arXiv subjects

Kang Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Kang Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

MeanSR: Restoration Trajectory Learning for One-Step Perceptual Super-Resolution

Diffusion-based super-resolution (SR) achieves strong perceptual quality but requires costly iterative denoising. Existing one-step distillation methods reduce inference time but depend on expensive pretrained teachers, whereas CTMSR avoids distillation through PF-ODE consistency training yet does not explicitly model the restoration dynamics from low-resolution (LR) inputs to high-resolution (HR) images. We propose MeanSR, a one-step perceptual SR method that learns an LR-conditioned average velocity field to directly capture the finite-time transition from degraded or noisy inputs to plausible HR outputs. We further reformulate distribution trajectory matching for average-velocity generation and introduce a Stage-Aware Temporal Sampling strategy to improve trajectory learning. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that MeanSR outperforms CTMSR on CLIPIQA, MUSIQ, and MANIQA while substantially reducing FLOPs and inference latency. MeanSR also reconstructs sharper structures and more realistic textures with fewer perceptual artifacts.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

FaithIR: Rethinking Infrared Image Super-Resolution from Perceptual Sharpness to Task Relevant Fidelity

Infrared image super-resolution (IISR) is important for downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Existing IISR methods often produce artificial textures, over-sharpened edges, and spurious high-frequency details that distort authentic thermal structures and semantic information. To address this issue, we propose FaithIR, a faithful infrared super-resolution framework for reliable machine perception. FaithIR consists of a patch-level conditioning branch that captures global thermal and structural information and a pixel-level restoration branch that performs dense local reconstruction under structural guidance. The entire restoration process is performed directly in the pixel domain to preserve infrared-specific structures and task-relevant information. Extensive experiments on FLIR-IISR, M3FD, and FMB demonstrate strong reconstruction fidelity, cross-dataset generalization, and superior performance in object detection and semantic segmentation. These results show that demonstrate that preserving faithful infrared structure preservations is more important for reliable machine perception than merely pursuing perceptual sharpness alone.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Unleashing the Power of Text: Text-Guided Flow Matching for Image Fusion under Complex Degradations

Infrared-visible image fusion under realistic degradation scenarios is a challenging task, as degradations not only cause a loss of reliable modality-specific information in observed images but also hinder the fusion process. Recent studies indicate that text can provide prior information about degradation characteristics, complementing the limited evidence available from corrupted input images and facilitating fusion. However, existing methods typically inject fixed global text representations into visual features, making it difficult for textual guidance to adapt to spatially varying degradations, local structures, and thermal saliency. To this end, we propose TGFusion, a text-guided latent-space flow matching framework that unifies degradation suppression and cross-modal fusion. TGFusion encodes task, degradation, and generation cues into structured prompts. To fully exploit these priors, we design a Prompt-conditioned Multi-stream Joint Flow Transformer that represents text as an independent semantic stream alongside fusion, visible, and infrared streams. Joint attention enables token-level bidirectional interaction and layer-wise updating among semantic and visual representations, allowing degradation semantics to dynamically guide reliable information selection and fusion latent generation. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and complex degradation scenarios demonstrate that TGFusion achieves superior or competitive performance in perceptual quality, image naturalness, structural-detail preservation, and infrared-saliency retention, while remaining robust across diverse single and compound degradations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Development and characterization of a millimeter-wave cold load prototype

Superconducting transition-edge sensors (TESs) are crucial detectors for cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations and require stable and tunable millimeter-wave cold loads for optical-efficiency calibration. This work presents the design, fabrication, and preliminary characterization of a 4-20 K millimeter-wave cold load prototype intended for integration into the 1 K stage of a dilution refrigerator and subsequent 40/90 GHz CMB TES calibration experiments. Two absorber prototypes based on commercially available CR-110 and a Stycast 2850FT composite were fabricated and studied. Simulation results show that both absorber structures exhibit small predicted steady-state temperature gradients and low normal-incidence reflectance in the target frequency bands. Room-temperature S11 measurements were used only to screen low-reflectance cold load prototype, and the measured results generally agree with the electromagnetic simulations. The measured S11 of the Stycast 2850FT composite is comparable to that of the commercial absorber TK RAM. Additionally, to explore a more readily obtainable alternative absorber material, TIE280-25AB was preliminarily evaluated by measuring its electromagnetic parameters. Based on the measured parameters, the simulated S11 of the TIE280-25AB pyramidal absorber structure is comparable to those of CR-110 and the Stycast 2850FT composite over 33-110 GHz. These results identify CR-110 and the Stycast 2850FT composite as promising absorbers for subsequent cryogenic evaluation. The absolute low-temperature emissivity, effective radiation temperature, and TES calibration performance remain to be established through future cryogenic radiometric and TES based optical-power measurements.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2026

Confidence-feedback-weighted graph matching network: online-offline laser-induced damage site matching under complex interference

Online inspection images of final optics in high-power laser facilities contain pseudo-damage sites that closely resemble true damage sites. Determining the authenticity of online-detected sites is therefore difficult and requires accurate matching to offline ground-truth sites. However, this matching remains highly challenging due to limited match-discriminative features, local geometric distortions, and numerous distractor sites. Existing matching models mainly suppress distractors implicitly through loss-function supervision. We propose a confidence-feedback-weighted graph matching network that requires only damage-site centroid coordinates as input. It estimates node matchability confidence from each round of matching scores and feeds it back as a reliability weight to guide subsequent edge-feature aggregation, thereby suppressing distractor propagation and enhancing cross-graph discriminability. Within this framework, a geometric consistency constraint calibrates spurious high-confidence matchability estimates, while a hard-example mining loss improves discrimination between structurally similar sites. Experiments on our Complex-Scene dataset show that the proposed method achieves a matching F1-score of 96.36$\%$ with robust and efficient performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

PAI: Preserving Amplitude Information in Representation-Based Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Representation-based time-series anomaly detection algorithms significantly outperform other methods on diverse anomaly detection tasks. However, we notice that they suffer from a major limitation in our evaluation - their learned embeddings are often amplitude-agnostic. Losing amplitude information can degrade performance on amplitude related anomalies, and this failure is prevalent across all existing representation-based methods. To address aforementioned issues, we propose a new anomaly scoring scheme named PAI. PAI consists of two complementary modules, a diagnostic module and a final score augmentation function. The diagnostic module compares cosine and Euclidean scoring on the same representation bank to test whether amplitude information is already captured in the learned representation. Then in final score augmentation function, PAI computes a point-wise median and MAD deviation score and a local mean-shift score-which are fused with the representation score to produce the final anomaly score. On the TSB-AD-U-Eva and TAB UV datasets, PAI improves all four evaluated representation-based methods across every reported metric, achieving average VUS-PR gains of 98.4% and 36.8%, respectively. Among all evaluated combinations, PaAno + PAI achieves the best performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art method by 15%. Further evaluation on bootstrap confidence intervals, anomaly-type breakdowns, and a TS2Vec input-normalization ablation further support the proposed scheme. These results suggest that explicitly retaining amplitude information is important for representation-based time-series anomaly detection, which has been underemphasized in existing scoring schemes. Code is available at: https://github.com/pantheon5100/PAI

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Cinematic Audio Source Separation Using Visual Cues

Cinematic Audio Source Separation (CASS) aims to decompose mixed film audio into speech, music, and sound effects, enabling applications like dubbing and remastering. Existing CASS approaches are audio-only, overlooking the inherent audio-visual nature of films, where sounds often align with visual cues. We present the first framework for audio-visual CASS (AV-CASS), leveraging visual context to enhance separation quality. Our method formulates CASS as a conditional generative modeling problem using conditional flow matching, enabling multimodal audio source separation. To address the lack of cinematic datasets with isolated sound tracks, we introduce a training data synthesis pipeline that pairs in-the-wild audio and video streams (e.g., facial videos for speech, scene videos for effects) and design a dedicated visual encoder for this dual-stream setup. Trained entirely on synthetic data, our model generalizes effectively to real-world cinematic content and achieves strong performance on synthetic, real-world, and audio-only CASS benchmarks. Code and demo are available at \url{https://cass-flowmatching.github.io}.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2026

DualTSR: Unified Dual-Diffusion Transformer for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution

Scene Text Image Super-Resolution (STISR) aims to restore high-resolution details in low-resolution text images, which is crucial for both human readability and machine recognition. Existing methods, however, often depend on external Optical Character Recognition (OCR) models for textual priors or rely on complex multi-component architectures that are difficult to train and reproduce. In this paper, we introduce DualTSR, a unified end-to-end framework that addresses both issues. DualTSR employs a single multimodal transformer backbone trained with a dual diffusion objective. It simultaneously models the continuous distribution of high-resolution images via Conditional Flow Matching and the discrete distribution of textual content via discrete diffusion. This shared design enables visual and textual information to interact at every layer, allowing the model to infer text priors internally instead of relying on an external OCR module. Compared with prior multi-branch diffusion systems, DualTSR offers a simpler end-to-end formulation with fewer hand-crafted components. Experiments on synthetic Chinese benchmarks and a curated real-world evaluation protocol show that DualTSR achieves strong perceptual quality and text fidelity.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A Hidden Semantic Bottleneck in Conditional Embeddings of Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in class-conditional and multimodal generation, yet the structure of their learned conditional embeddings remains poorly understood. In this work, we present the first systematic study of these embeddings and uncover a notable redundancy: class-conditioned embeddings exhibit extreme angular similarity, exceeding 99\% on ImageNet-1K, while continuous-condition tasks such as pose-guided image generation and video-to-audio generation reach over 99.9\%. We further find that semantic information is concentrated in a small subset of dimensions, with head dimensions carrying the dominant signal and tail dimensions contributing minimally. By pruning low-magnitude dimensions--removing up to two-thirds of the embedding space--we show that generation quality and fidelity remain largely unaffected, and in some cases improve. These results reveal a semantic bottleneck in Transformer-based diffusion models, providing new insights into how semantics are encoded and suggesting opportunities for more efficient conditioning mechanisms.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Video Diffusion Models Excel at Tracking Similar-Looking Objects Without Supervision

Distinguishing visually similar objects by their motion remains a critical challenge in computer vision. Although supervised trackers show promise, contemporary self-supervised trackers struggle when visual cues become ambiguous, limiting their scalability and generalization without extensive labeled data. We find that pre-trained video diffusion models inherently learn motion representations suitable for tracking without task-specific training. This ability arises because their denoising process isolates motion in early, high-noise stages, distinct from later appearance refinement. Capitalizing on this discovery, our self-supervised tracker significantly improves performance in distinguishing visually similar objects, an underexplored failure point for existing methods. Our method achieves up to a 6-point improvement over recent self-supervised approaches on established benchmarks and our newly introduced tests focused on tracking visually similar items. Visualizations confirm that these diffusion-derived motion representations enable robust tracking of even identical objects across challenging viewpoint changes and deformations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Model-Guided Dual-Role Alignment for High-Fidelity Open-Domain Video-to-Audio Generation

We present MGAudio, a novel flow-based framework for open-domain video-to-audio generation, which introduces model-guided dual-role alignment as a central design principle. Unlike prior approaches that rely on classifier-based or classifier-free guidance, MGAudio enables the generative model to guide itself through a dedicated training objective designed for video-conditioned audio generation. The framework integrates three main components: (1) a scalable flow-based Transformer model, (2) a dual-role alignment mechanism where the audio-visual encoder serves both as a conditioning module and as a feature aligner to improve generation quality, and (3) a model-guided objective that enhances cross-modal coherence and audio realism. MGAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance on VGGSound, reducing FAD to 0.40, substantially surpassing the best classifier-free guidance baselines, and consistently outperforms existing methods across FD, IS, and alignment metrics. It also generalizes well to the challenging UnAV-100 benchmark. These results highlight model-guided dual-role alignment as a powerful and scalable paradigm for conditional video-to-audio generation. Code is available at: https://github.com/pantheon5100/mgaudio

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Clinically Grounded Agent-based Report Evaluation: An Interpretable Metric for Radiology Report Generation

Radiological imaging is central to diagnosis, treatment planning, and clinical decision-making. Vision-language foundation models have spurred interest in automated radiology report generation (RRG), but safe deployment requires reliable clinical evaluation of generated reports. Existing metrics often rely on surface-level similarity or behave as black boxes, lacking interpretability. We introduce ICARE (Interpretable and Clinically-grounded Agent-based Report Evaluation), an interpretable evaluation framework leveraging large language model agents and dynamic multiple-choice question answering (MCQA). Two agents, each with either the ground-truth or generated report, generate clinically meaningful questions and quiz each other. Agreement on answers captures preservation and consistency of findings, serving as interpretable proxies for clinical precision and recall. By linking scores to question-answer pairs, ICARE enables transparent, and interpretable assessment. Clinician studies show ICARE aligns significantly more with expert judgment than prior metrics. Perturbation analyses confirm sensitivity to clinical content and reproducibility, while model comparisons reveal interpretable error patterns.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

PoEmotion: Can AI Utilize Chinese Calligraphy to Express Emotion from Poems?

This paper presents PoEmotion, an approach to visualizing emotions in poetry with Chinese calligraphy strokes. Traditional textual emotion analysis often lacks emotional resonance due to its mechanical nature. PoEmotion combines natural language processing with deep learning generative algorithms to create Chinese calligraphy that effectively conveys the emotions in poetry. The created calligraphy represents four fundamental emotions: excitement, anger, sadness, and relaxation, making the visual representation of emotions intuitive and concise. Furthermore, the approach delves into the relationship be-tween time, emotion, and cultural communication. Its goal is to provide a more natural means of communicating emotions through non-verbal mediums to enhance human emotional expression.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

LangPert: Detecting and Handling Task-level Perturbations for Robust Object Rearrangement

Task execution for object rearrangement could be challenged by Task-Level Perturbations (TLP), i.e., unexpected object additions, removals, and displacements that can disrupt underlying visual policies and fundamentally compromise task feasibility and progress. To address these challenges, we present LangPert, a language-based framework designed to detect and mitigate TLP situations in tabletop rearrangement tasks. LangPert integrates a Visual Language Model (VLM) to comprehensively monitor policy's skill execution and environmental TLP, while leveraging the Hierarchical Chain-of-Thought (HCoT) reasoning mechanism to enhance the Large Language Model (LLM)'s contextual understanding and generate adaptive, corrective skill-execution plans. Our experimental results demonstrate that LangPert handles diverse TLP situations more effectively than baseline methods, achieving higher task completion rates, improved execution efficiency, and potential generalization to unseen scenarios.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

The Dream Within Huang Long Cave: AI-Driven Interactive Narrative for Family Storytelling and Emotional Reflection

This paper introduces the art project The Dream Within Huang Long Cave, an AI-driven interactive and immersive narrative experience. The project offers new insights into AI technology, artistic practice, and psychoanalysis. Inspired by actual geographical landscapes and familial archetypes, the work combines psychoanalytic theory and computational technology, providing an artistic response to the concept of the non-existence of the Big Other. The narrative is driven by a combination of a large language model (LLM) and a realistic digital character, forming a virtual agent named YELL. Through dialogue and exploration within a cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE), the audience is invited to unravel the language puzzles presented by YELL and help him overcome his life challenges. YELL is a fictional embodiment of the Big Other, modeled after the artist's real father. Through a cross-temporal interaction with this digital father, the project seeks to deconstruct complex familial relationships. By demonstrating the non-existence of the Big Other, we aim to underscore the authenticity of interpersonal emotions, positioning art as a bridge for emotional connection and understanding within family dynamics.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2025

Strategic priorities for transformative progress in advancing biology with proteomics and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming scientific research, including proteomics. Advances in mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics data quality, diversity, and scale, combined with groundbreaking AI techniques, are unlocking new challenges and opportunities in biological discovery. Here, we highlight key areas where AI is driving innovation, from data analysis to new biological insights. These include developing an AI-friendly ecosystem for proteomics data generation, sharing, and analysis; improving peptide and protein identification and quantification; characterizing protein-protein interactions and protein complexes; advancing spatial and perturbation proteomics; integrating multi-omics data; and ultimately enabling AI-empowered virtual cells.

q-bio.OT↗

arXiv2024

Towards a Physics Engine to Simulate Robotic Laser Surgery: Finite Element Modeling of Thermal Laser-Tissue Interactions

This paper presents a computational model, based on the Finite Element Method (FEM), that simulates the thermal response of laser-irradiated tissue. This model addresses a gap in the current ecosystem of surgical robot simulators, which generally lack support for lasers and other energy-based end effectors. In the proposed model, the thermal dynamics of the tissue are calculated as the solution to a heat conduction problem with appropriate boundary conditions. The FEM formulation allows the model to capture complex phenomena, such as convection, which is crucial for creating realistic simulations. The accuracy of the model was verified via benchtop laser-tissue interaction experiments using agar tissue phantoms and ex-vivo chicken muscle. The results revealed an average root-mean-square error (RMSE) of less than 2 degrees Celsius across most experimental conditions.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Steering Large Text-to-Image Model for Abstract Art Synthesis: Preference-based Prompt Optimization and Visualization

With the advancement of neural generative capabilities, the art community has increasingly embraced GenAI (Generative Artificial Intelligence), particularly large text-to-image models, for producing aesthetically compelling results. However, the process often lacks determinism and requires a tedious trial-and-error process as users often struggle to devise effective prompts to achieve their desired outcomes. This paper introduces a prompting-free generative approach that applies a genetic algorithm and real-time iterative human feedback to optimize prompt generation, enabling the creation of user-preferred abstract art through a customized Artist Model. The proposed two-part approach begins with constructing an Artist Model capable of deterministically generating abstract art in specific styles, e.g., Kandinsky's Bauhaus style. The second phase integrates real-time user feedback to optimize the prompt generation and obtains an Optimized Prompting Model, which adapts to user preferences and generates prompts automatically. When combined with the Artist Model, this approach allows users to create abstract art tailored to their personal preferences and artistic style.

cs.HC↗