Simulation for Driving

Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) merges the benefits of pathology images and gene expression, linking molecular profiles with tissue structure to analyze spot-level function comprehensively. Predicting gene expression from histology images is a cost-effective alternative to expensive ST technologies. However, existing methods mainly focus on spot-level image-to-gene matching but fail to leverage the full hierarchical structure of ST data, especially on the gene expression side, leading to incomplete image-gene alignment. Moreover, a challenge arises from the inherent information asymmetry: gene expression profiles contain more molecular details that may lack salient visual correlates in histological images, demanding a sophisticated representation learning approach to bridge this modality gap. We propose HyperST, a framework for ST prediction that learns multi-level image-gene representations by modeling the data's inherent hierarchy within hyperbolic space, a natural geometric setting for such structures. First, we design Multi-Level Representation Extractors to capture both spot-level and niche-level representations from each modality, providing context-aware information beyond individual spot-level image-gene pairs. Second, a Hierarchical Hyperbolic Alignment module is introduced to unify these representations, performing spatial alignment while hierarchically structuring image and gene embeddings. This alignment strategy enriches the image representations with molecular semantics, significantly improving cross-modal prediction. HyperST achieves state-of-the-art performance on four public datasets from different tissues, paving the way for scalable and accurate spatial transcriptomics prediction.

Estimating dense three dimensional motion in dynamic high speed scenes remains challenging due to motion blur, illumination variation, and the limited temporal resolution of conventional cameras. We introduce ARES, a unified framework for Asymmetric RGB-Event Stereo that addresses these issues through a hybrid setup where an event camera captures fine grained temporal dynamics and an RGB camera provides rich spatial structure. To integrate these heterogeneous modalities, we propose Multimodal Contextual Attention, a transformer based fusion mechanism that attends to spatial and temporal contexts under cross view constraints and forms a unified correspondence space for disparity and optical flow estimation. Building on this shared representation, we introduce Temporal Disparity Posterior Fusion, a probabilistic framework that models the evolution of disparity posteriors to infer disparity change and recover metrically coherent scene flow. Trained with sparse supervision and dense self consistency cues, our ARES achieves geometrically consistent and temporally stable three dimensional motion estimation across diverse driving scenarios. Experiments show that ARES attains state of the art performance in scene flow estimation among RGB-event stereo methods, establishing a principled path toward unified asymmetric multimodal stereo sensing. Code available at the project website.

Recent advances in vision-language pretraining have enabled strong medical foundation models, yet most analyze radiographs in isolation, overlooking the key clinical task of comparing prior and current images to assess interval change. For chest radiographs (CXRs), capturing interval change is essential, as radiologists must evaluate not only the static appearance of findings but also how they evolve over time. We introduce TILA (Temporal Inversion-aware Learning and Alignment), a simple yet effective framework that uses temporal inversion, reversing image pairs, as a supervisory signal to enhance the sensitivity of existing temporal vision--language models to directional change. TILA integrates inversion-aware objectives across pretraining, fine-tuning, and inference, complementing conventional appearance modeling with explicit learning of temporal order. We also propose a unified evaluation protocol to assess order sensitivity and consistency under temporal inversion, and introduce MS-CXR-T_retrieval, a retrieval evaluation set constructed through a general protocol that can be applied to any temporal CXR dataset. Experiments on public datasets and real-world hospital cohorts demonstrate that TILA consistently improves progression classification and temporal embedding alignment when applied to multiple existing architectures.

Despite advances in physics-based 3D motion synthesis, current methods face key limitations: reliance on pre-reconstructed 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) built from dense multi-view images with time-consuming per-scene optimization; physics integration via either inflexible, hand-specified attributes or unstable, optimization-heavy guidance from video models using Score Distillation Sampling (SDS); and naive concatenation of prebuilt 3DGS with physics modules, which ignores physical information embedded in appearance and yields suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose PhysGM, a feed-forward framework that jointly predicts 3D Gaussian representation and physical properties from a single image, enabling immediate simulation and high-fidelity 4D rendering. Unlike slow appearance-agnostic optimization methods, we first pre-train a physics-aware reconstruction model that directly infers both Gaussian and physical parameters. We further refine the model with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), aligning simulations with the physically plausible reference videos and avoiding the high-cost SDS optimization. To address the absence of a supporting dataset for this task, we propose PhysAssets, a dataset of 50K+ 3D assets annotated with physical properties and corresponding reference videos. Experiments show that PhysGM produces high-fidelity 4D simulations from a single image in one minute, achieving a significant speedup over prior work while delivering realistic renderings.

Aerial-Ground Person Re-Identification (AGPReID) remains highly challenging due to drastic viewpoint variations between drones and fixed cameras. Existing methods typically follow a view-invariant paradigm, aligning shared features across views to achieve robustness. However, view-invariant inherently enforces part-level alignment, which ignores view-specific cues and discriminative identity information. To this end, this work proposes ViSA (View-aware Semantic Alignment), a view-aware framework that achieves cross-view semantic consistency containing an Expert-driven Token Generation Module (ETGM) and a Dual-branch Local Fusion Module (DLFM). Technically, the former constructs a set of view-aware experts to generate adaptive semantic queries that perceive viewpoint-specific patterns, while the latter leverages graph reasoning to extract and align local regions responsive to different experts under varying viewpoints. Extensive experiments on three large-scale AGPReID benchmarks including AG-ReID.v2, CARGO and LAGPeR demonstrate that ViSA consistently achieves superior performance, with a notable 10.06% mAP improvement on the challenging CARGO cross-view protocol. The code will be available.

Single-image relighting is highly under-constrained: small illumination changes can produce large, nonlinear variations in shading, shadows, and specularities, while geometry and materials remain unobserved. Existing diffusion-based approaches either rely on intrinsic- or G-buffer-based pipelines that require dense and fragile supervision, or operate purely in latent space without physical grounding, making fine-grained control of direction, intensity, and color unreliable. We observe that full intrinsic decomposition is unnecessary for accurate relighting. Instead, sparse but physically meaningful cues--indicating where illumination should change and how materials should respond--are sufficient to guide a diffusion model. Based on this insight, we introduce LightCtrl that integrates minimal physical priors at two levels: a few-shot latent proxy encoder that extracts compact material-geometry cues from limited PBR supervision, and a lighting-aware mask that identifies illumination-sensitive regions and steers the denoiser toward shading-relevant pixels. To compensate for scarce PBR data, we refine the proxy branch using a DPO-based objective that aligns predicted cues with perceptually preferred relighting behavior. We further present ScaLight, a large-scale object-level dataset with systematically varied illumination and complete camera-light metadata, enabling physically consistent and controllable training. Across object- and scene-level benchmarks, our method achieves photometrically faithful relighting with accurate continuous control, surpassing prior diffusion- and intrinsic-based baselines, including gains of up to +2.4 dB PSNR and 35% lower RMSE under controlled lighting shifts.

We present 4DPM, a dynamic reconstruction system that receives a casual monocular RGB video as input, and outputs a complete and persistent reconstruction of the scene. In other words, we reconstruct not only the currently visible parts of the scene, but also all previously viewed parts, which enables replaying the complete reconstruction across all timesteps. Our method decomposes the scene into a set of rigid 3D primitives, which are assumed to be moving through the scene. Using estimated dense 2D correspondences, we jointly infer the rigid motion of these primitives through an optimisation pipeline, yielding a 4D reconstruction of the scene, i.e. providing 3D geometry dynamically moving through time. To achieve this, we also introduce a mechanism to extrapolate motion for objects that become invisible, employing motion-grouping techniques to maintain continuity. The resulting system enables 4D spatio-temporal awareness, offering capabilities such as replayable 3D reconstructions of articulated objects through time, multi-object scanning, and object permanence. On object scanning and multi-object datasets, our system significantly outperforms existing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

This paper primarily investigates the task of expression-only portrait video performance editing based on a driving video, which plays a crucial role in animation and film industries. Most existing research mainly focuses on portrait animation, which aims to animate a static portrait image according to the facial motion from the driving video. As a consequence, it remains challenging for them to disentangle the facial expression from head pose rotation and thus lack the ability to edit facial expression independently. In this paper, we propose PerformRecast, a versatile expression-only video editing method which is dedicated to recast the performance in existing film and animation. The key insight of our method comes from the characteristics of 3D Morphable Face Model (3DMM), which models the face identity, facial expression and head pose of 3D face mesh with separate parameters. Therefore, we improve the keypoints transformation formula in previous methods to make it more consistent with 3DMM model, which achieves a better disentanglement and provides users with much more fine-grained control. Furthermore, to avoid the misalignment around the boundary of face in generated results, we decouple the facial and non-facial regions of input portrait images and pre-train a teacher model to provide separate supervision for them. Extensive experiments show that our method produces high-quality results which are more faithful to the driving video, outperforming existing methods in both controllability and efficiency. Our code, data and trained models are available at https://youku-aigc.github.io/PerformRecast.

Learning from multiple modalities often suffers from imbalance, where information-rich modalities dominate optimization while weaker or partially missing modalities contribute less. This imbalance becomes severe in realistic settings with imbalanced missing modalities (IMR), where each modality is absent with different probabilities, distorting representation learning and gradient dynamics. We revisit this issue from a training-process perspective and propose BALM, a model-agnostic plug-in framework to achieve balanced multimodal learning under IMR. The framework consists of two complementary modules. The Feature Calibration Module (FCM) operates at the representation level, recalibrating unimodal features through global contextual information to build a shared representation basis across heterogeneous missing patterns. The Gradient Rebalancing Module (GRM) works at the optimization level, equalizing learning dynamics across modalities by modulating gradient magnitudes and directions from distributional and spatial perspectives. BALM can be seamlessly integrated into diverse backbones, including multimodal emotion recognition (MER) models, without altering their architectures. Experimental results across multiple MER benchmarks confirm that BALM consistently enhances robustness and improves performance under diverse missing and imbalance settings.

Video face swapping is crucial in film and entertainment production, where achieving high fidelity and temporal consistency over long and complex video sequences remains a significant challenge. Inspired by recent advances in reference-guided image editing, we explore whether rich visual attributes from source videos can be similarly leveraged to enhance both fidelity and temporal coherence in video face swapping. Building on this insight, this work presents LivingSwap, the first video reference guided face swapping model. Our approach employs keyframes as conditioning signals to inject the target identity, enabling flexible and controllable editing. By combining keyframe conditioning with video reference guidance, the model performs temporal stitching to ensure stable identity preservation and high-fidelity reconstruction across long video sequences. To address the scarcity of data for reference-guided training, we construct a paired face-swapping dataset, Face2Face, and further reverse the data pairs to ensure reliable ground-truth supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results, seamlessly integrating the target identity with the source video's expressions, lighting, and motion, while significantly reducing manual effort in production workflows. Project webpage: https://aim-uofa.github.io/LivingSwap

Hybrid CNN-Transformer architectures achieve strong results in image super-resolution, but scaling attention windows or convolution kernels significantly increases computational cost, limiting deployment on resource-constrained devices. We present UCAN, a lightweight network that unifies convolution and attention to expand the effective receptive field efficiently. UCAN combines window-based spatial attention with a Hedgehog Attention mechanism to model both local texture and long-range dependencies, and introduces a distillation-based large-kernel module to preserve high-frequency structure without heavy computation. In addition, we employ cross-layer parameter sharing to further reduce complexity. On Manga109 (4x), UCAN-L achieves 31.63 dB PSNR with only 48.4G MACs, surpassing recent lightweight models. On BSDS100, UCAN attains 27.79 dB, outperforming methods with significantly larger models. Extensive experiments show that UCAN achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy, efficiency, and scalability, making it well-suited for practical high-resolution image restoration.

Ancient inscriptions, as repositories of cultural memory, have suffered from centuries of environmental and human-induced degradation. Restoring their intertwined visual and textual integrity poses one of the most demanding challenges in digital heritage preservation. However, existing AI-based approaches often rely on rigid pipelines, struggling to generalize across such complex and heterogeneous real-world degradations. Inspired by the skill-coordinated workflow of human epigraphers, we propose EpiAgent, an agent-centric system that formulates inscription restoration as a hierarchical planning problem. Following an Observe-Conceive-Execute-Reevaluate paradigm, an LLM-based central planner orchestrates collaboration among multimodal analysis, historical experience, specialized restoration tools, and iterative self-refinement. This agent-centric coordination enables a flexible and adaptive restoration process beyond conventional single-pass methods. Across real-world degraded inscriptions, EpiAgent achieves superior restoration quality and stronger generalization compared to existing methods. Our work marks an important step toward expert-level agent-driven restoration of cultural heritage. The code is available at https://github.com/blackprotoss/EpiAgent.

We introduce PhysGaia, a novel physics-aware benchmark for Dynamic Novel View Synthesis (DyNVS) that encompasses both structured objects and unstructured physical phenomena. While existing datasets primarily focus on photorealistic appearance, PhysGaia is specifically designed to support physics-consistent dynamic reconstruction. Our benchmark features complex scenarios with rich multi-body interactions, where objects realistically collide and exchange forces. Furthermore, it incorporates a diverse range of materials, including liquid, gas, textile, and rheological substance, moving beyond the rigid-body assumptions prevalent in prior work. To ensure physical fidelity, all scenes in PhysGaia are generated using material-specific physics solvers that strictly adhere to fundamental physical laws. We provide comprehensive ground-truth information, including 3D particle trajectories and physical parameters (e.g., viscosity), enabling the quantitative evaluation of physical modeling. To facilitate research adoption, we also provide integration pipelines for recent 4D Gaussian Splatting models along with our dataset and their results. By addressing the critical shortage of physics-aware benchmarks, PhysGaia can significantly advance research in dynamic view synthesis, physics-based scene understanding, and the integration of deep learning with physical simulation, ultimately enabling more faithful reconstruction and interpretation of complex dynamic scenes.

Activation outliers in large-scale transformer models pose a fundamental challenge to model quantization, creating excessively large ranges that cause severe accuracy drops during quantization. We empirically observe that outlier severity intensifies with pre-training scale (e.g., progressing from CLIP to the more extensively trained SigLIP and SigLIP2). Through theoretical analysis as well as empirical correlation studies, we establish the direct link between these activation outliers and dominant singular values of the weights. Building on this insight, we propose Selective Spectral Decay (S2D), a geometrically-principled conditioning method that surgically regularizes only the weight components corresponding to the largest singular values during fine-tuning. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that S2D significantly reduces activation outliers and produces well-conditioned representations that are inherently quantization-friendly. Models trained with S2D achieve up to 7% improved PTQ accuracy on ImageNet under W4A4 quantization and 4% gains when combined with QAT. These improvements also generalize across downstream tasks and vision-language models, enabling the scaling of increasingly large and rigorously trained models without sacrificing deployment efficiency.

Point cloud denoising is a critical preprocessing step for enhancing the reliability and accuracy of 3D perception systems. Most existing progressive denoising methods rely on fixed iterative pipelines that process all regions uniformly, resulting in redundant computation and over-smoothing of geometric details when handling point clouds with non-uniform noise distributions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Dynamic Skip Net (DSNet), a novel progressive denoising framework that enables routing on demand by adaptively determining the optimal denoising path for each local patch based on its noise characteristics. DSNet incorporates a noise discriminator that quantifies local noise intensity by analyzing normal similarity, and a reverse monotonic decision function that maps this measure to an appropriate denoising module. Furthermore, we propose a path-selective iteration mechanism that dynamically re-evaluates the restoration state and re-plans the denoising route at each stage, enabling cross-stage skipping to minimize unnecessary computation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DSNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in noise suppression, geometric fidelity, and computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/cz-61/DSNet

Physics-based humanoid control relies on training with motion datasets that have diverse data distributions. However, the fixed difficulty distribution of datasets limits the performance ceiling of the trained control policies. Additionally, the method of acquiring high-quality data through professional motion capture systems is constrained by costs, making it difficult to achieve large-scale scalability. To address these issues, we propose a closed-loop automated motion data generation and iterative framework. It can generate high-quality motion data with rich action semantics, including martial arts, dance, combat, sports, gymnastics, and more. Furthermore, our framework enables difficulty iteration of policies and data through physical metrics and objective evaluations, allowing the trained tracker to break through its original difficulty limits. On the PHC single-primitive tracker, using only approximately 1/10 of the AMASS dataset size, the average failure rate on the test set (2201 clips) is reduced by 45% compared to the baseline. Finally, we conduct comprehensive ablation and comparative experiments to highlight the rationality and advantages of our framework.

Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) image restoration is trapped in a scalability crisis: existing models, bound to pixel-wise operations, demand unsustainable computation. While state space models (SSMs) like Mamba promise linear complexity, their pixel-serial scanning remains a fundamental bottleneck for the millions of pixels in UHD content. We ask: must we process every pixel to understand the image? This paper introduces C^2SSM, a visual state space model that breaks this taboo by shifting from pixel-serial to cluster-serial scanning. Our core discovery is that the rich feature distribution of a UHD image can be distilled into a sparse set of semantic centroids via a neural-parameterized mixture model. C^2SSM leverages this to reformulate global modeling into a novel dual-path process: it scans and reasons over a handful of cluster centers, then diffuses the global context back to all pixels through a principled similarity distribution, all while a lightweight modulator preserves fine details. This cluster-centric paradigm achieves a decisive leap in efficiency, slashing computational costs while establishing new state-of-the-art results across five UHD restoration tasks. More than a solution, C^2SSM charts a new course for efficient large-scale vision: scan clusters, not pixels. The code is available at https://github.com/5chen/C2SSM.

Reconstructing photorealistic and animatable 4D head avatars from a single portrait image remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. While diffusion models have enabled remarkable progress in image and video generation for avatar reconstruction, existing methods primarily rely on 2D priors and struggle to achieve consistent 3D geometry. We propose a novel framework that leverages geometry-aware diffusion to distill strong geometry priors for high-fidelity head avatar reconstruction. Our approach jointly synthesizes portrait images and corresponding surface normals, while a pose-free expression encoder captures implicit expression representations. Both synthesized images and expression latents are distilled into 3D Gaussian-based avatars, enabling photorealistic rendering with accurate geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in visual quality, expression fidelity, and cross-identity generalization, while supporting real-time rendering.

Nighttime photography is susceptible to flare caused by strong light sources, which degrades visual quality and disrupts structural information required by downstream vision tasks. Existing nighttime flare removal methods generally lack semantic priors for flare-occluded regions and thus tend to introduce artifacts and lose details under severe degradation. To address this problem, we propose a language-guided one-step diffusion framework that explicitly aligns flare-occluded regions with the underlying scene content at the semantic level. Specifically, we develop the first flare-specific vision-language model, Flare-VLM, which extracts fine-grained textual descriptions to guide one-step diffusion for high-quality restoration of severely damaged areas. Then, we propose semantics-aware distribution distillation to constrain the noise distribution with high-level semantics, suppressing redundant perturbations on clean backgrounds and improving the stability of distillation. In addition, we design an instruction-driven data synthesis pipeline to generate geometrically and semantically aligned nighttime flare samples, narrowing the gap to real degradations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better restoration and enhances the performance of downstream vision tasks.

Modern detectors typically deepen backbones and rely on aggressive downsampling to harvest high-level semantics. But this severely degrades low-energy infrared tiny targets via rescale-induced information loss. This work introduces InvDet, a target-aware invertible encoder that unifies information preservation and target-aware enhancement within a reconstruction-guided detection framework. An invertible pathway reconstructs the input from feature latents, exposing information loss as an optimizable quantity. To decouple detection from irrelevant reconstruction, a Target-Aware Reconstruction Modulation (TARM) module operates only in the inverse path, gating high-pass latents and applying a mild gain to low-pass features without altering the forward detection distribution. In addition, a Geometry-Content Tolerance Metric (GCTM) is proposed to focus on truly informative regions and yields a pixel-wise weight map that gently regularizes the reconstruction branch. Our method achieves competitive accuracy on five public infrared benchmarks while exhibiting strong cross-dataset generalization, providing a principled pathway toward detection-friendly representation learning for scale-challenged visual regimes.