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arXiv

Spatiotemporally Decoupled Autoregressive Diffusion Model for Human Motion Generation

Chengqun Yang, Liang Xu, Yanping Li, Fulong Liu, Jingnan Gao, Weili Zeng, Yichao Yan

Text-driven human motion synthesis has made substantial development with two core modules of motion representation and generative architecture. For representation, Vector Quantization (VQ)-based methods compress motion data into discrete tokens while latent-based models operate directly in continuous space. However, both of these representations exhibit significant limitations. VQ-based methods suffer from inherent information loss, which compromises the quality, diversity, and generalization of generated motions, while continuous representation on holistic whole-body motion hinders part-level flexibility. For architecture, diffusion and autoregressive diffusion models have demonstrated their superiority, yet the fine-grained controllability over individual body parts is also limited. Thus, we propose a unified spatiotemporally decoupled framework named DeMoDiff, which jointly redesigns representation and architecture. To enhance representation extraction capabilities and offer greater part-level controllability, we present a spatial-temporal VAE that encodes each body joint rather than compressing the whole-body motion into a single latent space. Then, we incorporate spatial-temporal masking and attention mechanisms into an autoregressive diffusion generator, achieving both generative capability and controllable editability. Extensive experiments on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance and compelling motion generation results. Moreover, our framework demonstrates strong temporal and spatial editing capabilities, further validating its effectiveness. Our project page: https://rex0191.github.io/DeMoDiff/

arXiv

Dual-Grained Agent Memory and Shapley Context Attribution for Multimodal Agentic Learner

Jieke Wang, Tiancheng SHEN, Yibo Yang, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) deliver impressive perception yet still falter on scientific and mathematical reasoning. Parameter-level adaptation is unavailable for closed-weight or on-device backbones, and stateless prompting forfeits any compounding benefit from problems already solved. We propose \textbf{DG-Mem}, a dual-grained agentic memory framework that augments a frozen MLLM with a non-parametric, externally stored memory built once from training-time rollouts and consulted read-only at test time. Motivated by the Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) account of human memory, DG-Mem factors its store into an instance-grounded exemplar memory and a category-level schema memory of IF-THEN rules, with a transient reflection store mediating their construction so that schemas are synthesized only from abstract reflections, never from exemplar text. Two design choices distinguish DG-Mem: an online concept categorizer that grows the category space incrementally during training rather than committing to a predefined taxonomy, and a Shapley context attribution procedure that decomposes correctness across the entire retrieved rule set and yields a per-rule utility that re-weights retrieval at test time. The pipeline introduces no gradient updates and is deployable on closed-weight or on-device backbones. Across MathVista, MMMU, and MMMU-Pro on four open-weight and proprietary backbones (Qwen3.5-27B, Qwen3.5-122B-A10B, GPT-5-Nano, Gemini-3-Flash), DG-Mem improves consistently over no-memory and competitive memory baselines.

arXiv

E2S-Pruner: Progressive Two-Stage Evidence Fusion for Visual Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models

Taoyu Qian, Qi Wang, Daqian Shi, Yuanhao Jiang, Shang Gao, Hualong Yu

Vision-language models typically encode an image into hundreds of visual tokens, incurring substantial inference latency and GPU memory overhead. Existing pruning methods largely rely on attention scores and directly aggregate outputs across attention heads and network layers, making it difficult to characterize evidential uncertainty and conflict. We propose E2S-Pruner, a progressive two-stage evidence-fusion framework for visual token pruning that requires no auxiliary model, trainable parameters, or fine-tuning. In the first stage, E2S-Pruner treats each attention head as an independent evidence source, estimates its reliability from evidence clarity and inter-head consistency, and represents each visual token using three states: important, unimportant, and uncertain. In the second stage, Dempster--Shafer evidence theory is used to quantify inter-layer conflict and fuse complementary evidence from multiple network layers. We further introduce a spatial novelty constraint that promotes coverage of distinct image regions and prevents the retained tokens from concentrating in a few locally salient areas. On LLaVA-1.5-7B, E2S-Pruner retains 98.0%, 96.8%, and 90.6% of the aggregate performance when the average numbers of retained visual tokens are 192, 128, and 64, respectively, while improving throughput by 1.96x and 2.09x under the 128-token and 64-token settings. Experiments on Qwen2-VL-7B further demonstrate cross-model generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/taoyu-qian/E2S-Pruner.git.

arXiv

Semantic Reconstruction and 3-D Detection via Learned Multi-Pair Fusion in RF Imaging

Amir Rezaei, Wen-Xin Pan, Giuseppe Caire

We consider a multistatic radio-frequency imaging problem with anisotropy, in which the reflection from a point depends on the positions of the transmit (Tx) and receive (Rx) arrays. The goal is to label the voxels of a field of view by a finite set of semantic classes and to group them into object instances. For the image formation of each Tx--Rx pair we apply a standard inverse-problem solver, and we feed the resulting per-pair reconstructions into a trained three-dimensional (3-D) U-Net that performs the fusion implicitly and the per-voxel classification explicitly. On a controlled, under-determined multistatic setup, we consider the following image formation methods: back-projection (BP) and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) from a single deterministic snapshot, and incoherent BP and group-LASSO from multiple fading snapshots. For each imaging method we train a separate U-Net that fuses the six Tx--Rx pairs (its input channels) and assigns each voxel a probability vector over the classes. Taking the most probable class gives a labeled volume---the semantic reconstruction. Object instances and their oriented bounding boxes then follow by geometric post-processing (clustering and principal-component analysis). Across a wide range of signal-to-noise ratio, the semantic reconstruction (scored against ground truth by segmentation intersection-over-union) and the resulting 3-D detection degrade far more gracefully than the classical intensity reconstruction: the detection in particular stays reliable well into noise levels at which that reconstruction has dissolved. Because real scenes contain objects of classes the network was not trained on, we add an explicit unknown class trained by outlier exposure, which labels held-out novel objects as unknown instead of mislabeling them as a known class by reconstructed shape.

arXiv

Mover360: Controllable Object Manipulation in 360° Panoramic Images

Haoyi Zhong, Fang-Lue Zhang, Andrew Chalmers, Taehyun Rhee

We present Mover360, a controllable object manipulation framework for 360° images. Unlike perspective images, 360° images in equirectangular projection (ERP) exhibit horizontal wrap-around, latitude-dependent distortion, and global scene continuity, which makes object-level edits difficult for existing perspective editors to produce and for users to specify. To address this, Mover360 centers on object Translation (relocating a specified object within an existing panorama) while supporting reference-guided Insert and Remove as auxiliary tasks. Its interface unifies point-, bbox-, and mask-guided control by encoding each task into a fixed prompt and a compact, ERP-aligned instruction map. In the default point mode, a single click relocates an object, allowing the model to infer a plausible size, support, and illumination using panoramic context and an auxiliary depth condition. Structurally, Mover360 is a lightweight adaptation of a pretrained diffusion transformer. To generate paired supervision, we construct a UE5 data-generation pipeline with surface-aware object placement and randomized illumination, yielding large-scale paired data and a dual-domain benchmark of synthetic and real panoramas with ground truth for all three tasks. Across both test domains and two evaluation protocols, Mover360 outperforms strong baselines for perspective editing, insertion, and inpainting in reconstruction fidelity, semantic consistency, and distributional quality. Code and our benchmark dataset are available at https://zhonghaoyi.github.io/Mover360/.

arXiv

MLLM-Assisted Audio VOS: A 3rd Place Report for the MeViS-Audio Track, 8th LSVOS Challenge

Liangtao Shi, Jinxia Xie, Xiantao Hu, Ting Liu

In this technical report, we present a training-free framework for audio-guided video object segmentation, which integrates Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with SAM-based segmentation models. We decompose the task into several stages and identify suitable foundation models for each stage. Without introducing additional model training or task-specific fine-tuning, our approach leverages the strong multimodal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs to model text-visual correspondence and employs SAM-based models for accurate object mask generation. The proposed framework demonstrates the effectiveness of leveraging foundation models for audio-guided video segmentation and achieves competitive performance in the MeViS-Audio Track of the 8th LSVOS Challenge.

arXiv

Think Only When Needed: Prompt-Authority Control for Selective Slow-Path Intervention in Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

Zhiruo Zhou, Zelin Li, Xiwen Chen, Jiazhuo Li, Chenwei Wang, Huiming Chen, Xiaojun Zhu

Retrieval can efficiently and effectively augment a frozen vision--language--action (VLA) policy without retraining, yet retrieved text becomes a control intervention once it enters the executed prompt. In a matched audit, raw appended text reduces mean success from 92.47\% to 3.00\%, while meaningful and length-matched meaningless appends both fail on all 500 states. This result identifies \emph{prompt-form collapse}: changing the instruction form, rather than adding useful semantics, can dominate execution. We introduce TOWN-VLA (Think Only When Needed), a prompt-authority interface that separates candidate generation from permission to alter the policy input. A fixed compatibility rule authorizes a canonical compact instruction; otherwise, the interface restores the original Base prompt exactly. Across 900 audited routes, every route follows this contract: 525 routes recover Base with matching hashes, and all 375 authorized prompts preserve the task signature. On a matched $4\times7$ LIBERO-Plus evaluation with 10{,}030 episodes per method, success rises from 69.5\% to 73.1\% ($+362$ episodes; 95\% CI 1.89--5.45 points), improving on six perturbation axes and all four suites. On a physical PiPER arm with a frozen \pizerofive{} checkpoint, success rises from 52.7\% to 78.7\% over 150 trials per method ($p=3.16\times10^{-6}$). Prompt authority is enforceable for a frozen controller; oracle-free admission calibration is the next deployment target.

arXiv

BenthicDINO: Physics-Informed Self-Distillation for View-Invariant Side-Scan Sonar Representations

Taqi Hamoda, Hayat Rajani, Nuno Gracias

Automated perception in side-scan sonar (SSS) imagery is severely hindered by physical acoustic artifacts, resulting in representations that inextricably mix intrinsic seabed reflectivity with transient viewing geometries. Existing self-supervised learning (SSL) frameworks rely on augmentations designed for natural images, failing to account for acoustic degradation and explicitly enforce view-invariance. To address this gap, we introduce a physics-informed self-distillation framework built upon the DINOv3 architecture utilizing a ConvNeXt-v2-Tiny backbone to maximize data efficiency. The proposed methodology enforces view-invariance through two primary mechanisms: physically motivated augmentations that simulate speckle noise, range-dependent attenuation, and radiometric miscalibration; and a Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) penalty that explicitly decouples learned dense patch features from physical viewing parameters. Furthermore, we propose a dense, hierarchical feature fusion strategy across all four network stages to preserve fine-grained sediment details alongside deep semantic abstractions. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that the framework natively groups complex benthic topographies into stable, noise-free semantic clusters without relying on manual annotations. During supervised downstream tasks on the S3Seg dataset, the fused representations exhibited exceptional data efficiency, achieving 96% of its absolute peak performance using only 10% of the available annotated data, ultimately reaching a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 71.4% and an overall accuracy of 86.5%.

arXiv

Bee Detection and Tracking at Hive Entrance using YOLO11 and ByteTrack

Thi Thu Thao Nguyen, Johannes Reschke

This work presents an automatic bee entrance monitoring system based on YOLO11 transfer learning and the ByteTrack tracking algorithm. The study investigates the influence of data augmentation, backbone freezing, and tracker parameter optimization on the detection and counting of small, fast-moving bees. The detector with progressive backbone unfreezing strategy achieved about 97.0% precision and 98.7% mAP50, while providing more stable convergence than full fine-tuning. Experiments also showed that light augmentation outperformed heavy augmentation. For tracking, ByteTrack parameters were optimized to improve trajectory continuity under low-confidence detections. On an independent 25 FPS side-view video, the optimized YOLO11-ByteTrack system correctly counted 43 of 47 incoming bees (91.5%) and 7 of 30 outgoing bees (23.3%). Error analysis showed that most counting errors were caused by missed detections due to rapid bee motion and motion blur, while tracking failures became less frequent after parameter optimization. Overall, the results indicate that moderate augmentation, progressive backbone unfreezing, and ByteTrack tuning improve the reliability of automatic bee entrance monitoring under realistic recording conditions.

arXiv

Toward a Foundation Plug-and-Play Prior for Computed Tomography Reconstruction via a Multimodal Diffusion Model

Haley Duba-Sullivan, Patxi Fernandez-Zelaia, Obaidullah Rahman, Amirkoushyar Ziabari

Computed tomography (CT) throughput is limited by scan time, which grows with both the number of projections acquired and the detector integration time for each. Reconstructing high-quality volumes from sparse-view or low-dose measurements therefore depends on an informative prior, typically a neural network trained for one specific scan setting and retrained whenever the modality, geometry, or material changes. We investigate whether a single diffusion model trained across several imaging domains can instead serve as a prior for many CT problems simultaneously. We evaluate the proposed method using the same frozen model on three datasets that differ in modality, beam geometry, material, and degradation type, spanning flaw analysis in additively manufactured metal parts imaged with cone-beam X-ray CT and concrete microstructure imaged with parallel-beam neutron CT. Our proposed method out-performs analytic reconstructions in all three cases, providing a step toward a reusable foundation prior for heterogeneous CT reconstruction problems.

arXiv

EchoWM: Open and Enterable Omnimodal World Models

Songchun Zhang, Yaowei Li, Junhao Zhuang, Weiyang Jin, Haoyu Wang, Xin Lu, Yilang Sun, Shiyi Zhang, Haoran Li, Xiaoxiao Ma, Yuming Li, Yijun Liu, Yaofeng Su, Yanwen Ma, Haoyu Wu, Zihan Su, Yue Ma, Lvmin Zhang, Haoyang Huang, Zeyue Xue, Anyi Rao, Nan Duan

We present EchoWM, an omnimodal world model for enterable generative media that responds to continuous navigation while jointly generating 720p video, environmental sound, music and speech. We organize interaction around camera intent: in first-person scenes, it specifies observer motion, while in third-person scenes, camera--character dynamics are learned from data without view-specific controllers. Discrete commands and continuous poses are mapped to a shared metric-scale relative 6-DoF trajectory, with dataset-level calibration preserving motion magnitude across heterogeneous data. To jointly learn audio-visual generation and trajectory control, we construct a complementary data engine and adopt progressive training followed by autoregressive post-training for long-horizon generation. Extensive evaluations show that \model achieves strong trajectory following and high visual quality on public world-model benchmarks, supporting both first- and third-person interaction across varied subjects, and maintaining synchronized environmental sound and speech over long-horizon generation.

arXiv

A Comparative Study of Label-free Representation Quality Metrics in Deep Learning

Daniel Richards Arputharaj, Daniel Jönsson, Gabriel Eilertsen

We present a comparative study of label-free metrics for assessing the quality of representations in deep neural networks to understand their reliability under a wide variety of configurations. We group existing label-free metrics into three families based on their construction and analytically establish connections between metrics within the same family. We then characterise the sensitivity of spectral metrics through controlled synthetic experiments. Finally, all label-free metrics are evaluated against downstream task accuracy across a diverse set of 260 vision models on six datasets spanning generic object classification, fine-grained object classification, scene recognition and geospatial task, stratifying results by architecture class and training objective. We find that intrinsic dimensionality (ID) is the most reliable predictor among the metrics considered. However, the reliability of all metrics, including ID, is moderated by architecture class and training objective. Our results provide a clearer understanding of what label-free representation quality metrics measure, when they are reliable, and how to interpret them in practice.

arXiv

Neighbor-Aware View Synthesis for Restoring Missing Views in Light-Field Camera Arrays

Sakshi Goel, Ayush Goyal, K S Venkatesh, Koteswar Rao Jerripothula

In light-field (LF) imaging systems, dense spatial sampling from a camera array enables powerful post-capture capabilities such as refocusing and depth estimation. However, real-world LF capture is often affected by hardware malfunctions, where one or more cameras in the array fail, leading to missing sub-aperture images and degraded reconstruction quality. This paper addresses the problem of defective or missing view restoration in light-field camera arrays. We propose a novel generative framework that synthesizes the absent views by exploiting information from a carefully selected subset of neighboring cameras. These selected images, along with a positional encoding map indicating both their locations and the desired target view, are fed into a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) trained to generate the missing viewpoint in a geometrically consistent manner. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world LF datasets demonstrate that our method produces visually plausible and photometrically accurate reconstructions, outperforming baselines for view interpolation both quantitatively and qualitatively. The proposed framework thus offers a robust and efficient solution for fault-tolerant light-field image acquisition.

arXiv

BenthicFlow: Generating Extensible Underwater Environments via Flow Matching

Joaquín Figueira, Camile Lendering, Manfred Gonzalez-Hernandez, Giacomo D'Amicantonio, Erkut Akdag, Egor Bondarev

Computer vision applications for 3D scene understanding in underwater environments remain challenging due to the lack of high-quality 3D data and the inability of surface-trained models to generalize to underwater scenes. To address this challenge, an emerging trend is to employ generative models to close the data domain gap. However, existing methods assemble large scenes by stitching independently generated tiles post hoc with separately trained models, while demonstrating heterogeneous landscapes only within individual survey sites. We introduce BenthicFlow, a unified framework based on a single conditional flow-matching model that jointly generates aligned textures and depth maps. A MultiDiffusion-inspired sampling procedure reconciles overlapping windows throughout the generative trajectory, enabling spatially extensible RGBD mosaics without a separate stitching model. The generated mosaics are subsequently lifted into explicit 3D benthic environments using surface-aligned Gaussian surfels. Experiments across geographically distinct survey sites demonstrate that BenthicFlow preserves site-specific appearance while generating coherent, large-scale 3D scenes that closely match the target distributions. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/jacomof/BenthicFlow.

arXiv

An end-to-end-trained vision-language model for native-language prostate pathology report generation

Christian Grashei, Fabian Gülhan, Maximilian Legnar, Fabian Stögbauer, Cleo-Aron Weis, Carolin Mogler, Peter Schüffler

Prostate cancer is among the most frequently diagnosed malignancies worldwide, and structured reporting of each biopsy core burdens pathologists. Existing tools frame this as classification, leaving pathologists to assemble coherent reports, while many slide-level vision-language models rely on English-centric encoders that transfer poorly to other clinical languages. We present a slide-level framework generating prostate biopsy reports that is language-independent by construction: tokenizer and model are trained from scratch, demonstrated here in German. To address paired-data scarcity, an automated pipeline uses a locally deployed large language model to split composite reports into core-specific image-text pairs, yielding 17,344 pairs from 2,402 historical cases without manual annotation. Evaluated for clinical attributes rather than linguistic similarity, the model achieves 96.2% F1 for malignancy detection and 65.2% for Gleason grading, competitive with an FDA-cleared classifier. Grading is further validated on three external cohorts with latent-space augmentation. Institutions can thus train native-language reporting models on their own archives.

arXiv

How Merge-Tolerant Are Vision Transformers for Wheat Phenotyping?

Simon Ravé, Pejman Rasti, David Rousseau

Vision-based wheat phenotyping requires repeated measurements under deployment constraints, from growth-stage recognition to wheat-head counting and organ segmentation. Plain Vision Transformers (ViTs) provide a common architecture for these tasks, but quadratic attention limits high-throughput and edge inference. Training-free token merging is attractive because it can be inserted into trained models without retraining. We provide a systematic benchmark of ToMe and Mutual Pair Merging across growth-stage classification, wheat-head detection, and wheat-organ segmentation, measuring task quality, throughput, token count, and peak GPU memory, with additional Raspberry Pi 5 measurements. The benchmark reveals a clear hierarchy: classification is highly merge-tolerant, while detection and segmentation are constrained by repeated instances, thin organs, dense boundaries, reconstruction, and runtime overhead. Optimized attention backends can erase apparent speedups, so deployment value must be profiled on the target runtime rather than inferred from token count.

arXiv

MIVIFI: Bridging Perspective and Fisheye Domains for Training Multi-View Fisheye Image Generation Models

Matthias Neuwirth-Trapp, Begüm Altunbas, Jiayi Wang, Yan Xia, Maarten Bieshaar, Xinyu Huang, Daniel Cremers

Achieving 360° coverage is critical for the visual perception systems of autonomous vehicles. Fisheye cameras offer a cost-effective solution by enabling full surround coverage with as few as two sensors. However, existing multi-view fisheye datasets are limited, and synthesizing rare corner cases typically requires computationally expensive 3D simulations, hindering the training. While generative models have achieved significant success in standard perspective imagery, their application to wide-angle distortion remains unexplored. In this work, we formally introduce the novel problem of multi-view fisheye image generation conditioned on volumetric semantic representations and present two distinct methods. We first propose SyntheOcc-FE, which adapts the SyntheOcc architecture to fisheye data. While effective, this method is constrained by the scarcity of fisheye datasets, which limits its generalization. To overcome these limitations, we propose our second method, MIVIFI (multi-view fisheye), which leverages cross-domain learning with Equirectangular Projections. By bridging the gap between dataset domains using KITTI-360 fisheye images alongside nuScenes multi-view standard images, our approach enables high-fidelity manipulation of scene content. This framework enables the structural modification of semantic occupancy inputs to introduce or eliminate specific actors and facilitates the rendering of diverse meteorological conditions and illumination scenarios absent in the limited fisheye datasets. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve robust photorealistic multi-view fisheye image generation and highlight the specific advantages of our cross-domain strategy for handling data scarcity.

arXiv

Pointing-VLA: Typed Spatial Grounding Interfaces for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

Xiwen Chen, Zelin Li, Zhiruo Zhou, Huiming Chen, Chenwei Wang, Xiaojun Zhu

Vision-language-action (VLA) models often expose spatial grounding through autoregressive text coordinates or opaque action tokens, creating brittle interfaces between multimodal reasoning and robot execution. We present Pointing-VLA, a typed hidden-state spatial readout built on Embodied-R1. Geometry-specific heads predict normalized points, object-functional grounding (OFG) heatmaps, and visual trajectories without serializing geometry as text. For the evaluated Bridge/WidowX and physical pick-place deployments, an explicit execution contract assigns PICK to source-conditioned OFG and PLACE to Pointing, providing direct stage-aligned spatial targets. Pointing-VLA achieves SOTA performance on Bridge/WidowX, averaging 72.9\% across the evaluated four-task set without Bridge-specific finetuning under collision-enabled CuRobo execution. Pointing and OFG show complementary strengths across native and cross-dataset evaluations. The OFG/contact readout transfers to NORA-1.5, preserving or improving success while reducing recorded controller time by more than 20$\times$; typed heads are also 6.68--6.90$\times$ faster than Embodied-R1 text decoding on a shared external suite. When integrated as spatial guidance for a $π_{0.5}$ action policy, Pointing-VLA raises autonomous real-robot success from 52.7\% to 80.7\% across three visual contexts. These results establish typed spatial readouts as an efficient, inspectable interface between embodied reasoning and robot execution.

arXiv

Bridge Damage Detection from Low-Light UAV Imagery via Degradation-Aware Mixture-of-Experts Enhancement

Hu Wang, Hongxu Pu, Zhiqi Hu, Fangzhou Lin, Wang Wang

Poor illumination obscures small, low-contrast defects in UAV bridge imagery, reducing the reliability and operational flexibility of automated inspection. This paper investigates whether degradation-aware image restoration can improve bridge damage detection under low-light conditions and transfer from synthetic degradations to real inspection scenes. We propose DaL- MoE, a detector-agnostic restoration front end trained with an ISP-aware low-light synthesis pipeline and equipped with degradation-aware guidance estimation and complementary experts for noise suppression, color adjustment, and structural-detail recovery. On paired synthetic data, DaL-MoE achieves 23.12 dB PSNR and 0.8482 SSIM, increasing YOLOv11m box mAP50 from 0.3097 to 0.4923 and mask mAP50 from 0.2281 to 0.3529. On real low-light UAV imagery without paired normal-light references, sim-to-real evaluation shows improved defect visibility and more complete detections than direct inference on raw low-light inputs. Future work will develop low-light-aware bridge damage detectors with stronger cross-scene generalization across bridge sites, imaging conditions, and illumination levels.

arXiv

Training-Free Pseudo-Fusion for Composed Image Retrieval with Diffusion Models and Multimodal Large Language Models

Fan Xu, Luis A. Leiva

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is an emerging paradigm in content-based image retrieval that enables users to formulate compositional queries by combining a reference image with an auxiliary modality, usually text-based. This approach supports fine-grained search where the target image shares structural elements with the user-provided image while incorporating the modifications specified by the auxiliary text. Conventional CIR methods rely on multimodal fusion to combine visual and textual features into a joint query embedding, which requires training modules that align composed queries with the targets. In this work, we propose PeFuse (for pseudo-fusion), a training-free framework that leverages pretrained Diffusion Models and Multimodal Large Language Models to bridge modalities via generative conversion. We introduce two novel strategies: uni-directional and bi-directional conversion, which convert CIR into four single-modality retrieval problems. These methods reformulate CIR as either intra-modal or cross-modal single-query retrieval tasks, bypassing the need for dedicated task-specific training. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that converting CIR into text-to-image retrieval tasks is more effective than alternative conversion strategies, achieving competitive or superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining high flexibility thanks to replaceable components of the conversion pipeline. These results highlight the effectiveness of the pseudo-fusion paradigm for zero-shot CIR. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/StevenXuf/PeFuse4CIR.

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