arXiv subjects

Qi Mao

Publications and source records attributed to Qi Mao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

CutVerse: A Compositional GUI Agents Benchmark for Media Post-Production Editing

While GUI agents have made significant progress in web navigation and basic operating system tasks, their capabilities in professional creative workflows remain largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cutverse, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate autonomous GUI agents in realistic media post-production environments. We curate expert demonstrations across 7 professional applications (e.g., Premiere Pro, Photoshop), covering 186 complex, long-horizon tasks grounded in authentic editing workflows, involving dense multimodal interfaces and tightly coupled interaction sequences. To support scalable evaluation, we develop a lightweight parser that transforms raw screen recordings and low-level interaction logs into structured, compositional GUI action trajectories with precise grounding. Extensive evaluations reveal that existing agents achieve only 36.0\% task success on realistic media editing tasks, underscoring the challenges posed by complex, long-horizon media post-production workflows in our benchmark.While current models demonstrate promising spatial grounding, multimodal alignment, and coordinated action execution, they remain limited in long-horizon reliability and domain-specific planning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Dual-Latent Collaborative Decoding for Fidelity-Perception Balanced Image Compression

Learned image compression (LIC) increasingly requires reconstructions that balance distortion fidelity and perceptual realism across a wide range of bitrates. However, most existing methods still rely on a single compressed latent representation to simultaneously carry structural details, semantic cues, and perceptual priors, requiring the same latent representation to serve multiple, potentially conflicting roles. This tension becomes evident across different latent paradigms: scalar-quantized (SQ) continuous latents provide rate-scalable fidelity but tend to lose perceptual details at low rates, while vector-quantized (VQ) discrete tokens preserve compact semantic cues but suffer from limited structural fidelity and bitrate scalability. To address this issue, we propose Mixture of Decoder Experts (MoDE), a dual-latent collaborative decoding framework that decomposes reconstruction responsibilities across complementary latent paradigms. Specifically, MoDE treats the SQ branch as a fidelity-oriented expert and the VQ branch as a perception-oriented expert, and coordinates them through two decoder-side modules: Expert-Specific Enhancement (ESE), which preserves branch-specific expert references, and Cross-Expert Modulation (CEM), which enables selective complementary transfer during reconstruction. The resulting framework supports selective cross-latent collaboration under a shared dual-stream bitstream and enables both fidelity-anchored and perception-anchored decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoDE achieves a more favorable fidelity-perception balance than representative distortion-oriented, perception-oriented, generative, and dual-latent baselines across a wide bitrate range, highlighting decoder-side expert collaboration as an effective design for wide-range fidelity-perception balanced LIC.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

EditTransfer++: Toward Faithful and Efficient Visual-Prompt-Guided Image Editing

Visual-prompt-guided edit transfer aims to learn image transformations directly from example pairs, offering more precise and controllable editing than purely text-driven approaches. However, existing diffusion transformer-based methods often fail to faithfully reproduce the demonstrated edits due to structural mismatches between the task and the backbone, including a pretrained bias toward textual conditioning and inherent stochastic instability during sampling. To bridge this gap, we present EditTransfer++, a framework that combines progressively structured training with an efficient conditioning scheme to improve both visual prompt faithfulness and inference efficiency. We first mitigate textual dominance with a text-decoupled training strategy that removes text conditioning during fine-tuning, compelling the model to infer transformations solely from visual evidence while still supporting optional text guidance at inference. On top of this visually grounded model, a best-worst contrastive refinement mechanism reshapes the denoising trajectories to suppress unfaithful generations and improve consistency across random seeds. To alleviate the computational bottleneck of high-resolution in-context editing, we further introduce a condition compression and reuse strategy that reduces token redundancy and enables efficient generation of images with a 1024-pixel long edge. Extensive experiments on existing benchmarks and the proposed EditTransfer-Bench show that EditTransfer++ achieves state-of-the-art visual prompt faithfulness with substantially faster inference than prior methods, suggesting a promising direction for scalable prompt-guided image editing and broader visual in-context learning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

FlowAnchor: Stabilizing the Editing Signal for Inversion-Free Video Editing

We propose FlowAnchor, a training-free framework for stable and efficient inversion-free, flow-based video editing. Inversion-free editing methods have recently shown impressive efficiency and structure preservation in images by directly steering the sampling trajectory with an editing signal. However, extending this paradigm to videos remains challenging, often failing in multi-object scenes or with increased frame counts. We identify the root cause as the instability of the editing signal in high-dimensional video latent spaces, which arises from imprecise spatial localization and length-induced magnitude attenuation. To overcome this challenge, FlowAnchor explicitly anchors both where to edit and how strongly to edit. It introduces Spatial-aware Attention Refinement, which enforces consistent alignment between textual guidance and spatial regions, and Adaptive Magnitude Modulation, which adaptively preserves sufficient editing strength. Together, these mechanisms stabilize the editing signal and guide the flow-based evolution toward the desired target distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowAnchor achieves more faithful, temporally coherent, and computationally efficient video editing across challenging multi-object and fast-motion scenarios. The project page is available at https://cuc-mipg.github.io/FlowAnchor.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Camera Artist: A Multi-Agent Framework for Cinematic Language Storytelling Video Generation

We propose Camera Artist, a multi-agent framework that models a real-world filmmaking workflow to generate narrative videos with explicit cinematic language. While recent multi-agent systems have made substantial progress in automating filmmaking workflows from scripts to videos, they often lack explicit mechanisms to structure narrative progression across adjacent shots and deliberate use of cinematic language, resulting in fragmented storytelling and limited filmic quality. To address this, Camera Artist builds upon established agentic pipelines and introduces a dedicated Cinematography Shot Agent, which integrates recursive storyboard generation to strengthen shot-to-shot narrative continuity and cinematic language injection to produce more expressive, film-oriented shot designs. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines in narrative consistency, dynamic expressiveness, and perceived film quality.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

MLV-Edit: Towards Consistent and Highly Efficient Editing for Minute-Level Videos

We propose MLV-Edit, a training-free, flow-based framework that address the unique challenges of minute-level video editing. While existing techniques excel in short-form video manipulation, scaling them to long-duration videos remains challenging due to prohibitive computational overhead and the difficulty of maintaining global temporal consistency across thousands of frames. To address this, MLV-Edit employs a divide-and-conquer strategy for segment-wise editing, facilitated by two core modules: Velocity Blend rectifies motion inconsistencies at segment boundaries by aligning the flow fields of adjacent chunks, eliminating flickering and boundary artifacts commonly observed in fragmented video processing; and Attention Sink anchors local segment features to global reference frames, effectively suppressing cumulative structural drift. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that MLV-Edit consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of temporal stability and semantic fidelity.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

IC-Effect: Precise and Efficient Video Effects Editing via In-Context Learning

We propose \textbf{IC-Effect}, an instruction-guided, DiT-based framework for few-shot video VFX editing that synthesizes complex effects (\eg flames, particles and cartoon characters) while strictly preserving spatial and temporal consistency. Video VFX editing is highly challenging because injected effects must blend seamlessly with the background, the background must remain entirely unchanged, and effect patterns must be learned efficiently from limited paired data. However, existing video editing models fail to satisfy these requirements. IC-Effect leverages the source video as clean contextual conditions, exploiting the contextual learning capability of DiT models to achieve precise background preservation and natural effect injection. A two-stage training strategy, consisting of general editing adaptation followed by effect-specific learning via Effect-LoRA, ensures strong instruction following and robust effect modeling. To further improve efficiency, we introduce spatiotemporal sparse tokenization, enabling high fidelity with substantially reduced computation. We also release a paired VFX editing dataset spanning $15$ high-quality visual styles. Extensive experiments show that IC-Effect delivers high-quality, controllable, and temporally consistent VFX editing, opening new possibilities for video creation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Generative Neural Video Compression via Video Diffusion Prior

We present GNVC-VD, the first DiT-based generative neural video compression framework built upon an advanced video generation foundation model, where spatio-temporal latent compression and sequence-level generative refinement are unified within a single codec. Existing perceptual codecs primarily rely on pre-trained image generative priors to restore high-frequency details, but their frame-wise nature lacks temporal modeling and inevitably leads to perceptual flickering. To address this, GNVC-VD introduces a unified flow-matching latent refinement module that leverages a video diffusion transformer to jointly enhance intra- and inter-frame latents through sequence-level denoising, ensuring consistent spatio-temporal details. Instead of denoising from pure Gaussian noise as in video generation, GNVC-VD initializes refinement from decoded spatio-temporal latents and learns a correction term that adapts the diffusion prior to compression-induced degradation. A conditioning adaptor further injects compression-aware cues into intermediate DiT layers, enabling effective artifact removal while maintaining temporal coherence under extreme bitrate constraints. Extensive experiments show that GNVC-VD surpasses both traditional and learned codecs in perceptual quality and significantly reduces the flickering artifacts that persist in prior generative approaches, even below 0.01 bpp, highlighting the promise of integrating video-native generative priors into neural codecs for next-generation perceptual video compression.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

PFEA: An LLM-based High-Level Natural Language Planning and Feedback Embodied Agent for Human-Centered AI

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked a significant breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence (AI), ushering in a new era of Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). HAI aims to better serve human welfare and needs, thereby placing higher demands on the intelligence level of robots, particularly in aspects such as natural language interaction, complex task planning, and execution. Intelligent agents powered by LLMs have opened up new pathways for realizing HAI. However, existing LLM-based embodied agents often lack the ability to plan and execute complex natural language control tasks online. This paper explores the implementation of intelligent robotic manipulating agents based on Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in the physical world. We propose a novel embodied agent framework for robots, which comprises a human-robot voice interaction module, a vision-language agent module and an action execution module. The vision-language agent itself includes a vision-based task planner, a natural language instruction converter, and a task performance feedback evaluator. Experimental results demonstrate that our agent achieves a 28\% higher average task success rate in both simulated and real environments compared to approaches relying solely on LLM+CLIP, significantly improving the execution success rate of high-level natural language instruction tasks.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

UniVid: Unifying Vision Tasks with Pre-trained Video Generation Models

Large language models, trained on extensive corpora, successfully unify diverse linguistic tasks within a single generative framework. Inspired by this, recent works like Large Vision Model (LVM) extend this paradigm to vision by organizing tasks into sequential visual sentences, where visual prompts serve as the context to guide outputs. However, such modeling requires task-specific pre-training across modalities and sources, which is costly and limits scalability to unseen tasks. Given that pre-trained video generation models inherently capture temporal sequence dependencies, we explore a more unified and scalable alternative: can a pre-trained video generation model adapt to diverse image and video tasks? To answer this, we propose UniVid, a framework that fine-tunes a video diffusion transformer to handle various vision tasks without task-specific modifications. Tasks are represented as visual sentences, where the context sequence defines both the task and the expected output modality. We evaluate the generalization of UniVid from two perspectives: (1) cross-modal inference with contexts composed of both images and videos, extending beyond LVM's uni-modal setting; (2) cross-source tasks from natural to annotated data, without multi-source pre-training. Despite being trained solely on natural video data, UniVid generalizes well in both settings. Notably, understanding and generation tasks can easily switch by simply reversing the visual sentence order in this paradigm. These findings highlight the potential of pre-trained video generation models to serve as a scalable and unified foundation for vision modeling. Our code will be released at https://github.com/CUC-MIPG/UniVid.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

UniMIC: Token-Based Multimodal Interactive Coding for Human-AI Collaboration

The rapid progress of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and cloud-based AI agents is transforming human-AI collaboration into bidirectional, multimodal interaction. However, existing codecs remain optimized for unimodal, one-way communication, resulting in repeated degradation under conventional compress-transmit-reconstruct pipelines. To address this limitation, we propose UniMIC, a Unified token-based Multimodal Interactive Coding framework that bridges edge devices and cloud AI agents. Instead of transmitting raw pixels or plain text, UniMIC employs compact tokenized representations as the communication medium, enabling efficient low-bitrate transmission while maintaining compatibility with LMMs. To further enhance compression, lightweight Transformer-based entropy models with scenario-specific designs-generic, masked, and text-conditioned-effectively minimize inter-token redundancy. Extensive experiments on text-to-image generation, text-guided inpainting, outpainting, and visual question answering show that UniMIC achieves substantial bitrate savings and remains robust even at ultra-low bitrates (<0.05bpp), without compromising downstream task performance. These results establish UniMIC as a practical and forward-looking paradigm for next-generation multimodal interactive communication.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

CRITICTOOL: Evaluating Self-Critique Capabilities of Large Language Models in Tool-Calling Error Scenarios

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to utilize external tools has enabled them to tackle an increasingly diverse range of tasks. However, as the tasks become more complex and long-horizon, the intricate tool utilization process may trigger various unexpected errors. Therefore, how to effectively handle such errors, including identifying, diagnosing, and recovering from them, has emerged as a key research direction for advancing tool learning. In this work, we first extensively analyze the types of errors encountered during the function-calling process on several competitive tool evaluation benchmarks. Based on it, we introduce CRITICTOOL, a comprehensive critique evaluation benchmark specialized for tool learning. Building upon a novel evolutionary strategy for dataset construction, CRITICTOOL holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments on CRITICTOOL, and validate the generalization and effectiveness of our constructed benchmark strategy. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the tool reflection ability on various LLMs, offering a new perspective on the field of tool learning in LLMs. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/Shellorley0513/CriticTool}{https://github.com/Shellorley0513/CriticTool}.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Tuning-Free Image Editing with Fidelity and Editability via Unified Latent Diffusion Model

Balancing fidelity and editability is essential in text-based image editing (TIE), where failures commonly lead to over- or under-editing issues. Existing methods typically rely on attention injections for structure preservation and leverage the inherent text alignment capabilities of pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models for editability, but they lack explicit and unified mechanisms to properly balance these two objectives. In this work, we introduce UnifyEdit, a tuning-free method that performs diffusion latent optimization to enable a balanced integration of fidelity and editability within a unified framework. Unlike direct attention injections, we develop two attention-based constraints: a self-attention (SA) preservation constraint for structural fidelity, and a cross-attention (CA) alignment constraint to enhance text alignment for improved editability. However, simultaneously applying both constraints can lead to gradient conflicts, where the dominance of one constraint results in over- or under-editing. To address this challenge, we introduce an adaptive time-step scheduler that dynamically adjusts the influence of these constraints, guiding the diffusion latent toward an optimal balance. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating its superiority in achieving a robust balance between structure preservation and text alignment across various editing tasks, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be available at https://github.com/CUC-MIPG/UnifyEdit.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Edit Transfer: Learning Image Editing via Vision In-Context Relations

We introduce a new setting, Edit Transfer, where a model learns a transformation from just a single source-target example and applies it to a new query image. While text-based methods excel at semantic manipulations through textual prompts, they often struggle with precise geometric details (e.g., poses and viewpoint changes). Reference-based editing, on the other hand, typically focuses on style or appearance and fails at non-rigid transformations. By explicitly learning the editing transformation from a source-target pair, Edit Transfer mitigates the limitations of both text-only and appearance-centric references. Drawing inspiration from in-context learning in large language models, we propose a visual relation in-context learning paradigm, building upon a DiT-based text-to-image model. We arrange the edited example and the query image into a unified four-panel composite, then apply lightweight LoRA fine-tuning to capture complex spatial transformations from minimal examples. Despite using only 42 training samples, Edit Transfer substantially outperforms state-of-the-art TIE and RIE methods on diverse non-rigid scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of few-shot visual relation learning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

EmoAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for Diverse Affective Image Manipulation

Affective Image Manipulation (AIM) aims to alter visual elements within an image to evoke specific emotional responses from viewers. However, existing AIM approaches rely on rigid \emph{one-to-one} mappings between emotions and visual cues, making them ill-suited for the inherently subjective and diverse ways in which humans perceive and express emotion.To address this, we introduce a novel task setting termed \emph{Diverse AIM (D-AIM)}, aiming to generate multiple visually distinct yet emotionally consistent image edits from a single source image and target emotion. We propose \emph{EmoAgent}, the first multi-agent framework tailored specifically for D-AIM. EmoAgent explicitly decomposes the manipulation process into three specialized phases executed by collaborative agents: a Planning Agent that generates diverse emotional editing strategies, an Editing Agent that precisely executes these strategies, and a Critic Agent that iteratively refines the results to ensure emotional accuracy. This collaborative design empowers EmoAgent to model \emph{one-to-many} emotion-to-visual mappings, enabling semantically diverse and emotionally faithful edits.Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that EmoAgent substantially outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both emotional fidelity and semantic diversity, effectively generating multiple distinct visual edits that convey the same target emotion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Stable Diffusion is a Natural Cross-Modal Decoder for Layered AI-generated Image Compression

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) have garnered significant interest, accompanied by an increasing need to transmit and compress the vast number of AI-generated images (AIGIs). However, there is a noticeable deficiency in research focused on compression methods for AIGIs. To address this critical gap, we introduce a scalable cross-modal compression framework that incorporates multiple human-comprehensible modalities, designed to efficiently capture and relay essential visual information for AIGIs. In particular, our framework encodes images into a layered bitstream consisting of a semantic layer that delivers high-level semantic information through text prompts; a structural layer that captures spatial details using edge or skeleton maps; and a texture layer that preserves local textures via a colormap. Utilizing Stable Diffusion as the backend, the framework effectively leverages these multimodal priors for image generation, effectively functioning as a decoder when these priors are encoded. Qualitative and quantitative results show that our method proficiently restores both semantic and visual details, competing against baseline approaches at extremely low bitrates ( <0.02 bpp). Additionally, our framework facilitates downstream editing applications without requiring full decoding, thereby paving a new direction for future research in AIGI compression.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

StarVid: Enhancing Semantic Alignment in Video Diffusion Models via Spatial and SynTactic Guided Attention Refocusing

Recent advances in text-to-video (T2V) generation with diffusion models have garnered significant attention. However, they typically perform well in scenes with a single object and motion, struggling in compositional scenarios with multiple objects and distinct motions to accurately reflect the semantic content of text prompts. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{StarVid}, a plug-and-play, training-free method that improves semantic alignment between multiple subjects, their motions, and text prompts in T2V models. StarVid first leverages the spatial reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for two-stage motion trajectory planning based on text prompts. Such trajectories serve as spatial priors, guiding a spatial-aware loss to refocus cross-attention (CA) maps into distinctive regions. Furthermore, we propose a syntax-guided contrastive constraint to strengthen the correlation between the CA maps of verbs and their corresponding nouns, enhancing motion-subject binding. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms baseline methods, delivering videos of higher quality with improved semantic consistency.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Mirror contrastive loss based sliding window transformer for subject-independent motor imagery based EEG signal recognition

While deep learning models have been extensively utilized in motor imagery based EEG signal recognition, they often operate as black boxes. Motivated by neurological findings indicating that the mental imagery of left or right-hand movement induces event-related desynchronization (ERD) in the contralateral sensorimotor area of the brain, we propose a Mirror Contrastive Loss based Sliding Window Transformer (MCL-SWT) to enhance subject-independent motor imagery-based EEG signal recognition. Specifically, our proposed mirror contrastive loss enhances sensitivity to the spatial location of ERD by contrasting the original EEG signals with their mirror counterparts-mirror EEG signals generated by interchanging the channels of the left and right hemispheres of the EEG signals. Moreover, we introduce a temporal sliding window transformer that computes self-attention scores from high temporal resolution features, thereby improving model performance with manageable computational complexity. We evaluate the performance of MCL-SWT on subject-independent motor imagery EEG signal recognition tasks, and our experimental results demonstrate that MCL-SWT achieved accuracies of 66.48% and 75.62%, surpassing the state-of-the-art (SOTA) model by 2.82% and 2.17%, respectively. Furthermore, ablation experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed mirror contrastive loss. A code demo of MCL-SWT is available at https://github.com/roniusLuo/MCL_SWT.

eess.SP↗