arXiv subjects

Jielei Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Jielei Wang.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Visual Graph Reasoning via Knowledge Compilation

Visual graph reasoning requires answering graph-theoretic questions directly from graph images, where graph topology and state are conveyed visually rather than given in symbolic form. Despite recent progress of vision-language models (VLMs), current approaches to visual graph reasoning still fail on simple visual graph problems. This reveals a fundamental limitation of existing approaches: they prioritize final-answer supervision over the intermediate recovery of an explicit graph representation that preserves graph topology and state from visual input. To address this limitation, we propose VGCompiler, a compilation-centric paradigm for visual graph reasoning via knowledge compilation. VGCompiler organizes reasoning around two compilers: a representation compiler that recovers a structure-preserving intermediate graph representation from visual input, and an operation compiler that compiles query intent under the recovered graph state into an executable graph operation. Specifically, we build VGCompiler on Qwen3-VL-8B and train it with reinforcement learning guided by a layered reward over executability, compiled graph validity, representation quality, and operation quality. VGCompiler uses a frozen observer to summarize graph and question conditions into lightweight signatures, enabling archive retrieval and code reuse across similar regimes. Experiments on three benchmarks GVLQA, VisionGraph, and VGCURE, show that Qwen-VGCompiler, built on an 8B backbone, surpasses the strongest closed-source VLM baseline by 28.9% and the strongest code-based baseline by 23.7%, while maintaining high efficiency. We further evaluate VGCompiler on three real-world domains, including metro routing, logistics delivery, and network fault assessment, where it generalizes across heterogeneous visual graphs and domain-grounded tasks.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2026

UniDFKD: A Unified Semantic Prior Framework for Architecture-Agnostic Data-Free Knowledge Distillation

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) transfers knowledge from a pretrained teacher model to a compact student model by synthesizing semantically informative data, eliminating the need for access to the original training dataset. Existing DFKD methods rely heavily on architecture-specific statistical priors (e.g., Batch Normalization statistics) to guide data synthesis, however, such architecture-dependent priors are often absent in modern architectures such as Vision Transformers (ViTs), resulting in degraded semantic quality of the synthesized data and consequently catastrophic performance degradation. In this paper, we propose \emph{UniDFKD}, a unified data-free knowledge distillation framework that replaces architecture-specific statistics with explicit, architecture-agnostic semantic priors. \emph{UniDFKD} governs the entire synthesis-distillation pipeline along three dimensions: (1) Categorical Semantic Conditioning (CSC) defines \emph{what} to synthesize by persistently modulating the generator with language-derived embeddings to capture semantic diversity; (2) Spatial Semantic Anchoring (SSA) dictates \emph{where} evidence belongs by anchoring the teacher's spatial attributions to a Gaussian prior; and (3) Spatial Semantic Distillation (SSD) controls \emph{how} knowledge is transferred by explicitly aligning teacher-student spatial evidence alongside predictions. Extensive experiments across CNNs and ViTs demonstrate that UniDFKD establishes a new state-of-the-art, outperforming existing methods by an average absolute margin of over 20\% in both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

What to Remove, What to Preserve: Dual-Ambiguity Rectification for All-in-One Image Restoration

All-in-one image restoration aims to handle diverse degradations within a unified framework. Existing methods commonly encode heterogeneous degradation conditions in a shared latent space, where degradation-related cues and scene content can remain entangled. We characterize the resulting challenge as dual ambiguity: semantic ambiguity in channel-wise modulation and spatial ambiguity in restoration responses, which can lead to content corruption and residual artifacts. To mitigate this issue, we propose DAR-Net, a Dual-Ambiguity Rectification Network for all-in-one image restoration. DAR-Net first introduces a Degradation Archetype Representation (DAR) module to construct a structured degradation state through simplex-constrained archetype mixture modeling. Based on this state, a Semantic Ambiguity Rectification (SeAR) module generates degradation-aware prompts to improve channel-wise conditioning in the decoder. A Spatial Ambiguity Rectification (SpAR) module further regularizes degradation-aware and complementary features toward orthogonal response subspaces, reducing spatial interference between removal and preservation cues. Extensive experiments on standard all-in-one restoration benchmarks show that DAR-Net achieves the best overall performance under both three-degradation and five-degradation settings, improving the average PSNR over the strongest competitor by 0.14 dB and 0.34 dB, respectively; it additionally shows superior performance on CDD-11 and WeatherBench.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

DIVER:Diving Deeper into Distilled Data via Expressive Semantic Recovery

Dataset distillation aims to synthesize a compact proxy dataset that is unreadable or non-raw from the original dataset for privacy protection and highly efficient learning. However, previous approaches typically adopt a single-stage distillation paradigm, which suffers from learning specific patterns that overfit on a prior architecture, consequently suppressing the expression of semantics and leading to performance degradation across heterogeneous architectures. To address this issue, we propose a novel dual-stage distillation framework called ${\textbf{DIVER}}$, which leverages the pre-trained diffusion model to dive deeper into $\textbf{DI}$stilled data $\textbf{V}$ia $\textbf{E}$xpressive semantic $\textbf{R}$ecovery, an entire process of semantic inheritance, guidance, and fusion. Semantic inheritance distills high-level semantics of abstract distilled images into the latent space to filter out architecture-specific ``noise" and retain the intrinsic semantics. Furthermore, semantic guidance improves the preservation of the original semantics by directing the reverse procedure. Finally, semantic fusion is designed to provide semantic guidance only during the concrete phase of the reverse process, preventing semantic ambiguity and artifacts while maintaining the guidance information. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and efficiency of DIVER in improving classical distillation techniques and significantly improving cross-architecture generalization, requiring processing time comparable to raw DiT on ImageNet (256$\times$256) with only 4 GB of GPU memory usage.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

AnchorDiff: Topology-Aware Masked Diffusion with Confidence-based Rewriting for Radiology Report Generation

Radiology report generation (RRG) aims to automatically produce clinically accurate textual reports from medical images. Existing methods predominantly rely on autoregressive (AR) language models, whose causal dependency structure restricts generation to a unidirectional left-to-right process. This paradigm can induce sequence bias, where models tend to follow stereotypical token orders and high-frequency report templates rather than fully grounding generation in image-specific evidence. In this paper, we propose AnchorDiff, the first masked-diffusion framework for RRG that integrates knowledge-graph-derived clinical anchors into diffusion language modeling. By leveraging bidirectional context and iterative refinement, AnchorDiff mitigates the limitations of fixed-order autoregressive decoding. Specifically, we introduce a topology-aware training strategy that uses RadGraph-derived entity hierarchies to assign clinically important tokens differentiated masking protection and loss weights. We further design an inference-time rewriting strategy that detects unstable committed tokens through perturbation-based testing and selectively revises them during denoising. Extensive experiments on the MIMIC-CXR and MIMIC-RG4 benchmarks demonstrate that AnchorDiff achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, showing the effectiveness of clinically anchored masked diffusion for radiology report generation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

EDITS: Enhancing Dataset Distillation with Implicit Textual Semantics

Dataset distillation aims to synthesize a compact dataset from the original large-scale one, enabling highly efficient learning while preserving competitive model performance. However, traditional techniques primarily capture low-level visual features, neglecting the high-level semantic and structural information inherent in images. In this paper, we propose EDITS, a novel framework that exploits the implicit textual semantics within the image data to achieve enhanced distillation. First, external texts generated by a Vision Language Model (VLM) are fused with image features through a Global Semantic Query module, forming the prior clustered buffer. Local Semantic Awareness then selects representative samples from the buffer to construct image and text prototypes, with the latter produced by guiding a Large Language Model (LLM) with meticulously crafted prompt. Ultimately, Dual Prototype Guidance strategy generates the final synthetic dataset through a diffusion model. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our method.Source code is available in: https://github.com/einsteinxia/EDITS.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Efficient Dataset Distillation for Pre-Trained Self-Supervised Models via Statistical Flow Matching

Dataset distillation seeks to synthesize a highly compact dataset that achieves performance comparable to the original dataset on downstream tasks. For the classification task that use pre-trained self-supervised models as backbones, previous linear gradient matching optimizes synthetic images by encouraging them to mimic the gradient updates induced by real images on the linear classifier. However, this batch-level formulation requires loading thousands of real images and applying multiple rounds of differentiable augmentations to synthetic images at each distillation step, leading to substantial computational and memory overhead. In this paper, we introduce statistical flow matching , a stable and efficient supervised learning framework that optimizes synthetic images by aligning constant statistical flows from target class centers to non-target class centers in the original data. Our approach loads raw statistics only once and performs a single augmentation pass on the synthetic data, achieving performance comparable to or better than the state-of-the-art methods with 10x lower GPU memory usage and 4x shorter runtime. Furthermore, we propose a classifier inheritance strategy that reuses the classifier trained on the original dataset for inference, requiring only an extremely lightweight linear projector and marginal storage while achieving substantial performance gains.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

CBV: Clean-label Backdoor Attacks on Vision Language Models via Diffusion Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering (VQA). However, as their applications become increasingly widespread, recent studies have revealed that VLMs are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks on VLMs primarily rely on data poisoning by adding visual triggers and modifying text labels, where the induced image-text mismatch makes poisoned samples easy to detect. To address this limitation, we propose the Clean-Label Backdoor Attack on VLMs via Diffusion Models (CBV), which leverages diffusion models to generate natural poisoned examples via score matching. Specifically, CBV modifies the score during the reverse generation process of the diffusion model to guide the generation of poisoned samples that contain triggered image features. To further enhance the effectiveness of the attack, we incorporate the textual information of the triggered images as multimodal guidance during generation. Moreover, to enhance stealthiness, we introduce a GradCAM-guided Mask (GM) that restricts modifications to only the most semantically important regions, rather than the entire image. We evaluate our method on MSCOCO and VQA v2 with four representative VLMs, achieving over 80% ASR while preserving normal functionality.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Rethinking SAR ATR: A Target-Aware Frequency-Spatial Enhancement Framework with Noise-Resilient Knowledge Guidance

Synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR ATR) is of considerable importance in marine navigation and disaster monitoring. However, the coherent speckle noise inherent in SAR imagery often obscures salient target features, leading to degraded recognition accuracy and limited model generalization. To address this issue, this paper proposes a target-aware frequency-spatial enhancement framework with noise-resilient knowledge guidance (FSCE) for SAR target recognition. The proposed framework incorporates a frequency-spatial shallow feature adaptive enhancement (DSAF) module, which processes shallow features through spatial multi-scale convolution and frequency-domain wavelet convolution. In addition, a teacher-student learning paradigm combined with an online knowledge distillation method (KD) is employed to guide the student network to focus more effectively on target regions, thereby enhancing its robustness to high-noise backgrounds. Through the collaborative optimization of attention transfer and noise-resilient representation learning, the proposed approach significantly improves the stability of target recognition under noisy conditions. Based on the FSCE framework, two network architectures with different performance emphases are developed: lightweight DSAFNet-M and high-precision DSAFNet-L. Extensive experiments are conducted on the MSTAR, FUSARShip and OpenSARShip datasets. The results show that DSAFNet-L achieves competitive or superior performance compared with various methods on three datasets; DSAFNet-M significantly reduces the model complexity while maintaining comparable accuracy. These results indicate that the proposed FSCE framework exhibits strong cross-model generalization.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

AlignVAR: Towards Globally Consistent Visual Autoregression for Image Super-Resolution

Visual autoregressive (VAR) models have recently emerged as a promising alternative for image generation, offering stable training, non-iterative inference, and high-fidelity synthesis through next-scale prediction. This encourages the exploration of VAR for image super-resolution (ISR), yet its application remains underexplored and faces two critical challenges: locality-biased attention, which fragments spatial structures, and residual-only supervision, which accumulates errors across scales, severely compromises global consistency of reconstructed images. To address these issues, we propose AlignVAR, a globally consistent visual autoregressive framework tailored for ISR, featuring two key components: (1) Spatial Consistency Autoregression (SCA), which applies an adaptive mask to reweight attention toward structurally correlated regions, thereby mitigating excessive locality and enhancing long-range dependencies; and (2) Hierarchical Consistency Constraint (HCC), which augments residual learning with full reconstruction supervision at each scale, exposing accumulated deviations early and stabilizing the coarse-to-fine refinement process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlignVAR consistently enhances structural coherence and perceptual fidelity over existing generative methods, while delivering over 10x faster inference with nearly 50% fewer parameters than leading diffusion-based approaches, establishing a new paradigm for efficient ISR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

PRISM: Precision-Recall Informed Data-Free Knowledge Distillation via Generative Diffusion

Data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD) transfers knowledge from a teacher to a student without access to the real in-distribution (ID) data. While existing methods perform well on small-scale images, they suffer from mode collapse when synthesizing large-scale images, resulting in limited knowledge transfer. Recently, leveraging advanced generative models to synthesize photorealistic images has emerged as a promising alternative. Nevertheless, directly using off-the-shelf diffusion to generate datasets faces the precision-recall challenges: 1) ensuring synthetic data aligns with the real distribution, and 2) ensuring coverage of the real ID manifold. In response, we propose PRISM, a precision-recall informed synthesis method. Specifically, we introduce Energy-guided Distribution Alignment to avoid the generation of out-of-distribution samples, and design the Diversified Prompt Engineering to enhance coverage of the real ID manifold. Extensive experiments on various large-scale image datasets demonstrate the superiority of PRISM. Moreover, we demonstrate that models trained with PRISM exhibit strong domain generalization.

cs.CV↗