Daily Papers

Multimodal large models have shown excellent ability in addressing image super-resolution in real-world scenarios by leveraging language class as condition information, yet their abilities in degraded images remain limited. In this paper, we first revisit the capabilities of the Recognize Anything Model (RAM) for degraded images by calculating text similarity. We find that directly using contrastive learning to fine-tune RAM in the degraded space is difficult to achieve acceptable results. To address this issue, we employ a degradation selection strategy to propose a Real Embedding Extractor (REE), which achieves significant recognition performance gain on degraded image content through contrastive learning. Furthermore, we use a Conditional Feature Modulator (CFM) to incorporate the high-level information of REE for a powerful Mamba-based network, which can leverage effective pixel information to restore image textures and produce visually pleasing results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the REE can effectively help image super-resolution networks balance fidelity and perceptual quality, highlighting the great potential of Mamba in real-world applications. The source code of this work will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/nathan66666/DACESR.git

Recent RGB-guided depth super-resolution methods have achieved impressive performance under the assumption of fixed and known degradation (e.g., bicubic downsampling). However, in real-world scenarios, captured depth data often suffer from unconventional and unknown degradation due to sensor limitations and complex imaging environments (e.g., low reflective surfaces, varying illumination). Consequently, the performance of these methods significantly declines when real-world degradation deviate from their assumptions. In this paper, we propose the Degradation Oriented and Regularized Network (DORNet), a novel framework designed to adaptively address unknown degradation in real-world scenes through implicit degradation representations. Our approach begins with the development of a self-supervised degradation learning strategy, which models the degradation representations of low-resolution depth data using routing selection-based degradation regularization. To facilitate effective RGB-D fusion, we further introduce a degradation-oriented feature transformation module that selectively propagates RGB content into the depth data based on the learned degradation priors. Extensive experimental results on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our DORNet in handling unknown degradation, outperforming existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/yanzq95/DORNet.

Modern agents powered by thinking LLMs achieve high accuracy through long chain-of-thought reasoning but incur substantial inference costs. While many LLMs now support configurable reasoning levels (e.g., high/medium/low), static strategies are often ineffective: using low-effort modes at every step leads to significant performance degradation, while random selection fails to preserve accuracy or provide meaningful cost reduction. However, agents should reserve high reasoning effort for difficult steps like navigating complex website structures, while using lower-effort modes for simpler steps like opening a target URL. In this paper, we propose Ares, a framework for per-step dynamic reasoning effort selection tailored for multi-step agent tasks. Ares employs a lightweight router to predict the lowest appropriate reasoning level for each step based on the interaction history. To train this router, we develop a data generation pipeline that identifies the minimum reasoning effort required for successful step completion. We then fine-tune the router to predict these levels, enabling plug-and-play integration for any LLM agents. We evaluate Ares on a diverse set of agent tasks, including TAU-Bench for tool use agents, BrowseComp-Plus for deep-research agents, and WebArena for web agents. Experimental results show that Ares reduces reasoning token usage by up to 52.7% compared to fixed high-effort reasoning, while introducing minimal degradation in task success rates.

Recently, considerable progress has been made in all-in-one image restoration. Generally, existing methods can be degradation-agnostic or degradation-aware. However, the former are limited in leveraging degradation-specific restoration, and the latter suffer from the inevitable error in degradation estimation. Consequently, the performance of existing methods has a large gap compared to specific single-task models. In this work, we make a step forward in this topic, and present our UniRestorer with improved restoration performance. Specifically, we perform hierarchical clustering on degradation space, and train a multi-granularity mixture-of-experts (MoE) restoration model. Then, UniRestorer adopts both degradation and granularity estimation to adaptively select an appropriate expert for image restoration. In contrast to existing degradation-agnostic and -aware methods, UniRestorer can leverage degradation estimation to benefit degradation specific restoration, and use granularity estimation to make the model robust to degradation estimation error. Experimental results show that our UniRestorer outperforms state-of-the-art all-in-one methods by a large margin, and is promising in closing the performance gap to specific single task models.

Degradations vary widely across images, so a practical restoration system has to handle many degradation types with one model. A recent and effective recipe adapts a large pretrained image-editing model to restoration using a small low-rank adapter with a text prompt. We replace that prompt with an instruction derived from the degraded image itself. The image reaches the editor through two paths: its structure comes from the model's VAE, and its semantic instruction comes from a lightweight token mapper that shifts the degraded image's vision-language embedding toward the embedding a clean image would produce. Because the instruction is a continuous vector, scaling it yields a family of valid restorations for tasks whose target is not unique, such as low-light enhancement. We adapt one Qwen-Image-Edit model to six tasks with a single adapter trained in about three hours on one GPU. The image instruction outperforms text conditioning under a matched comparison, and it supports task agnostic restoration without a degradation label, which the text variant does not.

The quality of a fundus image can be compromised by numerous factors, many of which are challenging to be appropriately and mathematically modeled. In this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion model based framework, named Learning Enhancement from Degradation (LED), for enhancing fundus images. Specifically, we first adopt a data-driven degradation framework to learn degradation mappings from unpaired high-quality to low-quality images. We then apply a conditional diffusion model to learn the inverse enhancement process in a paired manner. The proposed LED is able to output enhancement results that maintain clinically important features with better clarity. Moreover, in the inference phase, LED can be easily and effectively integrated with any existing fundus image enhancement framework. We evaluate the proposed LED on several downstream tasks with respect to various clinically-relevant metrics, successfully demonstrating its superiority over existing state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. The source code is available at https://github.com/QtacierP/LED.

Diffusion-based image super-resolution (SR) methods have achieved remarkable success by leveraging large pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models as priors. However, these methods still face two challenges: the requirement for dozens of sampling steps to achieve satisfactory results, which limits efficiency in real scenarios, and the neglect of degradation models, which are critical auxiliary information in solving the SR problem. In this work, we introduced a novel one-step SR model, which significantly addresses the efficiency issue of diffusion-based SR methods. Unlike existing fine-tuning strategies, we designed a degradation-guided Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module specifically for SR, which corrects the model parameters based on the pre-estimated degradation information from low-resolution images. This module not only facilitates a powerful data-dependent or degradation-dependent SR model but also preserves the generative prior of the pre-trained diffusion model as much as possible. Furthermore, we tailor a novel training pipeline by introducing an online negative sample generation strategy. Combined with the classifier-free guidance strategy during inference, it largely improves the perceptual quality of the super-resolution results. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superior efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed model compared to recent state-of-the-art methods.

Real-world Super-Resolution (Real-SR) methods focus on dealing with diverse real-world images and have attracted increasing attention in recent years. The key idea is to use a complex and high-order degradation model to mimic real-world degradations. Although they have achieved impressive results in various scenarios, they are faced with the obstacle of evaluation. Currently, these methods are only assessed by their average performance on a small set of degradation cases randomly selected from a large space, which fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of their overall performance and often yields inconsistent and potentially misleading results. To overcome the limitation in evaluation, we propose SEAL, a framework for systematic evaluation of real-SR. In particular, we cluster the extensive degradation space to create a set of representative degradation cases, which serves as a comprehensive test set. Next, we propose a coarse-to-fine evaluation protocol to measure the distributed and relative performance of real-SR methods on the test set. The protocol incorporates two new metrics: acceptance rate (AR) and relative performance ratio (RPR), derived from acceptance and excellence lines. Under SEAL, we benchmark existing real-SR methods, obtain new observations and insights into their performance, and develop a new strong baseline. We consider SEAL as the first step towards creating a comprehensive real-SR evaluation platform, which can promote the development of real-SR. The source code is available at https://github.com/XPixelGroup/SEAL

In real-world scenarios, image impairments often manifest as composite degradations, presenting a complex interplay of elements such as low light, haze, rain, and snow. Despite this reality, existing restoration methods typically target isolated degradation types, thereby falling short in environments where multiple degrading factors coexist. To bridge this gap, our study proposes a versatile imaging model that consolidates four physical corruption paradigms to accurately represent complex, composite degradation scenarios. In this context, we propose OneRestore, a novel transformer-based framework designed for adaptive, controllable scene restoration. The proposed framework leverages a unique cross-attention mechanism, merging degraded scene descriptors with image features, allowing for nuanced restoration. Our model allows versatile input scene descriptors, ranging from manual text embeddings to automatic extractions based on visual attributes. Our methodology is further enhanced through a composite degradation restoration loss, using extra degraded images as negative samples to fortify model constraints. Comparative results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate OneRestore as a superior solution, significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in addressing complex, composite degradations.

The advent of instruction-tuned Large Language Models designed for coding tasks (Code LLMs) has transformed software engineering practices. However, their robustness against various input challenges remains a critical concern. This study introduces DegradePrompter, a novel method designed to systematically evaluate the robustness of instruction-tuned Code LLMs. We assess the impact of diverse input challenges on the functionality and correctness of generated code using rigorous metrics and established benchmarks. Our comprehensive evaluation includes five state-of-the-art open-source models and three production-grade closed-source models, revealing varying degrees of robustness. Open-source models demonstrate an increased susceptibility to input perturbations, resulting in declines in functional correctness ranging from 12% to 34%. In contrast, commercial models demonstrate relatively greater resilience, with performance degradation ranging from 3% to 24%. To enhance the robustness of the models against these vulnerabilities, we investigate a straightforward yet effective mitigation strategy. Our findings highlight the need for robust defense mechanisms and comprehensive evaluations during both the development and deployment phases to ensure the resilience and reliability of automated code generation systems.

In many application domains (e.g., recommender systems, intelligent tutoring systems), the rewards associated to the actions tend to decrease over time. This decay is either caused by the actions executed in the past (e.g., a user may get bored when songs of the same genre are recommended over and over) or by an external factor (e.g., content becomes outdated). These two situations can be modeled as specific instances of the rested and restless bandit settings, where arms are rotting (i.e., their value decrease over time). These problems were thought to be significantly different, since Levine et al. (2017) showed that state-of-the-art algorithms for restless bandit perform poorly in the rested rotting setting. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm, Rotting Adaptive Window UCB (RAW-UCB), that achieves near-optimal regret in both rotting rested and restless bandit, without any prior knowledge of the setting (rested or restless) and the type of non-stationarity (e.g., piece-wise constant, bounded variation). This is in striking contrast with previous negative results showing that no algorithm can achieve similar results as soon as rewards are allowed to increase. We confirm our theoretical findings on a number of synthetic and dataset-based experiments.

All-in-one image restoration, which aims to address diverse degradations within a unified framework, is critical for practical applications. However, existing methods rely on predicting and integrating degradation conditions, which can misactivate degradation-specific features in complex scenarios, limiting their restoration performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel all-in-one image restoration framework guided by Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), named HOGformer. By leveraging the degradation-discriminative capability of HOG descriptors, HOGformer employs a dynamic self-attention mechanism that adaptively attends to long-range spatial dependencies based on degradation-aware HOG cues. To enhance the degradation sensitivity of attention inputs, we design a HOG-guided local dynamic-range convolution module that captures long-range degradation similarities while maintaining awareness of global structural information. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic interaction feed-forward module, efficiently increasing the model capacity to adapt to different degradations through channel-spatial interactions. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks, including adverse weather and natural degradations, demonstrate that HOGformer achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes effectively to complex real-world degradations. Code is available at https://github.com/Fire-friend/HOGformer.

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/.

The multi-step, iterative image editing capabilities of multi-modal agentic systems have transformed digital content creation. Although latest image editing models faithfully follow instructions and generate high-quality images in single-turn edits, we identify a critical weakness in multi-turn editing, which is the iterative degradation of image quality. As images are repeatedly edited, minor artifacts accumulate, rapidly leading to a severe accumulation of visible noise and a failure to follow simple editing instructions. To systematically study these failures, we introduce Banana100, a comprehensive dataset of 28,000 degraded images generated through 100 iterative editing steps, including diverse textures and image content. Alarmingly, image quality evaluators fail to detect the degradation. Among 21 popular no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) metrics, none of them consistently assign lower scores to heavily degraded images than to clean ones. The dual failures of generators and evaluators may threaten the stability of future model training and the safety of deployed agentic systems, if the low-quality synthetic data generated by multi-turn edits escape quality filters. We release the full code and data to facilitate the development of more robust models, helping to mitigate the fragility of multi-modal agentic systems.

Recent research in Cooperative Coevolution~(CC) have achieved promising progress in solving large-scale global optimization problems. However, existing CC paradigms have a primary limitation in that they require deep expertise for selecting or designing effective variable decomposition strategies. Inspired by advancements in Meta-Black-Box Optimization, this paper introduces LCC, a pioneering learning-based cooperative coevolution framework that dynamically schedules decomposition strategies during optimization processes. The decomposition strategy selector is parameterized through a neural network, which processes a meticulously crafted set of optimization status features to determine the optimal strategy for each optimization step. The network is trained via the Proximal Policy Optimization method in a reinforcement learning manner across a collection of representative problems, aiming to maximize the expected optimization performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LCC not only offers certain advantages over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of optimization effectiveness and resource consumption, but it also exhibits promising transferability towards unseen problems.

Recently, diffusion-based blind super-resolution (SR) methods have shown great ability to generate high-resolution images with abundant high-frequency detail, but the detail is often achieved at the expense of fidelity. Meanwhile, another line of research focusing on rectifying the reverse process of diffusion models (i.e., diffusion guidance), has demonstrated the power to generate high-fidelity results for non-blind SR. However, these methods rely on known degradation kernels, making them difficult to apply to blind SR. To address these issues, we present DADiff in this paper. DADiff incorporates degradation-aware models into the diffusion guidance framework, eliminating the need to know degradation kernels. Additionally, we propose two novel techniques: input perturbation and guidance scalar, to further improve our performance. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method has superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on blind SR benchmarks.

Real-world image restoration is hampered by diverse degradations stemming from varying capture conditions, capture devices and post-processing pipelines. Existing works make improvements through simulating those degradations and leveraging image generative priors, however generalization to in-the-wild data remains an unresolved problem. In this paper, we focus on complex degradations, i.e., arbitrary mixtures of multiple types of known degradations, which is frequently seen in the wild. A simple yet flexible diffusionbased framework, named UniRes, is proposed to address such degradations in an end-to-end manner. It combines several specialized models during the diffusion sampling steps, hence transferring the knowledge from several well-isolated restoration tasks to the restoration of complex in-the-wild degradations. This only requires well-isolated training data for several degradation types. The framework is flexible as extensions can be added through a unified formulation, and the fidelity-quality trade-off can be adjusted through a new paradigm. Our proposed method is evaluated on both complex-degradation and single-degradation image restoration datasets. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental results show consistent performance gain especially for images with complex degradations.

Image super-resolution (SR) methods typically model degradation to improve reconstruction accuracy in complex and unknown degradation scenarios. However, extracting degradation information from low-resolution images is challenging, which limits the model performance. To boost image SR performance, one feasible approach is to introduce additional priors. Inspired by advancements in multi-modal methods and text prompt image processing, we introduce text prompts to image SR to provide degradation priors. Specifically, we first design a text-image generation pipeline to integrate text into SR dataset through the text degradation representation and degradation model. The text representation applies a discretization manner based on the binning method to describe the degradation abstractly. This representation method can also maintain the flexibility of language. Meanwhile, we propose the PromptSR to realize the text prompt SR. The PromptSR employs the diffusion model and the pre-trained language model (e.g., T5 and CLIP). We train the model on the generated text-image dataset. Extensive experiments indicate that introducing text prompts into image SR, yields excellent results on both synthetic and real-world images. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/PromptSR.

Long-lived AI agents are increasingly deployed as persistent operational systems, yet they are still evaluated like freshly initialized models. Day-one benchmarks miss a basic systems question: how long does an agent remain reliable after deployment? Even when model weights are frozen, an agent's effective state keeps changing as it compresses interaction history, retrieves from a growing memory store, revises facts after updates, and undergoes routine maintenance. Reliability therefore becomes a lifespan property of the full agent harness, not only a snapshot property of the base model. We introduce AgingBench, a longitudinal reliability benchmark for agent lifespan engineering: measuring not only whether deployed agents degrade, but what form the degradation takes and where repair should target. AgingBench organizes agent aging into four mechanisms: compression aging, interference aging, revision aging, and maintenance aging. To diagnose these failures, AgingBench uses temporal dependency graphs and paired counterfactual probes that produce diagnostic profiles for the write, retrieval, and utilization stages of the memory pipeline. Across 7 scenarios, 14 models, multiple memory policies, and both runner-controlled and autonomous agents, over ~400 runs spanning 8 - 200 sessions show that agent aging is not one-dimensional: behavioral tests can remain clean while factual precision decays; derived-state tracking can collapse sharply within a single model; and the same wrong answer can require different repairs depending on what the diagnostic profile points to. These results suggest that reliable agent deployment requires lifespan evaluation, mechanism-level diagnosis, and stage-targeted repair, not only stronger day-one models.

Super-resolution (SR) techniques designed for real-world applications commonly encounter two primary challenges: generalization performance and restoration accuracy. We demonstrate that when methods are trained using complex, large-range degradations to enhance generalization, a decline in accuracy is inevitable. However, since the degradation in a certain real-world applications typically exhibits a limited variation range, it becomes feasible to strike a trade-off between generalization performance and testing accuracy within this scope. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to craft training degradation distributions using a small set of reference images. Our strategy is founded upon the binned representation of the degradation space and the Fr\'echet distance between degradation distributions. Our results indicate that the proposed technique significantly improves the performance of test images while preserving generalization capabilities in real-world applications.

Digital zoom on smartphones relies on learning-based super-resolution (SR) models that operate on RAW sensor images, but obtaining sensor-specific training data is challenging due to the lack of ground-truth images. Synthetic data generation via ``unprocessing'' pipelines offers a potential solution by simulating the degradations that transform high-resolution (HR) images into their low-resolution (LR) counterparts. However, these pipelines can introduce domain gaps due to incomplete or unrealistic degradation modeling. In this paper, we demonstrate that principled and carefully designed degradation modeling can enhance SR performance in real-world conditions. Instead of relying on generic priors for camera blur and noise, we model device-specific degradations through calibration and unprocess publicly available rendered images into the RAW domain of different smartphones. Using these image pairs, we train a single-image RAW-to-RGB SR model and evaluate it on real data from a held-out device. Our experiments show that accurate degradation modeling leads to noticeable improvements, with our SR model outperforming baselines trained on large pools of arbitrarily chosen degradations.

Real-world image restoration is challenging due to complex and interacting mixed degradations. Recent agent-based approaches address this problem by composing multiple task-specific restoration tools. However, empirical analysis reveals that their performance is fundamentally limited by implicitly constrained planning spaces and the lack of coordination among independently pretrained tools. To address these issues, we propose OPERA (Optimized Planning-Execution Restoration Agent), a framework that jointly optimizes restoration planning and tool execution in an end-to-end manner. On the planning side, OPERA uses reinforcement learning to directly optimize tool composition over a combinatorial plan space, with the final restoration quality as the reward. On the execution side, OPERA introduces agent-guided co-training of restoration tools, enabling them to learn cooperative behaviors under sequential composition. Extensive experiments on multi-degradation benchmarks and real-world datasets demonstrate that OPERA consistently outperforms both all-in-one restoration models and existing agent-based methods across diverse and complex degradation scenarios.

Semiconductor lasers have been rapidly evolving to meet the demands of next-generation optical networks. This imposes much more stringent requirements on the laser reliability, which are dominated by degradation mechanisms (e.g., sudden degradation) limiting the semiconductor laser lifetime. Physics-based approaches are often used to characterize the degradation behavior analytically, yet explicit domain knowledge and accurate mathematical models are required. Building such models can be very challenging due to a lack of a full understanding of the complex physical processes inducing the degradation under various operating conditions. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we propose a new data-driven approach, extracting useful insights from the operational monitored data to predict the degradation trend without requiring any specific knowledge or using any physical model. The proposed approach is based on an unsupervised technique, a conditional variational autoencoder, and validated using vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) and tunable edge emitting laser reliability data. The experimental results confirm that our model (i) achieves a good degradation prediction and generalization performance by yielding an F1 score of 95.3%, (ii) outperforms several baseline ML based anomaly detection techniques, and (iii) helps to shorten the aging tests by early predicting the failed devices before the end of the test and thereby saving costs

The Diffusion models, widely used for image generation, face significant challenges related to their broad applicability due to prolonged inference times and high memory demands. Efficient Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is crucial to address these issues. However, unlike traditional models, diffusion models critically rely on the time-step for the multi-round denoising. Typically, each time-step is encoded into a hypersensitive temporal feature by several modules. Despite this, existing PTQ methods do not optimize these modules individually. Instead, they employ unsuitable reconstruction objectives and complex calibration methods, leading to significant disturbances in the temporal feature and denoising trajectory, as well as reduced compression efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel quantization framework that includes three strategies: 1) TIB-based Maintenance: Based on our innovative Temporal Information Block (TIB) definition, Temporal Information-aware Reconstruction (TIAR) and Finite Set Calibration (FSC) are developed to efficiently align original temporal features. 2) Cache-based Maintenance: Instead of indirect and complex optimization for the related modules, pre-computing and caching quantized counterparts of temporal features are developed to minimize errors. 3) Disturbance-aware Selection: Employ temporal feature errors to guide a fine-grained selection between the two maintenance strategies for further disturbance reduction. This framework preserves most of the temporal information and ensures high-quality end-to-end generation. Extensive testing on various datasets, diffusion models and hardware confirms our superior performance and acceleration..

Most super-resolution (SR) models struggle with real-world low-resolution (LR) images. This issue arises because the degradation characteristics in the synthetic datasets differ from those in real-world LR images. Since SR models are trained on pairs of high-resolution (HR) and LR images generated by downsampling, they are optimized for simple degradation. However, real-world LR images contain complex degradation caused by factors such as the imaging process and JPEG compression. Due to these differences in degradation characteristics, most SR models perform poorly on real-world LR images. This study proposes a dataset generation method using undertrained image reconstruction models. These models have the property of reconstructing low-quality images with diverse degradation from input images. By leveraging this property, this study generates LR images with diverse degradation from HR images to construct the datasets. Fine-tuning pre-trained SR models on our generated datasets improves noise removal and blur reduction, enhancing performance on real-world LR images. Furthermore, an analysis of the datasets reveals that degradation diversity contributes to performance improvements, whereas color differences between HR and LR images may degrade performance. 11 pages, (11 figures and 2 tables)

Image restoration aims to reconstruct degraded images, e.g., denoising or deblurring. Existing works focus on designing task-specific methods and there are inadequate attempts at universal methods. However, simply unifying multiple tasks into one universal architecture suffers from uncontrollable and undesired predictions. To address those issues, we explore prompt learning in universal architectures for image restoration tasks. In this paper, we present Degradation-aware Visual Prompts, which encode various types of image degradation, e.g., noise and blur, into unified visual prompts. These degradation-aware prompts provide control over image processing and allow weighted combinations for customized image restoration. We then leverage degradation-aware visual prompts to establish a controllable and universal model for image restoration, called ProRes, which is applicable to an extensive range of image restoration tasks. ProRes leverages the vanilla Vision Transformer (ViT) without any task-specific designs. Furthermore, the pre-trained ProRes can easily adapt to new tasks through efficient prompt tuning with only a few images. Without bells and whistles, ProRes achieves competitive performance compared to task-specific methods and experiments can demonstrate its ability for controllable restoration and adaptation for new tasks. The code and models will be released in https://github.com/leonmakise/ProRes.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in spatial intelligence, yet existing spatial reasoning benchmarks largely assume pristine visual inputs and overlook the degradations that commonly occur in real-world deployment, such as motion blur, low light, adverse weather, lens distortion, and compression artifacts. This raises a fundamental question: how robust is the spatial intelligence of current MLLMs when visual observations are imperfect? To answer this question, we introduce SpaceDG, the first large-scale dataset for degradation-aware spatial understanding. It is constructed with a physically grounded degradation synthesis engine that embeds degradation formation process into 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) rendering, enabling realistic simulation of nine degradation types. The resulting dataset contains approximately 1M QA pairs from nearly 1,000 indoor scenes. We further introduce SpaceDG-Bench, an human-verified benchmark with 1,102 questions spanning 11 reasoning categories and 9 visual degradation types, yielding over 10K VQA instances. Evaluating 25 open- and closed-source MLLMs reveals that visual degradations consistently and substantially impair spatial reasoning, exposing a critical robustness gap. Finally, we show that finetuning on SpaceDG markedly improves degradation robustness and can even surpass human performance under degraded conditions without any performance drop on clean images, highlighting the promise of degradation-aware training for robust spatial intelligence.

The presence of composite degradations poses a significant challenge, since the underlying corruption factors exhibit complex and interdependent interactions. Even when the degradation types are known, accurately restoring the image remains difficult due to the intertwined nature of their effects and the need for selective control during the recovery process. To address this, we introduce CURE, a unified framework that enables controllable restoration in complex degradation settings by learning disentangled and adjustable representations. CURE is driven by four complementary objectives. First, an identity embedding is incorporated, along with a reconstruction constraint, to ensure that the model can reproduce the input image when restoration is unnecessary. Second, the ratio control mechanism blends the identity embedding with degradation-specific embeddings using user-regulated mixing ratios, allowing continuous control over restoration intensity. Third, an intermediate loss is applied to supervise stepwise outputs, each encouraged to tackle the removal of only a single degradation factor within a composite mixture. Finally, a permutation-invariant loss ensures that the model achieves consistent restoration quality regardless of the order in which multiple degradations are addressed. Since CURE modifies only the training strategy and not the underlying network architecture, it can be seamlessly integrated into existing controllable restoration models. Experiments demonstrate that CURE delivers state-of-the-art performance on composite degradation benchmarks, while enabling both selective and jointly fused restoration through flexible modulation of embedding ratios. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/bo-oseng/CURE.

Interactive image restoration aims to restore images by adjusting several controlling coefficients, which determine the restoration strength. Existing methods are restricted in learning the controllable functions under the supervision of known degradation types and levels. They usually suffer from a severe performance drop when the real degradation is different from their assumptions. Such a limitation is due to the complexity of real-world degradations, which can not provide explicit supervision to the interactive modulation during training. However, how to realize the interactive modulation in real-world super-resolution has not yet been studied. In this work, we present a Metric Learning based Interactive Modulation for Real-World Super-Resolution (MM-RealSR). Specifically, we propose an unsupervised degradation estimation strategy to estimate the degradation level in real-world scenarios. Instead of using known degradation levels as explicit supervision to the interactive mechanism, we propose a metric learning strategy to map the unquantifiable degradation levels in real-world scenarios to a metric space, which is trained in an unsupervised manner. Moreover, we introduce an anchor point strategy in the metric learning process to normalize the distribution of metric space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MM-RealSR achieves excellent modulation and restoration performance in real-world super-resolution. Codes are available at https://github.com/TencentARC/MM-RealSR.

Though many attempts have been made in blind super-resolution to restore low-resolution images with unknown and complex degradations, they are still far from addressing general real-world degraded images. In this work, we extend the powerful ESRGAN to a practical restoration application (namely, Real-ESRGAN), which is trained with pure synthetic data. Specifically, a high-order degradation modeling process is introduced to better simulate complex real-world degradations. We also consider the common ringing and overshoot artifacts in the synthesis process. In addition, we employ a U-Net discriminator with spectral normalization to increase discriminator capability and stabilize the training dynamics. Extensive comparisons have shown its superior visual performance than prior works on various real datasets. We also provide efficient implementations to synthesize training pairs on the fly.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) methods are emerging as a way to fine-tune diffusion models (DMs) for visual generation. However, commonly used on-policy strategies are limited by the generalization capability of the reward model, while off-policy approaches require large amounts of difficult-to-obtain paired human-annotated data, particularly in visual generation tasks. To address the limitations of both on- and off-policy RLHF, we propose a preference optimization method that aligns DMs with preferences without relying on reward models or paired human-annotated data. Specifically, we introduce a Semi-Policy Preference Optimization (SePPO) method. SePPO leverages previous checkpoints as reference models while using them to generate on-policy reference samples, which replace "losing images" in preference pairs. This approach allows us to optimize using only off-policy "winning images." Furthermore, we design a strategy for reference model selection that expands the exploration in the policy space. Notably, we do not simply treat reference samples as negative examples for learning. Instead, we design an anchor-based criterion to assess whether the reference samples are likely to be winning or losing images, allowing the model to selectively learn from the generated reference samples. This approach mitigates performance degradation caused by the uncertainty in reference sample quality. We validate SePPO across both text-to-image and text-to-video benchmarks. SePPO surpasses all previous approaches on the text-to-image benchmarks and also demonstrates outstanding performance on the text-to-video benchmarks. Code will be released in https://github.com/DwanZhang-AI/SePPO.

Object detectors achieve strong performance under nominal imaging conditions but can fail silently when exposed to blur, noise, compression, adverse weather, or resolution changes. In safety-critical settings, it is therefore insufficient to produce predictions without assessing whether the input remains within the detector's nominal operating regime. We refer to this capability as self-aware object detection. We introduce a degradation-aware self-awareness framework based on degradation manifolds, which explicitly structure a detector's feature space according to image degradation rather than semantic content. Our method augments a standard detection backbone with a lightweight embedding head trained via multi-layer contrastive learning. Images sharing the same degradation composition are pulled together, while differing degradation configurations are pushed apart, yielding a geometrically organized representation that captures degradation type and severity without requiring degradation labels or explicit density modeling. To anchor the learned geometry, we estimate a pristine prototype from clean training embeddings, defining a nominal operating point in representation space. Self-awareness emerges as geometric deviation from this reference, providing an intrinsic, image-level signal of degradation-induced shift that is independent of detection confidence. Extensive experiments on synthetic corruption benchmarks, cross-dataset zero-shot transfer, and natural weather-induced distribution shifts demonstrate strong pristine-degraded separability, consistent behavior across multiple detector architectures, and robust generalization under semantic shift. These results suggest that degradation-aware representation geometry provides a practical and detector-agnostic foundation.

Not a day goes by without hearing about the impressive feats of large language models (LLMs), and equally, not a day passes without hearing about their challenges. LLMs are notoriously vulnerable to biases in their dataset, leading to issues such as toxicity. While domain-adaptive training has been employed to mitigate these issues, these techniques often address all model parameters indiscriminately during the repair process, resulting in poor repair quality and reduced model versatility. In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic slicing-based intent-aware LLM repair strategy, IRepair. This approach selectively targets the most error-prone sections of the model for repair. Specifically, we propose dynamically slicing the model's most sensitive layers that require immediate attention, concentrating repair efforts on those areas. This method enables more effective repairs with potentially less impact on the model's overall performance by altering a smaller portion of the model. We evaluated our technique on three models from the GPT2 and GPT-Neo families, with parameters ranging from 800M to 1.6B, in a toxicity mitigation setup. Our results show that IRepair repairs errors 43.6% more effectively while causing 46% less disruption to general performance compared to the closest baseline, direct preference optimization. Our empirical analysis also reveals that errors are more concentrated in a smaller section of the model, with the top 20% of layers exhibiting 773% more error density than the remaining 80\%. This highlights the need for selective repair. Additionally, we demonstrate that a dynamic selection approach is essential for addressing errors dispersed throughout the model, ensuring a robust and efficient repair.

Real-world images rarely suffer from a single degradation, and the order in which degradations are removed substantially affects the final restoration quality, motivating agent-based image restoration (IR), where a vision-language model schedules a pool of pre-built restoration-experts. However, existing training-based agents require O((N^{D})^{2}) restoration-expert calls per image to construct the Optimal Restoration-action Trajectory Dataset (ORTD), where N^{D} denotes the number of degradation types in the universe D, and couple agent training to a fixed restoration-expert pool, preventing extension to newly introduced restoration-experts without full retraining. To overcome these efficiency and extensibility bottlenecks, we propose DiTTo, a novel order-aware image restoration agent framework consisting of the DiTTo Simulator and the DiTTo Agent. The DiTTo Simulator combines cupS-IR for single-step restoration-action simulation and AiO-IQA for per-action quality prediction, reducing ORTD construction to O(N^{D}) simulator calls per image; the DiTTo Agent is trained by SFT on the simulator-generated ORTD, followed by Order-aware Restoration Alignment (ORA) that aligns degradation identification, restoration-action-ordering, and output format along independent axes. This enables plug-and-play scalable extensibility: adding a new restoration-expert requires updating only the lightweight ORA stage. On the MiO-100 evaluation set with up to five concurrent degradations, our DiTTo Agent achieves state-of-the-art multi-degradation restoration quality among previous agent-based IR methods.

Optimizing deployed AI systems increasingly amounts to editing prompts, skills, harnesses, and code rather than model weights. Existing approaches commonly optimize these artifacts through propose-evaluate-select procedures, where candidate configurations are evaluated and only those meeting an acceptance criterion are selected. Yet our analysis shows that discarded candidates often contain information critical for subsequent optimization. Discarding them causes later proposals to revisit the same failure modes. We introduce Mara Chain, a refinement procedure that turns rejected candidates into stepping stones. Rather than discarding a rejected candidate, Mara Chain retains and iteratively refines it using evidence accumulated across preceding attempts. The procedure limits each refinement chain to a fixed depth and applies Pareto-filtered Top-N selection to bound the candidate pool. Across AppWorld skill optimization, TerminalBench 2.1 harness optimization, and MuSiQue retrieval-pipeline optimization, Mara Chain delivers greater task-performance gains with fewer rollouts. It outperforms GEPA, ACE, and SkillOpt-Lite by up to 20.5% in relative performance on AppWorld, reaching the target score with 65.5% fewer rollouts than GEPA. It improves the pass rate by 20.2 and 22.5 percentage points over AHE and Meta-Harness on TerminalBench 2.1, respectively, and improves MuSiQue test nDCG@10 and Recall@10 by 0.104 and 0.131 over a hand-written retrieval pipeline.

Early battery degradation trajectory forecasting (BDTF), which predicts the full-life state-of-health trajectory from early operational data, is critical for battery optimization, manufacturing, and deployment. Battery degradation data exhibit two key characteristics. First, degradation data present a multi-level structure, including regularities shared within aging conditions and trajectory patterns shared across batteries. Second, degradation-related variations in voltage-current profiles are often localized to specific state-of-charge (SOC) intervals. Existing approaches often fail to explicitly model these characteristics. To bridge this gap, we propose BatteryMFormer, a multi-level Transformer for early BDTF. BatteryMFormer integrates (1) an aging-condition-aware decoder that injects aging-condition priors via aging-condition-informed queries and aging-condition-aware attention, (2) a meta degradation pattern memory that learns and retrieves trajectory prototypes to guide long-horizon forecasting, and (3) a dual-view encoder that jointly captures temporal dynamics and SOC-localized variations from voltage and current time series. Extensive experiments on four battery domains show that BatteryMFormer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, marking a significant step toward reliable BDTF. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ruifeng-Tan/BatteryMFormer.

Existing benchmarks measure capability -- whether a model succeeds on a single attempt -- but production deployments require reliability -- consistent success across repeated attempts on tasks of varying duration. We show these properties diverge systematically as task duration grows, and that pass@1 on short tasks is structurally blind to this divergence. We introduce a reliability science framework for long-horizon LLM agents with four metrics: Reliability Decay Curve (RDC), Variance Amplification Factor (VAF), Graceful Degradation Score (GDS), and Meltdown Onset Point (MOP). We evaluate 10 models across 23,392 episodes on a 396-task benchmark spanning four duration buckets and three domains. Key findings: (1) reliability decay is domain-stratified -- SE GDS drops from 0.90 to 0.44 while document processing is nearly flat (0.74 to 0.71); (2) VAF bifurcates by capability tier -- high VAF is a capability signature, not an instability signal; (3) capability and reliability rankings diverge substantially, with multi-rank inversions at long horizons; (4) frontier models have the highest meltdown rates (up to 19%) because they attempt ambitious multi-step strategies that sometimes spiral; and (5) memory scaffolds universally hurt long-horizon performance across all 10 models. These results motivate reliability as a first-class evaluation dimension alongside capability.

Super-resolution methods are increasingly becoming popular for both real-world and face-specific tasks. Many existing approaches, however, rely on simplistic degradation models, which limits their ability to handle complex and unknown degradation patterns effectively. While diffusion-based super-resolution techniques have recently shown impressive results, they are still constrained by the need for numerous inference steps. To address this, we propose TDDSR, an efficient single-step diffusion-based super-resolution method. Our method, distilled from a pre-trained teacher model and based on a diffusion network, performs super-resolution in a single step. It integrates a learnable diffusion-based downsampler to capture diverse degradation patterns and employs two discriminators, one for high-resolution and one for low-resolution images, to enhance the overall performance. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness across real-world and face-specific SR tasks, achieving performance beyond other state-of-the-art models and comparable to previous diffusion methods with multiple sampling steps.

Blind face restoration usually synthesizes degraded low-quality data with a pre-defined degradation model for training, while more complex cases could happen in the real world. This gap between the assumed and actual degradation hurts the restoration performance where artifacts are often observed in the output. However, it is expensive and infeasible to include every type of degradation to cover real-world cases in the training data. To tackle this robustness issue, we propose Diffusion-based Robust Degradation Remover (DR2) to first transform the degraded image to a coarse but degradation-invariant prediction, then employ an enhancement module to restore the coarse prediction to a high-quality image. By leveraging a well-performing denoising diffusion probabilistic model, our DR2 diffuses input images to a noisy status where various types of degradation give way to Gaussian noise, and then captures semantic information through iterative denoising steps. As a result, DR2 is robust against common degradation (e.g. blur, resize, noise and compression) and compatible with different designs of enhancement modules. Experiments in various settings show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on heavily degraded synthetic and real-world datasets.

Real-world images often suffer from spatially diverse degradations such as haze, rain, snow, and low-light, significantly impacting visual quality and downstream vision tasks. Existing all-in-one restoration (AIR) approaches either depend on external text prompts or embed hand-crafted architectural priors (e.g., frequency heuristics); both impose discrete, brittle assumptions that weaken generalization to unseen or mixed degradations. To address this limitation, we propose to reframe AIR as learned latent prior inference, where degradation-aware representations are automatically inferred from the input without explicit task cues. Based on latent priors, we formulate AIR as a structured reasoning paradigm: (1) which features to route (adaptive feature selection), (2) where to restore (spatial localization), and (3) what to restore (degradation semantics). We design a lightweight decoding module that efficiently leverages these latent encoded cues for spatially-adaptive restoration. Extensive experiments across six common degradation tasks, five compound settings, and previously unseen degradations demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches, achieving an average PSNR improvement of 1.68 dB while being three times more efficient.

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

Image restoration involves recovering a high-quality clean image from its degraded version. Deep learning-based methods have significantly improved image restoration performance, however, they have limited generalization ability to different degradation types and levels. This restricts their real-world application since it requires training individual models for each specific degradation and knowing the input degradation type to apply the relevant model. We present a prompt-based learning approach, PromptIR, for All-In-One image restoration that can effectively restore images from various types and levels of degradation. In particular, our method uses prompts to encode degradation-specific information, which is then used to dynamically guide the restoration network. This allows our method to generalize to different degradation types and levels, while still achieving state-of-the-art results on image denoising, deraining, and dehazing. Overall, PromptIR offers a generic and efficient plugin module with few lightweight prompts that can be used to restore images of various types and levels of degradation with no prior information on the corruptions present in the image. Our code and pretrained models are available here: https://github.com/va1shn9v/PromptIR

Battery degradation remains a critical challenge in the pursuit of green technologies and sustainable energy solutions. Despite significant research efforts, predicting battery capacity loss accurately remains a formidable task due to its complex nature, influenced by both aging and cycling behaviors. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel general-purpose model for battery degradation prediction and synthesis, DiffBatt. Leveraging an innovative combination of conditional and unconditional diffusion models with classifier-free guidance and transformer architecture, DiffBatt achieves high expressivity and scalability. DiffBatt operates as a probabilistic model to capture uncertainty in aging behaviors and a generative model to simulate battery degradation. The performance of the model excels in prediction tasks while also enabling the generation of synthetic degradation curves, facilitating enhanced model training by data augmentation. In the remaining useful life prediction task, DiffBatt provides accurate results with a mean RMSE of 196 cycles across all datasets, outperforming all other models and demonstrating superior generalizability. This work represents an important step towards developing foundational models for battery degradation.

Accurate remaining useful life (RUL) prediction hinges on the quality of health indicators (HIs), yet existing methods often fail to disentangle complex degradation mechanisms in multi-sensor systems or quantify uncertainty in HI reliability. This paper introduces a novel framework for HI construction, advancing three key contributions. First, we adapt Reconstruction along Projected Pathways (RaPP) as a health indicator (HI) for RUL prediction for the first time, showing that it outperforms traditional reconstruction error metrics. Second, we show that augmenting RaPP-derived HIs with aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty quantification (UQ) via Monte Carlo dropout and probabilistic latent spaces- significantly improves RUL-prediction robustness. Third, and most critically, we propose indicator groups, a paradigm that isolates sensor subsets to model system-specific degradations, giving rise to our novel method, I-GLIDE which enables interpretable, mechanism-specific diagnostics. Evaluated on data sourced from aerospace and manufacturing systems, our approach achieves marked improvements in accuracy and generalizability compared to state-of-the-art HI methods while providing actionable insights into system failure pathways. This work bridges the gap between anomaly detection and prognostics, offering a principled framework for uncertainty-aware degradation modeling in complex systems.

Semiconductor lasers, one of the key components for optical communication systems, have been rapidly evolving to meet the requirements of next generation optical networks with respect to high speed, low power consumption, small form factor etc. However, these demands have brought severe challenges to the semiconductor laser reliability. Therefore, a great deal of attention has been devoted to improving it and thereby ensuring reliable transmission. In this paper, a predictive maintenance framework using machine learning techniques is proposed for real-time heath monitoring and prognosis of semiconductor laser and thus enhancing its reliability. The proposed approach is composed of three stages: i) real-time performance degradation prediction, ii) degradation detection, and iii) remaining useful life (RUL) prediction. First of all, an attention based gated recurrent unit (GRU) model is adopted for real-time prediction of performance degradation. Then, a convolutional autoencoder is used to detect the degradation or abnormal behavior of a laser, given the predicted degradation performance values. Once an abnormal state is detected, a RUL prediction model based on attention-based deep learning is utilized. Afterwards, the estimated RUL is input for decision making and maintenance planning. The proposed framework is validated using experimental data derived from accelerated aging tests conducted for semiconductor tunable lasers. The proposed approach achieves a very good degradation performance prediction capability with a small root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.01, a good anomaly detection accuracy of 94.24% and a better RUL estimation capability compared to the existing ML-based laser RUL prediction models.

Image restoration (IR) seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded observations caused by a wide range of factors, including noise, blur, compression, and adverse weather. While traditional IR methods have made notable progress by targeting individual degradation types, their specialization often comes at the cost of generalization, leaving them ill-equipped to handle the multifaceted distortions encountered in real-world applications. In response to this challenge, the all-in-one image restoration (AiOIR) paradigm has recently emerged, offering a unified framework that adeptly addresses multiple degradation types. These innovative models enhance the convenience and versatility by adaptively learning degradation-specific features while simultaneously leveraging shared knowledge across diverse corruptions. In this survey, we provide the first in-depth and systematic overview of AiOIR, delivering a structured taxonomy that categorizes existing methods by architectural designs, learning paradigms, and their core innovations. We systematically categorize current approaches and assess the challenges these models encounter, outlining research directions to propel this rapidly evolving field. To facilitate the evaluation of existing methods, we also consolidate widely-used datasets, evaluation protocols, and implementation practices, and compare and summarize the most advanced open-source models. As the first comprehensive review dedicated to AiOIR, this paper aims to map the conceptual landscape, synthesize prevailing techniques, and ignite further exploration toward more intelligent, unified, and adaptable visual restoration systems. A curated code repository is available at https://github.com/Harbinzzy/All-in-One-Image-Restoration-Survey.

Archival film restoration is a challenging problem because historical footage contains compound degradations such as scratches, dust, blur, noise, flicker, and photometric aging, while clean reference videos are unavailable. Existing video restoration methods largely treat these degradations implicitly, reconstructing frames without explicit knowledge of where damage occurs or how severe it is. We propose DART, a degradation-aware recurrent transformer for archival film restoration. DART predicts and propagates a soft defect mask through time, using it to guide temporal fusion and condition the restoration network on both damage location and severity. This makes the restoration process explicitly aware of film artifacts rather than relying only on reconstruction losses. Experiments on real archival benchmarks show that DART improves no-reference perceptual quality over prior restoration architectures while remaining compact and efficient, producing cleaner and more temporally consistent restorations of structured film damage.

In the image acquisition process, various forms of degradation, including noise, haze, and rain, are frequently introduced. These degradations typically arise from the inherent limitations of cameras or unfavorable ambient conditions. To recover clean images from degraded versions, numerous specialized restoration methods have been developed, each targeting a specific type of degradation. Recently, all-in-one algorithms have garnered significant attention by addressing different types of degradations within a single model without requiring prior information of the input degradation type. However, these methods purely operate in the spatial domain and do not delve into the distinct frequency variations inherent to different degradation types. To address this gap, we propose an adaptive all-in-one image restoration network based on frequency mining and modulation. Our approach is motivated by the observation that different degradation types impact the image content on different frequency subbands, thereby requiring different treatments for each restoration task. Specifically, we first mine low- and high-frequency information from the input features, guided by the adaptively decoupled spectra of the degraded image. The extracted features are then modulated by a bidirectional operator to facilitate interactions between different frequency components. Finally, the modulated features are merged into the original input for a progressively guided restoration. With this approach, the model achieves adaptive reconstruction by accentuating the informative frequency subbands according to different input degradations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on different image restoration tasks, including denoising, dehazing, deraining, motion deblurring, and low-light image enhancement. Our code is available at https://github.com/c-yn/AdaIR.

Objects in post-fire environments often undergo irreversible physical transformations that change their geometry, material state, and visual appearance. Detecting and identifying these remnants is critical for locating hazards, reconstructing pre-incident contents, and inventorying losses. Unlike standard image corruptions, these degradations affect the physical structure of the object itself. To study this setting, we introduce TRACE, a transformation-aware benchmark for post-fire object understanding. TRACE contains 21.4K real-image-grounded synthetic scenes and paired object-level pristine-to-degraded progressions spanning 499 object identities across 189 categories. We define five tasks targeting localization and pre-degradation understanding: degraded-object detection, pristine-state recovery and retrieval, original material recovery, pristine description generation, and functional reasoning. Existing models degrade sharply with severity. From the least to the most severe level, RF-DETR mAP decreases by 71% relative, while InternVL3.5 retrieval R@1 falls from 93.85 to 28.11. To address this, we propose the Feature Recovery Module (FRM), a plug-and-play module that maps degraded encoder features to pristine-aligned representations while keeping the host frozen. Trained only with paired feature supervision, FRM improves scene-level detection, CLIP/SigLIP2 feature recovery, and all four object-level VLM tasks, with larger gains under more severe degradation. Across VLM hosts and severity levels, relative gains average 12.5% for retrieval, 20.1% for material recovery, 13.2% for description generation, and 12.4% for functional reasoning.

Deep learning-based models for All-In-One Image Restoration (AIOR) have achieved significant advancements in recent years. However, their practical applicability is limited by poor generalization to samples outside the training distribution. This limitation arises primarily from insufficient diversity in degradation variations and scenes within existing datasets, resulting in inadequate representations of real-world scenarios. Additionally, capturing large-scale real-world paired data for degradations such as haze, low-light, and raindrops is often cumbersome and sometimes infeasible. In this paper, we leverage the generative capabilities of latent diffusion models to synthesize high-quality degraded images from their clean counterparts. Specifically, we introduce GenDeg, a degradation and intensity-aware conditional diffusion model capable of producing diverse degradation patterns on clean images. Using GenDeg, we synthesize over 550k samples across six degradation types: haze, rain, snow, motion blur, low-light, and raindrops. These generated samples are integrated with existing datasets to form the GenDS dataset, comprising over 750k samples. Our experiments reveal that image restoration models trained on the GenDS dataset exhibit significant improvements in out-of-distribution performance compared to those trained solely on existing datasets. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive analyses on the implications of diffusion model-based synthetic degradations for AIOR. The code will be made publicly available.

Can heterogeneous physical degradation systems benefit from joint pretraining and move beyond system-specific prognostics toward reusable cross-system representation learning? CORD combines type-specific observation interfaces with a shared degradation backbone. Its two self-supervised objectives learn at complementary scales: Intra-Observation Structure Modeling (ISM) captures structure within observations, while Inter-Observation Dynamics Modeling (IDM) captures latent degradation evolution across observation histories. We evaluate CORD under two transfer boundaries: Pretraining-Included System Types, where downstream datasets and held-out units are unseen but their system types are represented during source pretraining, and Pretraining-Excluded System Types, where the entire turbofan-engine type is absent from pretraining. Across bearings, batteries, and cutting tools, CORD (Multi-domain) consistently improves over CORD (Single-domain) under Frozen adaptation, provides further gains under Full FT in most settings, and remains competitive with representative external baselines. Source-pretrained initialization also improves low-label adaptation to the pretraining-excluded engine type. Frozen-representation analysis further shows improved cross-unit lifecycle consistency after multi-domain pretraining. Joint pretraining across heterogeneous physical systems thus produces degradation representations reusable across devices, datasets, and system types.

Recent advances in learning rate (LR) scheduling have demonstrated the effectiveness of decay-free approaches that eliminate the traditional decay phase while maintaining competitive performance. Model merging techniques have emerged as particularly promising solutions in this domain. We present Warmup-Stable and Merge (WSM), a general framework that establishes a formal connection between learning rate decay and model merging. WSM provides a unified theoretical foundation for emulating various decay strategies-including cosine decay, linear decay and inverse square root decay-as principled model averaging schemes, while remaining fully compatible with diverse optimization methods. Through extensive experiments, we identify merge duration-the training window for checkpoint aggregation-as the most critical factor influencing model performance, surpassing the importance of both checkpoint interval and merge quantity. Our framework consistently outperforms the widely-adopted Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD) approach across multiple benchmarks, achieving significant improvements of +3.5% on MATH, +2.9% on HumanEval, and +5.5% on MMLU-Pro. The performance advantages extend to supervised fine-tuning scenarios, highlighting WSM's potential for long-term model refinement.

The diversity and complexity of degradations in real-world video super-resolution (VSR) pose non-trivial challenges in inference and training. First, while long-term propagation leads to improved performance in cases of mild degradations, severe in-the-wild degradations could be exaggerated through propagation, impairing output quality. To balance the tradeoff between detail synthesis and artifact suppression, we found an image pre-cleaning stage indispensable to reduce noises and artifacts prior to propagation. Equipped with a carefully designed cleaning module, our RealBasicVSR outperforms existing methods in both quality and efficiency. Second, real-world VSR models are often trained with diverse degradations to improve generalizability, requiring increased batch size to produce a stable gradient. Inevitably, the increased computational burden results in various problems, including 1) speed-performance tradeoff and 2) batch-length tradeoff. To alleviate the first tradeoff, we propose a stochastic degradation scheme that reduces up to 40\% of training time without sacrificing performance. We then analyze different training settings and suggest that employing longer sequences rather than larger batches during training allows more effective uses of temporal information, leading to more stable performance during inference. To facilitate fair comparisons, we propose the new VideoLQ dataset, which contains a large variety of real-world low-quality video sequences containing rich textures and patterns. Our dataset can serve as a common ground for benchmarking. Code, models, and the dataset will be made publicly available.

Machine vision systems (MVS) are intrinsically vulnerable to performance degradation under adverse visual conditions. To address this, we propose a machine-centric image quality assessment (MIQA) framework that quantifies the impact of image degradations on MVS performance. We establish an MIQA paradigm encompassing the end-to-end assessment workflow. To support this, we construct a machine-centric image quality database (MIQD-2.5M), comprising 2.5 million samples that capture distinctive degradation responses in both consistency and accuracy metrics, spanning 75 vision models, 250 degradation types, and three representative vision tasks. We further propose a region-aware MIQA (RA-MIQA) model to evaluate MVS visual quality through fine-grained spatial degradation analysis. Extensive experiments benchmark the proposed RA-MIQA against seven human visual system (HVS)-based IQA metrics and five retrained classical backbones. Results demonstrate RA-MIQA's superior performance in multiple dimensions, e.g., achieving SRCC gains of 13.56% on consistency and 13.37% on accuracy for image classification, while also revealing task-specific degradation sensitivities. Critically, HVS-based metrics prove inadequate for MVS quality prediction, while even specialized MIQA models struggle with background degradations, accuracy-oriented estimation, and subtle distortions. This study can advance MVS reliability and establish foundations for machine-centric image processing and optimization. The model and code are available at: https://github.com/XiaoqiWang/MIQA.

This paper introduces a new large-scale image restoration dataset, called HQ-50K, which contains 50,000 high-quality images with rich texture details and semantic diversity. We analyze existing image restoration datasets from five different perspectives, including data scale, resolution, compression rates, texture details, and semantic coverage. However, we find that all of these datasets are deficient in some aspects. In contrast, HQ-50K considers all of these five aspects during the data curation process and meets all requirements. We also present a new Degradation-Aware Mixture of Expert (DAMoE) model, which enables a single model to handle multiple corruption types and unknown levels. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that HQ-50K consistently improves the performance on various image restoration tasks, such as super-resolution, denoising, dejpeg, and deraining. Furthermore, our proposed DAMoE, trained on our \dataset, outperforms existing state-of-the-art unified models designed for multiple restoration tasks and levels. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/littleYaang/HQ-50K.

Restoring archival film remains a fundamentally challenging problem due to the absence of paired training data and the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks. Pristine versions of deteriorated footage are physically unrecoverable, requiring supervised methods to rely on synthetic data that often fail to capture the complex, temporally coherent nature of real film degradation. At the same time, existing real-world datasets are limited in scale, quality, and accessibility, hindering reliable evaluation and fair comparison across methods. We address both limitations with AbsoluteDegradation, a physics-inspired, modular pipeline for synthesizing realistic film degradations, and a new large-scale archival benchmark. The proposed pipeline models the analog-to-digital process as a structured composition of artifact families, incorporating signal-dependent grain, parametric scratches, and temporally coherent camera motion, enabling controlled generation of diverse degradation regimes. In parallel, we introduce a curated dataset of 81,576 high-resolution frames sourced from real archival footage, designed for consistent evaluation under real-world conditions. Together, these contributions provide a unified framework for training and benchmarking restoration models. Extensive experiments across multiple architectures show that models trained with AbsoluteDegradation generalize better to real-world footage, while the proposed benchmark reveals systematic failure modes of current methods. We hope this work establishes a foundation for reproducible and domain-authentic evaluation in archival film restoration.

Modern Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) systems generate multiple candidate masks per expression but rely on a simple heuristic--typically the argmax detection score--to select the final output. We identify query selection as a failure-case bottleneck: although heuristic selection succeeds on 82-93% of samples, the residual 7-18% of failures dominate the error budget, leaving a best-query selection gap of 3-11% mIoU. We introduce Venice-H1, a lightweight, backbone-decoupled post-hoc re-ranking module that encodes each candidate through multi-scale grid signatures--compact spatial descriptors pooled onto 4x4, 8x8, and 16x16 grids--and feeds them to a Transformer-based re-ranker with a Failure Gate (ROCAUC 0.78-0.82) that intervenes only when the default choice is likely suboptimal. Instantiated on DeRIS-L and DeRIS-B, Venice-H1 achieves delta_fail of +1.40 and +0.89 mIoU with strictly positive 95% CIs on all 16/16 (split, backbone) pairs and harmful-switch rates below 0.53%. Zero-shot transfer to medical referring segmentation (MS-CXR, M3D-RefSeg-2D) yields +1.16 and +0.51 mIoU without RIS-backbone fine-tuning. The module adds approximately 11.3M parameters and under 1 ms latency.

Training data quality is one of the most important drivers of final model quality. In this work, we introduce a method for evaluating data integrity based on the assumption that low-quality input prompts result in high variance and low quality responses. This is achieved by measuring the rejected response quality and the reward gap between the chosen and rejected preference pair. Our method, Rejecting Instruction Preferences (RIP) can be used to filter prompts from existing training sets, or to make high quality synthetic datasets, yielding large performance gains across various benchmarks compared to unfiltered data. Using Llama 3.1-8B-Instruct, RIP improves AlpacaEval2 LC Win Rate by 9.4%, Arena-Hard by 8.7%, and WildBench by 9.9%. Using Llama 3.3-70B-Instruct, RIP improves Arena-Hard from 67.5 to 82.9, which is from 18th place to 6th overall in the leaderboard.

Software development is iterative, yet agentic coding benchmarks overwhelmingly evaluate single-shot solutions against complete specifications. Code can pass the test suite but become progressively harder to extend. Recent iterative benchmarks attempt to close this gap, but constrain the agent's design decisions too tightly to faithfully measure how code quality shapes future extensions. We introduce SlopCodeBench, a language-agnostic benchmark comprising 20 problems and 93 checkpoints, in which agents repeatedly extend their own prior solutions under evolving specifications that force architectural decisions without prescribing internal structure. We track two trajectory-level quality signals: verbosity, the fraction of redundant or duplicated code, and structural erosion, the share of complexity mass concentrated in high-complexity functions. No agent solves any problem end-to-end across 11 models; the highest checkpoint solve rate is 17.2%. Quality degrades steadily: erosion rises in 80% of trajectories and verbosity in 89.8%. Against 48 open-source Python repositories, agent code is 2.2x more verbose and markedly more eroded. Tracking 20 of those repositories over time shows that human code stays flat, while agent code deteriorates with each iteration. A prompt-intervention study shows that initial quality can be improved, but it does not halt degradation. These results demonstrate that pass-rate benchmarks systematically undermeasure extension robustness, and that current agents lack the design discipline iterative software development demands.

Image quality assessment (IQA) focuses on the perceptual visual quality of images, playing a crucial role in downstream tasks such as image reconstruction, compression, and generation. The rapid advancement of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has significantly broadened the scope of IQA, moving toward comprehensive image quality understanding that incorporates content analysis, degradation perception, and comparison reasoning beyond mere numerical scoring. Previous MLLM-based methods typically either generate numerical scores lacking interpretability or heavily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using large-scale annotated datasets to provide descriptive assessments, limiting their flexibility and applicability. In this paper, we propose Q-Insight, a reinforcement learning-based model built upon group relative policy optimization (GRPO), which demonstrates strong visual reasoning capability for image quality understanding while requiring only a limited amount of rating scores and degradation labels. By jointly optimizing score regression and degradation perception tasks with carefully designed reward functions, our approach effectively exploits their mutual benefits for enhanced performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Insight substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both score regression and degradation perception tasks, while exhibiting impressive zero-shot generalization to comparison reasoning tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/lwq20020127/Q-Insight.

In long-horizon tasks, decision-relevant state is often scattered across an expanding trajectory, while the action agent must surface it and act. As trajectories grow, task requirements, environment facts, prior attempts, diagnoses, and open subgoals can be buried in the context window or pushed beyond it, failing to influence decisions when needed. We call this failure mode "behavioral state decay". We study memory as an active intervention mechanism rather than passive retrieval. A separate memory agent runs alongside an unmodified action agent, updating a structured memory bank from the recent trajectory and deciding whether to inject a memory-grounded reminder or remain silent. The module is plug-and-play with frontier action agents and existing agent harnesses. Across Terminal-Bench 2.0 and τ^2-Bench, it improves pass@1 for both weaker and stronger action agents, with gains of +8.3 pp on Terminal-Bench and +6.8 pp on τ^2-Bench. Ablations show that selective intervention outperforms passive bank exposure, always-on injection, advisor-only guidance, and general retrieval. As an early step toward open-weight memory policies, we train Qwen3.5-27B on SETA using SFT and GRPO, improving validation reward and achieving partial transfer to Terminal-Bench.

Image restoration is a fundamental problem that involves recovering a high-quality clean image from its degraded observation. All-In-One image restoration models can effectively restore images from various types and levels of degradation using degradation-specific information as prompts to guide the restoration model. In this work, we present the first approach that uses human-written instructions to guide the image restoration model. Given natural language prompts, our model can recover high-quality images from their degraded counterparts, considering multiple degradation types. Our method, InstructIR, achieves state-of-the-art results on several restoration tasks including image denoising, deraining, deblurring, dehazing, and (low-light) image enhancement. InstructIR improves +1dB over previous all-in-one restoration methods. Moreover, our dataset and results represent a novel benchmark for new research on text-guided image restoration and enhancement. Our code, datasets and models are available at: https://github.com/mv-lab/InstructIR

The stability of recursively trained large language models (LLMs) is a foundational problem for AI safety. Prevailing theory predicts model collapse, a progressive degradation when models are trained on their own output. We challenge this narrative by introducing a selective feedback mechanism. Contrary to expectation, instead of merely slowing decay, our experiments provide strong evidence that this pressure reverses it, inducing a statistically significant performance improvement in a Gemma 2B model on a complex summarization task. We name this phenomenon the Anti-Ouroboros Effect. We contrast this with a foundational experiment using a simple classifier, where the theoretical degenerative loop was validated, highlighting the unique dynamics of high-dimensional models. Our findings establish that systemic resilience can be an emergent property of LLMs under simple selection pressure, suggesting a powerful and scalable principle for developing safer and more robust AI systems. Across five generations, a quality-filtered condition improved by 6.6% in ROUGE-L F1 score, whereas an unfiltered control degraded by 3.5% and a random-filter control degraded by 4.2%

Long-horizon LLM multi-agent systems face reliability risks invisible to infrastructure monitoring. We propose the ADE Predictive Reliability Framework (ADE-PRF), enabling proactive health trajectory prediction from passive degradation detection. ADE-PRF aggregates 20 heterogeneous signals across five layers into a Trust Margin (TM) metric (39.2-point dynamic range). Triple-method parallel prediction enables 8-hour forecasts: the Exponential method achieves MAE=1.228, Direction Accuracy=76.8%, with 99.65% within +/-10-point tolerance. Production validation spans 380,227 predictions and 280,579 validations across six agent profiles over 15 continuous days, plus seven sandbox-controlled experiments. Key findings include detection of "false prosperity" -- degradation concealed by normal surface metrics -- and immediate TM coupling with ground-truth states upon ADE plugin integration, with 16/20 factors relying on ADE-collected data. Exponential consistently outperforms Kalman. ADE-PRF provides among the earliest reliability quantification with forward-looking warnings for production LLM agents.

Training modern neural networks is increasingly fragile, with rare but severe destabilizing updates often causing irreversible divergence or silent performance degradation. Existing optimization methods primarily rely on preventive mechanisms embedded within the optimizer, offering limited ability to detect and recover from instability once it occurs. We introduce a supervisory runtime stability framework that treats optimization as a controlled stochastic process. By isolating an innovation signal derived from secondary measurements, such as validation probes, the framework enables automatic detection and recovery from destabilizing updates without modifying the underlying optimizer. We provide theoretical runtime safety guarantees that formalize bounded degradation and recovery. Our implementation incurs minimal overhead and is compatible with memory-constrained training settings.

Mutation testing is an effective approach to evaluate and strengthen software test suites, but its adoption is currently limited by the mutants' execution computational cost. Several strategies have been proposed to reduce this cost (a.k.a. mutation cost reduction strategies), however none of them has proven to be effective for all scenarios since they often need an ad-hoc manual selection and configuration depending on the software under test (SUT). In this paper, we propose a novel multi-objective evolutionary hyper-heuristic approach, dubbed Sentinel, to automate the generation of optimal cost reduction strategies for every new SUT. We evaluate Sentinel by carrying out a thorough empirical study involving 40 releases of 10 open-source real-world software systems and both baseline and state-of-the-art strategies as a benchmark. We execute a total of 4,800 experiments, and evaluate their results with both quality indicators and statistical significance tests, following the most recent best practice in the literature. The results show that strategies generated by Sentinel outperform the baseline strategies in 95% of the cases always with large effect sizes. They also obtain statistically significantly better results than state-of-the-art strategies in 88% of the cases, with large effect sizes for 95% of them. Also, our study reveals that the mutation strategies generated by Sentinel for a given software version can be used without any loss in quality for subsequently developed versions in 95% of the cases. These results show that Sentinel is able to automatically generate mutation strategies that reduce mutation testing cost without affecting its testing effectiveness (i.e. mutation score), thus taking off from the tester's shoulders the burden of manually selecting and configuring strategies for each SUT.

Battery state of health (SoH) forecasting is important for battery management, but remains challenging due to nonlinear degradation and heterogeneity across batteries. Existing data-driven approaches primarily use temporal models to learn from numerical battery time series, and higher-level degradation characteristics are often not explicitly represented. These characteristics, however, can provide degradation guidance to support reliable forecasting and make the influence of degradation more interpretable. In this paper, we propose Sera, a semantic representation aggregation framework that complements temporal modelling with degradation semantics. Guided by battery domain expertise, Sera extracts degradation semantics from time series and constructs two complementary representations using rule-based knowledge and LLM-based interpretation. The representations are independently encoded and integrated with the representation learned by temporal models through gated aggregations. Experiments on the mainstream benchmark across multiple prediction horizons and different temporal models show that Sera consistently improves forecasting performance, achieving up to a 37.3% reduction in prediction error over the temporal baseline and enhanced generalizability. Counterfactual analysis examines how forecasts respond to changes in degradation semantics to assess interpretability. The results show that prediction responses are consistent with the meanings of key degradation descriptors across tested horizons. Together, these findings demonstrate that structured degradation semantics and effective aggregation can improve forecasting accuracy and support reliable and interpretable battery health forecasting for advanced battery management.

Image restoration under real-world degradations is critical for downstream tasks such as autonomous driving and object detection. However, existing restoration models are often limited by the scale and distribution of their training data, resulting in poor generalization to real-world scenarios. Recently, large-scale image editing models have shown strong generalization ability in restoration tasks, especially for closed-source models like Nano Banana Pro, which can restore images while preserving consistency. Nevertheless, achieving such performance with those large universal models requires substantial data and computational costs. To address this issue, we construct a large-scale dataset covering nine common real-world degradation types and train a state-of-the-art open-source model to narrow the gap with closed-source alternatives. Furthermore, we introduce RealIR-Bench, which contains 464 real-world degraded images and tailored evaluation metrics focusing on degradation removal and consistency preservation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our model ranks first among open-source methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Large language models have revolutionized natural language processing, yet their deployment remains hampered by the substantial memory and runtime overhead of the transformer's Key-Value cache. To mitigate this, recent methods employ a scoring-aggregation framework to evict unimportant cache entries, based on the stability assumption-that a fixed subset of entries remains consistently important during generation. However, prior work has largely focused on refining importance indicators for scoring, while defaulting to mean aggregation due to a faithful trust in the stability assumption. In this work, we argue that this underlying assumption is inherently fragile, making mean aggregation highly vulnerable in extreme cases. To counter this, we propose a simple yet elegant defensive aggregation strategy: a two-step, linear-time approach that controls worst-case risk, thereby defending against extreme cases with negligible computational overhead. Embodying this strategy, we propose a novel cache eviction method, DefensiveKV and its extension, Layer-DefensiveKV, which incorporates layer-wise budget allocation. Across seven task domains (18 datasets), our methods reduce generation quality loss by 2.3x and 4.3x respectively, versus the strongest baseline under a 20% cache size. These results set new performance benchmarks and pioneer a promising direction for optimizing cache eviction against underlying fragility through worst-case risk management. Our code is available at https://github.com/FFY0/DefensiveKV.

Universal image restoration (UIR) aims to recover clean images from diverse and unknown degradations using a unified model. Existing UIR methods primarily focus on pixel reconstruction and often lack explicit diagnostic reasoning over degradation composition, severity, and scene semantics prior to restoration. We propose Reason and Restore (R\&R), a novel framework that integrates structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the image restoration pipeline. R\&R introduces an explicit reasoner, implemented by fine-tuning Qwen3-VL, to diagnose degradation types, quantify degradation severity, infer key degradation-related factors, and describe relevant scene and object semantics. The resulting structured reasoning provides interpretable and fine-grained diagnostic priors for the restorer. To further improve restoration quality, the quantified degradation severity produced by the reasoner is leveraged as reinforcement learning (RL) signals to guide and strengthen the restorer. Unlike existing multimodal LLM-based agentic systems that decouple reasoning from low-level vision tasks, R\&R tightly couples semantic diagnostic reasoning with pixel-level restoration in a unified framework. Extensive experiments across diverse UIR benchmarks demonstrate that R\&R achieves state-of-the-art performance while offering unique interpretability into the restoration process.

As LLM agents are deployed in long-horizon sessions, context accumulation drives up inference costs. Existing approaches utilize text pruning or dynamic memory eviction to minimize token footprints; however, their unconstrained sequence mutations alter layouts, introducing prefix mismatches and cache invalidation. This reveals a critical trade-off between text sparsity and prompt cache continuity. To address this, we present TokenPilot, a dual-granularity context management framework. Globally, Ingestion-Aware Compaction acts as a framework harness to stabilize prompt prefixes and eliminate open-world environmental noise at the ingestion gate. Locally, Lifecycle-Aware Eviction monitors the ongoing residual utility of context segments, enforcing a conservative batch-turn schedule to offload content segments only when task relevance expires. Experiments on PinchBench and Claw-Eval under both isolated and continuous modes demonstrate that TokenPilot reduces costs by 61% and 56% in isolated mode, and 61% and 87% in continuous mode, while maintaining competitive performance compared to prior systems. TokenPilot has been integrated into LightMem2 at https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem2.

This paper proposes the Degradation Classification Pre-Training (DCPT), which enables models to learn how to classify the degradation type of input images for universal image restoration pre-training. Unlike the existing self-supervised pre-training methods, DCPT utilizes the degradation type of the input image as an extremely weak supervision, which can be effortlessly obtained, even intrinsic in all image restoration datasets. DCPT comprises two primary stages. Initially, image features are extracted from the encoder. Subsequently, a lightweight decoder, such as ResNet18, is leveraged to classify the degradation type of the input image solely based on the features extracted in the first stage, without utilizing the input image. The encoder is pre-trained with a straightforward yet potent DCPT, which is used to address universal image restoration and achieve outstanding performance. Following DCPT, both convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformers demonstrate performance improvements, with gains of up to 2.55 dB in the 10D all-in-one restoration task and 6.53 dB in the mixed degradation scenarios. Moreover, previous self-supervised pretraining methods, such as masked image modeling, discard the decoder after pre-training, while our DCPT utilizes the pre-trained parameters more effectively. This superiority arises from the degradation classifier acquired during DCPT, which facilitates transfer learning between models of identical architecture trained on diverse degradation types. Source code and models are available at https://github.com/MILab-PKU/dcpt.

Real-world deployment of active learning typically forces practitioners to choose an acquisition strategy before any data is labeled. This is a daunting task: strategy performance varies widely across settings (e.g. datasets, surrogate models) and cannot be assessed without deployment. Existing strategy selection methods explore one strategy from a portfolio at each round and identify the optimal one using bandit feedback or model retraining. Many acquisition rounds are therefore spent exploring strategies rather than collecting the most informative data. Such overhead is a major barrier to AL-driven design of high-throughput experiments, such as genetic perturbation screens and directed evolution, where AL runs consist of only a few rounds with large batch sizes. This regime permits a natural alternative: acquiring data using multiple AL strategies within a single batch. We refer to this as soft strategy selection and introduce FractAL, a method specifically designed for this task. FractAL infers a per-strategy reward using influence-function-based data attribution, which requires no additional retraining, and then computes budget shares for each strategy in the portfolio using online mirror descent. We benchmark FractAL across 7 setups spanning classification, regression, and genetic perturbation effect prediction. The results highlight that strategy selection is a hard problem: every existing method performs worse than random sampling on at least one setup. FractAL, however, matches or outperforms every baseline, including random sampling, on all 7 setups. Its allocations concentrate budget on the strongest strategies in the portfolio while pruning the weakest. FractAL is therefore a reliable choice for real-world deployments, where the optimal strategy is unknown in advance, an important step towards making AL practical for high-throughput experiments and modern scientific discovery.

Machine learning systems increasingly face the need to remove the influence of entire data domains, such as toxic language, harmful behavior, or topical content, rather than isolated records. Recent work formalizes this problem as distributional unlearning: selecting a subset of a forget domain whose removal moves the training distribution away from an unwanted population while preserving proximity to the desired one. However, existing analyses often impose parametric assumptions to obtain tractable selection rules. These assumptions may be poorly suited to high-dimensional language-model representations. We introduce Mamushi, a framework for non-parametric distributional unlearning that ranks forget examples using a probabilistic classifier whose Bayes-optimal logit equals the forget-to-retain log-density ratio (up to an additive class-prior constant). We show that thresholding the population log-density ratio yields the optimal fixed-budget selection rule for our removal--preservation objective and establish a non-asymptotic transfer guarantee relating score-estimation and threshold-calibration errors to degradation from the population-optimal selection rule. Our empirical evaluation spans real-world datasets on toxic-language removal and topical-domain removal regimes using different representations, with Mamushi achieving a more favorable removal--preservation trade-off than other baselines. Our work shows that Mamushi can serve as an efficient selection approach for downstream machine unlearning procedures, reducing the number of forget examples required to reach a fixed forgetting target.

Image restoration, which aims to retrieve and enhance degraded images, is fundamental across a wide range of applications. While conventional deep learning approaches have notably improved the image quality across various tasks, they still suffer from (i) the high storage cost needed for various task-specific models and (ii) the lack of interactivity and flexibility, hindering their wider application. Drawing inspiration from the pronounced success of prompts in both linguistic and visual domains, we propose novel Prompt-In-Prompt learning for universal image restoration, named PIP. First, we present two novel prompts, a degradation-aware prompt to encode high-level degradation knowledge and a basic restoration prompt to provide essential low-level information. Second, we devise a novel prompt-to-prompt interaction module to fuse these two prompts into a universal restoration prompt. Third, we introduce a selective prompt-to-feature interaction module to modulate the degradation-related feature. By doing so, the resultant PIP works as a plug-and-play module to enhance existing restoration models for universal image restoration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of PIP on multiple restoration tasks, including image denoising, deraining, dehazing, deblurring, and low-light enhancement. Remarkably, PIP is interpretable, flexible, efficient, and easy-to-use, showing promising potential for real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/longzilicart/pip_universal.

Differentiable Neural Architecture Search is one of the most popular Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods for its search efficiency and simplicity, accomplished by jointly optimizing the model weight and architecture parameters in a weight-sharing supernet via gradient-based algorithms. At the end of the search phase, the operations with the largest architecture parameters will be selected to form the final architecture, with the implicit assumption that the values of architecture parameters reflect the operation strength. While much has been discussed about the supernet's optimization, the architecture selection process has received little attention. We provide empirical and theoretical analysis to show that the magnitude of architecture parameters does not necessarily indicate how much the operation contributes to the supernet's performance. We propose an alternative perturbation-based architecture selection that directly measures each operation's influence on the supernet. We re-evaluate several differentiable NAS methods with the proposed architecture selection and find that it is able to extract significantly improved architectures from the underlying supernets consistently. Furthermore, we find that several failure modes of DARTS can be greatly alleviated with the proposed selection method, indicating that much of the poor generalization observed in DARTS can be attributed to the failure of magnitude-based architecture selection rather than entirely the optimization of its supernet.

Automated decision systems produce operational data across multiple infrastructure layers, yet no single logging format captures the complete governance-relevant record of how a decision was reached. Regulatory frameworks prescribe what must be recorded without specifying a data model for how to record it -- a gap this paper terms the Fragmented Trace Problem. Following a design science methodology, the paper presents the Decision Event Schema (DES), a JSON Schema specification that bridges four infrastructure layers -- ML inference, rule/policy evaluation, cross-system coupling, and governance metadata -- within a single per-decision event structure. The schema employs degradation-aware field design: each of six top-level field groups maps to a governance evidence property and the degradation type it must resist. DES defines ten required root-level fields and introduces a tiered evidence strategy (lightweight, sampled, full) that enables organizations to match evidence completeness to decision risk and throughput. A mechanism feasibility analysis demonstrates compatibility with the highest-throughput integrity mechanisms at production-scale decision rates. Evaluation against 25+ existing formats confirms that DES is the only specification covering all four layers simultaneously. The schema offers practitioners a reference adoptable directly or adaptable through namespace extensions, and regulators a mapping from requirements to minimum evidence tiers.

Image restoration has always been a cutting-edge topic in the academic and industrial fields of computer vision. Since degradation signals are often random and diverse, "all-in-one" models that can do blind image restoration have been concerned in recent years. Early works require training specialized headers and tails to handle each degradation of concern, which are manually cumbersome. Recent works focus on learning visual prompts from data distribution to identify degradation type. However, the prompts employed in most of models are non-text, lacking sufficient emphasis on the importance of human-in-the-loop. In this paper, an effective textual prompt guided image restoration model has been proposed. In this model, task-specific BERT is fine-tuned to accurately understand user's instructions and generating textual prompt guidance. Depth-wise multi-head transposed attentions and gated convolution modules are designed to bridge the gap between textual prompts and visual features. The proposed model has innovatively introduced semantic prompts into low-level visual domain. It highlights the potential to provide a natural, precise, and controllable way to perform image restoration tasks. Extensive experiments have been done on public denoising, dehazing and deraining datasets. The experiment results demonstrate that, compared with popular state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model can obtain much more superior performance, achieving accurate recognition and removal of degradation without increasing model's complexity. Related source codes and data will be publicly available on github site https://github.com/MoTong-AI-studio/TextPromptIR.

Due to the disparity between real-world degradations in user-generated content(UGC) images and synthetic degradations, traditional super-resolution methods struggle to generalize effectively, necessitating a more robust approach to model real-world distortions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to UGC image super-resolution by integrating semantic guidance into a diffusion framework. Our method addresses the inconsistency between degradations in wild and synthetic datasets by separately simulating the degradation processes on the LSDIR dataset and combining them with the official paired training set. Furthermore, we enhance degradation removal and detail generation by incorporating a pretrained semantic extraction model (SAM2) and fine-tuning key hyperparameters for improved perceptual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach against state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, the proposed model won second place in the CVPR NTIRE 2025 Short-form UGC Image Super-Resolution Challenge, further validating its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.c10pom/Moonsofang/NTIRE-2025-SRlab.

In this paper, we introduce a new perspective for improving image restoration by removing degradation in the textual representations of a given degraded image. Intuitively, restoration is much easier on text modality than image one. For example, it can be easily conducted by removing degradation-related words while keeping the content-aware words. Hence, we combine the advantages of images in detail description and ones of text in degradation removal to perform restoration. To address the cross-modal assistance, we propose to map the degraded images into textual representations for removing the degradations, and then convert the restored textual representations into a guidance image for assisting image restoration. In particular, We ingeniously embed an image-to-text mapper and text restoration module into CLIP-equipped text-to-image models to generate the guidance. Then, we adopt a simple coarse-to-fine approach to dynamically inject multi-scale information from guidance to image restoration networks. Extensive experiments are conducted on various image restoration tasks, including deblurring, dehazing, deraining, and denoising, and all-in-one image restoration. The results showcase that our method outperforms state-of-the-art ones across all these tasks. The codes and models are available at https://github.com/mrluin/TextualDegRemoval.

Image restoration under diverse degradations remains challenging for unified all-in-one frameworks due to feature interference and insufficient expert specialization. We propose SLER-IR, a spherical layer-wise expert routing framework that dynamically activates specialized experts across network layers. To ensure reliable routing, we introduce a Spherical Uniform Degradation Embedding with contrastive learning, which maps degradation representations onto a hypersphere to eliminate geometry bias in linear embedding spaces. In addition, a Global-Local Granularity Fusion (GLGF) module integrates global semantics and local degradation cues to address spatially non-uniform degradations and the train-test granularity gap. Experiments on three-task and five-task benchmarks demonstrate that SLER-IR achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods in both PSNR and SSIM. Code and models will be publicly released.

Remote sensing images acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and satellites are often degraded by adverse weather, illumination variation, and imaging artifacts, which may co-occur and jointly induce global distribution shifts and local structural corruption. Although All-in-One image restoration offers an appealing unified alternative to task-specific pipelines, existing methods still suffer from weak or implicit degradation cues and parameter redundancy caused by full-rank multi-expert designs with overlapping restoration behaviors. We propose CoRE-UIR (Common and Residual Experts for Universal Image Restoration), a prior-guided global-local framework centered on the Common-and-Residual Expert Block (CoRE). CoRE explicitly decomposes restoration capacity into a common dense expert for degradation-invariant restoration and low-rank residual experts for degradation-specific compensation, enabling adaptive specialization without redundant expert replication. Built on this design, Degradation Prior Embedding (DPE) adapts frozen CLIP features into an explicit restoration-oriented prior, while Global Feature Modulation (GFM) aligns global feature statistics before local residual compensation. We also construct MDVD-108K (Multi-Degradation VisDrone), a large-scale UAV restoration dataset covering both single and compound degradations, together with a real-world test set. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that CoRE-UIR improves the overall average PSNR by 1.05 dB while running 11.83times faster and reducing peak memory by 85.3% relative to the strongest baseline, BaryIR, thereby maintaining a favorable quality-efficiency trade-off. Evaluations on downstream tasks and unseen degradation also validate the generalizability of CoRE-UIR. The code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/zzaiyan/CoRE-UIR.

Learning rate schedules used in practice bear little resemblance to those recommended by theory. We close much of this theory/practice gap, and as a consequence are able to derive new problem-adaptive learning rate schedules. Our key technical contribution is a refined analysis of learning rate schedules for a wide class of optimization algorithms (including SGD). In contrast to most prior works that study the convergence of the average iterate, we study the last iterate, which is what most people use in practice. When considering only worst-case analysis, our theory predicts that the best choice is the linear decay schedule: a popular choice in practice that sets the stepsize proportionally to 1 - t/T, where t is the current iteration and T is the total number of steps. To go beyond this worst-case analysis, we use the observed gradient norms to derive schedules refined for any particular task. These refined schedules exhibit learning rate warm-up and rapid learning rate annealing near the end of training. Ours is the first systematic approach to automatically yield both of these properties. We perform the most comprehensive evaluation of learning rate schedules to date, evaluating across 10 diverse deep learning problems, a series of LLMs, and a suite of logistic regression problems. We validate that overall, the linear-decay schedule matches or outperforms all commonly used default schedules including cosine annealing, and that our schedule refinement method gives further improvements.

Recent development of Under-Display Camera (UDC) systems provides a true bezel-less and notch-free viewing experience on smartphones (and TV, laptops, tablets), while allowing images to be captured from the selfie camera embedded underneath. In a typical UDC system, the microstructure of the semi-transparent organic light-emitting diode (OLED) pixel array attenuates and diffracts the incident light on the camera, resulting in significant image quality degradation. Oftentimes, noise, flare, haze, and blur can be observed in UDC images. In this work, we aim to analyze and tackle the aforementioned degradation problems. We define a physics-based image formation model to better understand the degradation. In addition, we utilize one of the world's first commodity UDC smartphone prototypes to measure the real-world Point Spread Function (PSF) of the UDC system, and provide a model-based data synthesis pipeline to generate realistically degraded images. We specially design a new domain knowledge-enabled Dynamic Skip Connection Network (DISCNet) to restore the UDC images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real UDC data. Our physics-based image formation model and proposed DISCNet can provide foundations for further exploration in UDC image restoration, and even for general diffraction artifact removal in a broader sense.

Preserving cultural heritage is of paramount importance. In the domain of art restoration, developing a computer vision model capable of effectively restoring deteriorated images of art pieces was difficult, but now we have a good computer vision state-of-art. Traditional restoration methods are often time-consuming and require extensive expertise. The aim of this work is to design an automated solution based on computer vision models that can enhance and reconstruct degraded artworks, improving their visual quality while preserving their original characteristics and artifacts. The model should handle a diverse range of deterioration types, including but not limited to noise, blur, scratches, fading, and other common forms of degradation. We adapt the current state-of-art for the image super-resolution based on the Diffusion Model (DM) and fine-tune it for Image art restoration. Our results show that instead of fine-tunning multiple different models for different kinds of degradation, fine-tuning one super-resolution. We train it on multiple datasets to make it robust. code link: https://github.com/Naagar/art_restoration_DM

In the real world, image degradations caused by rain often exhibit a combination of rain streaks and raindrops, thereby increasing the challenges of recovering the underlying clean image. Note that the rain streaks and raindrops have diverse shapes, sizes, and locations in the captured image, and thus modeling the correlation relationship between irregular degradations caused by rain artifacts is a necessary prerequisite for image deraining. This paper aims to present an efficient and flexible mechanism to learn and model degradation relationships in a global view, thereby achieving a unified removal of intricate rain scenes. To do so, we propose a Sparse Sampling Transformer based on Uncertainty-Driven Ranking, dubbed UDR-S2Former. Compared to previous methods, our UDR-S2Former has three merits. First, it can adaptively sample relevant image degradation information to model underlying degradation relationships. Second, explicit application of the uncertainty-driven ranking strategy can facilitate the network to attend to degradation features and understand the reconstruction process. Finally, experimental results show that our UDR-S2Former clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for all benchmarks.

Deep Recommender Systems (DRS) are increasingly dependent on a large number of feature fields for more precise recommendations. Effective feature selection methods are consequently becoming critical for further enhancing the accuracy and optimizing storage efficiencies to align with the deployment demands. This research area, particularly in the context of DRS, is nascent and faces three core challenges. Firstly, variant experimental setups across research papers often yield unfair comparisons, obscuring practical insights. Secondly, the existing literature's lack of detailed analysis on selection attributes, based on large-scale datasets and a thorough comparison among selection techniques and DRS backbones, restricts the generalizability of findings and impedes deployment on DRS. Lastly, research often focuses on comparing the peak performance achievable by feature selection methods, an approach that is typically computationally infeasible for identifying the optimal hyperparameters and overlooks evaluating the robustness and stability of these methods. To bridge these gaps, this paper presents ERASE, a comprehensive bEnchmaRk for feAture SElection for DRS. ERASE comprises a thorough evaluation of eleven feature selection methods, covering both traditional and deep learning approaches, across four public datasets, private industrial datasets, and a real-world commercial platform, achieving significant enhancement. Our code is available online for ease of reproduction.

Nowadays, software systems tend to include Artificial Intelligence (AI) components. Changes in the operational environment have been known to negatively impact the stability of AI-enabled software systems by causing unintended changes in behavior. However, how an environment configuration impacts the behavior of such systems has yet to be explored. Understanding and quantifying the degree of instability caused by different environment settings can help practitioners decide the best environment configuration for the most stable AI systems. To achieve this goal, we performed experiments with eight different combinations of three key environment variables (operating system, Python version, and CPU architecture) on 30 open-source AI-enabled systems using the Travis CI platform. We determine the existence and the degree of instability introduced by each configuration using three metrics: the output of an AI component of the system (model performance), the time required to build and run the system (processing time), and the cost associated with building and running the system (expense). Our results indicate that changes in environment configurations lead to instability across all three metrics; however, it is observed more frequently with respect to processing time and expense rather than model performance. For example, between Linux and MacOS, instability is observed in 23\%, 96.67\%, and 100\% of the studied projects in model performance, processing time, and expense, respectively. Our findings underscore the importance of identifying the optimal combination of configuration settings to mitigate drops in model performance and reduce the processing time and expense before deploying an AI-enabled system.

Neural architecture search (NAS) methods rely on a search strategy for deciding which architectures to evaluate next and a performance estimation strategy for assessing their performance (e.g., using full evaluations, multi-fidelity evaluations, or the one-shot model). In this paper, we focus on the search strategy. We introduce the simple yet powerful evolutionary algorithm of differential evolution to the NAS community. Using the simplest performance evaluation strategy of full evaluations, we comprehensively compare this search strategy to regularized evolution and Bayesian optimization and demonstrate that it yields improved and more robust results for 13 tabular NAS benchmarks based on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-1Shot1, NAS-Bench-201 and NAS-HPO bench.

Image degradation from blur, noise, compression, and poor illumination severely undermines multimodal understanding in real-world settings. Unified multimodal models that combine understanding and generation within a single architecture are a natural fit for this challenge, as their generative pathway can model the fine-grained visual structure that degradation destroys. Yet these models fail to leverage their own generative capacity on degraded inputs. We trace this disconnect to two compounding factors: existing training regimes never ask the model to invoke generation during reasoning, and the standard decode-reencode pathway does not support effective joint optimization. We present CLEAR, a framework that connects the two capabilities through three progressive steps: (1) supervised fine-tuning on a degradation-aware dataset to establish the generate-then-answer reasoning pattern; (2) a Latent Representation Bridge that replaces the decode-reencode detour with a direct, optimizable connection between generation and reasoning; (3) Interleaved GRPO, a reinforcement learning method that jointly optimizes text reasoning and visual generation under answer-correctness rewards. We construct MMD-Bench, covering three degradation severity levels across six standard multimodal benchmarks. Experiments show that CLEAR substantially improves robustness on degraded inputs while preserving clean-image performance. Our analysis further reveals that removing pixel-level reconstruction supervision leads to intermediate visual states with higher perceptual quality, suggesting that task-driven optimization and visual quality are naturally aligned.

Image restoration under adverse conditions, such as underwater, haze or fog, and low-light environments, remains a highly challenging problem due to complex physical degradations and severe information loss. Existing datasets are predominantly limited to a single degradation type or heavily rely on synthetic data without stereo consistency, inherently restricting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce M3D-Stereo, a stereo dataset with 7904 high-resolution image pairs for image restoration research acquired in multiple media with multiple controlled degradation levels. It encompasses four degradation scenarios: underwater scatter, haze/fog, underwater low-light, and haze low-light. Each scenario forms a subset, and is divided into six levels of progressive degradation, allowing fine-grained evaluations of restoration methods with increasing severity of degradation. Collected via a laboratory setup, the dataset provides aligned stereo image pairs along with their pixel-wise consistent clear ground truths. Two restoration tasks, single-level and mixed-level degradation, were performed to verify its validity. M3D-Stereo establishes a better controlled and more realistic benchmark to evaluate image restoration and stereo matching methods in complex degradation environments. It is made public under LGPLv3 license.

Blind all-in-one image restoration models aim to recover a high-quality image from an input degraded with unknown distortions. However, these models require all the possible degradation types to be defined during the training stage while showing limited generalization to unseen degradations, which limits their practical application in complex cases. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective adaptive blind all-in-one restoration (ABAIR) model, which can address multiple degradations, generalizes well to unseen degradations, and efficiently incorporate new degradations by training a small fraction of parameters. First, we train our baseline model on a large dataset of natural images with multiple synthetic degradations, augmented with a segmentation head to estimate per-pixel degradation types, resulting in a powerful backbone able to generalize to a wide range of degradations. Second, we adapt our baseline model to varying image restoration tasks using independent low-rank adapters. Third, we learn to adaptively combine adapters to versatile images via a flexible and lightweight degradation estimator. Our model is both powerful in handling specific distortions and flexible in adapting to complex tasks, it not only outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin on five- and three-task IR setups, but also shows improved generalization to unseen degradations and also composite distortions.

Old photos preserve invaluable historical memories, making their restoration and colorization highly desirable. While existing restoration models can address some degradation issues like denoising and scratch removal, they often struggle with accurate colorization. This limitation arises from the unique degradation inherent in old photos, such as faded brightness and altered color hues, which are different from modern photo distributions, creating a substantial domain gap during colorization. In this paper, we propose a novel old photo colorization framework based on the generative diffusion model FLUX. Our approach introduces a structure-color decoupling strategy that separates structure preservation from color restoration, enabling accurate colorization of old photos while maintaining structural consistency. We further enhance the model with a progressive Direct Preference Optimization (Pro-DPO) strategy, which allows the model to learn subtle color preferences through coarse-to-fine transitions in color augmentation. Additionally, we address the limitations of text-based prompts by introducing visual semantic prompts, which extract fine-grained semantic information directly from old photos, helping to eliminate the color bias inherent in old photos. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art colorization methods, including closed-source commercial models, producing high-quality and vivid colorization.

The rapid proliferation of data centers (DCs), driven by cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), has led to massive energy demand and carbon emissions, posing significant sustainability challenges. Carbon-aware optimization in geographically distributed data centers has been widely studied. Most existing approaches mainly focus on operational carbon emissions from server usage. However, existing literature often ignores workload-induced thermal stress, which accelerates nonlinear hardware degradation. This leads to more frequent server replacements and ultimately increases embodied carbon emissions. To address these limitations, we propose a comprehensive carbon life-cycle modeling framework for distributed data centers. Apart from operational carbon emissions, this work combines workload scheduling with a utilization-dependent exponential aging model to evaluate long-term carbon costs from server degradation. In order to solve the proposed optimization model in an online and privacy-preserving manner, an enhanced Lyapunov framework with time-varying queue shifting (TVQS) is first introduced to handle system uncertainties. Then, a zero-sum perturbation-based alternating direction method of multipliers (ZSP-ADMM) framework is developed to enable distributed coordination across geographically separated data centers while protecting locally exchanged workload information. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves up to 13.0% lower carbon emissions and 12.6% lower operational costs compared with benchmarks.

Machine learning systems in fraud detection, credit scoring, and clinical risk assessment operate under delayed ground truth: outcome labels arrive days to months after the decision they evaluate. During this blind period, governance evidence degrades through mechanisms that neither drift detection methods nor governance frameworks adequately address. This paper formalizes an evidence sufficiency model with four dimensions (completeness, freshness, reliability, representativeness) and a decision-readiness gate that quantifies how label latency degrades evidence quality. The model maps three drift types to dimension-specific degradation trajectories. A complementary proxy indicator framework comprising seven measurement categories estimates sufficiency degradation without labels, with explicit coverage mapping and characterized blind spots per drift type. Evaluation on the IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection dataset (~590K transactions) with controlled drift injection shows that composite proxy monitoring detects covariate and mixed drift with 100% detection rate, while concept drift without feature change remains undetected -- consistent with the theoretical impossibility of unsupervised detection when P(X) is unchanged. Blind period simulation confirms monotone sufficiency degradation, with concept drift degrading fastest (S=0.242 at day 60 vs 0.418 for no-drift). The framework contributes a governance sufficiency monitoring instrument; its value lies in translating drift signals into auditable sufficiency assessments with characterized blind spots. Mapping sufficiency levels to governance actions requires deployment-specific calibration beyond this study's scope.

Despite substantial advances in all-in-one image restoration for addressing diverse degradations within a unified model, existing methods remain vulnerable to out-of-distribution degradations, thereby limiting their generalization in real-world scenarios. To tackle the challenge, this work is motivated by the intuition that multisource degraded feature distributions are induced by different degradation-specific shifts from an underlying degradation-agnostic distribution, and recovering such a shared distribution is thus crucial for achieving generalization across degradations. With this insight, we propose BaryIR, a representation learning framework that aligns multisource degraded features in the Wasserstein barycenter (WB) space, which models a degradation-agnostic distribution by minimizing the average of Wasserstein distances to multisource degraded distributions. We further introduce residual subspaces, whose embeddings are mutually contrasted while remaining orthogonal to the WB embeddings. Consequently, BaryIR explicitly decouples two orthogonal spaces: a WB space that encodes the degradation-agnostic invariant contents shared across degradations, and residual subspaces that adaptively preserve the degradation-specific knowledge. This disentanglement mitigates overfitting to in-distribution degradations and enables adaptive restoration grounded on the degradation-agnostic shared invariance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BaryIR performs competitively against state-of-the-art all-in-one methods. Notably, BaryIR generalizes well to unseen degradations (e.g., types and levels) and shows remarkable robustness in learning generalized features, even when trained on limited degradation types and evaluated on real-world data with mixed degradations.

As large language models are increasingly responsible for online content, concerns arise about the impact of repeatedly processing their own outputs. Inspired by the "broken telephone" effect in chained human communication, this study investigates whether LLMs similarly distort information through iterative generation. Through translation-based experiments, we find that distortion accumulates over time, influenced by language choice and chain complexity. While degradation is inevitable, it can be mitigated through strategic prompting techniques. These findings contribute to discussions on the long-term effects of AI-mediated information propagation, raising important questions about the reliability of LLM-generated content in iterative workflows.

A major barrier to deploying current machine learning models lies in their non-reliability to dataset shifts. To resolve this problem, most existing studies attempted to transfer stable information to unseen environments. Particularly, independent causal mechanisms-based methods proposed to remove mutable causal mechanisms via the do-operator. Compared to previous methods, the obtained stable predictors are more effective in identifying stable information. However, a key question remains: which subset of this whole stable information should the model transfer, in order to achieve optimal generalization ability? To answer this question, we present a comprehensive minimax analysis from a causal perspective. Specifically, we first provide a graphical condition for the whole stable set to be optimal. When this condition fails, we surprisingly find with an example that this whole stable set, although can fully exploit stable information, is not the optimal one to transfer. To identify the optimal subset under this case, we propose to estimate the worst-case risk with a novel optimization scheme over the intervention functions on mutable causal mechanisms. We then propose an efficient algorithm to search for the subset with minimal worst-case risk, based on a newly defined equivalence relation between stable subsets. Compared to the exponential cost of exhaustively searching over all subsets, our searching strategy enjoys a polynomial complexity. The effectiveness and efficiency of our methods are demonstrated on synthetic data and the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

The diffusion model presents a powerful ability to capture the entire (conditional) data distribution. However, due to the lack of sufficient training and data to learn to cover low-probability areas, the model will be penalized for failing to generate high-quality images corresponding to these areas. To achieve better generation quality, guidance strategies such as classifier free guidance (CFG) can guide the samples to the high-probability areas during the sampling stage. However, the standard CFG often leads to over-simplified or distorted samples. On the other hand, the alternative line of guiding diffusion model with its bad version is limited by carefully designed degradation strategies, extra training and additional sampling steps. In this paper, we proposed a simple yet effective strategy Internal Guidance (IG), which introduces an auxiliary supervision on the intermediate layer during training process and extrapolates the intermediate and deep layer's outputs to obtain generative results during sampling process. This simple strategy yields significant improvements in both training efficiency and generation quality on various baselines. On ImageNet 256x256, SiT-XL/2+IG achieves FID=5.31 and FID=1.75 at 80 and 800 epochs. More impressively, LightningDiT-XL/1+IG achieves FID=1.34 which achieves a large margin between all of these methods. Combined with CFG, LightningDiT-XL/1+IG achieves the current state-of-the-art FID of 1.19.

We introduce Cautious Weight Decay (CWD), a one-line, optimizer-agnostic modification that applies weight decay only to parameter coordinates whose signs align with the optimizer update. Unlike standard decoupled decay, which implicitly optimizes a regularized or constrained objective, CWD preserves the original loss and admits a bilevel interpretation: it induces sliding-mode behavior upon reaching the stationary manifold, allowing it to search for locally Pareto-optimal stationary points of the unmodified objective. In practice, CWD is a drop-in change for optimizers such as AdamW, Lion, and Muon, requiring no new hyperparameters or additional tuning. For language model pre-training and ImageNet classification, CWD consistently improves final loss and accuracy at million- to billion-parameter scales.

Recent video editing models have achieved impressive results, but most still require large-scale paired datasets. Collecting such naturally aligned pairs at scale remains highly challenging and constitutes a critical bottleneck, especially for local video editing data. Existing workarounds transfer image editing to video through global motion control for pair-free video editing, but such designs struggle with background and temporal consistency. In this paper, we propose NOVA: Sparse Control \& Dense Synthesis, a new framework for unpaired video editing. Specifically, the sparse branch provides semantic guidance through user-edited keyframes distributed across the video, and the dense branch continuously incorporates motion and texture information from the original video to maintain high fidelity and coherence. Moreover, we introduce a degradation-simulation training strategy that enables the model to learn motion reconstruction and temporal consistency by training on artificially degraded videos, thus eliminating the need for paired data. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NOVA outperforms existing approaches in edit fidelity, motion preservation, and temporal coherence.

This study introduces a Masked Degradation Classification Pre-Training method (MaskDCPT), designed to facilitate the classification of degradation types in input images, leading to comprehensive image restoration pre-training. Unlike conventional pre-training methods, MaskDCPT uses the degradation type of the image as an extremely weak supervision, while simultaneously leveraging the image reconstruction to enhance performance and robustness. MaskDCPT includes an encoder and two decoders: the encoder extracts features from the masked low-quality input image. The classification decoder uses these features to identify the degradation type, whereas the reconstruction decoder aims to reconstruct a corresponding high-quality image. This design allows the pre-training to benefit from both masked image modeling and contrastive learning, resulting in a generalized representation suited for restoration tasks. Benefit from the straightforward yet potent MaskDCPT, the pre-trained encoder can be used to address universal image restoration and achieve outstanding performance. Implementing MaskDCPT significantly improves performance for both convolution neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers, with a minimum increase in PSNR of 3.77 dB in the 5D all-in-one restoration task and a 34.8% reduction in PIQE compared to baseline in real-world degradation scenarios. It also emergences strong generalization to previously unseen degradation types and levels. In addition, we curate and release the UIR-2.5M dataset, which includes 2.5 million paired restoration samples across 19 degradation types and over 200 degradation levels, incorporating both synthetic and real-world data. The dataset, source code, and models are available at https://github.com/MILab-PKU/MaskDCPT.

It is widely acknowledged that single image super-resolution (SISR) methods would not perform well if the assumed degradation model deviates from those in real images. Although several degradation models take additional factors into consideration, such as blur, they are still not effective enough to cover the diverse degradations of real images. To address this issue, this paper proposes to design a more complex but practical degradation model that consists of randomly shuffled blur, downsampling and noise degradations. Specifically, the blur is approximated by two convolutions with isotropic and anisotropic Gaussian kernels; the downsampling is randomly chosen from nearest, bilinear and bicubic interpolations; the noise is synthesized by adding Gaussian noise with different noise levels, adopting JPEG compression with different quality factors, and generating processed camera sensor noise via reverse-forward camera image signal processing (ISP) pipeline model and RAW image noise model. To verify the effectiveness of the new degradation model, we have trained a deep blind ESRGAN super-resolver and then applied it to super-resolve both synthetic and real images with diverse degradations. The experimental results demonstrate that the new degradation model can help to significantly improve the practicability of deep super-resolvers, thus providing a powerful alternative solution for real SISR applications.

In the blind single image super-resolution (SISR) task, existing works have been successful in restoring image-level unknown degradations. However, when a single video frame becomes the input, these works usually fail to address degradations caused by video compression, such as mosquito noise, ringing, blockiness, and staircase noise. In this work, we for the first time, present a video compression-based degradation model to synthesize low-resolution image data in the blind SISR task. Our proposed image synthesizing method is widely applicable to existing image datasets, so that a single degraded image can contain distortions caused by the lossy video compression algorithms. This overcomes the leak of feature diversity in video data and thus retains the training efficiency. By introducing video coding artifacts to SISR degradation models, neural networks can super-resolve images with the ability to restore video compression degradations, and achieve better results on restoring generic distortions caused by image compression as well. Our proposed approach achieves superior performance in SOTA no-reference Image Quality Assessment, and shows better visual quality on various datasets. In addition, we evaluate the SISR neural network trained with our degradation model on video super-resolution (VSR) datasets. Compared to architectures specifically designed for the VSR purpose, our method exhibits similar or better performance, evidencing that the presented strategy on infusing video-based degradation is generalizable to address more complicated compression artifacts even without temporal cues.

A major challenge in training large-scale machine learning models is configuring the training process to maximize model performance, i.e., finding the best training setup from a vast design space. In this work, we unlock a gradient-based approach to this problem. We first introduce an algorithm for efficiently calculating metagradients -- gradients through model training -- at scale. We then introduce a "smooth model training" framework that enables effective optimization using metagradients. With metagradient descent (MGD), we greatly improve on existing dataset selection methods, outperform accuracy-degrading data poisoning attacks by an order of magnitude, and automatically find competitive learning rate schedules.

Feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) overcomes the limitations of optimization-based 3DGS by enabling fast and high-quality reconstruction without the need for per-scene optimization. However, existing feedforward approaches typically assume that input multi-view images are clean and high-quality. In real-world scenarios, images are often captured under challenging conditions such as noise, low light, or rain, resulting in inaccurate geometry and degraded 3D reconstruction. To address these challenges, we propose a general and efficient multi-view feature enhancement module, RobustGS, which substantially improves the robustness of feedforward 3DGS methods under various adverse imaging conditions, enabling high-quality 3D reconstruction. The RobustGS module can be seamlessly integrated into existing pretrained pipelines in a plug-and-play manner to enhance reconstruction robustness. Specifically, we introduce a novel component, Generalized Degradation Learner, designed to extract generic representations and distributions of multiple degradations from multi-view inputs, thereby enhancing degradation-awareness and improving the overall quality of 3D reconstruction. In addition, we propose a novel semantic-aware state-space model. It first leverages the extracted degradation representations to enhance corrupted inputs in the feature space. Then, it employs a semantic-aware strategy to aggregate semantically similar information across different views, enabling the extraction of fine-grained cross-view correspondences and further improving the quality of 3D representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach, when integrated into existing methods in a plug-and-play manner, consistently achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality across various types of degradations.

Lossy image compression is pervasively conducted to save communication bandwidth, resulting in undesirable compression artifacts. Recently, extensive approaches have been proposed to reduce image compression artifacts at the decoder side; however, they require a series of architecture-identical models to process images with different quality, which are inefficient and resource-consuming. Besides, it is common in practice that compressed images are with unknown quality and it is intractable for existing approaches to select a suitable model for blind quality enhancement. In this paper, we propose a resource-efficient blind quality enhancement (RBQE) approach for compressed images. Specifically, our approach blindly and progressively enhances the quality of compressed images through a dynamic deep neural network (DNN), in which an early-exit strategy is embedded. Then, our approach can automatically decide to terminate or continue enhancement according to the assessed quality of enhanced images. Consequently, slight artifacts can be removed in a simpler and faster process, while the severe artifacts can be further removed in a more elaborate process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RBQE approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both blind quality enhancement and resource efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/RyanXingQL/RBQE.

Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) represent a promising therapeutic modality that induces targeted protein degradation by hijacking the ubiquitin-proteasome system. However, rational PROTAC design remains challenging due to the complex interplay between molecular structure, target proteins, E3 ligases, and the cellular context. We present TACK, a statistical evaluation of degradation activity on a novel TArgeting Chimeras Knowledge dataset of 3,514 PROTACs and 6,561 degradation endpoints aggregated from three major repositories with standardized molecular representations, protein annotations, and experimental conditions. Using scaffold-based 5times5 cross-validation, we perform a rigorous statistical comparison of three machine learning methods to predict PROTAC degradation activity across three tasks: DC_{50} and Dmax regression, and binary activity classification. Feature ablation demonstrates that cellular context features and simple protein representations rival complex ESM protein embeddings, highlighting the importance of feature engineering over architectural sophistication. Models trained on the best performing features show that potency (pDC_{50}, R^2=0.66) is substantially more predictable than maximum degradation (Dmax, R^2=0.36). In activity prediction, statistical tests support that classical methods (XGBoost and MLP) significantly outperform PROTAC-STAN, a domain-specific graph neural network model (ROC-AUC: 0.85 vs. 0.74, p<0.001). Finally, we propose an ensemble-based uncertainty quantification approach showing that prediction variance correlates with prediction error (pDC_{50}: Spearman ρ=0.36, p<0.001; Dmax: ρ=0.69, p<0.001), enabling confidence-aware experimental prioritization. Our findings challenge assumptions about specialized architectures for degradation prediction and provide evidence-based guidance for ML-driven PROTAC assessment.

Text-to-image diffusion models deliver high-quality images, yet aligning them with human preferences remains challenging. We revisit diffusion-based Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for these models and identify a critical pathology: enlarging the preference margin does not necessarily improve generation quality. In particular, the standard Diffusion-DPO objective can increase the reconstruction error of both winner and loser branches. Consequently, degradation of the less-preferred outputs can become sufficiently severe that the preferred branch is also adversely affected even as the margin grows. To address this, we introduce Diffusion-SDPO, a safeguarded update rule that preserves the winner by adaptively scaling the loser gradient according to its alignment with the winner gradient. A first-order analysis yields a closed-form scaling coefficient that guarantees the error of the preferred output is non-increasing at each optimization step. Our method is simple, model-agnostic, broadly compatible with existing DPO-style alignment frameworks and adds only marginal computational overhead. Across standard text-to-image benchmarks, Diffusion-SDPO delivers consistent gains over preference-learning baselines on automated preference, aesthetic, and prompt alignment metrics. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/AIDC-AI/Diffusion-SDPO.

Fine-tuning a pretrained LLM into a vision-language model (VLM) can erode the backbone's text capability, with the damage concentrated on tasks that require following exact output rules, such as instruction following, chain-of-thought reasoning graded on a strictly parsed final answer, and similar evaluations with strict graders. We trace this gap to attention-sink corruption: VL fine-tuning perturbs the early sink position that anchors a large fraction of attention probability, and how well the base LLM preserves its sink tracks how much of the affected capability survives adaptation. Building on this view, we introduce Sink Strength, a single scalar computed on the base LLM in a few seconds on a single GPU that predicts post-VL degradation without any VL training. It consistently tracks relative degradation across the six VLM-LLM pairs and multiple format-sensitive tasks. Complementing this diagnostic, we find that post-pretraining QK-RMSNorm injection fails to reproduce the protection of native QK-RMSNorm, while several off-the-shelf weight-merging settings fail to recover the lost capability after VL training. These negative results underscore the value of screening backbones with Sink Strength before VL training and narrow the intervention space toward head-selective training-time protection.

Information-based data selection for instruction tuning is compelling: maximizing the log-determinant of the Fisher information yields a monotone submodular objective, enabling greedy algorithms to achieve a (1-1/e) approximation under a cardinality budget. In practice, however, we identify alleviating gradient conflicts, misalignment between per-sample gradients, is a key factor that slows down the decay of marginal log-determinant information gains, thereby preventing significant loss of information. We formalize this via an varepsilon-decomposition that quantifies the deviation from ideal submodularity as a function of conflict statistics, yielding data-dependent approximation factors that tighten as conflicts diminish. Guided by this analysis, we propose SPICE, a conflict-aware selector that maximizes information while penalizing misalignment, and that supports early stopping and proxy models for efficiency. Empirically, SPICE selects subsets with higher log-determinant information than original criteria, and these informational gains translate into performance improvements: across 8 benchmarks with LLaMA2-7B and Qwen2-7B, SPICE uses only 10% of the data, yet matches or exceeds 6 methods including full-data tuning. This achieves performance improvements with substantially lower training cost.

LLM agent systems are built by stacking scaffolding components (planning, tools, memory, self-reflection, retrieval) assuming more is better. We study cross-component interference (CCI): degradation when components interact destructively. We run a full factorial experiment over all 2^5=32 subsets of five components on HotpotQA and GSM8K with Llama-3.1-8B/70B (96 conditions, up to 10 seeds). The All-In system is consistently suboptimal: on HotpotQA, a single-tool agent surpasses All-In by 32% (F1 0.233 vs 0.177, p=0.023); on GSM8K, a 3-component subset beats All-In by 79% (0.43 vs 0.24, p=0.010). Optimal component count is task-dependent (k*=1-4) and scale-sensitive: at 70B, combinations that hurt at 8B provide gains, though All-In still trails the best subset. We fit a main-effects regression (R^2=0.916, adj-R^2=0.899, LOOCV=0.872), compute exact Shapley values, and find 183/325 submodularity violations (56.3%), showing greedy selection is unreliable. A three-body synergy among Tool Use, Self-Reflection, and Retrieval (INT_3=+0.175, 95% CI [+0.003,+0.351]) is reported as exploratory. CCI replicates across model families (Qwen2.5) and is robust to prompt paraphrasing. Our findings suggest maximally-equipped agent defaults should be replaced by task-specific subset selection via interaction-aware analysis.

Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is extremely fragile, as fine-tuning on a small number of benign samples can erase safety behaviors learned from millions of preference examples. Existing studies attempt to explain this phenomenon by comparing parameters and hidden states before and after fine-tuning, but overlook their dynamic evolution during fine-tuning. In this paper, we uncover a critical mechanism underlying safety degradation by analyzing parameter dynamics, where benign fine-tuning causes parameters to cumulatively drift toward danger-aligned directions, progressively undermining the model's safety. This finding suggests that samples contributing more to this drift has greater fine-tuning risks. Based on this insight, we propose a method of Sample-Level Quantification of Safety Degradation (SQSD), which quantifies the influence of each training sample on safety degradation. Specifically, SQSD computes continuous risk scores to samples by measuring their induced parameter updates' projection difference between danger and safety directions. Extensive experiments across multiple models and datasets demonstrate that SQSD effectively quantifies sample-level fine-tuning risks and exhibits strong transferability across model architectures, parameter scales, and parameter-efficient methods.

Gradient-based preference optimization methods for large language model (LLM) alignment suffer from preference collapse, converging to narrow behavioral modes while neglecting preference diversity. We introduce EvoPref, a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm that maintains populations of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters optimized across helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty objectives using Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) selection with archive-based diversity preservation. Our primary contribution is demonstrating that population-based methods discover substantially more diverse alignments than gradient descent. On standard benchmarks, EvoPref improves preference coverage by 18% (median 82.5% vs. 70.0% for ORPO, p<0.001, Wilcoxon, n=30) and reduces collapse rates by 47% (11.0% vs. 20.6%, p<0.001), while achieving competitive alignment quality (median 75.5% RewardBench vs. 75.0% for ORPO, p<0.05). We provide theoretical motivation extending recent multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) runtime analysis (Dang et al., 2025) suggesting why archive-based methods escape collapse more effectively than single-trajectory optimization. Comprehensive comparisons against MOEA/D, SMS-EMOA, CMA-ES, and gradient baselines (DPO, IPO, KTO, ORPO) with rigorous statistical testing (Friedman with Holm correction, Vargha-Delaney effect sizes, median with IQR) confirm that multi-objective selection with diversity preservation is essential. This work establishes evolutionary optimization as a principled paradigm for diverse LLM alignment.

Benchmarks of machine learning models often include many datasets, making evaluation expensive. For efficiency, it is preferable to perform evaluations on small, representative datasets instead. The selection of such subsets typically relies on heuristics and is rarely analyzed for the robustness of the resulting model rankings. We introduce a framework to perform the task of selecting datasets subsets with an evaluation of how different selection strategies preserve the global model rankings. Our framework includes bootstrap aggregation, which provides valid confidence intervals, allowing a principled comparison of selection strategies. We consider clustering, design criteria (A/D-optimality), random baselines, and greedy farthest-first (FAFI). For the latter, we derive upper bounds on selection quality in terms of ranking errors as a function of the number of selected datasets. Empirically, in time series classification (TSC, 112 datasets) and in a supplementary natural language processing benchmark derived from MTEB (57 tasks), several selection strategies improve rank preservation compared with random subsets, including simple FAFI. In contrast, in recommender systems (30 datasets), the improvement of strategies over random selection is small and typically statistically insignificant. For TSC, our best-performing strategy achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.95 with the full benchmark model rankings using only five selected datasets. Additional experiments indicate that the effectiveness of selection approaches depends on both the quality of dataset representations and the scale of the benchmarking regime.

Automated agent design improves agent harnesses through iterative revision, evaluation, and feedback summarization. Existing methods are largely candidate-centric: cross-round experience is organized around candidate agents, which leaves the repair progress implicit. This causes inefficient repair targeting, slow consolidation of partial progress, and propagation of ineffective interventions across rounds. Therefore, we formulate issue-centric agent optimization, in which repair progress is carried forward as an explicit persistent issue state to guide optimization, rather than re-derived from candidate history in each round. We instantiate the formulation in ADIAS, a framework for automated full-code agent design with two mechanisms. A persistent issue state maintains stable issue identities, lifecycle status, supporting evidence, and intervention-outcome histories. Issue-guided optimization uses this state to jointly propose repair targets and revision directions for subsequent focused full-code modification. Across five interactive benchmarks, ADIAS outperforms the strongest baseline by 25.2% on average and achieves consistent gains across four backbone models. Controlled ablations further show that removing persistent issue state or replacing issue-centric revision with candidate-centric policies leads to performance drops of up to 40.7%.

Vision-language models such as CLIP have shown great impact on diverse downstream tasks for zero-shot or label-free predictions. However, when it comes to low-level vision such as image restoration their performance deteriorates dramatically due to corrupted inputs. In this paper, we present a degradation-aware vision-language model (DA-CLIP) to better transfer pretrained vision-language models to low-level vision tasks as a universal framework for image restoration. More specifically, DA-CLIP trains an additional controller that adapts the fixed CLIP image encoder to predict high-quality feature embeddings. By integrating the embedding into an image restoration network via cross-attention, we are able to pilot the model to learn a high-fidelity image reconstruction. The controller itself will also output a degradation feature that matches the real corruptions of the input, yielding a natural classifier for different degradation types. In addition, we construct a mixed degradation dataset with synthetic captions for DA-CLIP training. Our approach advances state-of-the-art performance on both degradation-specific and unified image restoration tasks, showing a promising direction of prompting image restoration with large-scale pretrained vision-language models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Algolzw/daclip-uir.

The field of image generation has made significant progress thanks to the introduction of Diffusion Models, which learn to progressively reverse a given image corruption. Recently, a few studies introduced alternative ways of corrupting images in Diffusion Models, with an emphasis on blurring. However, these studies are purely empirical and it remains unclear what is the optimal procedure for corrupting an image. In this work, we hypothesize that the optimal procedure minimizes the length of the path taken when corrupting an image towards a given final state. We propose the Fisher metric for the path length, measured in the space of probability distributions. We compute the shortest path according to this metric, and we show that it corresponds to a combination of image sharpening, rather than blurring, and noise deblurring. While the corruption was chosen arbitrarily in previous work, our Shortest Path Diffusion (SPD) determines uniquely the entire spatiotemporal structure of the corruption. We show that SPD improves on strong baselines without any hyperparameter tuning, and outperforms all previous Diffusion Models based on image blurring. Furthermore, any small deviation from the shortest path leads to worse performance, suggesting that SPD provides the optimal procedure to corrupt images. Our work sheds new light on observations made in recent works and provides a new approach to improve diffusion models on images and other types of data.

Post-training quantization reduces the deployment cost of large language models, yet how severely a quantized model degrades is not determined by bit-width alone. We systematically study weight-only post-training quantization across bit-widths, quantization methods, model scales and downstream tasks on multiple model families. We observe that such degradation varies substantially across these factors: 4-bit quantization usually preserves performance, 2-bit often causes broad degradation, and at 3-bit, degradation becomes apparent but varies markedly with task type, quantization method and model scale. To explain this variability, we use the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to measure how strongly quantization perturbs full-precision representations. We trace degradation back to two linked processes: how quantization errors arise within individual modules, and how they accumulate across layers. First, a source SNR decomposition shows that newly introduced errors depend on three factors: the magnitude of the weight error, the strength of the task-specific signal, and how strongly the quantization error aligns with task-specific activations. Different factors affect these components in distinct ways. Second, a cross-layer propagation analysis shows that these errors can be attenuated, preserved, or amplified as they pass across layers, and that larger models benefit from weaker error amplification. Together, these results establish that quantization degradation is governed by how errors are introduced at the source and how they accumulate across the network.

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art video generation quality, but their inference remains expensive due to the large number of sequential denoising steps. This has motivated a growing line of research on accelerating diffusion inference. Among training-free acceleration methods, caching reduces computation by reusing previously computed model outputs across timesteps. Existing caching methods rely on heuristic criteria to choose cache/reuse timesteps and require extensive tuning. We address this limitation with a principled sensitivity-aware caching framework. Specifically, we formalize the caching error through an analysis of the model output sensitivity to perturbations in the denoising inputs, i.e., the noisy latent and the timestep, and show that this sensitivity is a key predictor of caching error. Based on this analysis, we propose Sensitivity-Aware Caching (SenCache), a dynamic caching policy that adaptively selects caching timesteps on a per-sample basis. Our framework provides a theoretical basis for adaptive caching, explains why prior empirical heuristics can be partially effective, and extends them to a dynamic, sample-specific approach. Experiments on Wan 2.1, CogVideoX, and LTX-Video show that SenCache achieves better visual quality than existing caching methods under similar computational budgets.