Daily Papers

Amortized neural inverse design typically remains closed-world: component choices are fixed vocabulary tokens, coordinate grids are frozen at training time, and continuous variables are discretized into sequence tokens. Multilayer optical coatings are an industrially important instance, coupling material sequence, layer thickness and wavelength-dependent response. We present IrisFlow, a query-based, open-vocabulary flow-matching framework instantiated in coatings: the target reflectance/transmittance spectrum, wavelength grid, candidate-material optical constants and layer count are supplied at query time. Candidate materials enter as wavelength-aware optical tokens rather than learned identities; material sequences are sampled by discrete flow matching over the query's candidate bank, thicknesses by continuous flow matching without discretization. A single 136M-parameter model designs 2-100-layer stacks. Across a 224-task benchmark it reconstructs in-distribution targets faithfully and retains same-order accuracy on a 15-material held-out bank without retraining; it reconstructs bands up to 1100 nm beyond its training envelope, designs against analytic application specifications and outperforms an autoregressive baseline on that baseline's material library. With optical constants calibrated to our deposition process, IrisFlow designs four color-displaying coolers, fabricated by ion-assisted evaporation: the three chromatic devices reach a CIEDE2000 color error of 3.1-5.2 while retaining 93-95% solar near-infrared reflectance, demonstrating open-vocabulary design carried through to fabricated coatings.

The inverse problem of multilayer thin-film optical coatings design represents a complex combinatorial-continuous optimization challenge. We present PRISM (Position-encoded Regressive Inverse Spectral Model), a unified decoder-only autoregressive transformer that streamlines this process by jointly predicting discrete material selection and continuous thickness regression within a single backbone. PRISM introduces two primary architectural innovations: (1) spectrum prefix conditioning, which utilizes standard prefix tokens for in-context target injection, and (2) cumulative-depth Rotary Position Embeddings, which encode continuous thickness directly into the positional representation to preserve the physical spatial relationships of the stack. Our benchmarks demonstrate that a PRISM-13M model reduces MAE by over 50\% compared to other transformer baselines while utilizing only one-fifth of the parameters. Furthermore, a 44M-parameter variant achieves state-of-the-art performance (MAE = 0.010) on our in-distribution validation benchmark and operates significantly faster than simulated annealing, offering a highly efficient alternative to classical optimization methods.

Deep learning-based methods have recently been established as fast and accurate surrogate simulators for optical multilayer thin film structures. However, existing methods only work for limited types of structures with different material arrangements, preventing their applications towards diverse and universal structures. Here, we propose the Opto-Layer (OL) Transformer to act as a universal surrogate simulator for enormous types of structures. Combined with the technique of structure serialization, our model can predict accurate reflection and transmission spectra for up to 10^{25} different multilayer structures, while still achieving a six-fold degradation in simulation time compared to physical solvers. Further investigation reveals that the general learning ability comes from the fact that our model first learns the physical embeddings and then uses the self-attention mechanism to capture the hidden relationship of light-matter interaction between each layer.

Optical multilayer thin film structures have been widely used in numerous photonic applications. However, existing inverse design methods have many drawbacks because they either fail to quickly adapt to different design targets, or are difficult to suit for different types of structures, e.g., designing for different materials at each layer. These methods also cannot accommodate versatile design situations under different angles and polarizations. In addition, how to benefit practical fabrications and manufacturing has not been extensively considered yet. In this work, we introduce OptoGPT (Opto Generative Pretrained Transformer), a decoder-only transformer, to solve all these drawbacks and issues simultaneously.

We demonstrate the capability of block-copolymer templating to tune the refractive indices of functional oxides over a broad range by structuring materials on the 20-1000 atoms scale, with simple one-pot synthesis. The presented method is then combined with genetic algorithm-based optimization to explore its application for anti-reflection coating design. Merging these techniques allows for the realization of a minimal two-layer anti-reflection stack for silicon with broadband reflectivity of just 3% from the nominal value of 38%, over a 120° angular span, validated by fabrication followed by optical measurements.

Recent advances in photonic optimization have enabled calculation of performance bounds for a wide range of electromagnetic objectives, albeit restricted to single-material systems. Motivated by growing theoretical interest and fabrication advances, we present a framework to bound the performance of photonic heterostructures and apply it to investigate maximum absorption characteristics of multilayer films and compact, free-form multi-material scatterers. Limits predict trends seen in topology-optimized geometries -- often coming within factors of two of specific designs -- and may be exploited in conjunction with inverse designs to predict when heterostructures are expected to outperform their optimal single-material counterparts.

Understanding how nano- or micro-scale structures and material properties can be optimally configured to attain specific functionalities remains a fundamental challenge. Photonic metasurfaces, for instance, can be spectrally tuned through material choice and structural geometry to achieve unique optical responses. However, existing numerical design methods require prior identification of specific material-structure combinations, or device classes, as the starting point for optimization. As such, a unified solution that simultaneously optimizes across materials and geometries has yet to be realized. To overcome these challenges, we present a global deep learning-based inverse design framework, where a conditional deep convolutional generative adversarial network is trained on colored images encoded with a range of material and structural parameters, including refractive index, plasma frequency, and geometric design. We demonstrate that, in response to target absorption spectra, the network can identify an effective metasurface in terms of its class, materials properties, and overall shape. Furthermore, the model can arrive at multiple design variants with distinct materials and structures that present nearly identical absorption spectra. Our proposed framework is thus an important step towards global photonics and materials design strategies that can identify combinations of device categories, material properties, and geometric parameters which algorithmically deliver a sought functionality.

The thermal noise of mirror coatings for gravitational-wave detectors critically depends on the elastic properties of the constituent materials. Data analyses and theoretical models typically assume each material is homogeneous and isotropic, but isotropy has never been explicitly verified. Using Brillouin light scattering (BLS), we demonstrate for the first time that ion-beam-sputtered SiO2 -- a material still viable for future mirror coatings -- exhibits cylindrical elastic symmetry, with in-plane isotropy but a notable 6% compressive anisotropy along the film normal. This anisotropy remains unchanged after the post-deposition heat treatment currently used in ground-based detectors (500 ^circC, 10 h) but is nearly eliminated at 900 ^circC. Infrared reflectivity experiments support these findings by directly revealing heterogeneities in the distribution of bridging and non-bridging oxygen structures along the growth axis. While BLS measures the real part of the elastic constants at GHz frequencies, the data reveal negligible contributions from mechanical relaxations in the kHz-GHz range, making BLS a valid substitute for low-frequency properties obtained from standard anisotropy-insensitive techniques. Our results highlight that restoring isotropy through heat treatment -- by softening the material, enabling more than 7% out-of-plane expansion, and smoothing out structural heterogeneities -- may play a key role in reducing thermal noise. This proof-of-concept study extends beyond silica, providing critical insights for the design of future coatings.

Generating high-quality, multi-layer transparent images from text prompts can unlock a new level of creative control, allowing users to edit each layer as effortlessly as editing text outputs from LLMs. However, the development of multi-layer generative models lags behind that of conventional text-to-image models due to the absence of a large, high-quality corpus of multi-layer transparent data. In this paper, we address this fundamental challenge by: (i) releasing the first open, ultra-high-fidelity PrismLayers (PrismLayersPro) dataset of 200K (20K) multilayer transparent images with accurate alpha mattes, (ii) introducing a trainingfree synthesis pipeline that generates such data on demand using off-the-shelf diffusion models, and (iii) delivering a strong, open-source multi-layer generation model, ART+, which matches the aesthetics of modern text-to-image generation models. The key technical contributions include: LayerFLUX, which excels at generating high-quality single transparent layers with accurate alpha mattes, and MultiLayerFLUX, which composes multiple LayerFLUX outputs into complete images, guided by human-annotated semantic layout. To ensure higher quality, we apply a rigorous filtering stage to remove artifacts and semantic mismatches, followed by human selection. Fine-tuning the state-of-the-art ART model on our synthetic PrismLayersPro yields ART+, which outperforms the original ART in 60% of head-to-head user study comparisons and even matches the visual quality of images generated by the FLUX.1-[dev] model. We anticipate that our work will establish a solid dataset foundation for the multi-layer transparent image generation task, enabling research and applications that require precise, editable, and visually compelling layered imagery.

Materials combining both a high refractive index and a wide band gap are of great interest for optoelectronic and sensor applications. However, these two properties are typically described by an inverse correlation with high refractive index appearing in small gap materials and vice-versa. Here, we conduct a first-principles high-throughput study on more than 4000 semiconductors (with a special focus on oxides). Our data confirm the general inverse trend between refractive index and band gap but interesting outliers are also identified. The data are then analyzed through a simple model involving two main descriptors: the average optical gap and the effective frequency. The former can be determined directly from the electronic structure of the compounds, but the latter cannot. This calls for further analysis in order to obtain a predictive model. Nonetheless, it turns out that the negative effect of a large band gap on the refractive index can counterbalanced in two ways: (i) by limiting the difference between the direct band gap and the average optical gap which can be realized by a narrow distribution in energy of the optical transitions and (ii) by increasing the effective frequency which can be achieved through either a high number of transitions from the top of the valence band to the bottom of the conduction or a high average probability for these transitions. Focusing on oxides, we use our data to investigate how the chemistry influences this inverse relationship and rationalize why certain classes of materials would perform better. Our findings can be used to search for new compounds in many optical applications both in the linear and non-linear regime (waveguides, optical modulators, laser, frequency converter, etc.).

We introduce neural lithography to address the 'design-to-manufacturing' gap in computational optics. Computational optics with large design degrees of freedom enable advanced functionalities and performance beyond traditional optics. However, the existing design approaches often overlook the numerical modeling of the manufacturing process, which can result in significant performance deviation between the design and the fabricated optics. To bridge this gap, we, for the first time, propose a fully differentiable design framework that integrates a pre-trained photolithography simulator into the model-based optical design loop. Leveraging a blend of physics-informed modeling and data-driven training using experimentally collected datasets, our photolithography simulator serves as a regularizer on fabrication feasibility during design, compensating for structure discrepancies introduced in the lithography process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through two typical tasks in computational optics, where we design and fabricate a holographic optical element (HOE) and a multi-level diffractive lens (MDL) using a two-photon lithography system, showcasing improved optical performance on the task-specific metrics.

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is widely studied for numerous applications and is commercially employed in the semiconductor industry, where planar substrates are the norm. However, the inherent ALD feature of coating virtually any surface geometry with atomistic thickness control is equally attractive for coating particulate materials (supports). In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview of the developments in this decades-old field of ALD on particulate materials, drawing on a bottom-up and quantitative analysis of 799 articles from this field. The obtained dataset is the basis for abstractions regarding reactor types (specifically for particles), coating materials, reactants, supports and processing conditions. Furthermore, the dataset enables direct access to specific processing conditions (for a given material, surface functionality, application etc.) and increases accessibility of the respective literature. We also review fundamental concepts of ALD on particles, and discuss the most common applications, i.e., catalysis (thermo-, electro-, photo-), batteries, luminescent phosphors and healthcare. Finally, we identify historical trends, and provide an outlook on prospective developments.

An electro-optic modulator offers the function of modulating the propagation of light in a material with electric field and enables seamless connection between electronics-based computing and photonics-based communication. The search for materials with large electro-optic coefficients and low optical loss is critical to increase the efficiency and minimize the size of electro-optic devices. We present a semi-empirical method to compute the electro-optic coefficients of ferroelectric materials by combining first-principles density-functional theory calculations with Landau-Devonshire phenomenological modeling. We apply the method to study the electro-optic constants, also called Pockels coefficients, of three paradigmatic ferroelectric oxides: BaTiO3, LiNbO3, and LiTaO3. We present their temperature-, frequency- and strain-dependent electro-optic tensors calculated using our method. The predicted electro-optic constants agree with the experimental results, where available, and provide benchmarks for experimental verification.

Recent advances in deep learning such as neural radiance fields and implicit neural representations have significantly propelled the field of 3D reconstruction. However, accurately reconstructing objects with complex optical properties, such as metals and glass, remains a formidable challenge due to their unique specular and light-transmission characteristics. To facilitate the development of solutions to these challenges, we introduce the OpenMaterial dataset, comprising 1001 objects made of 295 distinct materials-including conductors, dielectrics, plastics, and their roughened variants- and captured under 723 diverse lighting conditions. To this end, we utilized physics-based rendering with laboratory-measured Indices of Refraction (IOR) and generated high-fidelity multiview images that closely replicate real-world objects. OpenMaterial provides comprehensive annotations, including 3D shape, material type, camera pose, depth, and object mask. It stands as the first large-scale dataset enabling quantitative evaluations of existing algorithms on objects with diverse and challenging materials, thereby paving the way for the development of 3D reconstruction algorithms capable of handling complex material properties.

Next-generation nano and quantum devices have increasingly complex 3D structure. As the dimensions of these devices shrink to the nanoscale, their performance is often governed by interface quality or precise chemical or dopant composition. Here we present the first phase-sensitive extreme ultraviolet imaging reflectometer. It combines the excellent phase stability of coherent high-harmonic sources, the unique chemical- and phase-sensitivity of extreme ultraviolet reflectometry, and state-of-the-art ptychography imaging algorithms. This tabletop microscope can non-destructively probe surface topography, layer thicknesses, and interface quality, as well as dopant concentrations and profiles. High-fidelity imaging was achieved by implementing variable-angle ptychographic imaging, by using total variation regularization to mitigate noise and artifacts in the reconstructed image, and by using a high-brightness, high-harmonic source with excellent intensity and wavefront stability. We validate our measurements through multiscale, multimodal imaging to show that this technique has unique advantages compared with other techniques based on electron and scanning-probe microscopies.

The out-of-band energy loss caused by in-built color filters significantly degrades the signal-to-noise ratio and the dynamic range of conventional image sensors, which has restricted the attempt to develop ultrahigh-density imaging devices by merely shrinking the pixel size. This issue will be more serious for security cameras which need to collect visible (VIS) light and near-infrared (NIR) photons as well. The existing solutions mostly explore complex photonic nanostructures, which are often too complicated for production. In this work, we demonstrate a pixel-scale spectral router utilizing two-dimensional (2D) Si3N4 Mie scattering metagratings that can spatially divide NIR (850 nm) and VIS (400-700 nm) light to different pixels at high efficiencies. It has a minimum feature size larger than 360 nm, highly promising for massive production. Compared with the traditional filter design, our router can gain about 42% and 30% signal enhancement for NIR and VIS band, respectively. We show that it also has good polarization insensitivity and incident angle tolerance. The NIR-VIS simultaneous imaging is inspected without any complex reconstruction algorithm. Mode analysis indicates that the multipolar scattering of our Mie-type metagratings provides the necessary degrees of freedom to spatially optimize the routing functions for broadband photons.

Color fundus photography and Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) are the two most cost-effective tools for glaucoma screening. Both two modalities of images have prominent biomarkers to indicate glaucoma suspected. Clinically, it is often recommended to take both of the screenings for a more accurate and reliable diagnosis. However, although numerous algorithms are proposed based on fundus images or OCT volumes in computer-aided diagnosis, there are still few methods leveraging both of the modalities for the glaucoma assessment. Inspired by the success of Retinal Fundus Glaucoma Challenge (REFUGE) we held previously, we set up the Glaucoma grAding from Multi-Modality imAges (GAMMA) Challenge to encourage the development of fundus \& OCT-based glaucoma grading. The primary task of the challenge is to grade glaucoma from both the 2D fundus images and 3D OCT scanning volumes. As part of GAMMA, we have publicly released a glaucoma annotated dataset with both 2D fundus color photography and 3D OCT volumes, which is the first multi-modality dataset for glaucoma grading. In addition, an evaluation framework is also established to evaluate the performance of the submitted methods. During the challenge, 1272 results were submitted, and finally, top-10 teams were selected to the final stage. We analysis their results and summarize their methods in the paper. Since all these teams submitted their source code in the challenge, a detailed ablation study is also conducted to verify the effectiveness of the particular modules proposed. We find many of the proposed techniques are practical for the clinical diagnosis of glaucoma. As the first in-depth study of fundus \& OCT multi-modality glaucoma grading, we believe the GAMMA Challenge will be an essential starting point for future research.

Freestanding thin films, a class of low-dimensional materials capable of maintaining structural integrity without substrates, have emerged as a forefront research focus. Their unique advantages-circumventing substrate clamping, liberating intrinsic material properties, and enabling cross-platform heterogeneous integration-underpin this prominence. This review systematically summarizes core fabrication techniques, including physical delamination (e.g., laser lift-off, mechanical exfoliation) and chemical etching, alongside associated transfer strategies. It further explores the induced strain modulation mechanisms, extreme mechanical properties and interface decoupling effects enabled by these films. Representative case studies demonstrate breakthrough applications in flexible/ultrathin electronics, ultrahigh-sensitivity sensors and the exploration of novel quantum states. Critical challenges regarding scalable fabrication, precise interface control, and long-term stability are analyzed, concluding with prospects for emerging applications in bio-inspired intelligent devices, quantum precision sensing, and brain-inspired neural networks.

Transparent objects are common in daily life, and understanding their multi-layer depth information -- perceiving both the transparent surface and the objects behind it -- is crucial for real-world applications that interact with transparent materials. In this paper, we introduce LayeredDepth, the first dataset with multi-layer depth annotations, including a real-world benchmark and a synthetic data generator, to support the task of multi-layer depth estimation. Our real-world benchmark consists of 1,500 images from diverse scenes, and evaluating state-of-the-art depth estimation methods on it reveals that they struggle with transparent objects. The synthetic data generator is fully procedural and capable of providing training data for this task with an unlimited variety of objects and scene compositions. Using this generator, we create a synthetic dataset with 15,300 images. Baseline models training solely on this synthetic dataset produce good cross-domain multi-layer depth estimation. Fine-tuning state-of-the-art single-layer depth models on it substantially improves their performance on transparent objects, with quadruplet accuracy on our benchmark increased from 55.14% to 75.20%. All images and validation annotations are available under CC0 at https://layereddepth.cs.princeton.edu.

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) aims to restore natural visibility, color fidelity, and structural detail under severe illumination degradation. State-of-the-art (SOTA) LLIE techniques often rely on large models and multi-stage training, limiting practicality for edge deployment. Moreover, their dependence on a single color space introduces instability and visible exposure or color artifacts. To address these, we propose Multinex, an ultra-lightweight structured framework that integrates multiple fine-grained representations within a principled Retinex residual formulation. It decomposes an image into illumination and color prior stacks derived from distinct analytic representations, and learns to fuse these representations into luminance and reflectance adjustments required to correct exposure. By prioritizing enhancement over reconstruction and exploiting lightweight neural operations, Multinex significantly reduces computational cost, exemplified by its lightweight (45K parameters) and nano (0.7K parameters) versions. Extensive benchmarks show that all lightweight variants significantly outperform their corresponding lightweight SOTA models, and reach comparable performance to heavy models. Paper page available at https://albrateanu.github.io/multinex.

Optical design is the process of configuring optical elements to precisely manipulate light for high-fidelity imaging. It is inherently a highly non-convex optimization problem that relies heavily on human heuristic expertise and domain-specific knowledge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) possess extensive optical knowledge, their capabilities in leveraging the knowledge in designing lens system remain significantly constrained. This work represents the first attempt to employ LLMs in the field of optical design. We bridge the expertise gap by enabling users without formal optical training to successfully develop functional lens systems. Concretely, we curate a comprehensive dataset, named OptiDesignQA, which encompasses both classical lens systems sourced from standard optical textbooks and novel configurations generated by automated design algorithms for training and evaluation. Furthermore, we inject domain-specific optical expertise into the LLM through a hybrid objective of full-system synthesis and lens completion. To align the model with optical principles, we employ Group Relative Policy Optimization Done Right (DrGRPO) guided by Optical Lexicographic Reward for physics-driven policy alignment. This reward system incorporates structural format rewards, physical feasibility rewards, light-manipulation accuracy, and LLM-based heuristics. Finally, our model integrates with specialized optical optimization routines for end-to-end fine-tuning and precision refinement. We benchmark our proposed method against both traditional optimization-based automated design algorithms and LLM counterparts, and experimental results show the superiority of our method.

Metasurfaces are ultrathin, engineered materials composed of nanostructures that manipulate light in ways unattainable by natural materials. Recent advances have leveraged computational optimization, machine learning, and deep learning to automate their design. However, existing approaches exhibit two fundamental limitations: (1) they often restrict the model to generating only a subset of design parameters, and (2) they rely on heavily downsampled spectral targets, which compromises both the novelty and accuracy of the resulting structures. The core challenge lies in developing a generative model capable of exploring a large, unconstrained design space while precisely capturing the intricate physical relationships between material parameters and their high-resolution spectral responses. In this paper, we introduce MetaDiT, a novel framework for high-fidelity metasurface design that addresses these limitations. Our approach leverages a robust spectrum encoder pretrained with contrastive learning, providing strong conditional guidance to a Diffusion Transformer-based backbone. Experiments demonstrate that MetaDiT outperforms existing baselines in spectral accuracy, we further validate our method through extensive ablation studies. Our code and model weights will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

We develop a multiexposure image fusion method based on texture features, which exploits the edge preserving and intraregion smoothing property of nonlinear diffusion filters based on partial differential equations (PDE). With the captured multiexposure image series, we first decompose images into base layers and detail layers to extract sharp details and fine details, respectively. The magnitude of the gradient of the image intensity is utilized to encourage smoothness at homogeneous regions in preference to inhomogeneous regions. Then, we have considered texture features of the base layer to generate a mask (i.e., decision mask) that guides the fusion of base layers in multiresolution fashion. Finally, well-exposed fused image is obtained that combines fused base layer and the detail layers at each scale across all the input exposures. Proposed algorithm skipping complex High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) generation and tone mapping steps to produce detail preserving image for display on standard dynamic range display devices. Moreover, our technique is effective for blending flash/no-flash image pair and multifocus images, that is, images focused on different targets.

Existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) methods suffer from the existence of reflective objects, often resulting in blurry or distorted rendering. Instead of calculating a single radiance field, we propose a multi-space neural radiance field (MS-NeRF) that represents the scene using a group of feature fields in parallel sub-spaces, which leads to a better understanding of the neural network toward the existence of reflective and refractive objects. Our multi-space scheme works as an enhancement to existing NeRF methods, with only small computational overheads needed for training and inferring the extra-space outputs. We demonstrate the superiority and compatibility of our approach using three representative NeRF-based models, i.e., NeRF, Mip-NeRF, and Mip-NeRF 360. Comparisons are performed on a novelly constructed dataset consisting of 25 synthetic scenes and 7 real captured scenes with complex reflection and refraction, all having 360-degree viewpoints. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms the existing single-space NeRF methods for rendering high-quality scenes concerned with complex light paths through mirror-like objects. Our code and dataset will be publicly available at https://zx-yin.github.io/msnerf.

We require decomposition methods for the ABCD-matrix formulation in rotationally symmetric paraxial geometric optics when designing a multi-component optical system from a given single paraxial specification (represented by an ABCD matrix) to optimize non-paraxial specifications (e.g., optical aberrations). In this study, we propose two kinds of three-matrix decomposition of ABCD matrices by focusing on the fact that the ABCD matrices have three real-number degrees of freedom. In addition, we formulate a transformation between the two kinds of decomposition for a single matrix, which can increase or decrease the number of refraction surfaces in the optical configuration while keeping the paraxial specifications fixed. This nature is useful for the optical design of multi-component systems with optimized non-paraxial characteristics.

The challenge of image-based 3D reconstruction for glossy objects lies in separating diffuse and specular components on glossy surfaces from captured images, a task complicated by the ambiguity in discerning lighting conditions and material properties using RGB data alone. While state-of-the-art methods rely on tailored and/or high-end equipment for data acquisition, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming, this work introduces a scalable polarization-aided approach that employs cost-effective acquisition tools. By attaching a linear polarizer to readily available RGB cameras, multi-view polarization images can be captured without the need for advance calibration or precise measurements of the polarizer angle, substantially reducing system construction costs. The proposed approach represents polarimetric BRDF, Stokes vectors, and polarization states of object surfaces as neural implicit fields. These fields, combined with the polarizer angle, are retrieved by optimizing the rendering loss of input polarized images. By leveraging fundamental physical principles for the implicit representation of polarization rendering, our method demonstrates superiority over existing techniques through experiments in public datasets and real captured images on both reconstruction and novel view synthesis.

Artificial Neural Networks are computational network models inspired by signal processing in the brain. These models have dramatically improved the performance of many learning tasks, including speech and object recognition. However, today's computing hardware is inefficient at implementing neural networks, in large part because much of it was designed for von Neumann computing schemes. Significant effort has been made to develop electronic architectures tuned to implement artificial neural networks that improve upon both computational speed and energy efficiency. Here, we propose a new architecture for a fully-optical neural network that, using unique advantages of optics, promises a computational speed enhancement of at least two orders of magnitude over the state-of-the-art and three orders of magnitude in power efficiency for conventional learning tasks. We experimentally demonstrate essential parts of our architecture using a programmable nanophotonic processor.

Accurate subsurface scattering solutions require the integration of optical material properties along many complicated light paths. We present a method that learns a simple geometric approximation of random paths in a homogeneous volume of translucent material. The generated representation allows determining the absorption along the path as well as a direct lighting contribution, which is representative of all scattering events along the path. A sequence of conditional variational auto-encoders (CVAEs) is trained to model the statistical distribution of the photon paths inside a spherical region in presence of multiple scattering events. A first CVAE learns to sample the number of scattering events, occurring on a ray path inside the sphere, which effectively determines the probability of the ray being absorbed. Conditioned on this, a second model predicts the exit position and direction of the light particle. Finally, a third model generates a representative sample of photon position and direction along the path, which is used to approximate the contribution of direct illumination due to in-scattering. To accelerate the tracing of the light path through the volumetric medium toward the solid boundary, we employ a sphere-tracing strategy that considers the light absorption and is able to perform statistically accurate next-event estimation. We demonstrate efficient learning using shallow networks of only three layers and no more than 16 nodes. In combination with a GPU shader that evaluates the CVAEs' predictions, performance gains can be demonstrated for a variety of different scenarios. A quality evaluation analyzes the approximation error that is introduced by the data-driven scattering simulation and sheds light on the major sources of error in the accelerated path tracing process.

Direct exo-Earth imaging is a key science goal for astronomy in the next decade. This ambitious task imposes a target contrast of ~10^-7 at wavelengths from I to J-band. In our prior study, we determined that polarization aberrations can limit the achievable contrast to 10^-5 to 10^-6 in the infrared. However, these results assumed a perfect coronagraph coupled to a telescope with an ideal coating on each of the mirrors. In this study we seek to understand the influence of polarization aberrations from segment-to-segment coating variations on coronagraphy and polarimetry. We use the Poke open-source polarization ray tracing package to compute the Jones pupil of each GSMT with spatially-varying coatings applied to the segments. The influence of the resultant polarization aberrations is simulated by propagating the Jones pupil through physical optics models of coronagraphs using HCIPy. After applying wavefront control from an ideal adaptive optics system, we determine that the segment-to-segment variations applied limit the performance of coronagraphy to a raw contrast of approximately 10^-8 in I-band, which is 2-3 orders of magnitude lower the target performance for high-contrast imaging systems on the ground. This is a negligible addition to the nominal polarization aberrations for ground-based systems. We further observe negligible degradation in polarimetric imaging of debris disks from segment-to-segment aberrations above and beyond the impact of nominal polarization aberration.

Accurate 3D reconstruction of objects with reflective, transparent, or low-texture surfaces still remains notoriously challenging. Such materials often violate key assumptions in multi-view reconstruction pipelines, such as photometric consistency and the availability on distinct geometric texture cues. Existing datasets primarily focus on diffuse, textured objects, and therefore provide limited insight into performance under real-world material complexities. We introduce 3DReflecNet, a large-scale hybrid dataset exceeding 22 TB that is specifically designed to benchmark and advance 3D vision methods for these challenging materials. 3DReflecNet combines two types of data: over 120,000 synthetic instances generated via physically-based rendering of more than 12,000 shapes, and over 1,000 real-world objects captured using consumer devices. Together, these data consist of more than 7 million multi-view frames. The dataset spans diverse materials, complex lighting conditions, and a wide range of geometric forms, including shapes generated from both real and LLM-synthesized 2D images using diffusion-based pipelines. To support robust evaluation, we design benchmarks for five core tasks: image matching, structure-from-motion, novel view synthesis, reflection removal, and relighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art methods struggle to maintain accuracy across these settings, highlighting the need for more resilient 3D vision models.

We present PixCell, a neurosymbolic system in which multimodal agents convert a visually presented photonic component into a parametric program over a small domain-specific language (DSL) of geometric primitives. A system enabling deterministic visual verification renders evaluation asymmetrically cheaper than the generation attempt. While models using multi-seed sampling and iterative revision reach a mean best-turn IoU of only 0.416, multimodal agents through PixCell's interface and verifier consistently exceed 0.9 mean IoU, with scores reaching 0.974 and 0.955 across eight component targets while also satisfying source contracts. These results demonstrate that frontier multimodal agents can reliably understand and render executable parametric representations from visual targets. Using these live parameters, cross-stack studies on an interferometer reconstruct primitive programs that satisfy an 8.0 nm free spectral range target and the original footprint constraint on modeled 220-nm SOI, 400-nm SiN, and 400-nm TFLN stacks. PixCell further carries a paper-derived splitter from visual reconstruction through SOI full-wave simulation, producing symmetric propagation and balanced outputs. Finally, the same executable verifier supplies a training reward and dataset used to train a Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model with LoRA and GRPO without supervised demonstrations. On eight training-excluded paper figures, its mean champion IoU rises from 0.422 after eight initial attempts to 0.491 after three verifier-guided revision rounds. These results therefore establish a controlled framework for measuring, retargeting, and improving visual-to-parametric photonic component design.

This study investigates the impact of surface functionalization, oil coating, and oil absorption on droplet impact behavior on textured polydimethylsiloxane(PDMS) substrates. The textured surfaces were fabricated with square micro-posts having spacings of 5 and 20 microns. The PDMS samples were functionalized with octadecyltrichlorosilane (OTS) to improve water repellency. Following, the surfaces were either coated with or allowed to absorb two different lubricants, silicone oil (SO-5cSt) and hexadecane. We performed detailed wetting measurements on both untreated and OTS-functionalized substrates. These measurements provided useful insights into how water and lubricants were retained and distributed under static conditions. High-speed imaging was used to capture droplet impact across a range of Weber numbers. On SO-5cSt-absorbed substrates, droplets consistently showed complete rebound at all Weber numbers, regardless of post spacing. This robust rebound was attributed to the oil's ability to fill the gaps between the posts through capillary action, while also forming a stable lubricating layer above the texture. This thin oil film reduced friction between the droplet and the surface, enabling the droplet to retain sufficient energy for complete rebound. In contrast, hexadecane-absorbed substrates displayed different dynamics. At low Weber numbers, only partial rebound was observed, while at intermediate values, droplets rebounded completely. However, droplets no longer rebounded at higher Weber numbers and remained deposited. Repeated droplet impacts further demonstrated that hexadecane-infused surfaces gradually lost oil from the textured gaps, resulting in a decline in rebound performance over time. This effect was not observed with SO-5cSt, underscoring the importance of lubricant affinity and stability.

The promising coverage and spectral efficiency gains of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are attracting increasing interest. In order to realize these surfaces in practice, however, several challenges need to be addressed. One of these main challenges is how to configure the reflecting coefficients on these passive surfaces without requiring massive channel estimation or beam training overhead. Earlier work suggested leveraging supervised learning tools to design the IRS reflection matrices. While this approach has the potential of reducing the beam training overhead, it requires collecting large datasets for training the neural network models. In this paper, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning framework for predicting the IRS reflection matrices with minimal training overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed online learning framework can converge to the optimal rate that assumes perfect channel knowledge. This represents an important step towards realizing a standalone IRS operation, where the surface configures itself without any control from the infrastructure.

Optical resonances in nanostructures enable strong enhancement of nonlinear processes at the nanoscale, such as second-harmonic generation (SHG), with high-Q modes providing intensified light--matter interactions and sharp spectral selectivity for applications in filtering, sensing, and nonlinear spectroscopy. Thanks to the recent advances in thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) technology, these key features can be now translated to lithium niobate for realizing novel nanoscale nonlinear optical platforms. Here, we demonstrate a large-area metasurface, realized by scalable nanoimprint lithography, comprising a slanted titanium dioxide (TiO_2) nanograting on etchless TFLN for efficient narrowband SHG. This is enabled by the optimal coupling of quasi-bound state in the continuum (q-BIC) modes with a narrowband pulsed laser pump. The demonstrated normalized SHG efficiency is 0.15%,cm^2/GW, which is among the largest reported for LN metasurfaces. The low pump peak intensity (3.64~kW/cm^2) employed, which enables SHG even by continuous-wave pumping, allows envisioning integrated and portable photonic applications. SHG wavelength tuning from 870 to 920~nm with stable output power as well as polarization control is also achieved by off-normal pump illumination. This versatile platform opens new opportunities for sensing, THz generation and detection, and ultrafast electro-optic modulation of nonlinear optical signals.

Within the paradigm of metamaterials and metasurfaces, electromagnetic properties of composite materials can be engineered by shaping or modulating their constituents, so-called meta-atoms. Synthesis and analysis of complex-shape meta-atoms with general polarization properties is a challenging task. In this paper, we demonstrate that the most general response can be conceptually decomposed into a set of basic, fundamental polarization phenomena, which enables immediate all-direction characterization of electromagnetic properties of arbitrary linear metamaterials and metasurfaces. The proposed platform of modular characterization (called "materiatronics") is tested on several examples of bianisotropic and nonreciprocal meta-atoms. As a demonstration of the potential of the modular analysis, we use it to design a single-layer metasurface of vanishing thickness with unitary circular dichroism. The analysis approach developed in this paper is supported by a ready-to-use computational code and can be further extended to meta-atoms engineered for other types of wave interactions, such as acoustics and mechanics.

Artificial intelligence is transforming computational materials science, improving the prediction of material properties, and accelerating the discovery of novel materials. Recently, publicly available material data repositories have grown rapidly. This growth encompasses not only more materials, but also a greater variety and quantity of their associated properties. Existing machine learning efforts in materials science focus primarily on single-modality tasks, i.e., relationships between materials and a single physical property, thus not taking advantage of the rich and multimodal set of material properties. Here, we introduce Multimodal Learning for Materials (MultiMat), which enables self-supervised multi-modality training of foundation models for materials. We demonstrate our framework's potential using data from the Materials Project database on multiple axes: (i) MultiMat achieves state-of-the-art performance for challenging material property prediction tasks; (ii) MultiMat enables novel and accurate material discovery via latent space similarity, enabling screening for stable materials with desired properties; and (iii) MultiMat encodes interpretable emergent features that may provide novel scientific insights.

Foundation models are transforming Earth Observation (EO), yet the diversity of EO sensors and modalities makes a single universal model unrealistic. Multiple specialized EO foundation models (EOFMs) will likely coexist, making efficient knowledge transfer across modalities essential. Most existing EO pretraining relies on masked image modeling, which emphasizes local reconstruction but provides limited control over global semantic structure. To address this, we propose a dual-teacher contrastive distillation framework for multispectral imagery that aligns the student's pretraining objective with the contrastive self-distillation paradigm of modern optical vision foundation models (VFMs). Our approach combines a multispectral teacher with an optical VFM teacher, enabling coherent cross-modal representation learning. Experiments across diverse optical and multispectral benchmarks show that our model adapts to multispectral data without compromising performance on optical-only inputs, achieving state-of-the-art results in both settings, with an average improvement of 3.64 percentage points in semantic segmentation, 1.2 in change detection, and 1.31 in classification tasks. This demonstrates that contrastive distillation provides a principled and efficient approach to scalable representation learning across heterogeneous EO data sources. Project page: magenta{https://wolfilip.github.io/DEO/}.

Manual modeling of material parameters and 3D geometry is a time consuming yet essential task in the gaming and film industries. While recent advances in 3D reconstruction have enabled accurate approximations of scene geometry and appearance, these methods often fall short in relighting scenarios due to the lack of precise, spatially varying material parameters. At the same time, diffusion models operating on 2D images have shown strong performance in predicting physically based rendering (PBR) properties such as albedo, roughness, and metallicity. However, transferring these 2D material maps onto reconstructed 3D geometry remains a significant challenge. We propose a framework for fusing 2D material data into 3D geometry using a combination of novel learning-based and projection-based approaches. We begin by reconstructing scene geometry via Gaussian Splatting. From the input images, a diffusion model generates 2D maps for albedo, roughness, and metallic parameters. Any existing diffusion model that can convert images or videos to PBR materials can be applied. The predictions are further integrated into the 3D representation either by optimizing an image-based loss or by directly projecting the material parameters onto the Gaussians using Gaussian ray tracing. To enhance fine-scale accuracy and multi-view consistency, we further introduce a light-weight neural refinement step (Neural Merger), which takes ray-traced material features as input and produces detailed adjustments. Our results demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform existing techniques in both quantitative metrics and perceived visual realism. This enables more accurate, relightable, and photorealistic renderings from reconstructed scenes, significantly improving the realism and efficiency of asset creation workflows in content production pipelines.

Artificial neural networks have become a staple computing technique in many fields. Yet, they present fundamental differences with classical computing hardware in the way they process information. Photonic implementations of neural network architectures potentially offer fundamental advantages over their electronic counterparts in terms of speed, processing parallelism, scalability and energy efficiency. Scalable and high performance photonic neural networks (PNNs) have been demonstrated, yet they remain scarce. In this work, we study the performance of such a scalable, fully parallel and autonomous PNN based on a large area vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (LA-VCSEL). We show how the performance varies with different physical parameters, namely, injection wavelength, injection power, and bias current. Furthermore, we link these physical parameters to the general computational measures of consistency and dimensionality. We present a general method of gauging dimensionality in high dimensional nonlinear systems subject to noise, which could be applied to many systems in the context of neuromorphic computing. Our work will inform future implementations of spatially multiplexed VCSEL PNNs.

In recent years, the demand for hyperspectral imaging devices has grown significantly, driven by their ability of capturing high-resolution spectral information. Among the several possible optical designs for acquiring hyperspectral images, there is a growing interest in interferometric spectral imaging systems based on division of aperture. These systems have the advantage of capturing snapshot acquisitions while maintaining a compact design. However, they require a careful calibration to operate properly. In this work, we present the interferometer response characterization algorithm (IRCA), a robust three-step procedure designed to characterize the transmittance response of multi-aperture imaging spectrometers based on the interferometry of Fabry-Perot. Additionally, we propose a formulation of the image formation model for such devices suitable to estimate the parameters of interest by considering the model under various regimes of finesse. The proposed algorithm processes the image output obtained from a set of monochromatic light sources and refines the results using nonlinear regression after an ad-hoc initialization. Through experimental analysis conducted on four different prototypes from the Image SPectrometer On Chip (ImSPOC) family, we validate the performance of our approach for characterization. The associated source code for this paper is available at https://github.com/danaroth83/irca.

Metalenses offer significant potential for ultra-compact computational imaging but face challenges from complex optical degradation and computational restoration difficulties. Existing methods typically rely on precise optical calibration or massive paired datasets, which are non-trivial for real-world imaging systems. Furthermore, a lack of control over the inference process often results in undesirable hallucinated artifacts. We introduce Degradation-Modeled Multipath Diffusion for tunable metalens photography, leveraging powerful natural image priors from pretrained models instead of large datasets. Our framework uses positive, neutral, and negative-prompt paths to balance high-frequency detail generation, structural fidelity, and suppression of metalens-specific degradation, alongside pseudo data augmentation. A tunable decoder enables controlled trade-offs between fidelity and perceptual quality. Additionally, a spatially varying degradation-aware attention (SVDA) module adaptively models complex optical and sensor-induced degradation. Finally, we design and build a millimeter-scale MetaCamera for real-world validation. Extensive results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving high-fidelity and sharp image reconstruction. More materials: https://dmdiff.github.io/.

Metalens is an emerging optical system with an irreplaceable merit in that it can be manufactured in ultra-thin and compact sizes, which shows great promise of various applications such as medical imaging and augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR). Despite its advantage in miniaturization, its practicality is constrained by severe aberrations and distortions, which significantly degrade the image quality. Several previous arts have attempted to address different types of aberrations, yet most of them are mainly designed for the traditional bulky lens and not convincing enough to remedy harsh aberrations of the metalens. While there have existed aberration correction methods specifically for metalens, they still fall short of restoration quality. In this work, we propose MetaFormer, an aberration correction framework for metalens-captured images, harnessing Vision Transformers (ViT) that has shown remarkable restoration performance in diverse image restoration tasks. Specifically, we devise a Multiple Adaptive Filters Guidance (MAFG), where multiple Wiener filters enrich the degraded input images with various noise-detail balances, enhancing output restoration quality. In addition, we introduce a Spatial and Transposed self-Attention Fusion (STAF) module, which aggregates features from spatial self-attention and transposed self-attention modules to further ameliorate aberration correction. We conduct extensive experiments, including correcting aberrated images and videos, and clean 3D reconstruction from the degraded images. The proposed method outperforms the previous arts by a significant margin. We further fabricate a metalens and verify the practicality of MetaFormer by restoring the images captured with the manufactured metalens in the wild. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://benhenryl.github.io/MetaFormer

Generative models have excelled in RGB synthesis, but real-world applications require RGBA manipulation. This has led to a fragmented landscape: specialized, single-task models handle alpha but lack versatility, while unified multi-task frameworks are confined to the RGB domain. To bridge this critical gap, we propose OmniAlpha, the first unified, multi-task generative framework for sequence-to-sequence RGBA image generation and editing. Its architecture features MSRoPE-BiL, a novel RoPE method with a bi-directionally extendable layer axis for its Diffusion Transformer (DiT) backbone, enabling the concurrent processing of multiple input and target RGBA layers. To power this framework, we introduce AlphaLayers, a new dataset of 1,000 high-quality, multi-layer triplets, built via a novel automated synthesis and filter pipeline. Jointly training OmniAlpha on this dataset across a comprehensive suite of 21 diverse tasks, extensive experiments demonstrate that our unified approach consistently outperforms strong, specialized baselines. Most notably, OmniAlpha achieves a dramatic 84.8% relative reduction in SAD for mask-free matting on AIM-500 and wins over 90% of human preferences in layer-conditioned completion. Our work proves that a unified, multi-task model can learn a superior shared representation for RGBA, paving the way for more powerful, layer-aware generative systems.

We report an optical method of generating arbitrary polarization states by manipulating the thicknesses of a pair of uniaxial birefringent plates, the optical axes of which are set at a crossing angle of {\pi}/4. The method has the remarkable feature of being able to generate a distribution of arbitrary polarization states in a group of highly discrete spectra without spatially separating the individual spectral components. The target polarization-state distribution is obtained as an optimal solution through an exploration. Within a realistic exploration range, a sufficient number of near-optimal solutions are found. This property is also reproduced well by a concise model based on a distribution of exploration points on a Poincar\'e sphere, showing that the number of near-optimal solutions behaves according to a power law with respect to the number of spectral components of concern. As a typical example of an application, by applying this method to a set of phase-locked highly discrete spectra, we numerically demonstrate the continuous generation of a vector-like optical electric field waveform, the helicity of which is alternated within a single optical cycle in the time domain.

Training and evaluation of state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms for reliable shallow depth of field (DoF) rendering and defocus deblurring remain constrained by a persistent lack of large-scale, full-frame, high fidelity, real-image datasets. Optical effects of shallow DoF and defocus blur depend intimately on camera optical configuration set with focal length and aperture; requiring rigorous evaluation of the models when these parameters systematically change. Further, modern applications such as AR, VR, smartphones, industrial robots, etc. deploy stereo or multi-camera systems. We present MODEST - the first ultra-high-resolution(5472x3648px, 20MP), multi-optics depth of field stereo DSLR dataset that methodically varies focal length and aperture for a series of complex, real-world scenes, capturing the optical realism and complexity of professional camera systems. With 20,000 images across 50 distinct optical configurations, focal length in 28-70mm, aperture in f/22-f/2.8 for multiple stereo viewpoints for 10 scenes; this ultra-high-resolution, full-range optics coverage enables controlled analysis of geometric and optical effects for shallow DoF rendering and defocus deblurring. Each scene is curated to have challenging visual elements: reflective surfaces, transparent glass walls, fine-grained details, point lights, and multi-scale depth illusions. In addition, we provide intrinsics and extrinsics calibration images to support ever-evolving calibration methods. We evaluate several SOTA DoF and defocus deblurring methods and demonstrate failure cases and limitations. Our comprehensive tuning analysis demonstrates how MODEST evaluates sensitivity of the SOTA DoF models for the actual focal configuration of input images. This work attempts to bridge the realism gap between synthetic, low-resolution training data and inference generalization on high-resolution real-camera optics.

Recent advancements in large generative models, particularly diffusion-based methods, have significantly enhanced the capabilities of image editing. However, achieving precise control over image composition tasks remains a challenge. Layered representations, which allow for independent editing of image components, are essential for user-driven content creation, yet existing approaches often struggle to decompose image into plausible layers with accurately retained transparent visual effects such as shadows and reflections. We propose LayerDecomp, a generative framework for image layer decomposition which outputs photorealistic clean backgrounds and high-quality transparent foregrounds with faithfully preserved visual effects. To enable effective training, we first introduce a dataset preparation pipeline that automatically scales up simulated multi-layer data with synthesized visual effects. To further enhance real-world applicability, we supplement this simulated dataset with camera-captured images containing natural visual effects. Additionally, we propose a consistency loss which enforces the model to learn accurate representations for the transparent foreground layer when ground-truth annotations are not available. Our method achieves superior quality in layer decomposition, outperforming existing approaches in object removal and spatial editing tasks across several benchmarks and multiple user studies, unlocking various creative possibilities for layer-wise image editing. The project page is https://rayjryang.github.io/LayerDecomp.

Recent image generation models have shown impressive progress, yet they often struggle to yield controllable and consistent results when users attempt to edit specific elements within an existing image. Layered representations enable flexible, user-driven content creation, but existing approaches often fail to produce layers with coherent compositing relationships, and their object layers typically lack realistic visual effects such as shadows and reflections. To overcome these limitations, we propose LASAGNA, a novel, unified framework that generates an image jointly with its composing layers--a photorealistic background and a high-quality transparent foreground with compelling visual effects. Unlike prior work, LASAGNA efficiently learns correct image composition from a wide range of conditioning inputs--text prompts, foreground, background, and location masks--offering greater controllability for real-world applications. To enable this, we introduce LASAGNA-48K, a new dataset composed of clean backgrounds and RGBA foregrounds with physically grounded visual effects. We also propose LASAGNABENCH, the first benchmark for layer editing. We demonstrate that LASAGNA excels in generating highly consistent and coherent results across multiple image layers simultaneously, enabling diverse post-editing applications that accurately preserve identity and visual effects. LASAGNA-48K and LASAGNABENCH will be publicly released to foster open research in the community. The project page is https://rayjryang.github.io/LASAGNA-Page/.

Methylammonium lead iodide perovskite has attracted intensive interest for its diverse optoelectronic applications. However, most studies to date have been limited to bulk thin films that are difficult to implement for integrated device arrays because of their incompatibility with typical lithography processes. We report the first patterned growth of regular arrays of perovskite microplate crystals for functional electronics and optoelectronics. We show that large arrays of lead iodide microplates can be grown from an aqueous solution through a seeded growth process and can be further intercalated with methylammonium iodide to produce perovskite crystals. Structural and optical characterizations demonstrate that the resulting materials display excellent crystalline quality and optical properties. We further show that perovskite crystals can be selectively grown on prepatterned electrode arrays to create independently addressable photodetector arrays and functional field effect transistors. The ability to grow perovskite microplates and to precisely place them at specific locations offers a new material platform for the fundamental investigation of the electronic and optical properties of perovskite materials and opens a pathway for integrated electronic and optoelectronic systems.

Designing nanophotonic structures traditionally grapples with the complexities of discrete parameters, such as real materials, often resorting to costly global optimization methods. This paper introduces an approach that leverages generative deep learning to map discrete parameter sets into a continuous latent space, enabling direct gradient-based optimization. For scenarios with non-differentiable physics evaluation functions, a neural network is employed as a differentiable surrogate model. The efficacy of this methodology is demonstrated by optimizing the directional scattering properties of core-shell nanoparticles composed of a selection of realistic materials. We derive suggestions for core-shell geometries with strong forward scattering and minimized backscattering. Our findings reveal significant improvements in computational efficiency and performance when compared to global optimization techniques. Beyond nanophotonics design problems, this framework holds promise for broad applications across all types of inverse problems constrained by discrete variables.

3D reconstruction and relighting of objects made from scattering materials present a significant challenge due to the complex light transport beneath the surface. 3D Gaussian Splatting introduced high-quality novel view synthesis at real-time speeds. While 3D Gaussians efficiently approximate an object's surface, they fail to capture the volumetric properties of subsurface scattering. We propose a framework for optimizing an object's shape together with the radiance transfer field given multi-view OLAT (one light at a time) data. Our method decomposes the scene into an explicit surface represented as 3D Gaussians, with a spatially varying BRDF, and an implicit volumetric representation of the scattering component. A learned incident light field accounts for shadowing. We optimize all parameters jointly via ray-traced differentiable rendering. Our approach enables material editing, relighting and novel view synthesis at interactive rates. We show successful application on synthetic data and introduce a newly acquired multi-view multi-light dataset of objects in a light-stage setup. Compared to previous work we achieve comparable or better results at a fraction of optimization and rendering time while enabling detailed control over material attributes. Project page https://sss.jdihlmann.com/

Text-to-image diffusion generative models can generate high quality images at the cost of tedious prompt engineering. Controllability can be improved by introducing layout conditioning, however existing methods lack layout editing ability and fine-grained control over object attributes. The concept of multi-layer generation holds great potential to address these limitations, however generating image instances concurrently to scene composition limits control over fine-grained object attributes, relative positioning in 3D space and scene manipulation abilities. In this work, we propose a novel multi-stage generation paradigm that is designed for fine-grained control, flexibility and interactivity. To ensure control over instance attributes, we devise a novel training paradigm to adapt a diffusion model to generate isolated scene components as RGBA images with transparency information. To build complex images, we employ these pre-generated instances and introduce a multi-layer composite generation process that smoothly assembles components in realistic scenes. Our experiments show that our RGBA diffusion model is capable of generating diverse and high quality instances with precise control over object attributes. Through multi-layer composition, we demonstrate that our approach allows to build and manipulate images from highly complex prompts with fine-grained control over object appearance and location, granting a higher degree of control than competing methods.

This paper addresses the limitations of physical models in the current field of image dehazing by proposing an innovative dehazing network (CL2S). Building on the DM2F model, it identifies issues in its ablation experiments and replaces the original logarithmic function model with a trigonometric (sine) model. This substitution aims to better fit the complex and variable distribution of haze. The approach also integrates the atmospheric scattering model and other elementary functions to enhance dehazing performance. Experimental results demonstrate that CL2S achieves outstanding performance on multiple dehazing datasets, particularly in maintaining image details and color authenticity. Additionally, systematic ablation experiments supplementing DM2F validate the concerns raised about DM2F and confirm the necessity and effectiveness of the functional components in the proposed CL2S model. Our code is available at https://github.com/YesianRohn/CL2S, where the corresponding pre-trained models can also be accessed.

We propose a method for converting a single RGB-D input image into a 3D photo - a multi-layer representation for novel view synthesis that contains hallucinated color and depth structures in regions occluded in the original view. We use a Layered Depth Image with explicit pixel connectivity as underlying representation, and present a learning-based inpainting model that synthesizes new local color-and-depth content into the occluded region in a spatial context-aware manner. The resulting 3D photos can be efficiently rendered with motion parallax using standard graphics engines. We validate the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of challenging everyday scenes and show fewer artifacts compared with the state of the arts.

We present a generative framework for inverse design of five-layer transmissive Huygens' metasurfaces (HMSs), addressing a longstanding challenge in achieving full-phase, high-efficiency unit cell designs with minimal full-wave simulations. The key to achieving this is our reliance on the field-based semianalytical (SA) scheme developed in Part I of this paper, which allows rapid and highly effective synthesis of such multilayer composites, however with limited accuracy. To overcome the prohibitive data demands of traditional pipelines, we employ Mamba, a selective state space model well suited for long-range sequence modeling as the backbone of our learning framework. A bidirectional Mamba (Bi-Mamba) forward surrogate is first trained on SA-generated data and subsequently fine-tuned with full-wave CST samples. An ablation over a 1080-sample CST pool shows that as few as 270 full-wave calibration samples suffice to reach near-CST-level agreement at a fraction of the simulation cost. An autoregressive Mamba inverse generator is subsequently trained on surrogate-augmented data, treating unit-cell synthesis as a sequential generation task. The resulting one-to-many generative model produces diverse unit cell geometries conditioned on target scattering responses. It achieves CST-validated designs with field transmission magnitude 0.9 across the full 0-2π phase range at 20 GHz. Moreover, a CST-calibrated surrogate trained to accurately predict frequency responses (18-22 GHz) enables functional post-selection of inverse generated designs. Together, the hybrid SA-generative methodology in this two-part compilation establishes a scalable and data-efficient solution for multilayer HMS synthesis, with natural extensions toward broadband, oblique-incidence, and higher-dimensional electromagnetic inverse-design problems.

Multimodal adversarial attacks for dense prediction remain largely underexplored. In particular, visual-infrared (VI) perception systems introduce unique challenges due to heterogeneous spectral characteristics and modality-specific intensity distributions. Existing adversarial patch methods are primarily designed for single-modal inputs and fail to account for crossspectral inconsistencies, leading to reduced attack effectiveness and poor stealthiness when applied to VI dense prediction models. To address these challenges, we propose a joint position-color optimization framework (AP-PCO) for generating adversarial patches in visual-infrared settings. The proposed method optimizes patch placement and color composition simultaneously using a fitness function derived from model outputs, enabling a single patch to perturb both visible and infrared modalities. To further bridge spectral discrepancies, we introduce a crossmodal color adaptation strategy that constrains patch appearance according to infrared grayscale characteristics while maintaining strong perturbations in the visible domain, thereby reducing cross-spectral saliency. The optimization procedure operates without requiring internal model information, supporting flexible black-box attacks. Extensive experiments on visual-infrared dense prediction tasks demonstrate that the proposed AP-PCO achieves consistently strong attack performance across multiple architectures, providing a practical benchmark for robustness evaluation in VI perception systems.

Thermal radiation and luminescence are among the most ubiquitous sources of light, yet their properties are difficult to engineer due to their incoherent nature. Recent advances in thermal emission control have endowed heat-generated light with spatial and temporal coherence, as well as control over its polarization, by judiciously patterning periodic arrays of nanostructures. However, custom wavefront engineering of incoherent light has remained an open challenge, as it requires not only sufficient spatial and temporal coherence but also arbitrary local phase control, which experimentally translates into sustaining long-range lattice resonances in aperiodic systems while maintaining their robustness against local phase perturbations. In this work, we address this longstanding limitation and demonstrate programmable vectorial control over the thermal emission wavefront from single-layer aperiodic nonlocal metasurfaces, realized by manipulating local geometric phases across a collective delocalized resonance. We exemplify the wavefront-shaping capabilities of our approach by demonstrating thermal beam steering, spin-momentum-locked thermal focusing and the generation of a thermal vectorial hologram, providing custom spatial and spectral control over thermal light. Our platform addresses challenges in thermal emission engineering and provides a route for light generation and control without the need for external coherent sources or bulky setups. Future work may extend this design principle to other incoherent emission systems, such as photo- and electroluminescence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is vital in ophthalmology, tackling tasks like diagnosis, classification, and visual question answering (VQA). However, existing AI models in this domain often require extensive annotation and are task-specific, limiting their clinical utility. While recent developments have brought about foundation models for ophthalmology, they are limited by the need to train separate weights for each imaging modality, preventing a comprehensive representation of multi-modal features. This highlights the need for versatile foundation models capable of handling various tasks and modalities in ophthalmology. To address this gap, we present EyeFound, a multimodal foundation model for ophthalmic images. Unlike existing models, EyeFound learns generalizable representations from unlabeled multimodal retinal images, enabling efficient model adaptation across multiple applications. Trained on 2.78 million images from 227 hospitals across 11 ophthalmic modalities, EyeFound facilitates generalist representations and diverse multimodal downstream tasks, even for detecting challenging rare diseases. It outperforms previous work RETFound in diagnosing eye diseases, predicting systemic disease incidents, and zero-shot multimodal VQA. EyeFound provides a generalizable solution to improve model performance and lessen the annotation burden on experts, facilitating widespread clinical AI applications for retinal imaging.

Multi-exposure fusion (MEF) expands the luminance range beyond what a single exposure can capture. Combining images taken at different exposure levels requires handling geometric differences while naturally merging their complementary brightness information. It often demands generative completion where details are missing. Diffusion-based generative methods address these challenges, however, they are computationally expensive and struggle to preserve fine structures in saturated regions. We propose LIIFusion, a coarse-to-fine framework that balances fusion quality and efficiency in generative MEF. The coarse stage performs low resolution generative fusion, enhanced by an adaptive exposure correction that recovers structure lost in saturated over-exposed areas. The fine stage adapts a local implicit image function into a multi-exposure fusion function: conditioned on the HR OE/UE sources and the coarse output, it queries arbitrary target coordinates and fuses source evidence regardless of the HR input resolution. LIIFusion achieves up to 3.5times speed-up over existing generative methods while maintaining or improving structural fidelity and perceptual quality. We believe this framework provides an effective pathway toward making generative MEF more practical in real-world applications.

Developing ceramic glazes is a costly, time-consuming process of trial and error due to complex chemistry, placing a significant burden on independent artists. While recent advances in multimodal AI offer a modern solution, the field lacks the large-scale datasets required to train these models. We propose GlazyBench, the first dataset for AI-assisted glaze design. Comprising 23,148 real glaze formulations, GlazyBench supports two primary tasks: predicting post-firing surface properties, such as color and transparency, from raw materials, and generating accurate visual representations of the glaze based on these properties. We establish comprehensive baselines for property prediction using traditional machine learning and large language models, alongside image generation benchmarks using deep generative and large multimodal models. Our experiments demonstrate promising yet challenging results. GlazyBench pioneers a new research direction in AI-assisted material design, providing a standardized benchmark for systematic evaluation.

We introduce a platform to achieve ultra-strong coupling (USC) between light and matter using widely available materials. USC is a light-matter interaction regime characterized by coupling strengths exceeding 10% of the ground state energy. It gives rise to novel physical phenomena, such as efficient single-photon coupling and quantum gates, with applications in quantum sensing, nonlinear optics, and low-threshold lasing. Although early demonstrations in plasmonic systems have been realized, achieving USC in dielectric platforms, which offer lower losses and high Q-factors, remains challenging due to typically low mode overlap between the photonic field and the material resonance. Here we leverage dielectric dual gradient metasurfaces supporting quasi-bound states in the continuum to spatially encode both the spectral and coupling parameter space and demonstrate USC to an epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) mode in an ultra-thin SiO2 layer. The strong out-of-plane electric fields in our tapered bar structure overlap exceptionally well with those of the ENZ mode, resulting in a normalized coupling strength of 0.101 and a mode splitting equivalent to 20% of the ENZ mode energy; a four- to five-fold increase compared to previous approaches. The strong field confinement of our approach opens new possibilities for compact and scalable polaritonic devices, such as tunable frequency converters and low-energy optical modulators.

Autostereoscopic display, despite decades of development, has not achieved extensive application, primarily due to the daunting challenge of 3D content creation for non-specialists. The emergence of Radiance Field as an innovative 3D representation has markedly revolutionized the domains of 3D reconstruction and generation. This technology greatly simplifies 3D content creation for common users, broadening the applicability of Light Field Displays (LFDs). However, the combination of these two fields remains largely unexplored. The standard paradigm to create optimal content for parallax-based light field displays demands rendering at least 45 slightly shifted views preferably at high resolution per frame, a substantial hurdle for real-time rendering. We introduce DirectL, a novel rendering paradigm for Radiance Fields on 3D displays. We thoroughly analyze the interweaved mapping of spatial rays to screen subpixels, precisely determine the light rays entering the human eye, and propose subpixel repurposing to significantly reduce the pixel count required for rendering. Tailored for the two predominant radiance fields--Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), we propose corresponding optimized rendering pipelines that directly render the light field images instead of multi-view images. Extensive experiments across various displays and user study demonstrate that DirectL accelerates rendering by up to 40 times compared to the standard paradigm without sacrificing visual quality. Its rendering process-only modification allows seamless integration into subsequent radiance field tasks. Finally, we integrate DirectL into diverse applications, showcasing the stunning visual experiences and the synergy between LFDs and Radiance Fields, which unveils tremendous potential for commercialization applications. direct-l.github.io{Project Homepage

It is highly desired but challenging to acquire high-quality photos with clear content in low-light environments. Although multi-image processing methods (using burst, dual-exposure, or multi-exposure images) have made significant progress in addressing this issue, they typically focus on specific restoration or enhancement problems, and do not fully explore the potential of utilizing multiple images. Motivated by the fact that multi-exposure images are complementary in denoising, deblurring, high dynamic range imaging, and super-resolution, we propose to utilize exposure bracketing photography to get a high-quality image by combining these tasks in this work. Due to the difficulty in collecting real-world pairs, we suggest a solution that first pre-trains the model with synthetic paired data and then adapts it to real-world unlabeled images. In particular, a temporally modulated recurrent network (TMRNet) and self-supervised adaptation method are proposed. Moreover, we construct a data simulation pipeline to synthesize pairs and collect real-world images from 200 nighttime scenarios. Experiments on both datasets show that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art multi-image processing ones. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/cszhilu1998/BracketIRE.

Retinal imaging has emerged as a powerful, non-invasive modality for detecting and quantifying biomarkers of systemic diseases-ranging from diabetes and hypertension to Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular disorders but current insights remain dispersed across platforms and specialties. Recent technological advances in optical coherence tomography (OCT/OCTA) and adaptive optics (AO) now deliver ultra-high-resolution scans (down to 5 {\mu}m ) with superior contrast and spatial integration, allowing early identification of microvascular abnormalities and neurodegenerative changes. At the same time, AI-driven and machine learning (ML) algorithms have revolutionized the analysis of large-scale retinal datasets, increasing sensitivity and specificity; for example, deep learning models achieve > 90 \% sensitivity for diabetic retinopathy and AUC = 0.89 for the prediction of cardiovascular risk from fundus photographs. The proliferation of mobile health technologies and telemedicine platforms further extends access, reduces costs, and facilitates community-based screening and longitudinal monitoring. Despite these breakthroughs, translation into routine practice is hindered by heterogeneous imaging protocols, limited external validation of AI models, and integration challenges within clinical workflows. In this review, we systematically synthesize the latest OCT/OCT and AO developments, AI/ML approaches, and mHealth/Tele-ophthalmology initiatives and quantify their diagnostic performance across disease domains. Finally, we propose a roadmap for multicenter protocol standardization, prospective validation trials, and seamless incorporation of retinal screening into primary and specialty care pathways-paving the way for precision prevention, early intervention, and ongoing treatment of life-threatening systemic diseases.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a fundamental tool for assisting clinicians in analyzing ophthalmic images, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT). However, developing AI models often requires extensive annotation, and existing models tend to underperform on independent, unseen data. Foundation models (FMs), large AI models trained on vast unlabeled datasets, have shown promise in overcoming these challenges. Nonetheless, available FMs for ophthalmology lack extensive validation, especially for segmentation tasks, and focus on a single imaging modality. In this context, we propose MIRAGE, a novel multimodal FM for the analysis of OCT and scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) images. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation benchmark with OCT/SLO classification and segmentation tasks. The comparison with general and specialized FMs and segmentation methods shows the superiority of MIRAGE in both types of tasks, highlighting its suitability as a basis for the development of robust AI systems for retinal OCT image analysis. Both MIRAGE and the evaluation benchmark are publicly available: https://github.com/j-morano/MIRAGE.

Characterizing materials with electron micrographs poses significant challenges for automated labeling due to the complex nature of nanomaterial structures. To address this, we introduce a fully automated, end-to-end pipeline that leverages recent advances in Generative AI. It is designed for analyzing and understanding the microstructures of semiconductor materials with effectiveness comparable to that of human experts, contributing to the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in nanomaterial identification. Our approach utilizes Large MultiModal Models (LMMs) such as GPT-4V, alongside text-to-image models like DALLE-3. We integrate a GPT-4 guided Visual Question Answering (VQA) method to analyze nanomaterial images, generate synthetic nanomaterial images via DALLE-3, and employ in-context learning with few-shot prompting in GPT-4V for accurate nanomaterial identification. Our method surpasses traditional techniques by enhancing the precision of nanomaterial identification and optimizing the process for high-throughput screening.

The most widely used method for obtaining high-quality two-dimensional materials is through mechanical exfoliation of bulk crystals. Manual identification of suitable flakes from the resulting random distribution of crystal thicknesses and sizes on a substrate is a time-consuming, tedious task. Here, we present a platform for fully automated scanning, detection, and classification of two-dimensional materials, the source code of which we make openly available. Our platform is designed to be accurate, reliable, fast, and versatile in integrating new materials, making it suitable for everyday laboratory work. The implementation allows fully automated scanning and analysis of wafers with an average inference time of 100 ms for images of 2.3 Mpixels. The developed detection algorithm is based on a combination of the flakes' optical contrast toward the substrate and their geometric shape. We demonstrate that it is able to detect the majority of exfoliated flakes of various materials, with an average recall (AR50) between 67% and 89%. We also show that the algorithm can be trained with as few as five flakes of a given material, which we demonstrate for the examples of few-layer graphene, WSe_2, MoSe_2, CrI_3, 1T-TaS_2 and hexagonal BN. Our platform has been tested over a two-year period, during which more than 10^6 images of multiple different materials were acquired by over 30 individual researchers.

Multispectral object detection, which integrates information from multiple bands, can enhance detection accuracy and environmental adaptability, holding great application potential across various fields. Although existing methods have made progress in cross-modal interaction, low-light conditions, and model lightweight, there are still challenges like the lack of a unified single-stage framework, difficulty in balancing performance and fusion strategy, and unreasonable modality weight allocation. To address these, based on the YOLOv11 framework, we present YOLOv11-RGBT, a new comprehensive multimodal object detection framework. We designed six multispectral fusion modes and successfully applied them to models from YOLOv3 to YOLOv12 and RT-DETR. After reevaluating the importance of the two modalities, we proposed a P3 mid-fusion strategy and multispectral controllable fine-tuning (MCF) strategy for multispectral models. These improvements optimize feature fusion, reduce redundancy and mismatches, and boost overall model performance. Experiments show our framework excels on three major open-source multispectral object detection datasets, like LLVIP and FLIR. Particularly, the multispectral controllable fine-tuning strategy significantly enhanced model adaptability and robustness. On the FLIR dataset, it consistently improved YOLOv11 models' mAP by 3.41%-5.65%, reaching a maximum of 47.61%, verifying the framework and strategies' effectiveness. The code is available at: https://github.com/wandahangFY/YOLOv11-RGBT.

Neural material representations are becoming a popular way to represent materials for rendering. They are more expressive than analytic models and occupy less memory than tabulated BTFs. However, existing neural materials are immutable, meaning that their output for a certain query of UVs, camera, and light vector is fixed once they are trained. While this is practical when there is no need to edit the material, it can become very limiting when the fragment of the material used for training is too small or not tileable, which frequently happens when the material has been captured with a gonioreflectometer. In this paper, we propose a novel neural material representation which jointly tackles the problems of BTF compression, tiling, and extrapolation. At test time, our method uses a guidance image as input to condition the neural BTF to the structural features of this input image. Then, the neural BTF can be queried as a regular BTF using UVs, camera, and light vectors. Every component in our framework is purposefully designed to maximize BTF encoding quality at minimal parameter count and computational complexity, achieving competitive compression rates compared with previous work. We demonstrate the results of our method on a variety of synthetic and captured materials, showing its generality and capacity to learn to represent many optical properties.

Achieving high-fidelity 3D surface reconstruction while preserving fine details remains challenging, especially in the presence of materials with complex reflectance properties and without a dense-view setup. In this paper, we introduce a versatile framework that incorporates multi-view normal and optionally reflectance maps into radiance-based surface reconstruction. Our approach employs a pixel-wise joint re-parametrization of reflectance and surface normals, representing them as a vector of radiances under simulated, varying illumination. This formulation enables seamless incorporation into standard surface reconstruction pipelines, such as traditional multi-view stereo (MVS) frameworks or modern neural volume rendering (NVR) ones. Combined with the latter, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-view photometric stereo (MVPS) benchmark datasets, including DiLiGenT-MV, LUCES-MV and Skoltech3D. In particular, our method excels in reconstructing fine-grained details and handling challenging visibility conditions. The present paper is an extended version of the earlier conference paper by Brument et al. (in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024), featuring an accelerated and more robust algorithm as well as a broader empirical evaluation. The code and data relative to this article is available at https://github.com/RobinBruneau/RNb-NeuS2.

Printed Circuit Board (PCB) assurance in the optical domain is a crucial field of study. Though there are many existing PCB assurance methods using image processing, computer vision (CV), and machine learning (ML), the PCB field is complex and increasingly evolving so new techniques are required to overcome the emerging problems. Existing ML-based methods outperform traditional CV methods, however they often require more data, have low explainability, and can be difficult to adapt when a new technology arises. To overcome these challenges, CV methods can be used in tandem with ML methods. In particular, human-interpretable CV algorithms such as those that extract color, shape, and texture features increase PCB assurance explainability. This allows for incorporation of prior knowledge, which effectively reduce the number of trainable ML parameters and thus, the amount of data needed to achieve high accuracy when training or retraining an ML model. Hence, this study explores the benefits and limitations of a variety of common computer vision-based features for the task of PCB component detection using semantic data. Results of this study indicate that color features demonstrate promising performance for PCB component detection. The purpose of this paper is to facilitate collaboration between the hardware assurance, computer vision, and machine learning communities.

The rise of imaging techniques such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) and advances in deep learning (DL) have enabled clinicians and researchers to streamline retinal disease staging. A popular DL approach is self-supervised learning (SSL), where models learn from vast amounts of unlabeled data, avoiding costly annotation. SSL has allowed the development of foundation models (FMs), large models that can be used for a variety of downstream tasks. However, existing FMs for OCT, trained solely on image data, lack a comprehensive and robust semantic understanding of images, as evidenced by their downstream performance (especially for complex tasks), and thus require supervised fine-tuning (which may be unfeasible) to better adapt to specific applications and populations. To address this, we propose RetFiner, an SSL vision-language refinement scheme that improves the representations of existing FMs and enables their efficient and direct adaptation to specific populations for improved downstream performance. Our method uses a diverse set of training objectives which take advantage of the rich supervisory signal found in textual data. We tested RetFiner on the retinal FMs RETFound, UrFound, and VisionFM, showing significant improvements in linear probing performance on seven highly diverse OCT classification tasks, with an average increase of 5.8, 3.9, and 2.1 percentage points over their baselines, respectively. Our code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/ronnief1/RetFiner.

Generative image models can produce convincingly real images, with plausible shapes, textures, layouts and lighting. However, one domain in which they perform notably poorly is in the synthesis of transparent objects, which exhibit refraction, reflection, absorption and scattering. Refraction is a particular challenge, because refracted pixel rays often intersect with surfaces observed in other parts of the image, providing a constraint on the color. It is clear from inspection that generative models have not distilled the laws of optics sufficiently well to accurately render refractive objects. In this work, we consider the problem of generating images with accurate refraction, given a text prompt. We synchronize the pixels within the object's boundary with those outside by warping and merging the pixels using Snell's Law of Refraction, at each step of the generation trajectory. For those surfaces that are not directly observed in the image, but are visible via refraction or reflection, we recover their appearance by synchronizing the image with a second generated image -- a panorama centered at the object -- using the same warping and merging procedure. We demonstrate that our approach generates much more optically-plausible images that respect the physical constraints.

Hyperspectral pansharpening has received much attention in recent years due to technological and methodological advances that open the door to new application scenarios. However, research on this topic is only now gaining momentum. The most popular methods are still borrowed from the more mature field of multispectral pansharpening and often overlook the unique challenges posed by hyperspectral data fusion, such as i) the very large number of bands, ii) the overwhelming noise in selected spectral ranges, iii) the significant spectral mismatch between panchromatic and hyperspectral components, iv) a typically high resolution ratio. Imprecise data modeling especially affects spectral fidelity. Even state-of-the-art methods perform well in certain spectral ranges and much worse in others, failing to ensure consistent quality across all bands, with the risk of generating unreliable results. Here, we propose a hyperspectral pansharpening method that explicitly addresses this problem and ensures uniform spectral quality. To this end, a single lightweight neural network is used, with weights that adapt on the fly to each band. During fine-tuning, the spatial loss is turned on and off to ensure a fast convergence of the spectral loss to the desired level, according to a hysteresis-like dynamic. Furthermore, the spatial loss itself is appropriately redefined to account for nonlinear dependencies between panchromatic and spectral bands. Overall, the proposed method is fully unsupervised, with no prior training on external data, flexible, and low-complexity. Experiments on a recently published benchmarking toolbox show that it ensures excellent sharpening quality, competitive with the state-of-the-art, consistently across all bands. The software code and the full set of results are shared online on https://github.com/giu-guarino/rho-PNN.

The advances in remote sensing technologies have boosted applications for Earth observation. These technologies provide multiple observations or views with different levels of information. They might contain static or temporary views with different levels of resolution, in addition to having different types and amounts of noise due to sensor calibration or deterioration. A great variety of deep learning models have been applied to fuse the information from these multiple views, known as deep multi-view or multi-modal fusion learning. However, the approaches in the literature vary greatly since different terminology is used to refer to similar concepts or different illustrations are given to similar techniques. This article gathers works on multi-view fusion for Earth observation by focusing on the common practices and approaches used in the literature. We summarize and structure insights from several different publications concentrating on unifying points and ideas. In this manuscript, we provide a harmonized terminology while at the same time mentioning the various alternative terms that are used in literature. The topics covered by the works reviewed focus on supervised learning with the use of neural network models. We hope this review, with a long list of recent references, can support future research and lead to a unified advance in the area.

Many camera sensors use a dual-pixel (DP) design that operates as a rudimentary light field providing two sub-aperture views of a scene in a single capture. The DP sensor was developed to improve how cameras perform autofocus. Since the DP sensor's introduction, researchers have found additional uses for the DP data, such as depth estimation, reflection removal, and defocus deblurring. We are interested in the latter task of defocus deblurring. In particular, we propose a single-image deblurring network that incorporates the two sub-aperture views into a multi-task framework. Specifically, we show that jointly learning to predict the two DP views from a single blurry input image improves the network's ability to learn to deblur the image. Our experiments show this multi-task strategy achieves +1dB PSNR improvement over state-of-the-art defocus deblurring methods. In addition, our multi-task framework allows accurate DP-view synthesis (e.g., ~39dB PSNR) from the single input image. These high-quality DP views can be used for other DP-based applications, such as reflection removal. As part of this effort, we have captured a new dataset of 7,059 high-quality images to support our training for the DP-view synthesis task. Our dataset, code, and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Abdullah-Abuolaim/multi-task-defocus-deblurring-dual-pixel-nimat.

All-in-one image restoration is challenging because different degradation types, such as haze, blur, noise, and low-light, impose diverse requirements on restoration strategies, making it difficult for a single model to handle them effectively. In this paper, we propose a unified image restoration framework that integrates a dual-level Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with a pretrained diffusion model. The framework operates at two levels: the Inter-MoE layer adaptively combines expert groups to handle major degradation types, while the Intra-MoE layer further selects specialized sub-experts to address fine-grained variations within each type. This design enables the model to achieve coarse-grained adaptation across diverse degradation categories while performing fine-grained modulation for specific intra-class variations, ensuring both high specialization in handling complex, real-world corruptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches on multiple image restoration task.

Self-supervised pretraining on large-scale satellite data has raised great interest in building Earth observation (EO) foundation models. However, many important resources beyond pure satellite imagery, such as land-cover-land-use products that provide free global semantic information, as well as vision foundation models that hold strong knowledge of the natural world, tend to be overlooked. In this work, we show these free additional resources not only help resolve common contrastive learning bottlenecks, but also significantly boost the efficiency and effectiveness of EO pretraining. Specifically, we first propose soft contrastive learning that optimizes cross-scene soft similarity based on land-cover-generated multi-label supervision, naturally solving the issue of multiple positive samples and too strict positive matching in complex scenes. Second, we explore cross-domain continual pretraining for both multispectral and SAR imagery, building efficient EO foundation models from strongest vision models such as DINOv2. Integrating simple weight-initialization and Siamese masking strategies into our soft contrastive learning framework, we demonstrate impressive continual pretraining performance even when the input channels and modalities are not aligned. Without prohibitive training, we produce multispectral and SAR foundation models that achieve significantly better results in 9 out of 10 downstream tasks than most existing SOTA models. For example, our ResNet50/ViT-S achieve 84.8/85.0 linear probing mAP scores on BigEarthNet-10\% which are better than most existing ViT-L models; under the same setting, our ViT-B sets a new record of 86.8 in multispectral, and 82.5 in SAR, the latter even better than many multispectral models. Dataset and models are available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/softcon.

Bokeh is widely used in photography to draw attention to the subject while effectively isolating distractions in the background. Computational methods simulate bokeh effects without relying on a physical camera lens. However, in the realm of digital bokeh synthesis, the two main challenges for bokeh synthesis are color bleeding and partial occlusion at object boundaries. Our primary goal is to overcome these two major challenges using physics principles that define bokeh formation. To achieve this, we propose a novel and accurate filtering-based bokeh rendering equation and a physically-based occlusion-aware bokeh renderer, dubbed Dr.Bokeh, which addresses the aforementioned challenges during the rendering stage without the need of post-processing or data-driven approaches. Our rendering algorithm first preprocesses the input RGBD to obtain a layered scene representation. Dr.Bokeh then takes the layered representation and user-defined lens parameters to render photo-realistic lens blur. By softening non-differentiable operations, we make Dr.Bokeh differentiable such that it can be plugged into a machine-learning framework. We perform quantitative and qualitative evaluations on synthetic and real-world images to validate the effectiveness of the rendering quality and the differentiability of our method. We show Dr.Bokeh not only outperforms state-of-the-art bokeh rendering algorithms in terms of photo-realism but also improves the depth quality from depth-from-defocus.

Recent advances in diffusion models have greatly improved image generation and editing, yet generating or reconstructing layered PSD files with transparent alpha channels remains highly challenging. We propose OmniPSD, a unified diffusion framework built upon the Flux ecosystem that enables both text-to-PSD generation and image-to-PSD decomposition through in-context learning. For text-to-PSD generation, OmniPSD arranges multiple target layers spatially into a single canvas and learns their compositional relationships through spatial attention, producing semantically coherent and hierarchically structured layers. For image-to-PSD decomposition, it performs iterative in-context editing, progressively extracting and erasing textual and foreground components to reconstruct editable PSD layers from a single flattened image. An RGBA-VAE is employed as an auxiliary representation module to preserve transparency without affecting structure learning. Extensive experiments on our new RGBA-layered dataset demonstrate that OmniPSD achieves high-fidelity generation, structural consistency, and transparency awareness, offering a new paradigm for layered design generation and decomposition with diffusion transformers.

In recent years, the neural radiance field (NeRF) model has gained popularity due to its ability to recover complex 3D scenes. Following its success, many approaches proposed different NeRF representations in order to further improve both runtime and performance. One such example is Triplane, in which NeRF is represented using three 2D feature planes. This enables easily using existing 2D neural networks in this framework, e.g., to generate the three planes. Despite its advantage, the triplane representation lagged behind in its 3D recovery quality compared to NeRF solutions. In this work, we propose TriNeRFLet, a 2D wavelet-based multiscale triplane representation for NeRF, which closes the 3D recovery performance gap and is competitive with current state-of-the-art methods. Building upon the triplane framework, we also propose a novel super-resolution (SR) technique that combines a diffusion model with TriNeRFLet for improving NeRF resolution.

Reconstructing and relighting objects and scenes under varying lighting conditions is challenging: existing neural rendering methods often cannot handle the complex interactions between materials and light. Incorporating pre-computed radiance transfer techniques enables global illumination, but still struggles with materials with subsurface scattering effects. We propose a novel framework for learning the radiance transfer field via volume rendering and utilizing various appearance cues to refine geometry end-to-end. This framework extends relighting and reconstruction capabilities to handle a wider range of materials in a data-driven fashion. The resulting models produce plausible rendering results in existing and novel conditions. We will release our code and a novel light stage dataset of objects with subsurface scattering effects publicly available.

The task of synthesizing novel views from a single image has useful applications in virtual reality and mobile computing, and a number of approaches to the problem have been proposed in recent years. A Multiplane Image (MPI) estimates the scene as a stack of RGBA layers, and can model complex appearance effects, anti-alias depth errors and synthesize soft edges better than methods that use textured meshes or layered depth images. And unlike neural radiance fields, an MPI can be efficiently rendered on graphics hardware. However, MPIs are highly redundant and require a large number of depth layers to achieve plausible results. Based on the observation that the depth complexity in local image regions is lower than that over the entire image, we split an MPI into many small, tiled regions, each with only a few depth planes. We call this representation a Tiled Multiplane Image (TMPI). We propose a method for generating a TMPI with adaptive depth planes for single-view 3D photography in the wild. Our synthesized results are comparable to state-of-the-art single-view MPI methods while having lower computational overhead.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of retinal diseases. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated considerable potential in medical image analysis, existing benchmarks largely reduce OCT understanding to coarse-grained disease classification or isolated visual question answering, leaving the complete cognitive process from visual perception to clinical reasoning insufficiently evaluated. To address this limitation, we introduce OCT-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark dedicated to OCT image understanding. OCT-Bench comprises 10,076 high-quality multiple-choice questions constructed from 4,137 OCT images across seven public datasets. Following the real-world clinical interpretation workflow, we establish a hierarchical capability taxonomy consisting of 20 fine-grained tasks across three dimensions: Perception, Cognition, and Reasoning. These tasks cover a broad range of capabilities, including imaging attributes, retinal anatomy, lesion characteristics, spatial relationships, disease assessment, therapeutic decision-making, and prognostic management. We systematically evaluate 20 representative MLLMs, including proprietary models, open-source general-purpose models, and medical-domain models. Experimental results demonstrate that current models remain substantially short of reliable OCT understanding. Moreover, neither medical-domain adaptation nor increased model scale consistently improves performance across capability levels. OCT-Bench enables comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation of MLLMs, providing a foundation for identifying capability bottlenecks and advancing clinically grounded OCT understanding.

Single-source remote sensing object detection using optical or SAR images struggles in complex environments. Optical images offer rich textural details but are often affected by low-light, cloud-obscured, or low-resolution conditions, reducing the detection performance. SAR images are robust to weather, but suffer from speckle noise and limited semantic expressiveness. Optical and SAR images provide complementary advantages, and fusing them can significantly improve the detection accuracy. However, progress in this field is hindered by the lack of large-scale, standardized datasets. To address these challenges, we propose the first comprehensive dataset for optical-SAR fusion object detection, named Multi-resolution, Multi-polarization, Multi-scene, Multi-source SAR dataset (M4-SAR). It contains 112,184 precisely aligned image pairs and nearly one million labeled instances with arbitrary orientations, spanning six key categories. To enable standardized evaluation, we develop a unified benchmarking toolkit that integrates six state-of-the-art multi-source fusion methods. Furthermore, we propose E2E-OSDet, a novel end-to-end multi-source fusion detection framework that mitigates cross-domain discrepancies and establishes a robust baseline for future studies. Extensive experiments on M4-SAR demonstrate that fusing optical and SAR data can improve mAP by 5.7\% over single-source inputs, with particularly significant gains in complex environments. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/wchao0601/M4-SAR.

The stacking-dependent polarization and excitonic response of MoS_2/MoSe_2 heterostructures were investigated using GW+BSE many-body perturbation theory. While homobilayer MoS_2 exhibited a switchable interlayer dipole driven by registry-induced symmetry breaking, the MoS_2/MoSe_2 hetero-interface remained pinned by the intrinsic chemical potential mismatch between sulfur and selenium. In 2L-MoS_2/MoSe_2 trilayers, the stacking sequence enabled a deterministic control of photogenerated electrons between the central and bottom MoS_2 layers, governed by internal electric fields and quasiparticle band-edge shifts of 60--70~meV. Our calculations predicted a 36~meV interlayer excitonic shift, in remarkable agreement with recent experiments. These results elucidate the microscopic link between atomic registry and many-body interactions, establishing transition metal dichalcogenide trilayers as a potential platform for sliding ferroelectricity and programmable optoelectronic functionalities.

We present OCTCube-M, a 3D OCT-based multi-modal foundation model for jointly analyzing OCT and en face images. OCTCube-M first developed OCTCube, a 3D foundation model pre-trained on 26,685 3D OCT volumes encompassing 1.62 million 2D OCT images. It then exploits a novel multi-modal contrastive learning framework COEP to integrate other retinal imaging modalities, such as fundus autofluorescence and infrared retinal imaging, into OCTCube, efficiently extending it into multi-modal foundation models. OCTCube achieves best performance on predicting 8 retinal diseases, demonstrating strong generalizability on cross-cohort, cross-device and cross-modality prediction. OCTCube can also predict cross-organ nodule malignancy (CT) and low cardiac ejection fraction as well as systemic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension, revealing its wide applicability beyond retinal diseases. We further develop OCTCube-IR using COEP with 26,685 OCT and IR image pairs. OCTCube-IR can accurately retrieve between OCT and IR images, allowing joint analysis between 3D and 2D retinal imaging modalities. Finally, we trained a tri-modal foundation model OCTCube-EF from 4 million 2D OCT images and 400K en face retinal images. OCTCube-EF attains the best performance on predicting the growth rate of geographic atrophy (GA) across datasets collected from 6 multi-center global trials conducted in 23 countries. This improvement is statistically equivalent to running a clinical trial with more than double the size of the original study. Our analysis based on another retrospective case study reveals OCTCube-EF's ability to avoid false positive Phase-III results according to its accurate treatment effect estimation on the Phase-II results. In sum, OCTCube-M is a 3D multi-modal foundation model framework that integrates OCT and other retinal imaging modalities revealing substantial diagnostic and prognostic benefits.

We present a novel differentiable rendering framework for joint geometry, material, and lighting estimation from multi-view images. In contrast to previous methods which assume a simplified environment map or co-located flashlights, in this work, we formulate the lighting of a static scene as one neural incident light field (NeILF) and one outgoing neural radiance field (NeRF). The key insight of the proposed method is the union of the incident and outgoing light fields through physically-based rendering and inter-reflections between surfaces, making it possible to disentangle the scene geometry, material, and lighting from image observations in a physically-based manner. The proposed incident light and inter-reflection framework can be easily applied to other NeRF systems. We show that our method can not only decompose the outgoing radiance into incident lights and surface materials, but also serve as a surface refinement module that further improves the reconstruction detail of the neural surface. We demonstrate on several datasets that the proposed method is able to achieve state-of-the-art results in terms of geometry reconstruction quality, material estimation accuracy, and the fidelity of novel view rendering.

Developing accurate, transferable and computationally inexpensive machine learning models can rapidly accelerate the discovery and development of new materials. Some of the major challenges involved in developing such models are, (i) limited availability of materials data as compared to other fields, (ii) lack of universal descriptor of materials to predict its various properties. The limited availability of materials data can be addressed through transfer learning, while the generic representation was recently addressed by Xie and Grossman [1], where they developed a crystal graph convolutional neural network (CGCNN) that provides a unified representation of crystals. In this work, we develop a new model (MT-CGCNN) by integrating CGCNN with transfer learning based on multi-task (MT) learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MT-CGCNN by simultaneous prediction of various material properties such as Formation Energy, Band Gap and Fermi Energy for a wide range of inorganic crystals (46774 materials). MT-CGCNN is able to reduce the test error when employed on correlated properties by upto 8%. The model prediction has lower test error compared to CGCNN, even when the training data is reduced by 10%. We also demonstrate our model's better performance through prediction of end user scenario related to metal/non-metal classification. These results encourage further development of machine learning approaches which leverage multi-task learning to address the aforementioned challenges in the discovery of new materials. We make MT-CGCNN's source code available to encourage reproducible research.

The detection and classification of exfoliated two-dimensional (2D) material flakes from optical microscope images can be automated using computer vision algorithms. This has the potential to increase the accuracy and objectivity of classification and the efficiency of sample fabrication, and it allows for large-scale data collection. Existing algorithms often exhibit challenges in identifying low-contrast materials and typically require large amounts of training data. Here, we present a deep learning model, called MaskTerial, that uses an instance segmentation network to reliably identify 2D material flakes. The model is extensively pre-trained using a synthetic data generator, that generates realistic microscopy images from unlabeled data. This results in a model that can to quickly adapt to new materials with as little as 5 to 10 images. Furthermore, an uncertainty estimation model is used to finally classify the predictions based on optical contrast. We evaluate our method on eight different datasets comprising five different 2D materials and demonstrate significant improvements over existing techniques in the detection of low-contrast materials such as hexagonal boron nitride.

Planar metasurfaces can profoundly control electromagnetic scattering. At microwave frequencies, such devices are typically implemented using multilayer cascades of patterned metallic sheets, whose design often requires time-consuming full-wave optimization. Here, we extend analytical models originally developed for sparse loaded-wire metagratings to accurately describe densely packed Jerusalem-cross meta-atoms embedded in standard printed circuit board (PCB) dielectric stacks. The model captures both near- and far-field coupling within and between layers, enabling efficient prediction of the dual-polarized response. Using this framework, we identify highly transmissive meta-atoms whose phase is controlled by the leg lengths of the Jerusalem crosses (microscopic design stage). This (phase)-(leg-length) "lookup table" allows rapid synthesis of Huygens' metasurfaces (macroscopic design stage), demonstrated through a full-wave-validated metalens exhibiting low-reflection beam manipulation. Notably, we implement a judicious scaling method to further extend the model to predict wideband meta-atom responses. In the companion paper (Part II), a hybrid machine-learning approach leverages this semianalytical framework to enhance accuracy without requiring the conventional exhaustive full-wave training, enabling ultrafast inverse design across the full parameter space. Overall, the presented methodology -- the standalone semianlytical scheme (Part I) and the machine-learning enhanced version (Part II) -- establishes an effective open-source toolkit for versatile, rapid, and highly accurate synthesis of fabrication-ready dual-polarized transmissive Huygens' meta-atoms and metasurfaces.

Recent advancements in text-to-3D generation technology have significantly advanced the conversion of textual descriptions into imaginative well-geometrical and finely textured 3D objects. Despite these developments, a prevalent limitation arises from the use of RGB data in diffusion or reconstruction models, which often results in models with inherent lighting and shadows effects that detract from their realism, thereby limiting their usability in applications that demand accurate relighting capabilities. To bridge this gap, we present UniDream, a text-to-3D generation framework by incorporating unified diffusion priors. Our approach consists of three main components: (1) a dual-phase training process to get albedo-normal aligned multi-view diffusion and reconstruction models, (2) a progressive generation procedure for geometry and albedo-textures based on Score Distillation Sample (SDS) using the trained reconstruction and diffusion models, and (3) an innovative application of SDS for finalizing PBR generation while keeping a fixed albedo based on Stable Diffusion model. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that UniDream surpasses existing methods in generating 3D objects with clearer albedo textures, smoother surfaces, enhanced realism, and superior relighting capabilities.

Multi-view inverse rendering aims to recover geometry, materials, and illumination consistently across multiple viewpoints. When applied to multi-view images, existing single-view approaches often ignore cross-view relationships, leading to inconsistent results. In contrast, multi-view optimization methods rely on slow differentiable rendering and per-scene refinement, making them computationally expensive and hard to scale. To address these limitations, we introduce a feed-forward multi-view inverse rendering framework that directly predicts spatially varying albedo, metallic, roughness, diffuse shading, and surface normals from sequences of RGB images. By alternating attention across views, our model captures both intra-view long-range lighting interactions and inter-view material consistency, enabling coherent scene-level reasoning within a single forward pass. Due to the scarcity of real-world training data, models trained on existing synthetic datasets often struggle to generalize to real-world scenes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a consistency-based finetuning strategy that leverages unlabeled real-world videos to enhance both multi-view coherence and robustness under in-the-wild conditions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of multi-view consistency, material and normal estimation quality, and generalization to real-world imagery.

Optics and lenses are abstract categorical gadgets that model systems with bidirectional data flow. In this paper we observe that the denotational definition of optics - identifying two optics as equivalent by observing their behaviour from the outside - is not suitable for operational, software oriented approaches where optics are not merely observed, but built with their internal setups in mind. We identify operational differences between denotationally isomorphic categories of cartesian optics and lenses: their different composition rule and corresponding space-time tradeoffs, positioning them at two opposite ends of a spectrum. With these motivations we lift the existing categorical constructions and their relationships to the 2-categorical level, showing that the relevant operational concerns become visible. We define the 2-category 2-Optic(C) whose 2-cells explicitly track optics' internal configuration. We show that the 1-category Optic(C) arises by locally quotienting out the connected components of this 2-category. We show that the embedding of lenses into cartesian optics gets weakened from a functor to an oplax functor whose oplaxator now detects the different composition rule. We determine the difficulties in showing this functor forms a part of an adjunction in any of the standard 2-categories. We establish a conjecture that the well-known isomorphism between cartesian lenses and optics arises out of the lax 2-adjunction between their double-categorical counterparts. In addition to presenting new research, this paper is also meant to be an accessible introduction to the topic.

Creating photorealistic materials for light transport algorithms requires carefully fine-tuning a set of material properties to achieve a desired artistic effect. This is typically a lengthy process that involves a trained artist with specialized knowledge. In this work, we present a technique that aims to empower novice and intermediate-level users to synthesize high-quality photorealistic materials by only requiring basic image processing knowledge. In the proposed workflow, the user starts with an input image and applies a few intuitive transforms (e.g., colorization, image inpainting) within a 2D image editor of their choice, and in the next step, our technique produces a photorealistic result that approximates this target image. Our method combines the advantages of a neural network-augmented optimizer and an encoder neural network to produce high-quality output results within 30 seconds. We also demonstrate that it is resilient against poorly-edited target images and propose a simple extension to predict image sequences with a strict time budget of 1-2 seconds per image.

Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors are widely used in various fields of physics and technology, due to their high efficiency and timing precision. Although, in principle, their detection mechanism offers broadband operation, their wavelength range has to be optimized by the optical cavity parameters for a specific task. We present a study of the optical absorption of a superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD) with an optical cavity. The optical properties of the niobium nitride films, measured by spectroscopic ellipsometry, were modelled using the Drude-Lorentz model with quantum corrections. The numerical simulations of the optical response of the detectors show that the wavelength range of the detector is not solely determined by its geometry, but the optical conductivity of the disordered thin metallic films contributes considerably. This contribution can be conveniently expressed by the ratio of imaginary and real parts of the optical conductivity. This knowledge can be utilized in detector design.

Layering information spaces is a promising strategy to design intuitive and engaging interactive experiences. Although multi-layer displays enable promising interaction techniques through limited depth perception - achieved via slight separation between layers - it remains unclear how to fully design experiences that leverage the unique affordances of layered information. To address this, we introduce Proscenium, a dual-layer, large transparent display workspace setup with an adjustable separation between the layers. We demonstrate our preliminary design space focusing on how rendered information can be transitioned and linked across displays, and showcase 14 speculative experience prototypes across six categories.

Physical adversarial attacks against deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently gained increasing attention. The current mainstream physical attacks use printed adversarial patches or camouflage to alter the appearance of the target object. However, these approaches generate conspicuous adversarial patterns that show poor stealthiness. Another physical deployable attack is the optical attack, featuring stealthiness while exhibiting weakly in the daytime with sunlight. In this paper, we propose a novel Reflected Light Attack (RFLA), featuring effective and stealthy in both the digital and physical world, which is implemented by placing the color transparent plastic sheet and a paper cut of a specific shape in front of the mirror to create different colored geometries on the target object. To achieve these goals, we devise a general framework based on the circle to model the reflected light on the target object. Specifically, we optimize a circle (composed of a coordinate and radius) to carry various geometrical shapes determined by the optimized angle. The fill color of the geometry shape and its corresponding transparency are also optimized. We extensively evaluate the effectiveness of RFLA on different datasets and models. Experiment results suggest that the proposed method achieves over 99% success rate on different datasets and models in the digital world. Additionally, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in different physical environments by using sunlight or a flashlight.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in deep learning-based pansharpening. Thus far, research has mainly focused on architectures. Nonetheless, model training is an equally important issue. A first problem is the absence of ground truths, unavoidable in pansharpening. This is often addressed by training networks in a reduced resolution domain and using the original data as ground truth, relying on an implicit scale invariance assumption. However, on full resolution images results are often disappointing, suggesting such invariance not to hold. A further problem is the scarcity of training data, which causes a limited generalization ability and a poor performance on off-training test images. In this paper, we propose a full-resolution training framework for deep learning-based pansharpening. The framework is fully general and can be used for any deep learning-based pansharpening model. Training takes place in the high-resolution domain, relying only on the original data, thus avoiding any loss of information. To ensure spectral and spatial fidelity, a suitable two-component loss is defined. The spectral component enforces consistency between the pansharpened output and the low-resolution multispectral input. The spatial component, computed at high-resolution, maximizes the local correlation between each pansharpened band and the panchromatic input. At testing time, the target-adaptive operating modality is adopted, achieving good generalization with a limited computational overhead. Experiments carried out on WorldView-3, WorldView-2, and GeoEye-1 images show that methods trained with the proposed framework guarantee a pretty good performance in terms of both full-resolution numerical indexes and visual quality.

Nanophotonic sensors amplify analyte-induced optical signals through resonantly enhanced light-matter interactions. While effective for refractometric sensing, conventional sensing platforms typically collapse spatial variations in analyte distributions into ensemble-averaged readouts, thereby obscuring local heterogeneity. Here we present a dual-channel metasurface sensor capable of detecting both net analyte loading and nanoscale spatial inhomogeneity at deep-subwavelength scales. The device supports two distinct high-Q modes with deeply structured near-field profiles of opposite parity. Their complementary modal responses decouple analyte perturbations into bulk and differential components, which are encoded into two spectrally resolvable channels. We demonstrate these sensing modalities across analyte configurations exhibiting diverse forms of nanoscale heterogeneity, achieving a refractometric sensitivity of 357 nm/RIU and inhomogeneity detection below λ/10. This dual-channel capability, which extends nanophotonic sensing from analyte quantity to its spatial variation, opens a new avenue for multidimensional analysis of biological and material systems.

Can we capture shape and reflectance in stealth? Such capability would be valuable for many application domains in vision, xR, robotics, and HCI. We introduce Structured Polarization, the first depth and reflectance sensing method using patterns of polarized light (SPIDeRS). The key idea is to modulate the angle of linear polarization (AoLP) of projected light at each pixel. The use of polarization makes it invisible and lets us recover not only depth but also directly surface normals and even reflectance. We implement SPIDeRS with a liquid crystal spatial light modulator (SLM) and a polarimetric camera. We derive a novel method for robustly extracting the projected structured polarization pattern from the polarimetric object appearance. We evaluate the effectiveness of SPIDeRS by applying it to a number of real-world objects. The results show that our method successfully reconstructs object shapes of various materials and is robust to diffuse reflection and ambient light. We also demonstrate relighting using recovered surface normals and reflectance. We believe SPIDeRS opens a new avenue of polarization use in visual sensing.

Layered image generation and editing is a fundamental capability that enables layer-wise reuse, editing, and composition of generated visual content, analogous to word-level editing in natural language. Despite its importance, this remains an underexplored area at scale. To address this gap, we present MRT, a 20B-parameter masked region diffusion model tailored for multi-layer transparent image generation and editing, trained on over 10M multilingual design samples spanning diverse aspect ratios and textual prompts. To fully leverage this scale, we make two key technical contributions. First, we unify three complementary tasks including text-to-layers, image-to-layers, and layers-to-layers within a shared masked region diffusion framework, where selective token masking enables flexible layer-wise generation and editing. Second, to enable overflow layer generation, we introduce an overflow-aware canvas layer that handles boundary inconsistencies and supports semi-transparent background synthesis, enabling complete editable layers extending beyond visible canvas boundaries. Additionally, we apply diffusion distillation to achieve 8-step, real-time multi-layer generation with minimal quality degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework substantially outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, including various commercial systems, across all three tasks, establishing a new benchmark for multi-layer transparent image generation. Notably, our model significantly outperforms the concurrent Qwen-Image-Layered model in image-to-layers quality according to user-study results, while achieving 10-100\times faster inference and reducing activation GPU memory consumption by 50-90\% during image-to-layer inference.

Recently, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has exhibited significant success in novel view synthesis, surface reconstruction, etc. However, since no physical reflection is considered in its rendering pipeline, NeRF mistakes the reflection in the mirror as a separate virtual scene, leading to the inaccurate reconstruction of the mirror and multi-view inconsistent reflections in the mirror. In this paper, we present a novel neural rendering framework, named Mirror-NeRF, which is able to learn accurate geometry and reflection of the mirror and support various scene manipulation applications with mirrors, such as adding new objects or mirrors into the scene and synthesizing the reflections of these new objects in mirrors, controlling mirror roughness, etc. To achieve this goal, we propose a unified radiance field by introducing the reflection probability and tracing rays following the light transport model of Whitted Ray Tracing, and also develop several techniques to facilitate the learning process. Experiments and comparisons on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. The code and supplementary material are available on the project webpage: https://zju3dv.github.io/Mirror-NeRF/.

Depth foundation models (DFMs) offer strong learned priors for 3D perception from single RGB images but lack physical depth cues, leading to ambiguities in metric scale. We introduce metalenses, an emerging class of ultrathin planar optical elements, as a solution to physically encode missing metric depth cues via nanophotonics. In this paper, we bridge the gap between metalens and DFMs to achieve accurate metric monocular depth sensing. In a single monocular shot, our metalens embeds depth-dependent positional shifts into two polarized optical wavefronts. With an input adaptation strategty, we enable direct fine-tuning that aligns a pretrained DFM with the optical signals. To scale the training data, we further develop a comprehensive simulation pipeline that synthesizes metalens responses from RGB-D datasets, incorporating physical factors to minimize the sim-to-real gap. Experiments demonstrate that this approach outperforms both monocular metric depth estimation and depth-from-defocus baselines, showing an effective pathway for accurate monocular metric depth sensing.

Large-scale diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality images from textual descriptions, gaining popularity across various applications. However, the generation of layered content, such as transparent images with foreground and background layers, remains an under-explored area. Layered content generation is crucial for creative workflows in fields like graphic design, animation, and digital art, where layer-based approaches are fundamental for flexible editing and composition. In this paper, we propose a novel image generation pipeline based on Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) that generates images with two layers: a foreground layer (RGBA) with transparency information and a background layer (RGB). Unlike existing methods that generate these layers sequentially, our approach introduces a harmonized generation mechanism that enables dynamic interactions between the layers for more coherent outputs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, showing significant improvements in visual coherence, image quality, and layer consistency compared to baseline methods.

Recent advances in camouflaged object detection (COD) have led to substantial progress in challenging low-visibility scenarios, with pioneering studies demonstrating notable success in localizing objects in camouflaged scenes. Despite these achievements, existing approaches predominantly rely on conventional three-channel RGB imagery, thereby constraining the available visual information to a limited spectral range. Multispectral images offer a wide range of information about a scene by capturing fine-grained spectral signatures. Hence, by leveraging multispectral images for COD, we introduce a novel approach to detect camouflaged objects from the corresponding multispectral inputs. In particular, we propose an end-to-end framework, \textit{MSFormer}, that takes a multispectral camouflaged image as input and predicts a binary mask for it. Additionally, we also provide empirical justification for integrating multispectral bands for this complex low-vision task. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms existing methods.

This paper addresses reflection removal, which is the task of separating reflection components from a captured image and deriving the image with only transmission components. Considering that the existence of the reflection changes the polarization state of a scene, some existing methods have exploited polarized images for reflection removal. While these methods apply polarized images as the inputs, they predict the reflection and the transmission directly as non-polarized intensity images. In contrast, we propose a polarization-to-polarization approach that applies polarized images as the inputs and predicts "polarized" reflection and transmission images using two sequential networks to facilitate the separation task by utilizing the interrelated polarization information between the reflection and the transmission. We further adopt a recurrent framework, where the predicted reflection and transmission images are used to iteratively refine each other. Experimental results on a public dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

In this work, we present web scraping techniques to extract in- formation from patent tables, clean and structure them for future use in predictive machine learning models to develop new glasses. We extracted compositions and three properties relevant to the development of new glasses and structured them into a database to be used together with information from other available datasets. We also analyzed the consistency of the information obtained and what it adds to the existing databases. The extracted liquidus temperatures comprise 5,696 compositions; the second subset includes 4,298 refractive indexes and, finally, 1,771 compositions with Abbe numbers. The extraction performed here increases the available information by approximately 10.4% for liquidus temperature, 6.6% for refractive index, and 4.9% for Abbe number. The impact extends beyond quantity: the newly extracted data introduce compositions with property values that are more diverse than those in existing databases, thereby expanding the accessible compositional and property space for glass modeling applications. We emphasize that the compositions of the new database contain relatively more titanium, magnesium, zirconium, niobium, iron, tin, and yttrium oxides than those of the existing bases.