AI Research Papers

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/7/2026

PhyMRI-SR: Toward Physics-Aware MRI Image Super-Resolution

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) super-resolution is vital for improving diagnostic accessibility, yet most methods treat it as a deterministic mapping from a fixed low-resolution input to a high-resolution target. This overlooks a key property of MRI acquisition physics: spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are inherently coupled, making any given low-resolution scan merely one of many possible realizations under varying acquisition trade-offs. We rethink MRI super-resolution as a physics-aware reconstruction problem, in which the goal is to identify the optimal resolution-SNR configuration and then super-resolve it to obtain high-quality MRI results. A key implication of this formulation is that MRI resolution becomes dynamic rather than fixed. To handle such resolution-heterogeneous inputs, we adapt 2D Gaussian Splatting (2D GS) to MRI by formulating reconstruction as a coordinate-based, resolution-agnostic rendering problem. To further enhance fidelity, we introduce three innovations: (1) a prior-aware Gaussian representation that combines an Anatomical Structure Prior for tissue-specific kernel initialization with an Imaging System Prior that captures hardware characteristics via a covariance dictionary; (2) a physics-constrained signal modeling scheme that predicts intrinsic tissue parameters (proton density rho and effective relaxation rate R2) and synthesizes intensities through governing physical equations, ensuring biophysically plausible contrast; and (3) a meta-learning framework that alleviates paired-data scarcity by pretraining on simulated data and adapting to real-world conditions. Extensive experiments on dynamic-resolution datasets and standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its strong potential for clinical deployment.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/7/2026

Structured-Condensed Prompt Tuning in Vision-Language Models for Fine-grained Image Recognition

Fine-grained image recognition poses a significant challenge due to the substantial expertise and effort required for manual annotation. Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP provide a compelling zero-shot alternative, reducing reliance on extensive labeled data. However, their ability to capture subtle distinctions remains limited, leading to subpar recognition performance. While prompt tuning has proven effective for adapting VLMs, most existing methods treat class labels as isolated, discrete entities, overlooking the rich semantic relationships between them. This oversimplified assumption limits the model's ability to capture hierarchical dependencies and inter-class correlations -- both critical for distinguishing visually similar categories. The problem is especially acute in fine-grained classification, where accurate recognition depends on understanding complex label semantics. To address this, we propose Structured-Condensed Prompt Tuning (SCPT), which enhances semantic structure modeling in prompt learning. Specifically, we introduce Semantic Relation Encoding (SRE) to explicitly model inter-class semantic topology and encode structured label relationships. In parallel, we design a Semantic Condensation loss (ScLoss) to suppress redundant supervision and extract discriminative components from the global semantic space. Together, these components significantly improve semantic alignment and fine-grained discrimination. Extensive experiments on 14 fine-grained benchmarks show that SCPT effectively mitigates semantic ambiguity and achieves state-of-the-art performance in both few-shot and base-to-novel generalization settings.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/7/2026

MobileWan: Closing the Quality Gap for Mobile Video Diffusion

Recent advances in video diffusion have been driven by scaling transformer-based architectures to billions of parameters, substantially improving visual fidelity and motion coherence. In contrast, existing mobile video diffusion models remain limited to relatively small parameter budgets, typically 0.4-1.8B, restricting generation quality. In this work, we show that high-quality mobile video generation does not require small models. Instead, we demonstrate that a server-scale 5B-parameter video diffusion transformer can be deployed efficiently on memory-constrained mobile hardware through recurrent reformulation and structured compression. Starting from Wan2.2-5B, we rely on a recurrence distillation framework that converts video generation into a chunk-wise autoregressive process with constant-memory attention computation. Combined with causal linear attention, the model operates as an RNN at inference time while preserving temporal coherence across chunks. We further propose a learnable attention head pruning method based on binary per-head gates optimized end-to-end using a noise-biased sparsity objective and distillation-based finetuning. Together with sampling-step distillation and memory-optimized VAE decoding, MobileWan becomes the first 5B-scale video diffusion model deployable on a commercial mobile device. Our system generates 5-second 480x832 videos at 16 FPS in 20 seconds end-to-end latency, achieving a VBench score of 83.79 and establishing a new state of the art in mobile video generation. Project page: https://qualcomm-ai-research.github.io/mobilewan

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/7/2026

High-Resolution Artwork Outpainting with Global Blueprint Guidance and Layout Control

Image outpainting extends an image beyond its original borders, requiring seamless style integration and globally coherent scene completion. Building on the success of diffusion models, recent methods have achieved substantial improvements in visual quality. In practice, however, high-resolution outpainting is commonly performed via progressive expansion around a fixed source image, particularly in artwork scenarios. Despite this progress, existing approaches still suffer from three key limitations: (i) the absence of a reliable global planning mechanism, which leads to structural instability and error accumulation at high resolutions; (ii) limited spatial controllability beyond text prompts, making it difficult to place objects at user-specified locations; and (iii) high inference latency caused by inherently sequential patch generation. To address these issues, we propose a global blueprint-guided two-stage diffusion framework for layout-controllable high-resolution outpainting with efficient parallel synthesis. In Stage 1, we generate a low-resolution global blueprint using a layout adapter that injects bounding-box conditions into a Stable Diffusion inpainting backbone, producing a globally consistent structural plan while extracting global guidance features. In Stage 2, we synthesize high-resolution local patches in parallel by injecting the blueprint-derived global guidance and initializing each patch from the blueprint using the low-frequency preservation property of forward diffusion. This design eliminates sequential dependency while maintaining global coherence. Extensive experiments on large-scale artwork datasets demonstrate improved visual fidelity, stronger semantic consistency, and substantially reduced inference time compared to prior baselines, while uniquely supporting explicit layout control for artwork outpainting.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/7/2026

Enhanced Seam Segmentation for Automated Welding Robot in Construction Through Transfer Learning: Addressing Limitations of Bilateral Segmentation Network

Reliable seam segmentation is essential for autonomous robotic welding in construction, where harsh illumination, specular reflections, and thin weld geometries often degrade segmentation performance. This study proposes a reflection-robust seam segmentation framework that enhances a BiSeNetV2 backbone through transfer learning and a hybrid Cross-Entropy--Lovász loss. Rather than increasing architectural complexity, the proposed framework improves reflection robustness through learning-stability-oriented optimization. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 81.76\% Joint IoU and 90.73\% mIoU, improving Joint IoU by +22.36 percentage points over the OHEM-based baseline while maintaining identical FLOPs, parameter count, and inference speed. The proposed approach also recovers 96.33\% of severe zero-IoU failure cases under reflective conditions. Comparative experiments across BiSeNetV2, DeepLabV3+, UNet, and SegFormer further demonstrate that the proposed optimization strategy is particularly effective for lightweight real-time segmentation architectures. Qualitative analyses additionally show improved seam continuity and reflection robustness in challenging welding environments. These findings suggest that the proposed framework provides a practical and lightweight perception solution for robotic welding applications involving reflective metallic surfaces.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/7/2026

RFHNet: Relational and Frequency-Aware Hashing Network for Large-Scale Fine-Grained Food Image Retrieval

Fine-grained food image retrieval is a key task in computational gastronomy, with applications in food traceability, dietary monitoring, and smart catering systems. Although hashing-based retrieval is attractive for large-scale search due to its storage efficiency and fast Hamming-distance computation, existing methods often perform poorly in fine-grained food scenarios, where subtle local semantics and frequency-sensitive visual cues are essential. To address this challenge, we propose RFHNet, a cascaded hierarchical hashing network that captures both global structure and fine-grained local details through multi-level representations. RFHNet includes three components: (1) Fine-grained Relation Modeling (FRM) to capture subtle visual differences among similar food components; (2) Multi-Frequency Modulated Fusion (MFMF) to extract informative multi-frequency features; and (3) Hierarchical Semantic Synergy (HSS) to adaptively integrate multi-level representations and generate discriminative hash codes. Experiments on six food-specific benchmarks show that RFHNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods, with mAP gains of 4.44\% to 17.20\% at 12 bits. These results validate the effectiveness of RFHNet for large-scale visual food retrieval and smart catering applications. The source code will be released upon publication.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/7/2026

Tuning-Free Latent Diffusion Models for Ultrahigh-Resolution Image Editing

Recent diffusion-based generative models have shown impressive performance in image generation and editing. However, due to memory limitations and the high cost of collecting high-resolution training images, existing methods are typically restricted to inputs with linear resolutions below 1K. In contrast, photos captured by modern mobile devices often reach linear resolutions up to 8K, revealing a significant gap between current capabilities and real-world demands. Simply upscaling low-resolution edited results often results in visually enlarged but blurry images that lack fine details. This paper introduces UltraDiffEdit, a novel, tuning-free image editing framework that extends off-the-shelf latent diffusion models (LDMs) to ultrahigh resolutions. UltraDiffEdit employs a multi-scale progressive editing strategy, iteratively blending high-resolution edited content with unedited areas in a coarse-to-fine manner. We employ multi-patch encoding to preserve both edited and unedited visual details within the latent space. To mitigate editing artifacts, our global-local consistency denoising technique consistently integrates edited and unedited latent features, ensuring smooth transition at editing boundaries from the latent representation to the final image. We also introduce a patch-based hybrid sampling approach that captures local, intermediate, and global features, ensuring semantic coherence and enhancing fine detail during denoising. We conduct extensive experiments demonstrating UltraDiffEdit's superior editing quality and flexibility: it can handle image resolutions up to 8K using only a single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/LonglongaaaGo/UltraDiffEdit.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/7/2026

Self-Supervised Implicit CEST Reconstruction via Physics-Informed Lorentz Encoding

Multi-Pool Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) MRI provides valuable metabolic information but is clinically limited by long acquisition times. Although sparse sampling reduces scanning time, reconstructing high-resolution Z-spectra from limited data remains an ill-posed inverse problem. Conventional interpolation and generic Implicit Neural Rep-resentations (INRs) often lack physical constraints, leading to spectral artifacts and physically invalid signals. To address this, we propose Lorentz Encoding (LE), a physics-informed framework that formulates CEST reconstruction as a self-supervised reconstruction task via implicit continuous coordinate learning. Unlike generic positional encodings, LE regularizes the continuous spectral mapping by projecting sparse coordinates into a physically constrained space governed by a combination of parametric Lorentzian profiles with learnable basis functions. This mechanism effectively reduces noise and enforces consistency with physical models. Experiments on in vivo human brain data demonstrate that LE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, under a 39-point sampling strategy, LE achieves a PSNR of 57.58 dB and an SSIM of 0.9994. Furthermore, the learned physics-informed encodings form a continuous, geometrically ordered trajectory in the latent space, ensuring accurate quantitative metabo-lite mapping (APT, NOE, MT).

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/7/2026

AEGIS: A Mechanism-Guided Defense against Visual Synonym Jailbreaks in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved high visual fidelity and broad adoption, but remain vulnerable to safety violations when adversaries exploit them to synthesize illicit content. Existing alignment paradigms, from input sanitization to structural feature pruning, are largely organized around unsafe concepts explicitly exposed during filtering, editing, or localization. This leaves a blind spot for visual synonym attacks (VSA), a jailbreak where benign-looking prompts elicit prohibited imagery through implicit visual associations. As a result, current defenses face a safety-utility dilemma: they may either under-mitigate VSA threats or over-suppress visually similar benign concepts. The core challenge is that VSA hides the unsafe target at the textual surface while revealing it through generation-time visual-semantic convergence. In this work, we therefore shift from static suppression of pre-specified unsafe concepts to dynamic tracing of how unsafe semantics emerge during generation. Our mechanistic analysis shows that VSA and explicit unsafe prompts converge through sparse semantic-injecting attention heads, which serve as inference-time bottlenecks for prohibited visual semantics. Based on this insight, we propose AEGIS (Adaptive Evasion Guard via Identification and Steering), an inference-time defense that applies similarity-aware repulsion only at the identified vulnerable heads. Evaluated against 16 baselines, AEGIS improves both safety and utility. On SD 1.4, it reduces ASR to $\mathbf{0.00}/\mathbf{0.03}$ for in-domain violence/nudity VSA and achieves ASRs $\le \mathbf{0.09}$ on out-of-domain explicit and adversarial attacks. It preserves benign fidelity, avoids suppressing hard-negative concepts, and transfers to SD 2.1 and FLUX.1 after re-identifying the critical heads for each backbone.