Protocol

Studies of bias in LLM-as-judge systems typically build synthetic corpora by prompting an LLM to generate a hallucinated answer to pair with a factual one, then presenting both to a judge. We report a case in which this generation step silently failed, and use it to argue that the failure mode is structural rather than incidental. In a multilingual (Turkish/English) faithfulness-judgment corpus, a decoding-budget parameter shared between judging and generation calls truncated one producer's hallucinated answers to a few words. The resulting items produced a large, statistically robust effect: a 32-point cross-lingual collapse in one judge's selection accuracy, replicated from N=50 to N=500, explained by a three-layer mechanistic account, and confirmed by a controlled producer-swap experiment, none of which was real. The effect vanished to ceiling once the shared parameter was corrected, and only manual reading of the raw generations, not any aggregate statistical check, exposed the fault. A second measured bias (Markdown-formatting preference) was not fabricated but distorted by the same fault, its magnitude and in one case its sign shifting with stimulus length, a mode aggregate metrics cannot distinguish from the first. We frame the underlying vulnerability using the test oracle problem: corpora whose negative examples are LLM-generated carry no mechanical way to verify item integrity, while corpora built by deterministic perturbation of a gold answer carry an item-level oracle for free. A positive control supports this claim directly: an analogous fault injected into a minimal perturbation-based corpus is caught with 100% accuracy by a zero-cost, zero-human gold-to-negative string comparison. We close with a validation protocol, derived from our own case, for analysts working in the oracle-less regime that we argue describes most contemporary multilingual LLM-as-judge corpora.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 14

Möbius Transform for Mitigating Perspective Distortions in Representation Learning

Perspective distortion (PD) causes unprecedented changes in shape, size, orientation, angles, and other spatial relationships of visual concepts in images. Precisely estimating camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters is a challenging task that prevents synthesizing perspective distortion. Non-availability of dedicated training data poses a critical barrier to developing robust computer vision methods. Additionally, distortion correction methods make other computer vision tasks a multi-step approach and lack performance. In this work, we propose mitigating perspective distortion (MPD) by employing a fine-grained parameter control on a specific family of M\"obius transform to model real-world distortion without estimating camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters and without the need for actual distorted data. Also, we present a dedicated perspectively distorted benchmark dataset, ImageNet-PD, to benchmark the robustness of deep learning models against this new dataset. The proposed method outperforms existing benchmarks, ImageNet-E and ImageNet-X. Additionally, it significantly improves performance on ImageNet-PD while consistently performing on standard data distribution. Notably, our method shows improved performance on three PD-affected real-world applications crowd counting, fisheye image recognition, and person re-identification and one PD-affected challenging CV task: object detection. The source code, dataset, and models are available on the project webpage at https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/mpd.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 7, 2024

SciForma: Structure-Faithful Generation of Scientific Diagrams

Structural fidelity is essential to scientific methodology diagrams. To communicate research logic, these diagrams must faithfully render components, directional relations, and textual annotations. Since a single error, such as a reversed arrow or an unreadable equation, can invalidate the entire figure, structural fidelity is inherently conjunctive: correctness on one axis cannot compensate for failure on another. Current open-source models fail to satisfy this criterion. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) learns plausible layouts but cannot reliably ensure structural correctness, while scalar reward-based post-training obscures which structural dimension has failed. To address this, we introduce SciForma, a framework for the structure faithful generation of scientific methodology diagrams. Specifically, SciForma decomposes diagram quality into three structural axes: Component, Arrow, and Text, guided by a structural inventory. Built on this foundation, we curate SciFormaData-700K for structured training and SciFormaBench-2K for logic-verified evaluation. To close the gap left by SFT, we develop Multi-Dimensional Conjunctive Preference Optimization (M-DPO), which enforces simultaneous correctness across all axes and adaptively routes gradients to the most deficient dimension in post-training. The same structural inventory also enables iterative editing at inference time to correct residual errors. This combination allows SciForma-9B to exceed all open-source baselines and GPT-Image-1.5 on both SciFormaBench-2K and AIBench, bringing open scientific diagram generation close to proprietary-level structural fidelity. Our code and data will be available at: https://github.com/microsoft/SciForma.

Large Language Models Generate Harmful Content Using a Distinct, Unified Mechanism

Large language models (LLMs) undergo alignment training to avoid harmful behaviors, yet the resulting safeguards remain brittle: jailbreaks routinely bypass them, and fine-tuning on narrow domains can induce ``emergent misalignment'' that generalizes broadly. Whether this brittleness reflects a fundamental lack of coherent internal organization for harmfulness remains unclear. Here we use targeted weight pruning as a causal intervention to probe the internal organization of harmfulness in LLMs. We find that harmful content generation depends on a compact set of weights that are general across harm types and distinct from benign capabilities. Aligned models exhibit a greater compression of harm generation weights than unaligned counterparts, indicating that alignment reshapes harmful representations internally--despite the brittleness of safety guardrails at the surface level. This compression explains emergent misalignment: if weights of harmful capabilities are compressed, fine-tuning that engages these weights in one domain can trigger broad misalignment. Consistent with this, pruning harm generation weights in a narrow domain substantially reduces emergent misalignment. Notably, LLMs harmful generation capability is dissociated from how they recognize and explain such content. Together, these results reveal a coherent internal structure for harmfulness in LLMs that may serve as a foundation for more principled approaches to safety.

The Devil in the Details: Emergent Misalignment, Format and Coherence in Open-Weights LLMs

Prior work has shown that fine-tuning models on a narrow domain with misaligned data can lead to broad misalignment - a phenomenon termed "emergent misalignment" (Betley et al. 2025). While all tested models were susceptible to emergent misalignment, some models showed more resistance than others. Specifically the Qwen-2.5 family proved to be relatively resistant, while GPT-4o exhibited the strongest misalignment. In this paper we evaluate if current-generation open-weights models exhibit similar resistance to the Qwen-2.5 family and measure misalignment robustness over a range of model architectures and scales. We replicate the effect across nine modern open-weights models (Gemma 3 and Qwen 3 families, 1B-32B parameters). Models fine-tuned on insecure code generation show a 0.68% misalignment rate (compared to 0.07% for base models), matching the lower end of prior open-model results but dramatically lower than GPT-4o's 20%. We identify a critical format-dependent vulnerability: requiring JSON output doubles misalignment rates compared to natural language prompts (0.96% vs 0.42%). This suggests that structural constraints may bypass safety training by reducing the model's 'degrees of freedom' to refuse. These findings confirm emergent misalignment as a reproducible phenomenon in modern open-weights models, with rates substantially lower than observed in proprietary systems.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 25, 2025

Does resistance to style-transfer equal Global Shape Bias? Measuring network sensitivity to global shape configuration

Deep learning models are known to exhibit a strong texture bias, while human tends to rely heavily on global shape structure for object recognition. The current benchmark for evaluating a model's global shape bias is a set of style-transferred images with the assumption that resistance to the attack of style transfer is related to the development of global structure sensitivity in the model. In this work, we show that networks trained with style-transfer images indeed learn to ignore style, but its shape bias arises primarily from local detail. We provide a Disrupted Structure Testbench (DiST) as a direct measurement of global structure sensitivity. Our test includes 2400 original images from ImageNet-1K, each of which is accompanied by two images with the global shapes of the original image disrupted while preserving its texture via the texture synthesis program. We found that black{(1) models that performed well on the previous cue-conflict dataset do not fare well in the proposed DiST; (2) the supervised trained Vision Transformer (ViT) lose its global spatial information from positional embedding, leading to no significant advantages over Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on DiST. While self-supervised learning methods, especially mask autoencoder significantly improves the global structure sensitivity of ViT. (3) Improving the global structure sensitivity is orthogonal to resistance to style-transfer, indicating that the relationship between global shape structure and local texture detail is not an either/or relationship. Training with DiST images and style-transferred images are complementary, and can be combined to train network together to enhance the global shape sensitivity and robustness of local features.} Our code will be hosted in github: https://github.com/leelabcnbc/DiST

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 11, 2023

CAMEO: A Conditional and Quality-Aware Multi-Agent Image Editing Orchestrator

Conditional image editing aims to modify a source image according to textual prompts and optional reference guidance. Such editing is crucial in scenarios requiring strict structural control (i.e., anomaly insertion in driving scenes and complex human pose transformation). Despite recent advances in large-scale editing models (i.e., Seedream, Nano Banana, etc), most approaches rely on single-step generation. This paradigm often lacks explicit quality control, may introduce excessive deviation from the original image, and frequently produces structural artifacts or environment-inconsistent modifications, typically requiring manual prompt tuning to achieve acceptable results. We propose CAMEO, a structured multi-agent framework that reformulates conditional editing as a quality-aware, feedback-driven process rather than a one-shot generation task. CAMEO decomposes editing into coordinated stages of planning, structured prompting, hypothesis generation, and adaptive reference grounding, where external guidance is invoked only when task complexity requires it. To overcome the lack of intrinsic quality control in existing methods, evaluation is embedded directly within the editing loop. Intermediate results are iteratively refined through structured feedback, forming a closed-loop process that progressively corrects structural and contextual inconsistencies. We evaluate CAMEO on anomaly insertion and human pose switching tasks. Across multiple strong editing backbones and independent evaluation models, CAMEO consistently achieves 20\% more win rate on average compared to multiple state-of-the-art models, demonstrating improved robustness, controllability, and structural reliability in conditional image editing.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 2

Zolly: Zoom Focal Length Correctly for Perspective-Distorted Human Mesh Reconstruction

As it is hard to calibrate single-view RGB images in the wild, existing 3D human mesh reconstruction (3DHMR) methods either use a constant large focal length or estimate one based on the background environment context, which can not tackle the problem of the torso, limb, hand or face distortion caused by perspective camera projection when the camera is close to the human body. The naive focal length assumptions can harm this task with the incorrectly formulated projection matrices. To solve this, we propose Zolly, the first 3DHMR method focusing on perspective-distorted images. Our approach begins with analysing the reason for perspective distortion, which we find is mainly caused by the relative location of the human body to the camera center. We propose a new camera model and a novel 2D representation, termed distortion image, which describes the 2D dense distortion scale of the human body. We then estimate the distance from distortion scale features rather than environment context features. Afterwards, we integrate the distortion feature with image features to reconstruct the body mesh. To formulate the correct projection matrix and locate the human body position, we simultaneously use perspective and weak-perspective projection loss. Since existing datasets could not handle this task, we propose the first synthetic dataset PDHuman and extend two real-world datasets tailored for this task, all containing perspective-distorted human images. Extensive experiments show that Zolly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on both perspective-distorted datasets and the standard benchmark (3DPW).

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 24, 2023

Sample-adaptive Augmentation for Point Cloud Recognition Against Real-world Corruptions

Robust 3D perception under corruption has become an essential task for the realm of 3D vision. While current data augmentation techniques usually perform random transformations on all point cloud objects in an offline way and ignore the structure of the samples, resulting in over-or-under enhancement. In this work, we propose an alternative to make sample-adaptive transformations based on the structure of the sample to cope with potential corruption via an auto-augmentation framework, named as AdaptPoint. Specially, we leverage a imitator, consisting of a Deformation Controller and a Mask Controller, respectively in charge of predicting deformation parameters and producing a per-point mask, based on the intrinsic structural information of the input point cloud, and then conduct corruption simulations on top. Then a discriminator is utilized to prevent the generation of excessive corruption that deviates from the original data distribution. In addition, a perception-guidance feedback mechanism is incorporated to guide the generation of samples with appropriate difficulty level. Furthermore, to address the paucity of real-world corrupted point cloud, we also introduce a new dataset ScanObjectNN-C, that exhibits greater similarity to actual data in real-world environments, especially when contrasted with preceding CAD datasets. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple corruption benchmarks, including ModelNet-C, our ScanObjectNN-C, and ShapeNet-C.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 19, 2023

Photo3D: Advancing Photorealistic 3D Generation through Structure-Aligned Detail Enhancement

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 9, 2025

Cascaded Robust Rectification for Arbitrary Document Images

Document rectification in real-world scenarios poses significant challenges due to extreme variations in camera perspectives and physical distortions. Driven by the insight that complex transformations can be decomposed and resolved progressively, we introduce a novel multi-stage framework that progressively reverses distinct distortion types in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, our framework first performs a global affine transformation to correct perspective distortions arising from the camera's viewpoint, then rectifies geometric deformations resulting from physical paper curling and folding, and finally employs a content-aware iterative process to eliminate fine-grained content distortions. To address limitations in existing evaluation protocols, we also propose two enhanced metrics: layout-aligned OCR metrics (AED/ACER) for a stable assessment that decouples geometric rectification quality from the layout analysis errors of OCR engines, and masked AD/AAD (AD-M/AAD-M) tailored for accurately evaluating geometric distortions in documents with incomplete boundaries. Extensive experiments show that our method establishes new state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging benchmarks, yielding a substantial reduction of 14.1\%--34.7\% in the AAD metric and demonstrating superior efficacy in real-world applications. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/chaoyunwang/ArbDR.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 27, 2025