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arXiv2026

GLOW: Global Illumination-Aware Inverse Rendering of Indoor Scenes Captured with Dynamic Co-Located Light & Camera

Inverse rendering of indoor scenes remains challenging due to the ambiguity between reflectance and lighting, exacerbated by inter-reflections among multiple objects. While natural illumination-based methods struggle to resolve this ambiguity, co-located light-camera setups offer better disentanglement as lighting can be easily calibrated via Structure-from-Motion. However, such setups introduce additional complexities like strong inter-reflections, dynamic shadows, near-field lighting, and moving specular highlights, which existing approaches fail to handle. We present GLOW, a Global Illumination-aware Inverse Rendering framework designed to address these challenges. GLOW integrates a neural implicit surface representation with a neural radiance cache to approximate global illumination, jointly optimizing geometry and reflectance through carefully designed regularization and initialization. We then introduce a dynamic radiance cache that adapts to sharp lighting discontinuities from near-field motion, and a surface-angle-weighted radiometric loss to suppress specular artifacts common in flashlight captures. Experiments show that GLOW substantially outperforms prior methods in material reflectance estimation under both natural and co-located illumination.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Analyzing Image Beyond Visual Aspect: Image Emotion Classification via Multiple-Affective Captioning

Image emotion classification (IEC) is a longstanding research field that has received increasing attention with the rapid progress of deep learning. Although recent advances have leveraged the knowledge encoded in pre-trained visual models, their effectiveness is constrained by the "affective gap" , limits the applicability of pre-training knowledge for IEC tasks. It has been demonstrated in psychology that language exhibits high variability, encompasses diverse and abundant information, and can effectively eliminate the "affective gap". Inspired by this, we propose a novel Affective Captioning for Image Emotion Classification (ACIEC) to classify image emotion based on pure texts, which effectively capture the affective information in the image. In our method, a hierarchical multi-level contrastive loss is designed for detecting emotional concepts from images, while an emotional attribute chain-of-thought reasoning is proposed to generate affective sentences. Then, a pre-trained language model is leveraged to synthesize emotional concepts and affective sentences to conduct IEC. Additionally, a contrastive loss based on semantic similarity sampling is designed to solve the problem of large intra-class differences and small inter-class differences in affective datasets. Moreover, we also take the images with embedded texts into consideration, which were ignored by previous studies. Extensive experiments illustrate that our method can effectively bridge the affective gap and achieve superior results on multiple benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

NoiseRater: Meta-Learned Noise Valuation for Diffusion Model Training

Training a diffusion model involves two sources of randomness for each data sample: the timestep and the Gaussian noise realization. The timestep has been studied extensively through scheduling and weighting, whereas the impact of the noise realization at a given timestep is still underexplored. In this work, we examine whether different noise instances are equally informative. We introduce NoiseRater, a network that scores an individual noise instance conditioned on the data sample and timestep. The rater is learned through bilevel optimization, where its scores reweight the diffusion loss in the inner loop, and it is updated to reduce validation loss after the inner-loop updates. Using the trained rater to select training noise, we observe three properties of training noise. First, noise realizations at the same timestep are not equally useful: the rater's top-scored noise improves performance over i.i.d.\ sampling, while its bottom-scored noise degrades it. Second, this utility is contextual, depending jointly on the image, the class, and the timestep. Third, noise selection is complementary to timestep-level design, retaining most of its gain when combined with existing scheduling and weighting schemes. These findings establish instance-level noise valuation as a new axis for understanding and improving diffusion training. Code is available at https://github.com/JoeZhao527/Noise-Rater.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

SkelEM: Training-Signal Decoupling of Skeleton and Diffusion for Self-supervised Axial Super-Resolution in Volume Microscopy

Volume microscopy, including electron and light microscopy, suffers from severe anisotropic resolution due to physical axial sectioning. Existing self-supervised axial super-resolution (ASR) methods face a trilemma bounded by overly smoothed regression textures, structural hallucinations of pure diffusion models, and prohibitive inference latency. In this paper, we propose Skeleton-refinE Microscopy (SkelEM), a self-supervised framework that decouples ASR at the training-signal level: a frozen topological network and a diffusion refiner are optimized by disjoint objectives, separating low-frequency topology formulation from high-frequency detail enhancement. Building on this deterministic skeleton, we exploit a unified cycle-consistent mechanism on input sparse slices to simultaneously extract a real-domain residual prior and bidirectionally align the diffusion refiner, washing away cross-plane artifacts without synthetic bias. By truncating the reverse diffusion process with this physical prior, SkelEM achieves high-fidelity detail restoration in merely $\le 5$ steps. To rigorously assess cross-instrument generalization, we further introduce BRAVE-ASR, a new benchmark of co-aligned anisotropic and isotropic volumes acquired on a Plasma-FIB instrument. Across public benchmarks, SkelEM achieves the most favorable balance across the fidelity-perception trade-off among self-supervised methods, with state-of-the-art downstream membrane segmentation performance and robust zero-shot generalization across distinct modalities.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Shell-Supervised Gaussian Splatting for Urban Real-to-Sim Reconstruction

Real-to-sim reconstruction for embodied AI requires geometry that is useful for collision reasoning, navigation, and agent-environment interaction, not only photorealistic novel-view synthesis. However, close-range urban facades are difficult for video-to-3D reconstruction: glass, reflections, repeated windows, and weak texture can produce visually plausible renderings with unstable surface geometry. We introduce shell-supervised Gaussian Splatting, a reconstruction-stage framework that uses an external facade structural shell as lightweight geometric supervision for video-driven Gaussian reconstruction. The method aligns an exterior shell to the video reconstruction frame, renders per-view depth, camera-space normal, and valid-mask maps, and applies these cues through mask-gated losses during Gaussian optimization. This design preserves RGB-driven appearance while regularizing only visible shell-supported facade regions. Experiments on anonymized close-range urban facade scenes show improved facade orientation and visible-surface point-cloud consistency over photo-only, monocular-cue, and surface-oriented Gaussian baselines, while maintaining comparable held-out rendering quality.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

EmoteGPT: 3D Human Facial Expressions from Natural Language Descriptions

Precise control of 3D facial expressions from text is crucial for virtual avatars, animation, and human-computer interaction, yet existing text-to-3D methods jointly generate identity, expression, and texture, making fine-grained expression control difficult. We instead formulate text-driven expression synthesis as a regression problem in the disentangled parameter space of a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM). This setting, however, requires paired data linking detailed language to precise expression parameters, which are missing from existing resources. To fill this gap, we introduce Txt2Emote, a benchmark of diverse 3D facial expressions with fine-grained textual annotations obtained from GPT-4o and a high-fidelity face tracker, providing both explicit descriptions detailing facial features and implicit descriptions referencing the situational context behind the expression. Leveraging this dataset, we present EmoteGPT, a text-to-3D expression framework based on a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with a dedicated token to semantically ground expression representations, which are then decoded into 3DMM parameters. We further improve EmoteGPT by augmenting training with large-scale image-to-3DMM data, enabling it to surpass state-of-the-art text-to-3D face synthesis methods on emotion recognition metrics and in perceived expressiveness. Integrated into avatar pipelines, our method enables photorealistic and stylized 3D avatars, as well as expressive 3D-consistent 2D face synthesis from textual input.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Provable Pruning for Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting via Coresets

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-quality real-time novel-view synthesis, but practical scenes often contain millions of Gaussians, making compression essential for deployment on limited hardware. Existing reduction methods are effective but mostly heuristic: they provide no multiplicative approximation guarantee for the rendered objective, and thus rely heavily on costly post-pruning finetuning to recover quality. We ask a basic question: can a 3DGS scene be provably replaced by a much smaller weighted subset (coreset) while preserving the objective of interest? We first show that, in the unrestricted setting, no non-trivial multiplicative 3DGS coreset exists. We then show that multiplicative guarantees are not impossible, but resolution-dependent. For a prescribed rendering resolution, such as representative views or grids of views/rays, we provide the first weighted coreset construction theorem for 3DGS. The construction samples Gaussians by sensitivity: provable importance scores measuring each Gaussian's role in the full-scene objective. Finally, under explicit validity and log-transmittance stability assumptions, we turn this objective guarantee into a rendering guarantee. Empirically, our method is strongest where deployment needs it most: aggressive compression with no or minimal recovery compute. In prune-only and very short finetuning regimes, it achieves state-of-the-art performance, showing that principled importance estimation can be both theoretically meaningful and practically useful. Open-source code is available at https://github.com/waseem-m/3dgs_provable_coresets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

PAIQ: Patch-Aligned Semantic Injection via Residual Rotation

Language-aligned and self-supervised visual encoders offer complementary strengths in semantic abstraction and spatial detail. Harnessing this complementarity requires enriching local features while retaining distinctions between semantically related patches. We introduce PAIQ, a patch-aligned semantic injection framework that combines content-based cross-encoder matching with orthogonally constrained residual updates. Using DINOv3 patch features as the spatial base, PAIQ aggregates complementary SigLIP features through joint source allocation and injects the aggregate--base differences through a shared orthogonal transformation Q. This rotation adapts update directions while preserving residual norms and pairwise angles. For fixed projected features, we derive conditions for patch separability under similar semantic aggregates and show that rotation adds a nonnegative separation term over direct interpolation when the aggregate is shared. Only the projection and fusion parameters are trained; both visual encoders and the language model remain frozen, and fusion retains 196 visual tokens. Across diverse language backbones, PAIQ yields broad gains in judge-assessed correctness and reductions in hallucination severity over single-encoder interfaces on image description and visual question answering. On the 2B and 9B Qwen backbones, this compact interface outperforms the strongest evaluated fusion or token-compression baselines by about 2.9 correctness points on average.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Honeycomb: Constant-Size Scene Memory Representation for Video World Models

Video world models require persistent scene memory to maintain consistency during long-horizon video generation. Existing spatial memory systems accumulate RGB observations or latent features, causing storage requirements to grow as generation proceeds. We introduce **Honeycomb**, a video world model built on **HexMemory**, a compact low-rank representation that stores scene features in a fixed-size memory comprising six spatial and spatiotemporal planes. A feed-forward writer maps each newly generated video chunk to plane features. As the spatial coverage or temporal range expands, HexMemory warps the existing planes while preserving their dimensions, then integrates new features through confidence-weighted pooling and a learned residual correction. A reader retrieves latent features from HexMemory to condition subsequent video generation. Because the writer processes only observations from the latest chunk, Honeycomb avoids per-scene optimization and repeated processing of the full generation history. Experiments on WorldScore and RealEstate10K demonstrate strong video generation quality and robust consistency when revisiting previously observed regions, while maintaining constant feature-storage requirements throughout generation. Code and additional visualizations are available on our https://jackswl.github.io/honeycomb/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2013

Contextually learnt detection of unusual motion-based behaviour in crowded public spaces

In this paper we are interested in analyzing behaviour in crowded public places at the level of holistic motion. Our aim is to learn, without user input, strong scene priors or labelled data, the scope of "normal behaviour" for a particular scene and thus alert to novelty in unseen footage. The first contribution is a low-level motion model based on what we term tracklet primitives, which are scene-specific elementary motions. We propose a clustering-based algorithm for tracklet estimation from local approximations to tracks of appearance features. This is followed by two methods for motion novelty inference from tracklet primitives: (a) we describe an approach based on a non-hierarchial ensemble of Markov chains as a means of capturing behavioural characteristics at different scales, and (b) a more flexible alternative which exhibits a higher generalizing power by accounting for constraints introduced by intentionality and goal-oriented planning of human motion in a particular scene. Evaluated on a 2h long video of a busy city marketplace, both algorithms are shown to be successful at inferring unusual behaviour, the latter model achieving better performance for novelties at a larger spatial scale.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2013

Multiple-object tracking in cluttered and crowded public spaces

This paper addresses the problem of tracking moving objects of variable appearance in challenging scenes rich with features and texture. Reliable tracking is of pivotal importance in surveillance applications. It is made particularly difficult by the nature of objects encountered in such scenes: these too change in appearance and scale, and are often articulated (e.g. humans). We propose a method which uses fast motion detection and segmentation as a constraint for both building appearance models and their robust propagation (matching) in time. The appearance model is based on sets of local appearances automatically clustered using spatio-kinetic similarity, and is updated with each new appearance seen. This integration of all seen appearances of a tracked object makes it extremely resilient to errors caused by occlusion and the lack of permanence of due to low data quality, appearance change or background clutter. These theoretical strengths of our algorithm are empirically demonstrated on two hour long video footage of a busy city marketplace.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2013

Quaternion Fourier Transform on Quaternion Fields and Generalizations

We treat the quaternionic Fourier transform (QFT) applied to quaternion fields and investigate QFT properties useful for applications. Different forms of the QFT lead us to different Plancherel theorems. We relate the QFT computation for quaternion fields to the QFT of real signals. We research the general linear ($GL$) transformation behavior of the QFT with matrices, Clifford geometric algebra and with examples. We finally arrive at wide-ranging non-commutative multivector FT generalizations of the QFT. Examples given are new volume-time and spacetime algebra Fourier transformations.

math.RA↗

arXiv2013

A Semi-automated Statistical Algorithm for Object Separation

We explicate a semi-automated statistical algorithm for object identification and segregation in both gray scale and color images. The algorithm makes optimal use of the observation that definite objects in an image are typically represented by pixel values having narrow Gaussian distributions about characteristic mean values. Furthermore, for visually distinct objects, the corresponding Gaussian distributions have negligible overlap with each other and hence the Mahalanobis distance between these distributions are large. These statistical facts enable one to sub-divide images into multiple thresholds of variable sizes, each segregating similar objects. The procedure incorporates the sensitivity of human eye to the gray pixel values into the variable threshold size, while mapping the Gaussian distributions into localized δ-functions, for object separation. The effectiveness of this recursive statistical algorithm is demonstrated using a wide variety of images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Scale-invariant scale-channel networks: Deep networks that generalise to previously unseen scales

The ability to handle large scale variations is crucial for many real world visual tasks. A straightforward approach for handling scale in a deep network is to process an image at several scales simultaneously in a set of scale channels. Scale invariance can then, in principle, be achieved by using weight sharing between the scale channels together with max or average pooling over the outputs from the scale channels. The ability of such scale channel networks to generalise to scales not present in the training set over significant scale ranges has, however, not previously been explored. In this paper, we present a systematic study of this methodology by implementing different types of scale channel networks and evaluating their ability to generalise to previously unseen scales. We develop a formalism for analysing the covariance and invariance properties of scale channel networks, and explore how different design choices, unique to scaling transformations, affect the overall performance of scale channel networks. We first show that two previously proposed scale channel network designs do not generalise well to scales not present in the training set. We explain theoretically and demonstrate experimentally why generalisation fails in these cases. We then propose a new type of foveated scale channel architecture}, where the scale channels process increasingly larger parts of the image with decreasing resolution. This new type of scale channel network is shown to generalise extremely well, provided sufficient image resolution and the absence of boundary effects. Our proposed FovMax and FovAvg networks perform almost identically over a scale range of 8, also when training on single scale training data, and do also give improved performance when learning from datasets with large scale variations in the small sample regime.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Logarithmic Mathematical Morphology: Theory and applications

In Mathematical Morphology for grey-level functions, an image is analysed by another image named the structuring function. This structuring function is translated over the image domain and summed to the image. However, in an image presenting lighting variations, when the structuring function is added to this image, the amplitude of this translated structuring function should vary according to the image intensity. Such a property is not verified in Mathematical Morphology for grey level functions, when the structuring function is summed to the image with the usual additive law. This issue has been addressed by defining a framework that uses an additive law, for which the amplitude of the structuring function added to the image varies according to the amplitude of the image itself. This additive law is chosen within the Logarithmic Image Processing framework and models the lighting variations with a physical cause such as a change of light intensity. The framework is named Logarithmic Mathematical Morphology (LMM) and allows the definition of operators which are robust to such lighting variations.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2013

Discriminative extended canonical correlation analysis for pattern set matching

In this paper we address the problem of matching sets of vectors embedded in the same input space. We propose an approach which is motivated by canonical correlation analysis (CCA), a statistical technique which has proven successful in a wide variety of pattern recognition problems. Like CCA when applied to the matching of sets, our extended canonical correlation analysis (E-CCA) aims to extract the most similar modes of variability within two sets. Our first major contribution is the formulation of a principled framework for robust inference of such modes from data in the presence of uncertainty associated with noise and sampling randomness. E-CCA retains the efficiency and closed form computability of CCA, but unlike it, does not possess free parameters which cannot be inferred directly from data (inherent data dimensionality, and the number of canonical correlations used for set similarity computation). Our second major contribution is to show that in contrast to CCA, E-CCA is readily adapted to match sets in a discriminative learning scheme which we call discriminative extended canonical correlation analysis (DE-CCA). Theoretical contributions of this paper are followed by an empirical evaluation of its premises on the task of face recognition from sets of rasterized appearance images. The results demonstrate that our approach, E-CCA, already outperforms both CCA and its quasi-discriminative counterpart constrained CCA (C-CCA), for all values of their free parameters. An even greater improvement is achieved with the discriminative variant, DE-CCA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2010

Characterizing Complex Particle Morphologies Through Shape Matching: Descriptors, Applications, and Algorithms

Many standard structural quantities, such as order parameters and correlation functions, exist for common condensed matter systems, such as spherical and rod-like particles. However, these structural quantities are often insufficient for characterizing the unique and highly complex structures often encountered in the emerging field of nano and microscale self-assembly, or other disciplines involving complex structures such as computational biology. Computer science algorithms known as "shape matching" methods pose a unique solution to this problem by providing robust metrics for quantifying the similarity between pairs of arbitrarily complex structures. This pairwise matching operation, either implicitly or explicitly, lies at the heart of most standard structural characterization schemes for particle systems. By substituting more robust "shape descriptors" into these schemes we extend their applicability to structures formed from more complex building blocks. Here, we describe several structural characterization schemes and shape descriptors that can be used to obtain various types of structural information about particle systems. We demonstrate the application of shape matching algorithms to a variety of example problems, for topics including local and global structure identification and classification, automated phase diagram mapping, and the construction of spatial and temporal correlation functions. The methods are applicable to a wide range of systems, both simulated and experimental, provided particle positions are known or can be accurately imaged.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2023

Sequential training of GANs against GAN-classifiers reveals correlated "knowledge gaps" present among independently trained GAN instances

Modern Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) generate realistic images remarkably well. Previous work has demonstrated the feasibility of "GAN-classifiers" that are distinct from the co-trained discriminator, and operate on images generated from a frozen GAN. That such classifiers work at all affirms the existence of "knowledge gaps" (out-of-distribution artifacts across samples) present in GAN training. We iteratively train GAN-classifiers and train GANs that "fool" the classifiers (in an attempt to fill the knowledge gaps), and examine the effect on GAN training dynamics, output quality, and GAN-classifier generalization. We investigate two settings, a small DCGAN architecture trained on low dimensional images (MNIST), and StyleGAN2, a SOTA GAN architecture trained on high dimensional images (FFHQ). We find that the DCGAN is unable to effectively fool a held-out GAN-classifier without compromising the output quality. However, StyleGAN2 can fool held-out classifiers with no change in output quality, and this effect persists over multiple rounds of GAN/classifier training which appears to reveal an ordering over optima in the generator parameter space. Finally, we study different classifier architectures and show that the architecture of the GAN-classifier has a strong influence on the set of its learned artifacts.

cs.LG↗