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Chongyi Li

Publications and source records attributed to Chongyi Li.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

MarkCleaner: High-Fidelity Watermark Removal via Imperceptible Micro-Geometric Perturbation

Semantic watermarks exhibit strong robustness against conventional image-space attacks. In this work, we show that such robustness does not survive under micro-geometric perturbations: spatial displacements can remove watermarks by breaking the phase alignment. Motivated by this observation, we introduce MarkCleaner, a watermark removal framework that avoids semantic drift caused by regeneration-based watermark removal. Specifically, MarkCleaner is trained with micro-geometry-perturbed supervision, which encourages the model to separate semantic content from strict spatial alignment and enables robust reconstruction under subtle geometric displacements. The framework adopts a mask-guided encoder that learns explicit spatial representations and a 2D Gaussian Splatting-based decoder that explicitly parameterizes geometric perturbations while preserving semantic content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MarkCleaner achieves superior performance in both watermark removal effectiveness and visual fidelity, while enabling efficient real-time inference. Our code will be made available upon acceptance.

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Joint Semantic and Rendering Enhancements in 3D Gaussian Modeling with Anisotropic Local Encoding

Recent works propose extending 3DGS with semantic feature vectors for simultaneous semantic segmentation and image rendering. However, these methods often treat the semantic and rendering branches separately, relying solely on 2D supervision while ignoring the 3D Gaussian geometry. Moreover, current adaptive strategies adapt the Gaussian set depending solely on rendering gradients, which can be insufficient in subtle or textureless regions. In this work, we propose a joint enhancement framework for 3D semantic Gaussian modeling that synergizes both semantic and rendering branches. Firstly, unlike conventional point cloud shape encoding, we introduce an anisotropic 3D Gaussian Chebyshev descriptor using the Laplace-Beltrami operator to capture fine-grained 3D shape details, thereby distinguishing objects with similar appearances and reducing reliance on potentially noisy 2D guidance. In addition, without relying solely on rendering gradient, we adaptively adjust Gaussian allocation and spherical harmonics with local semantic and shape signals, enhancing rendering efficiency through selective resource allocation. Finally, we employ a cross-scene knowledge transfer module to continuously update learned shape patterns, enabling faster convergence and robust representations without relearning shape information from scratch for each new scene. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate improvements in segmentation accuracy and rendering quality while maintaining high rendering frame rates.

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PerTouch: VLM-Driven Agent for Personalized and Semantic Image Retouching

Image retouching aims to enhance visual quality while aligning with users' personalized aesthetic preferences. To address the challenge of balancing controllability and subjectivity, we propose a unified diffusion-based image retouching framework called PerTouch. Our method supports semantic-level image retouching while maintaining global aesthetics. Using parameter maps containing attribute values in specific semantic regions as input, PerTouch constructs an explicit parameter-to-image mapping for fine-grained image retouching. To improve semantic boundary perception, we introduce semantic replacement and parameter perturbation mechanisms during training. To connect natural language instructions with visual control, we develop a VLM-driven agent to handle both strong and weak user instructions. Equipped with mechanisms of feedback-driven rethinking and scene-aware memory, PerTouch better aligns with user intent and captures long-term preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate each component's effectiveness and the superior performance of PerTouch in personalized image retouching. Code Pages: https://github.com/Auroral703/PerTouch.

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VTinker: Guided Flow Upsampling and Texture Mapping for High-Resolution Video Frame Interpolation

Due to large pixel movement and high computational cost, estimating the motion of high-resolution frames is challenging. Thus, most flow-based Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) methods first predict bidirectional flows at low resolution and then use high-magnification upsampling (e.g., bilinear) to obtain the high-resolution ones. However, this kind of upsampling strategy may cause blur or mosaic at the flows' edges. Additionally, the motion of fine pixels at high resolution cannot be adequately captured in motion estimation at low resolution, which leads to the misalignment of task-oriented flows. With such inaccurate flows, input frames are warped and combined pixel-by-pixel, resulting in ghosting and discontinuities in the interpolated frame. In this study, we propose a novel VFI pipeline, VTinker, which consists of two core components: guided flow upsampling (GFU) and Texture Mapping. After motion estimation at low resolution, GFU introduces input frames as guidance to alleviate the blurring details in bilinear upsampling flows, which makes flows' edges clearer. Subsequently, to avoid pixel-level ghosting and discontinuities, Texture Mapping generates an initial interpolated frame, referred to as the intermediate proxy. The proxy serves as a cue for selecting clear texture blocks from the input frames, which are then mapped onto the proxy to facilitate producing the final interpolated frame via a reconstruction module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VTinker achieves state-of-the-art performance in VFI. Codes are available at: https://github.com/Wucy0519/VTinker.

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Expose Camouflage in the Water: Underwater Camouflaged Instance Segmentation and Dataset

With the development of underwater exploration and marine protection, underwater vision tasks are widespread. Due to the degraded underwater environment, characterized by color distortion, low contrast, and blurring, camouflaged instance segmentation (CIS) faces greater challenges in accurately segmenting objects that blend closely with their surroundings. Traditional camouflaged instance segmentation methods, trained on terrestrial-dominated datasets with limited underwater samples, may exhibit inadequate performance in underwater scenes. To address these issues, we introduce the first underwater camouflaged instance segmentation (UCIS) dataset, abbreviated as UCIS4K, which comprises 3,953 images of camouflaged marine organisms with instance-level annotations. In addition, we propose an Underwater Camouflaged Instance Segmentation network based on Segment Anything Model (UCIS-SAM). Our UCIS-SAM includes three key modules. First, the Channel Balance Optimization Module (CBOM) enhances channel characteristics to improve underwater feature learning, effectively addressing the model's limited understanding of underwater environments. Second, the Frequency Domain True Integration Module (FDTIM) is proposed to emphasize intrinsic object features and reduce interference from camouflage patterns, enhancing the segmentation performance of camouflaged objects blending with their surroundings. Finally, the Multi-scale Feature Frequency Aggregation Module (MFFAM) is designed to strengthen the boundaries of low-contrast camouflaged instances across multiple frequency bands, improving the model's ability to achieve more precise segmentation of camouflaged objects. Extensive experiments on the proposed UCIS4K and public benchmarks show that our UCIS-SAM outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

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UltraLED: Learning to See Everything in Ultra-High Dynamic Range Scenes

Ultra-high dynamic range (UHDR) scenes exhibit significant exposure disparities between bright and dark regions. Such conditions are commonly encountered in nighttime scenes with light sources. Even with standard exposure settings, a bimodal intensity distribution with boundary peaks often emerges, making it difficult to preserve both highlight and shadow details simultaneously. RGB-based bracketing methods can capture details at both ends using short-long exposure pairs, but are susceptible to misalignment and ghosting artifacts. We found that a short-exposure image already retains sufficient highlight detail. The main challenge of UHDR reconstruction lies in denoising and recovering information in dark regions. In comparison to the RGB images, RAW images, thanks to their higher bit depth and more predictable noise characteristics, offer greater potential for addressing this challenge. This raises a key question: can we learn to see everything in UHDR scenes using only a single short-exposure RAW image? In this study, we rely solely on a single short-exposure frame, which inherently avoids ghosting and motion blur, making it particularly robust in dynamic scenes. To achieve that, we introduce UltraLED, a two-stage framework that performs exposure correction via a ratio map to balance dynamic range, followed by a brightness-aware RAW denoiser to enhance detail recovery in dark regions. To support this setting, we design a 9-stop bracketing pipeline to synthesize realistic UHDR images and contribute a corresponding dataset based on diverse scenes, using only the shortest exposure as input for reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that UltraLED significantly outperforms existing single-frame approaches. Our code and dataset are made publicly available at https://srameo.github.io/projects/ultraled.

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Advancing Marine Research: UWSAM Framework and UIIS10K Dataset for Precise Underwater Instance Segmentation

With recent breakthroughs in large-scale modeling, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated significant potential in a variety of visual applications. However, due to the lack of underwater domain expertise, SAM and its variants face performance limitations in end-to-end underwater instance segmentation tasks, while their higher computational requirements further hinder their application in underwater scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a large-scale underwater instance segmentation dataset, UIIS10K, which includes 10,048 images with pixel-level annotations for 10 categories. Then, we introduce UWSAM, an efficient model designed for automatic and accurate segmentation of underwater instances. UWSAM efficiently distills knowledge from the SAM ViT-Huge image encoder into the smaller ViT-Small image encoder via the Mask GAT-based Underwater Knowledge Distillation (MG-UKD) method for effective visual representation learning. Furthermore, we design an End-to-end Underwater Prompt Generator (EUPG) for UWSAM, which automatically generates underwater prompts instead of explicitly providing foreground points or boxes as prompts, thus enabling the network to locate underwater instances accurately for efficient segmentation. Comprehensive experimental results show that our model is effective, achieving significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods on multiple underwater instance datasets. Datasets and codes are available at https://github.com/LiamLian0727/UIIS10K.

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RAM++: Robust Representation Learning via Adaptive Mask for All-in-One Image Restoration

This work presents Robust Representation Learning via Adaptive Mask (RAM++), a two-stage framework for all-in-one image restoration. RAM++ integrates high-level semantic understanding with low-level texture generation to achieve content-oriented robust restoration. It addresses the limitations of existing degradation-oriented methods in extreme scenarios (e.g., degradations strongly coupled with image structures). RAM++ also mitigates common challenges such as unbalanced performance across tasks, overfitting to seen degradations, and weak generalization to unseen ones through three key designs: 1) Adaptive Semantic-Aware Mask (AdaSAM): a pretraining strategy that applies pixel-level masks to semantically rich and textured regions. This design enables the network to learn both generative priors and image content priors from various degradations. 2) Mask Attribute Conductance (MAC): a selective fine-tuning strategy that adjusts the layers with higher contributions to bridge the integrity gap between masked pretraining and full-image fine-tuning while retaining learned priors. 3) Robust Feature Regularization (RFR): a strategy that leverages DINOv2's semantically consistent and degradation-invariant representations, together with efficient feature fusion, to achieve faithful and semantically coherent restoration. With these designs, RAM++ achieves robust, well-balanced, and state-of-the-art performance across seen, unseen, extreme, and mixed degradations. Our code and model will be released at https://github.com/DragonisCV/RAM

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DetectAnyLLM: Towards Generalizable and Robust Detection of Machine-Generated Text Across Domains and Models

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has drawn urgent attention to the task of machine-generated text detection (MGTD). However, existing approaches struggle in complex real-world scenarios: zero-shot detectors rely heavily on scoring model's output distribution while training-based detectors are often constrained by overfitting to the training data, limiting generalization. We found that the performance bottleneck of training-based detectors stems from the misalignment between training objective and task needs. To address this, we propose Direct Discrepancy Learning (DDL), a novel optimization strategy that directly optimizes the detector with task-oriented knowledge. DDL enables the detector to better capture the core semantics of the detection task, thereby enhancing both robustness and generalization. Built upon this, we introduce DetectAnyLLM, a unified detection framework that achieves state-of-the-art MGTD performance across diverse LLMs. To ensure a reliable evaluation, we construct MIRAGE, the most diverse multi-task MGTD benchmark. MIRAGE samples human-written texts from 10 corpora across 5 text-domains, which are then re-generated or revised using 17 cutting-edge LLMs, covering a wide spectrum of proprietary models and textual styles. Extensive experiments on MIRAGE reveal the limitations of existing methods in complex environment. In contrast, DetectAnyLLM consistently outperforms them, achieving over a 70% performance improvement under the same training data and base scoring model, underscoring the effectiveness of our DDL. Project page: {https://fjc2005.github.io/detectanyllm}.

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TimeMachine: Fine-Grained Facial Age Editing with Identity Preservation

With the advancement of generative models, facial image editing has made significant progress. However, achieving fine-grained age editing while preserving personal identity remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose TimeMachine, a novel diffusion-based framework that achieves accurate age editing while keeping identity features unchanged. To enable fine-grained age editing, we inject high-precision age information into the multi-cross attention module, which explicitly separates age-related and identity-related features. This design facilitates more accurate disentanglement of age attributes, thereby allowing precise and controllable manipulation of facial aging. Furthermore, we propose an Age Classifier Guidance (ACG) module that predicts age directly in the latent space, instead of performing denoising image reconstruction during training. By employing a lightweight module to incorporate age constraints, this design enhances age editing accuracy by modest increasing training cost. Additionally, to address the lack of large-scale, high-quality facial age datasets, we construct a HFFA dataset (High-quality Fine-grained Facial-Age dataset) which contains one million high-resolution images labeled with identity and facial attributes. Experimental results demonstrate that TimeMachine achieves state-of-the-art performance in fine-grained age editing while preserving identity consistency.

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ViDA-UGC: Detailed Image Quality Analysis via Visual Distortion Assessment for UGC Images

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have introduced a paradigm shift for Image Quality Assessment (IQA) from unexplainable image quality scoring to explainable IQA, demonstrating practical applications like quality control and optimization guidance. However, current explainable IQA methods not only inadequately use the same distortion criteria to evaluate both User-Generated Content (UGC) and AI-Generated Content (AIGC) images, but also lack detailed quality analysis for monitoring image quality and guiding image restoration. In this study, we establish the first large-scale Visual Distortion Assessment Instruction Tuning Dataset for UGC images, termed ViDA-UGC, which comprises 11K images with fine-grained quality grounding, detailed quality perception, and reasoning quality description data. This dataset is constructed through a distortion-oriented pipeline, which involves human subject annotation and a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) assessment framework. This framework guides GPT-4o to generate quality descriptions by identifying and analyzing UGC distortions, which helps capturing rich low-level visual features that inherently correlate with distortion patterns. Moreover, we carefully select 476 images with corresponding 6,149 question answer pairs from ViDA-UGC and invite a professional team to ensure the accuracy and quality of GPT-generated information. The selected and revised data further contribute to the first UGC distortion assessment benchmark, termed ViDA-UGC-Bench. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the ViDA-UGC and CoT framework for consistently enhancing various image quality analysis abilities across multiple base MLLMs on ViDA-UGC-Bench and Q-Bench, even surpassing GPT-4o.

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Frequency-Driven Inverse Kernel Prediction for Single Image Defocus Deblurring

Single image defocus deblurring aims to recover an all-in-focus image from a defocus counterpart, where accurately modeling spatially varying blur kernels remains a key challenge. Most existing methods rely on spatial features for kernel estimation, but their performance degrades in severely blurry regions where local high-frequency details are missing. To address this, we propose a Frequency-Driven Inverse Kernel Prediction network (FDIKP) that incorporates frequency-domain representations to enhance structural identifiability in kernel modeling. Given the superior discriminative capability of the frequency domain for blur modeling, we design a Dual-Branch Inverse Kernel Prediction (DIKP) strategy that improves the accuracy of kernel estimation while maintaining stability. Moreover, considering the limited number of predicted inverse kernels, we introduce a Position Adaptive Convolution (PAC) to enhance the adaptability of the deconvolution process. Finally, we propose a Dual-Domain Scale Recurrent Module (DSRM) to fuse deconvolution results and progressively improve deblurring quality from coarse to fine. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches. Code will be made publicly available.

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Tree-Mamba: A Tree-Aware Mamba for Underwater Monocular Depth Estimation

Underwater Monocular Depth Estimation (UMDE) is a critical task that aims to estimate high-precision depth maps from underwater degraded images caused by light absorption and scattering effects in marine environments. Recently, Mamba-based methods have achieved promising performance across various vision tasks; however, they struggle with the UMDE task because their inflexible state scanning strategies fail to model the structural features of underwater images effectively. Meanwhile, existing UMDE datasets usually contain unreliable depth labels, leading to incorrect object-depth relationships between underwater images and their corresponding depth maps. To overcome these limitations, we develop a novel tree-aware Mamba method, dubbed Tree-Mamba, for estimating accurate monocular depth maps from underwater degraded images. Specifically, we propose a tree-aware scanning strategy that adaptively constructs a minimum spanning tree based on feature similarity. The spatial topological features among the tree nodes are then flexibly aggregated through bottom-up and top-down traversals, enabling stronger multi-scale feature representation capabilities. Moreover, we construct an underwater depth estimation benchmark (called BlueDepth), which consists of 38,162 underwater image pairs with reliable depth labels. This benchmark serves as a foundational dataset for training existing deep learning-based UMDE methods to learn accurate object-depth relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed Tree-Mamba over several leading methods in both qualitative results and quantitative evaluations with competitive computational efficiency. Code and dataset will be available at https://wyjgr.github.io/Tree-Mamba.html.

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DiT4SR: Taming Diffusion Transformer for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models are becoming increasingly popular in solving the Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) problem because of their rich generative priors. The recent development of diffusion transformer (DiT) has witnessed overwhelming performance over the traditional UNet-based architecture in image generation, which also raises the question: Can we adopt the advanced DiT-based diffusion model for Real-ISR? To this end, we propose our DiT4SR, one of the pioneering works to tame the large-scale DiT model for Real-ISR. Instead of directly injecting embeddings extracted from low-resolution (LR) images like ControlNet, we integrate the LR embeddings into the original attention mechanism of DiT, allowing for the bidirectional flow of information between the LR latent and the generated latent. The sufficient interaction of these two streams allows the LR stream to evolve with the diffusion process, producing progressively refined guidance that better aligns with the generated latent at each diffusion step. Additionally, the LR guidance is injected into the generated latent via a cross-stream convolution layer, compensating for DiT's limited ability to capture local information. These simple but effective designs endow the DiT model with superior performance in Real-ISR, which is demonstrated by extensive experiments. Project Page: https://adam-duan.github.io/projects/dit4sr/.

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Incorporating Uncertainty-Guided and Top-k Codebook Matching for Real-World Blind Image Super-Resolution

Recent advancements in codebook-based real image super-resolution (SR) have shown promising results in real-world applications. The core idea involves matching high-quality image features from a codebook based on low-resolution (LR) image features. However, existing methods face two major challenges: inaccurate feature matching with the codebook and poor texture detail reconstruction. To address these issues, we propose a novel Uncertainty-Guided and Top-k Codebook Matching SR (UGTSR) framework, which incorporates three key components: (1) an uncertainty learning mechanism that guides the model to focus on texture-rich regions, (2) a Top-k feature matching strategy that enhances feature matching accuracy by fusing multiple candidate features, and (3) an Align-Attention module that enhances the alignment of information between LR and HR features. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in texture realism and reconstruction fidelity compared to existing methods. We will release the code upon formal publication.

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A Systematic Investigation on Deep Learning-Based Omnidirectional Image and Video Super-Resolution

Omnidirectional image and video super-resolution is a crucial research topic in low-level vision, playing an essential role in virtual reality and augmented reality applications. Its goal is to reconstruct high-resolution images or video frames from low-resolution inputs, thereby enhancing detail preservation and enabling more accurate scene analysis and interpretation. In recent years, numerous innovative and effective approaches have been proposed, predominantly based on deep learning techniques, involving diverse network architectures, loss functions, projection strategies, and training datasets. This paper presents a systematic review of recent progress in omnidirectional image and video super-resolution, focusing on deep learning-based methods. Given that existing datasets predominantly rely on synthetic degradation and fall short in capturing real-world distortions, we introduce a new dataset, 360Insta, that comprises authentically degraded omnidirectional images and videos collected under diverse conditions, including varying lighting, motion, and exposure settings. This dataset addresses a critical gap in current omnidirectional benchmarks and enables more robust evaluation of the generalization capabilities of omnidirectional super-resolution methods. We conduct comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations of existing methods on both public datasets and our proposed dataset. Furthermore, we provide a systematic overview of the current status of research and discuss promising directions for future exploration. All datasets, methods, and evaluation metrics introduced in this work are publicly available and will be regularly updated. Project page: https://github.com/nqian1/Survey-on-ODISR-and-ODVSR.

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DIPO: Dual-State Images Controlled Articulated Object Generation Powered by Diverse Data

We present DIPO, a novel framework for the controllable generation of articulated 3D objects from a pair of images: one depicting the object in a resting state and the other in an articulated state. Compared to the single-image approach, our dual-image input imposes only a modest overhead for data collection, but at the same time provides important motion information, which is a reliable guide for predicting kinematic relationships between parts. Specifically, we propose a dual-image diffusion model that captures relationships between the image pair to generate part layouts and joint parameters. In addition, we introduce a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) based graph reasoner that explicitly infers part connectivity relationships. To further improve robustness and generalization on complex articulated objects, we develop a fully automated dataset expansion pipeline, name LEGO-Art, that enriches the diversity and complexity of PartNet-Mobility dataset. We propose PM-X, a large-scale dataset of complex articulated 3D objects, accompanied by rendered images, URDF annotations, and textual descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIPO significantly outperforms existing baselines in both the resting state and the articulated state, while the proposed PM-X dataset further enhances generalization to diverse and structurally complex articulated objects. Our code and dataset will be released to the community upon publication.

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NTIRE 2025 challenge on Text to Image Generation Model Quality Assessment

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2025 challenge on Text to Image (T2I) generation model quality assessment, which will be held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement Workshop (NTIRE) at CVPR 2025. The aim of this challenge is to address the fine-grained quality assessment of text-to-image generation models. This challenge evaluates text-to-image models from two aspects: image-text alignment and image structural distortion detection, and is divided into the alignment track and the structural track. The alignment track uses the EvalMuse-40K, which contains around 40K AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) generated by 20 popular generative models. The alignment track has a total of 371 registered participants. A total of 1,883 submissions are received in the development phase, and 507 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 12 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. The structure track uses the EvalMuse-Structure, which contains 10,000 AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) with corresponding structural distortion mask. A total of 211 participants have registered in the structure track. A total of 1155 submissions are received in the development phase, and 487 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 8 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. Almost all methods have achieved better results than baseline methods, and the winning methods in both tracks have demonstrated superior prediction performance on T2I model quality assessment.

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