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Guangtao Zhai

Publications and source records attributed to Guangtao Zhai.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

AMIF: Authorizable Medical Image Fusion Model with Built-in Authentication

Multimodal image fusion enables precise lesion localization and characterization for accurate diagnosis, thereby strengthening clinical decision-making and driving its growing prominence in medical imaging research. A powerful multimodal image fusion model relies on high-quality, clinically representative multimodal training data and a rigorously engineered model architecture. Therefore, the development of such professional radiomics models represents a collaborative achievement grounded in standardized acquisition, clinical-specific expertise, and algorithmic design proficiency, which necessitates protection of associated intellectual property rights. However, current multimodal image fusion models generate fused outputs without built-in mechanisms to safeguard intellectual property rights, inadvertently exposing proprietary model knowledge and sensitive training data through inference leakage. For example, malicious users can exploit fusion outputs and model distillation or other inference-based reverse engineering techniques to approximate the fusion performance of proprietary models. To address this issue, we propose AMIF, the first Authorizable Medical Image Fusion model with built-in authentication, which integrates authorization access control into the image fusion objective. For unauthorized usage, AMIF embeds explicit and visible copyright identifiers into fusion results. In contrast, high-quality fusion results are accessible upon successful key-based authentication.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Variational Bayesian Personalized Ranking

Pairwise learning underpins implicit collaborative filtering, yet its effectiveness is often hindered by sparse supervision, noisy interactions, and popularity-driven exposure bias. In this paper, we propose Variational Bayesian Personalized Ranking (VarBPR), a tractable variational framework for implicit-feedback pairwise learning that offers principled exposure controllability and theoretical interpretability. VarBPR reformulates pairwise learning as variational inference over discrete latent indexing variables, explicitly modeling noise and indexing uncertainty, and divides training into two stages: variational inference and variational learning. In the variational inference stage, we develop a variational formulation that integrates preference alignment, denoising, and popularity debiasing under a unified ELBO/regularization objective, deriving closed-form posteriors with clear control semantics: the prior encodes a target exposure pattern, while temperature/regularization strength controls posterior-prior adherence. As a result, exposure controllability becomes an endogenous and interpretable outcome of variational inference. In the variational learning stage, we propose a posterior-compression objective that reduces the ideal ELBO's computational complexity from polynomial to linear, with the approximation justified by an explicit Jensen-gap upper bound. Theoretically, we provide interpretable generalization guarantees by identifying a structural error component and revealing the opportunity cost of prioritizing certain exposure patterns (e.g., long-tail), offering a concrete analytical lens for designing controllable recommender systems. Empirically, We validate VarBPR across popular backbones; it demonstrates consistent gains in ranking accuracy, enables controlled long-tail exposure, and preserves the linear-time complexity of BPR.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

A$^2$-Edit: Precise Reference-Guided Image Editing of Arbitrary Objects and Ambiguous Masks

We propose A^2-Edit, a unified inpainting framework for arbitrary object categories, which allows users to replace any target region with a reference object using only a coarse mask. To address the issues of severe homogenization and limited category coverage in existing datasets, we construct a large-scale multi-category dataset, UniEdit-500K, which includes 8 major categories, 209 fine-grained subcategories, and a total of 500,104 image pairs. Such rich category diversity poses new challenges for the model, requiring it to automatically learn semantic relationships and distinctions across categories. To this end, we introduce the Mixture of Transformer module, which performs differentiated modeling of various object categories through dynamic expert selection, and further enhances cross-category semantic transfer and generalization through collaboration among experts. In addition, we propose a Mask Annealing Training Strategy (MATS) that progressively relaxes mask precision during training, reducing the model's reliance on accurate masks and improving robustness across diverse editing tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as VITON-HD and AnyInsertion demonstrate that A^2-Edit consistently outperforms existing approaches across all metrics, providing a new and efficient solution for arbitrary object editing.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Preference-Guided Debiasing for No-Reference Enhancement Image Quality Assessment

Current no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) models for enhanced images often struggle to generalize, as they tend to overfit to the distinct patterns of specific enhancement algorithms rather than evaluating genuine perceptual quality. To address this issue, we propose a preference-guided debiasing framework for no-reference enhancement image quality assessment (EIQA). Specifically, we first learn a continuous enhancement-preference embedding space using supervised contrastive learning, where images generated by similar enhancement styles are encouraged to have closer representations. Based on this, we further estimate the enhancement-induced nuisance component contained in the raw quality representation and remove it before quality regression. In this way, the model is guided to focus on algorithm-invariant perceptual quality cues instead of enhancement-specific visual fingerprints. To facilitate stable optimization, we adopt a two-stage training strategy that first learns the enhancement-preference space and then performs debiased quality prediction. Extensive experiments on public EIQA benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method effectively mitigates algorithm-induced representation bias and achieves superior robustness and cross-algorithm generalization compared with existing approaches.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Agentic Retoucher for Text-To-Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models such as SDXL and FLUX have achieved impressive photorealism, yet small-scale distortions remain pervasive in limbs, face, text and so on. Existing refinement approaches either perform costly iterative re-generation or rely on vision-language models (VLMs) with weak spatial grounding, leading to semantic drift and unreliable local edits. To close this gap, we propose Agentic Retoucher, a hierarchical decision-driven framework that reformulates post-generation correction as a human-like perception-reasoning-action loop. Specifically, we design (1) a perception agent that learns contextual saliency for fine-grained distortion localization under text-image consistency cues, (2) a reasoning agent that performs human-aligned inferential diagnosis via progressive preference alignment, and (3) an action agent that adaptively plans localized inpainting guided by user preference. This design integrates perceptual evidence, linguistic reasoning, and controllable correction into a unified, self-corrective decision process. To enable fine-grained supervision and quantitative evaluation, we further construct GenBlemish-27K, a dataset of 6K T2I images with 27K annotated artifact regions across 12 categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Agentic Retoucher consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in perceptual quality, distortion localization and human preference alignment, establishing a new paradigm for self-corrective and perceptually reliable T2I generation.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

EditHF-1M: A Million-Scale Rich Human Preference Feedback for Image Editing

Recent text-guided image editing (TIE) models have achieved remarkable progress, while many edited images still suffer from issues such as artifacts, unexpected editings, unaesthetic contents. Although some benchmarks and methods have been proposed for evaluating edited images, scalable evaluation models are still lacking, which limits the development of human feedback reward models for image editing. To address the challenges, we first introduce \textbf{EditHF-1M}, a million-scale image editing dataset with over 29M human preference pairs and 148K human mean opinion ratings, both evaluated from three dimensions, \textit{i.e.}, visual quality, instruction alignment, and attribute preservation. Based on EditHF-1M, we propose \textbf{EditHF}, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) based evaluation model, to provide human-aligned feedback from image editing. Finally, we introduce \textbf{EditHF-Reward}, which utilizes EditHF as the reward signal to optimize the text-guided image editing models through reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments show that EditHF achieves superior alignment with human preferences and demonstrates strong generalization on other datasets. Furthermore, we fine-tune the Qwen-Image-Edit using EditHF-Reward, achieving significant performance improvements, which demonstrates the ability of EditHF to serve as a reward model to scale-up the image editing. Both the dataset and code will be released in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/IntMeGroup/EditHF.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Deepfake Generation and Detection: A Benchmark and Survey

Deepfake is a technology dedicated to creating highly realistic facial images and videos under specific conditions, which has significant application potential in fields such as entertainment, movie production, digital human creation, to name a few. With the advancements in deep learning, techniques primarily represented by Variational Autoencoders and Generative Adversarial Networks have achieved impressive generation results. More recently, the emergence of diffusion models with powerful generation capabilities has sparked a renewed wave of research. In addition to deepfake generation, corresponding detection technologies continuously evolve to regulate the potential misuse of deepfakes, such as for privacy invasion and phishing attacks. This survey comprehensively reviews the latest developments in deepfake generation and detection, summarizing and analyzing current state-of-the-arts in this rapidly evolving field. We first unify task definitions, comprehensively introduce datasets and metrics, and discuss developing technologies. Then, we discuss the development of several related sub-fields and focus on researching four representative deepfake fields: face swapping, face reenactment, talking face generation, and facial attribute editing, as well as forgery detection. Subsequently, we comprehensively benchmark representative methods on popular datasets for each field, fully evaluating the latest and influential published works. Finally, we analyze challenges and future research directions of the discussed fields.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

ODI-Bench: Can MLLMs Understand Immersive Omnidirectional Environments?

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) provide full 360x180 view which are widely adopted in VR, AR and embodied intelligence applications. While multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on conventional 2D image and video understanding benchmarks, their ability to comprehend the immersive environments captured by ODIs remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we first present ODI-Bench, a novel comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for omnidirectional image understanding. ODI-Bench contains 2,000 high-quality omnidirectional images and over 4,000 manually annotated question-answering (QA) pairs across 10 fine-grained tasks, covering both general-level and spatial-level ODI understanding. Extensive experiments are conducted to benchmark 20 representative MLLMs, including proprietary and open-source models, under both close-ended and open-ended settings. Experimental results reveal that current MLLMs still struggle to capture the immersive context provided by ODIs. To this end, we further introduce Omni-CoT, a training-free method which significantly enhances MLLMs' comprehension ability in the omnidirectional environment through chain-of-thought reasoning across both textual information and visual cues. Both the benchmark and the code will be released at https://github.com/ylylyl-sjtu/ODI-Bench.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

SIQA: Toward Reliable Scientific Image Quality Assessment

Scientific images fundamentally differ from natural and AI-generated images in that they encode structured domain knowledge rather than merely depict visual scenes. Assessing their quality therefore requires evaluating not only perceptual fidelity but also scientific correctness and logical completeness. However, existing image quality assessment (IQA) paradigms primarily focus on perceptual distortions or image-text alignment, implicitly assuming that depicted content is factually valid. This assumption breaks down in scientific contexts, where visually plausible figures may still contain conceptual errors or incomplete reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce Scientific Image Quality Assessment (SIQA), a framework that models scientific image quality along two complementary dimensions: Knowledge (Scientific Validity and Scientific Completeness) and Perception (Cognitive Clarity and Disciplinary Conformity). To operationalize this formulation, we design two evaluation protocols: SIQA-U (Understanding), which measures semantic comprehension of scientific content through multiple-choice tasks, and SIQA-S (Scoring), which evaluates alignment with expert quality judgments. We further construct the SIQA Challenge, consisting of an expert-annotated benchmark and a large-scale training set. Experiments across representative multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reveal a consistent discrepancy between scoring alignment and scientific understanding. While models can achieve strong agreement with expert ratings under SIQA-S, their performance on SIQA-U remains substantially lower. Fine-tuning improves both metrics, yet gains in scoring consistently outpace improvements in understanding. These results suggest that rating consistency alone may not reliably reflect scientific comprehension, underscoring the necessity of multidimensional evaluation for scientific image quality assessment.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

LifeEval: A Multimodal Benchmark for Assistive AI in Egocentric Daily Life Tasks

The rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) marks a significant step toward artificial general intelligence, offering great potential for augmenting human capabilities. However, their ability to provide effective assistance in dynamic, real-world environments remains largely underexplored. Existing video benchmarks predominantly assess passive understanding through retrospective analysis or isolated perception tasks, failing to capture the interactive and adaptive nature of real-time user assistance. To bridge this gap, we introduce LifeEval, a multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate real-time, task-oriented human-AI collaboration in daily life from an egocentric perspective. LifeEval emphasizes three key aspects: task-oriented holistic evaluation, egocentric real-time perception from continuous first-person streams, and human-assistant collaborative interaction through natural dialogues. Constructed via a rigorous annotation pipeline, the benchmark comprises 4,075 high-quality question-answer pairs across 6 core capability dimensions. Extensive evaluations of 26 state-of-the-art MLLMs on LifeEval reveal substantial challenges in achieving timely, effective and adaptive interaction, highlighting essential directions for advancing human-centered interactive intelligence.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Steering and Rectifying Latent Representation Manifolds in Frozen Multi-modal LLMs for Video Anomaly Detection

Video anomaly detection (VAD) aims to identify abnormal events in videos. Traditional VAD methods generally suffer from the high costs of labeled data and full training, thus some recent works have explored leveraging frozen multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) in a tuning-free manner to perform VAD. However, their performance is limited as they directly inherit pre-training biases and cannot adapt internal representations to specific video contexts, leading to difficulties in handling subtle or ambiguous anomalies. To address these limitations, we propose a novel intervention framework, termed SteerVAD, which advances MLLM-based VAD by shifting from passively reading to actively steering and rectifying internal representations. Our approach first leverages the gradient-free representational separability analysis (RSA) to identify top attention heads as latent anomaly experts (LAEs) which are most discriminative for VAD. Then a hierarchical meta-controller (HMC) generates dynamic rectification signals by jointly conditioning on global context and these LAE outputs. The signals execute targeted, anisotropic scaling directly upon the LAE representation manifolds, amplifying anomaly-relevant dimensions while suppressing inherent biases. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among tuning-free approaches requiring only 1% of training data, establishing it as a powerful new direction for video anomaly detection. The code will be released upon the publication.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

LayerT2V: A Unified Multi-Layer Video Generation Framework

Text-to-video generation has advanced rapidly, but existing methods typically output only the final composited video and lack editable layered representations, limiting their use in professional workflows. We propose \textbf{LayerT2V}, a unified multi-layer video generation framework that produces multiple semantically consistent outputs in a single inference pass: the full video, an independent background layer, and multiple foreground RGB layers with corresponding alpha mattes. Our key insight is that recent video generation backbones use high compression in both time and space, enabling us to serialize multiple layer representations along the temporal dimension and jointly model them on a shared generation trajectory. This turns cross-layer consistency into an intrinsic objective, improving semantic alignment and temporal coherence. To mitigate layer ambiguity and conditional leakage, we augment a shared DiT backbone with LayerAdaLN and layer-aware cross-attention modulation. LayerT2V is trained in three stages: alpha mask VAE adaptation, joint multi-layer learning, and multi-foreground extension. We also introduce \textbf{VidLayer}, the first large-scale dataset for multi-layer video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LayerT2V substantially outperforms prior methods in visual fidelity, temporal consistency, and cross-layer coherence.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

STAR : Bridging Statistical and Agentic Reasoning for Large Model Performance Prediction

As comprehensive large model evaluation becomes prohibitively expensive, predicting model performance from limited observations has become essential. However, existing statistical methods struggle with pattern shifts, data sparsity, and lack of explanation, while pure LLM methods remain unreliable. We propose STAR, a framework that bridges data-driven STatistical expectations with knowledge-driven Agentic Reasoning. STAR leverages specialized retrievers to gather external knowledge and embeds semantic features into Constrained Probabilistic Matrix Factorization (CPMF) to generate statistical expectations with uncertainty. A reasoning module guided by Expectation Violation Theory (EVT) then refines predictions through intra-family analysis, cross-model comparison, and credibility-aware aggregation, producing adjustments with traceable explanations. Extensive experiments show that STAR consistently outperforms all baselines on both score-based and rank-based metrics, delivering a 14.46% gain in total score over the strongest statistical method under extreme sparsity, with only 1--2 observed scores per test model.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Surveillance Facial Image Quality Assessment: A Multi-dimensional Dataset and Lightweight Model

Surveillance facial images are often captured under unconstrained conditions, resulting in severe quality degradation due to factors such as low resolution, motion blur, occlusion, and poor lighting. Although recent face restoration techniques applied to surveillance cameras can significantly enhance visual quality, they often compromise fidelity (i.e., identity-preserving features), which directly conflicts with the primary objective of surveillance images -- reliable identity verification. Existing facial image quality assessment (FIQA) predominantly focus on either visual quality or recognition-oriented evaluation, thereby failing to jointly address visual quality and fidelity, which are critical for surveillance applications. To bridge this gap, we propose the first comprehensive study on surveillance facial image quality assessment (SFIQA), targeting the unique challenges inherent to surveillance scenarios. Specifically, we first construct SFIQA-Bench, a multi-dimensional quality assessment benchmark for surveillance facial images, which consists of 5,004 surveillance facial images captured by three widely deployed surveillance cameras in real-world scenarios. A subjective experiment is conducted to collect six dimensional quality ratings, including noise, sharpness, colorfulness, contrast, fidelity and overall quality, covering the key aspects of SFIQA. Furthermore, we propose SFIQA-Assessor, a lightweight multi-task FIQA model that jointly exploits complementary facial views through cross-view feature interaction, and employs learnable task tokens to guide the unified regression of multiple quality dimensions. The experiment results on the proposed dataset show that our method achieves the best performance compared with the state-of-the-art general image quality assessment (IQA) and FIQA methods, validating its effectiveness for real-world surveillance applications.

eess.IV↗
arXiv2026

VQAThinker: Exploring Generalizable and Explainable Video Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning

Video quality assessment (VQA) aims to objectively quantify perceptual quality degradation in alignment with human visual perception. Despite recent advances, existing VQA models still suffer from two critical limitations: \textit{poor generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) videos} and \textit{limited explainability}, which restrict their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{VQAThinker}, a reasoning-based VQA framework that leverages large multimodal models (LMMs) with reinforcement learning to jointly model video quality understanding and scoring, emulating human perceptual decision-making. Specifically, we adopt group relative policy optimization (GRPO), a rule-guided reinforcement learning algorithm that enables reasoning over video quality under score-level supervision, and introduce three VQA-specific rewards: (1) a \textbf{bell-shaped regression reward} that increases rapidly as the prediction error decreases and becomes progressively less sensitive near the ground truth; (2) a \textbf{pairwise ranking reward} that guides the model to correctly determine the relative quality between video pairs; and (3) a \textbf{temporal consistency reward} that encourages the model to prefer temporally coherent videos over their perturbed counterparts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VQAThinker achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-domain and OOD VQA benchmarks, showing strong generalization for video quality scoring. Furthermore, evaluations on video quality understanding tasks validate its superiority in distortion attribution and quality description compared to existing explainable VQA models and LMMs. These findings demonstrate that reinforcement learning offers an effective pathway toward building generalizable and explainable VQA models solely with score-level supervision.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Samba+: General and Accurate Salient Object Detection via A More Unified Mamba-based Framework

Existing salient object detection (SOD) models are generally constrained by the limited receptive fields of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and quadratic computational complexity of Transformers. Recently, the emerging state-space model, namely Mamba, has shown great potential in balancing global receptive fields and computational efficiency. As a solution, we propose Saliency Mamba (Samba), a pure Mamba-based architecture that flexibly handles various distinct SOD tasks, including RGB/RGB-D/RGB-T SOD, video SOD (VSOD), RGB-D VSOD, and visible-depth-thermal SOD. Specifically, we rethink the scanning strategy of Mamba for SOD, and introduce a saliency-guided Mamba block (SGMB) that features a spatial neighborhood scanning (SNS) algorithm to preserve the spatial continuity of salient regions. A context-aware upsampling (CAU) method is also proposed to promote hierarchical feature alignment and aggregation by modeling contextual dependencies. As one step further, to avoid the "task-specific" problem as in previous SOD solutions, we develop Samba+, which is empowered by training Samba in a multi-task joint manner, leading to a more unified and versatile model. Two crucial components that collaboratively tackle challenges encountered in input of arbitrary modalities and continual adaptation are investigated. Specifically, a hub-and-spoke graph attention (HGA) module facilitates adaptive cross-modal interactive fusion, and a modality-anchored continual learning (MACL) strategy alleviates inter-modal conflicts together with catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Samba individually outperforms existing methods across six SOD tasks on 22 datasets with lower computational cost, whereas Samba+ achieves even superior results on these tasks and datasets by using a single trained versatile model. Additional results further demonstrate the potential of our Samba framework.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

VideoAesBench: Benchmarking the Video Aesthetics Perception Capabilities of Large Multimodal Models

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated outstanding capabilities in various visual perception tasks, which has in turn made the evaluation of LMMs significant. However, the capability of video aesthetic quality assessment, which is a fundamental ability for human, remains underexplored for LMMs. To address this, we introduce VideoAesBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LMMs' understanding of video aesthetic quality. VideoAesBench has several significant characteristics: (1) Diverse content including 1,804 videos from multiple video sources including user-generated (UGC), AI-generated (AIGC), compressed, robotic-generated (RGC), and game videos. (2) Multiple question formats containing traditional single-choice questions, multi-choice questions, True or False questions, and a novel open-ended questions for video aesthetics description. (3) Holistic video aesthetics dimensions including visual form related questions from 5 aspects, visual style related questions from 4 aspects, and visual affectiveness questions from 3 aspects. Based on VideoAesBench, we benchmark 23 open-source and commercial large multimodal models. Our findings show that current LMMs only contain basic video aesthetics perception ability, their performance remains incomplete and imprecise. We hope our VideoAesBench can be served as a strong testbed and offer insights for explainable video aesthetics assessment. The data will be released on https://github.com/michaelliyunhao/VideoAesBench

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

MACEval: A Multi-Agent Continual Evaluation Network for Large Models

Hundreds of benchmarks dedicated to evaluating large models have been presented over the past few years. However, most of them remain closed-ended and are prone to overfitting due to the potential data contamination. Moreover, the increasing scale and scope of current benchmarks with transient metrics, as well as the heavily human-dependent curation procedure, pose significant challenges for timely maintenance and adaptation. In this paper, we introduce MACEval, a Multi-Agent Continual Evaluation network for dynamic evaluation of large models, and define new metrics to quantify performance longitudinally. MACEval employs an interactive and autonomous evaluation mode, utilizing role assignment, in-process data generation, and evaluation routing through a cascaded agent network. Extensive experiments on 23 large models demonstrate the effectiveness of MACEval, which also lightens the evaluation process and reduces a considerable amount of overhead. We hope that MACEval can broaden future directions of large model evaluation. Project page: https://github.com/zijianchen98/MACEval.

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