Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Xiaogang Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaogang Xu.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

GDRO: Group-level Reward Post-training Suitable for Diffusion Models

Recent advancements adopt online reinforcement learning (RL) from LLMs to text-to-image rectified flow diffusion models for reward alignment. The use of group-level rewards successfully aligns the model with the targeted reward. However, it faces challenges including low efficiency, dependency on stochastic samplers, and reward hacking. The problem is that rectified flow models are fundamentally different from LLMs: 1) For efficiency, online image sampling takes much more time and dominates the time of training. 2) For stochasticity, rectified flow is deterministic once the initial noise is fixed. Aiming at these problems and inspired by the effects of group-level rewards from LLMs, we design Group-level Direct Reward Optimization (GDRO). GDRO is a new post-training paradigm for group-level reward alignment that combines the characteristics of rectified flow models. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we point out that GDRO supports full offline training that saves the large time cost for image rollout sampling. Also, it is diffusion-sampler-independent, which eliminates the need for the ODE-to-SDE approximation to obtain stochasticity. We also empirically study the reward hacking trap that may mislead the evaluation, and involve this factor in the evaluation using a corrected score that not only considers the original evaluation reward but also the trend of reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GDRO effectively and efficiently improves the reward score of the diffusion model through group-wise offline optimization across the OCR and GenEval tasks, while demonstrating strong stability and robustness in mitigating reward hacking.

cs.LG↗

Class Incremental Medical Image Segmentation via Prototype-Guided Calibration and Dual-Aligned Distillation

Class incremental medical image segmentation (CIMIS) aims to preserve knowledge of previously learned classes while learning new ones without relying on old-class labels. However, existing methods 1) either adopt one-size-fits-all strategies that treat all spatial regions and feature channels equally, which may hinder the preservation of accurate old knowledge, 2) or focus solely on aligning local prototypes with global ones for old classes while overlooking their local representations in new data, leading to knowledge degradation. To mitigate the above issues, we propose Prototype-Guided Calibration Distillation (PGCD) and Dual-Aligned Prototype Distillation (DAPD) for CIMIS in this paper. Specifically, PGCD exploits prototype-to-feature similarity to calibrate class-specific distillation intensity in different spatial regions, effectively reinforcing reliable old knowledge and suppressing misleading information from old classes. Complementarily, DAPD aligns the local prototypes of old classes extracted from the current model with both global prototypes and local prototypes, further enhancing segmentation performance on old categories. Comprehensive evaluations on two widely used multi-organ segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its robustness and generalization capabilities.

cs.CV↗

Robust-R1: Degradation-Aware Reasoning for Robust Visual Understanding

Multimodal Large Language Models struggle to maintain reliable performance under extreme real-world visual degradations, which impede their practical robustness. Existing robust MLLMs predominantly rely on implicit training/adaptation that focuses solely on visual encoder generalization, suffering from limited interpretability and isolated optimization. To overcome these limitations, we propose Robust-R1, a novel framework that explicitly models visual degradations through structured reasoning chains. Our approach integrates: (i) supervised fine-tuning for degradation-aware reasoning foundations, (ii) reward-driven alignment for accurately perceiving degradation parameters, and (iii) dynamic reasoning depth scaling adapted to degradation intensity. To facilitate this approach, we introduce a specialized 11K dataset featuring realistic degradations synthesized across four critical real-world visual processing stages, each annotated with structured chains connecting degradation parameters, perceptual influence, pristine semantic reasoning chain, and conclusion. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness: Robust-R1 outperforms all general and robust baselines on the real-world degradation benchmark R-Bench, while maintaining superior anti-degradation performance under multi-intensity adversarial degradations on MMMB, MMStar, and RealWorldQA.

cs.CV↗

Wan-Move: Motion-controllable Video Generation via Latent Trajectory Guidance

We present Wan-Move, a simple and scalable framework that brings motion control to video generative models. Existing motion-controllable methods typically suffer from coarse control granularity and limited scalability, leaving their outputs insufficient for practical use. We narrow this gap by achieving precise and high-quality motion control. Our core idea is to directly make the original condition features motion-aware for guiding video synthesis. To this end, we first represent object motions with dense point trajectories, allowing fine-grained control over the scene. We then project these trajectories into latent space and propagate the first frame's features along each trajectory, producing an aligned spatiotemporal feature map that tells how each scene element should move. This feature map serves as the updated latent condition, which is naturally integrated into the off-the-shelf image-to-video model, e.g., Wan-I2V-14B, as motion guidance without any architecture change. It removes the need for auxiliary motion encoders and makes fine-tuning base models easily scalable. Through scaled training, Wan-Move generates 5-second, 480p videos whose motion controllability rivals Kling 1.5 Pro's commercial Motion Brush, as indicated by user studies. To support comprehensive evaluation, we further design MoveBench, a rigorously curated benchmark featuring diverse content categories and hybrid-verified annotations. It is distinguished by larger data volume, longer video durations, and high-quality motion annotations. Extensive experiments on MoveBench and the public dataset consistently show Wan-Move's superior motion quality. Code, models, and benchmark data are made publicly available.

cs.CV↗

CG-FedLLM: How to Compress Gradients in Federated Fune-tuning for Large Language Models

The success of current Large-Language Models (LLMs) hinges on extensive training data that is collected and stored centrally, called Centralized Learning (CL). However, such a collection manner poses a privacy threat, and one potential solution is Federated Learning (FL), which transfers gradients, not raw data, among clients. Unlike traditional networks, FL for LLMs incurs significant communication costs due to their tremendous parameters. This study introduces an innovative approach to compress gradients to improve communication efficiency during LLM FL, formulating the new FL pipeline named CG-FedLLM. This approach integrates an encoder on the client side to acquire the compressed gradient features and a decoder on the server side to reconstruct the gradients. We also developed a novel training strategy that comprises Temporal-ensemble Gradient-Aware Pre-training (TGAP) to identify characteristic gradients of the target model and Federated AutoEncoder-Involved Fine-tuning (FAF) to compress gradients adaptively. Extensive experiments confirm that our approach reduces communication costs and improves performance (e.g., average 3 points increment compared with traditional CL- and FL-based fine-tuning with LlaMA on a well-recognized benchmark, C-Eval). This improvement is because our encoder-decoder, trained via TGAP and FAF, can filter gradients while selectively preserving critical features. Furthermore, we present a series of experimental analyses focusing on the signal-to-noise ratio, compression rate, and robustness within this privacy-centric framework, providing insight into developing more efficient and secure LLMs.

cs.LG↗

Enhancing Diffusion-based Restoration Models via Difficulty-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning with IQA Reward

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently been incorporated into diffusion models, e.g., tasks such as text-to-image. However, directly applying existing RL methods to diffusion-based image restoration models is suboptimal, as the objective of restoration fundamentally differs from that of pure generation: it places greater emphasis on fidelity. In this paper, we investigate how to effectively integrate RL into diffusion-based restoration models. First, through extensive experiments with various reward functions, we find that an effective reward can be derived from an Image Quality Assessment (IQA) model, instead of intuitive ground-truth-based supervision, which has already been optimized during the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) stage prior to RL. Moreover, our strategy focuses on using RL for challenging samples that are significantly distant from the ground truth, and our RL approach is innovatively implemented using MLLM-based IQA models to align distributions with high-quality images initially. As the samples approach the ground truth's distribution, RL is adaptively combined with SFT for more fine-grained alignment. This dynamic process is facilitated through an automatic weighting strategy that adjusts based on the relative difficulty of the training samples. Our strategy is plug-and-play that can be seamlessly applied to diffusion-based restoration models, boosting its performance across various restoration tasks. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed RL framework.

cs.CV↗

Boosting Fidelity for Pre-Trained-Diffusion-Based Low-Light Image Enhancement via Condition Refinement

Diffusion-based methods, leveraging pre-trained large models like Stable Diffusion via ControlNet, have achieved remarkable performance in several low-level vision tasks. However, Pre-Trained Diffusion-Based (PTDB) methods often sacrifice content fidelity to attain higher perceptual realism. This issue is exacerbated in low-light scenarios, where severely degraded information caused by the darkness limits effective control. We identify two primary causes of fidelity loss: the absence of suitable conditional latent modeling and the lack of bidirectional interaction between the conditional latent and noisy latent in the diffusion process. To address this, we propose a novel optimization strategy for conditioning in pre-trained diffusion models, enhancing fidelity while preserving realism and aesthetics. Our method introduces a mechanism to recover spatial details lost during VAE encoding, i.e., a latent refinement pipeline incorporating generative priors. Additionally, the refined latent condition interacts dynamically with the noisy latent, leading to improved restoration performance. Our approach is plug-and-play, seamlessly integrating into existing diffusion networks to provide more effective control. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant fidelity improvements in PTDB methods.

cs.CV↗

SEE: See Everything Every Time -- Adaptive Brightness Adjustment for Broad Light Range Images via Events

Event cameras, with a high dynamic range exceeding $120dB$, significantly outperform traditional embedded cameras, robustly recording detailed changing information under various lighting conditions, including both low- and high-light situations. However, recent research on utilizing event data has primarily focused on low-light image enhancement, neglecting image enhancement and brightness adjustment across a broader range of lighting conditions, such as normal or high illumination. Based on this, we propose a novel research question: how to employ events to enhance and adaptively adjust the brightness of images captured under broad lighting conditions? To investigate this question, we first collected a new dataset, SEE-600K, consisting of 610,126 images and corresponding events across 202 scenarios, each featuring an average of four lighting conditions with over a 1000-fold variation in illumination. Subsequently, we propose a framework that effectively utilizes events to smoothly adjust image brightness through the use of prompts. Our framework captures color through sensor patterns, uses cross-attention to model events as a brightness dictionary, and adjusts the image's dynamic range to form a broad light-range representation (BLR), which is then decoded at the pixel level based on the brightness prompt. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only performs well on the low-light enhancement dataset but also shows robust performance on broader light-range image enhancement using the SEE-600K dataset. Additionally, our approach enables pixel-level brightness adjustment, providing flexibility for post-processing and inspiring more imaging applications. The dataset and source code are publicly available at: https://github.com/yunfanLu/SEE.

cs.CV↗

DiffCamera: Arbitrary Refocusing on Images

The depth-of-field (DoF) effect, which introduces aesthetically pleasing blur, enhances photographic quality but is fixed and difficult to modify once the image has been created. This becomes problematic when the applied blur is undesirable~(e.g., the subject is out of focus). To address this, we propose DiffCamera, a model that enables flexible refocusing of a created image conditioned on an arbitrary new focus point and a blur level. Specifically, we design a diffusion transformer framework for refocusing learning. However, the training requires pairs of data with different focus planes and bokeh levels in the same scene, which are hard to acquire. To overcome this limitation, we develop a simulation-based pipeline to generate large-scale image pairs with varying focus planes and bokeh levels. With the simulated data, we find that training with only a vanilla diffusion objective often leads to incorrect DoF behaviors due to the complexity of the task. This requires a stronger constraint during training. Inspired by the photographic principle that photos of different focus planes can be linearly blended into a multi-focus image, we propose a stacking constraint during training to enforce precise DoF manipulation. This constraint enhances model training by imposing physically grounded refocusing behavior that the focusing results should be faithfully aligned with the scene structure and the camera conditions so that they can be combined into the correct multi-focus image. We also construct a benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of our refocusing model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffCamera supports stable refocusing across a wide range of scenes, providing unprecedented control over DoF adjustments for photography and generative AI applications.

cs.CV↗

Exploiting Unlabeled Structures through Task Consistency Training for Versatile Medical Image Segmentation

Versatile medical image segmentation (VMIS) targets the segmentation of multiple classes, while obtaining full annotations for all classes is often impractical due to the time and labor required. Leveraging partially labeled datasets (PLDs) presents a promising alternative; however, current VMIS approaches face significant class imbalance due to the unequal category distribution in PLDs. Existing methods attempt to address this by generating pseudo-full labels. Nevertheless, these typically require additional models and often result in potential performance degradation from label noise. In this work, we introduce a Task Consistency Training (TCT) framework to address class imbalance without requiring extra models. TCT includes a backbone network with a main segmentation head (MSH) for multi-channel predictions and multiple auxiliary task heads (ATHs) for task-specific predictions. By enforcing a consistency constraint between the MSH and ATH predictions, TCT effectively utilizes unlabeled anatomical structures. To avoid error propagation from low-consistency, potentially noisy data, we propose a filtering strategy to exclude such data. Additionally, we introduce a unified auxiliary uncertainty-weighted loss (UAUWL) to mitigate segmentation quality declines caused by the dominance of specific tasks. Extensive experiments on eight abdominal datasets from diverse clinical sites demonstrate our approach's effectiveness.

cs.CV↗

Geometric-Aware Low-Light Image and Video Enhancement via Depth Guidance

Low-Light Enhancement (LLE) is aimed at improving the quality of photos/videos captured under low-light conditions. It is worth noting that most existing LLE methods do not take advantage of geometric modeling. We believe that incorporating geometric information can enhance LLE performance, as it provides insights into the physical structure of the scene that influences illumination conditions. To address this, we propose a Geometry-Guided Low-Light Enhancement Refine Framework (GG-LLERF) designed to assist low-light enhancement models in learning improved features for LLE by integrating geometric priors into the feature representation space. In this paper, we employ depth priors as the geometric representation. Our approach focuses on the integration of depth priors into various LLE frameworks using a unified methodology. This methodology comprises two key novel modules. First, a depth-aware feature extraction module is designed to inject depth priors into the image representation. Then, Hierarchical Depth-Guided Feature Fusion Module (HDGFFM) is formulated with a cross-domain attention mechanism, which combines depth-aware features with the original image features within the LLE model. We conducted extensive experiments on public low-light image and video enhancement benchmarks. The results illustrate that our designed framework significantly enhances existing LLE methods.

cs.CV↗

Diffusion Noise Feature: Accurate and Fast Generated Image Detection

Generative models now produce images with such stunning realism that they can easily deceive the human eye. While this progress unlocks vast creative potential, it also presents significant risks, such as the spread of misinformation. Consequently, detecting generated images has become a critical research challenge. However, current detection methods are often plagued by low accuracy and poor generalization. In this paper, to address these limitations and enhance the detection of generated images, we propose a novel representation, Diffusion Noise Feature (DNF). Derived from the inverse process of diffusion models, DNF effectively amplifies the subtle, high-frequency artifacts that act as fingerprints of artificial generation. Our key insight is that real and generated images exhibit distinct DNF signatures, providing a robust basis for differentiation. By training a simple classifier such as ResNet-50 on DNF, our approach achieves remarkable accuracy, robustness, and generalization in detecting generated images, including those from unseen generators or with novel content. Extensive experiments across four training datasets and five test sets confirm that DNF establishes a new state-of-the-art in generated image detection. The code is available at https://github.com/YichiCS/Diffusion-Noise-Feature.

cs.CV↗

Generative Distribution Distillation

In this paper, we formulate the knowledge distillation (KD) as a conditional generative problem and propose the \textit{Generative Distribution Distillation (GenDD)} framework. A naive \textit{GenDD} baseline encounters two major challenges: the curse of high-dimensional optimization and the lack of semantic supervision from labels. To address these issues, we introduce a \textit{Split Tokenization} strategy, achieving stable and effective unsupervised KD. Additionally, we develop the \textit{Distribution Contraction} technique to integrate label supervision into the reconstruction objective. Our theoretical proof demonstrates that \textit{GenDD} with \textit{Distribution Contraction} serves as a gradient-level surrogate for multi-task learning, realizing efficient supervised training without explicit classification loss on multi-step sampling image representations. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments on balanced, imbalanced, and unlabeled data. Experimental results show that \textit{GenDD} performs competitively in the unsupervised setting, significantly surpassing KL baseline by \textbf{16.29\%} on ImageNet validation set. With label supervision, our ResNet-50 achieves \textbf{82.28\%} top-1 accuracy on ImageNet in 600 epochs training, establishing a new state-of-the-art.

cs.LG↗

LoViC: Efficient Long Video Generation with Context Compression

Despite recent advances in diffusion transformers (DiTs) for text-to-video generation, scaling to long-duration content remains challenging due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. While prior efforts -- such as sparse attention and temporally autoregressive models -- offer partial relief, they often compromise temporal coherence or scalability. We introduce LoViC, a DiT-based framework trained on million-scale open-domain videos, designed to produce long, coherent videos through a segment-wise generation process. At the core of our approach is FlexFormer, an expressive autoencoder that jointly compresses video and text into unified latent representations. It supports variable-length inputs with linearly adjustable compression rates, enabled by a single query token design based on the Q-Former architecture. Additionally, by encoding temporal context through position-aware mechanisms, our model seamlessly supports prediction, retradiction, interpolation, and multi-shot generation within a unified paradigm. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks validate the effectiveness and versatility of our approach.

cs.CV↗

Low-Light Video Enhancement via Spatial-Temporal Consistent Decomposition

Low-Light Video Enhancement (LLVE) seeks to restore dynamic or static scenes plagued by severe invisibility and noise. In this paper, we present an innovative video decomposition strategy that incorporates view-independent and view-dependent components to enhance the performance of LLVE. We leverage dynamic cross-frame correspondences for the view-independent term (which primarily captures intrinsic appearance) and impose a scene-level continuity constraint on the view-dependent term (which mainly describes the shading condition) to achieve consistent and satisfactory decomposition results. To further ensure consistent decomposition, we introduce a dual-structure enhancement network featuring a cross-frame interaction mechanism. By supervising different frames simultaneously, this network encourages them to exhibit matching decomposition features. This mechanism can seamlessly integrate with encoder-decoder single-frame networks, incurring minimal additional parameter costs. Extensive experiments are conducted on widely recognized LLVE benchmarks, covering diverse scenarios. Our framework consistently outperforms existing methods, establishing a new SOTA performance.

cs.CV↗

MiCo: Multi-image Contrast for Reinforcement Visual Reasoning

This work explores enabling Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to link visual cues across multiple images. A straightforward solution is to adapt rule-based reinforcement learning for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, such methods typically rely on manually curated question-answer pairs, which can be particularly challenging when dealing with fine grained visual details and complex logic across images. Inspired by self-supervised visual representation learning, we observe that images contain inherent constraints that can serve as supervision. Based on this insight, we construct image triplets comprising two augmented views of the same image and a third, similar but distinct image. During training, the model is prompted to generate a reasoning process to compare these images (i.e., determine same or different). Then we optimize the model with rule-based reinforcement learning. Due to the high visual similarity and the presence of augmentations, the model must attend to subtle visual changes and perform logical reasoning to succeed. Experiments show that, although trained solely on visual comparison tasks, the learned reasoning ability generalizes effectively to a wide range of questions. Without relying on any human-annotated question-answer pairs, our method achieves significant improvements on multi-image reasoning benchmarks and shows strong performance on general vision tasks.

cs.CV↗

Boosting Diffusion-Based Text Image Super-Resolution Model Towards Generalized Real-World Scenarios

Restoring low-resolution text images presents a significant challenge, as it requires maintaining both the fidelity and stylistic realism of the text in restored images. Existing text image restoration methods often fall short in hard situations, as the traditional super-resolution models cannot guarantee clarity, while diffusion-based methods fail to maintain fidelity. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework aimed at improving the generalization ability of diffusion models for text image super-resolution (SR), especially promoting fidelity. First, we propose a progressive data sampling strategy that incorporates diverse image types at different stages of training, stabilizing the convergence and improving the generalization. For the network architecture, we leverage a pre-trained SR prior to provide robust spatial reasoning capabilities, enhancing the model's ability to preserve textual information. Additionally, we employ a cross-attention mechanism to better integrate textual priors. To further reduce errors in textual priors, we utilize confidence scores to dynamically adjust the importance of textual features during training. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach not only produces text images with more realistic visual appearances but also improves the accuracy of text structure.

cs.CV↗

Adversarial Attacks of Vision Tasks in the Past 10 Years: A Survey

With the advent of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), new attack vectors, such as cognitive bias, prompt injection, and jailbreaking, have emerged. Understanding these attacks promotes system robustness improvement and neural networks demystification. However, existing surveys often target attack taxonomy and lack in-depth analysis like 1) unified insights into adversariality, transferability, and generalization; 2) detailed evaluations framework; 3) motivation-driven attack categorizations; and 4) an integrated perspective on both traditional and LVLM attacks. This article addresses these gaps by offering a thorough summary of traditional and LVLM adversarial attacks, emphasizing their connections and distinctions, and providing actionable insights for future research.

cs.CV↗