Daily Papers

We learn a visual representation that captures information about the camera that recorded a given photo. To do this, we train a multimodal embedding between image patches and the EXIF metadata that cameras automatically insert into image files. Our model represents this metadata by simply converting it to text and then processing it with a transformer. The features that we learn significantly outperform other self-supervised and supervised features on downstream image forensics and calibration tasks. In particular, we successfully localize spliced image regions "zero shot" by clustering the visual embeddings for all of the patches within an image.

Advances in photo editing and manipulation tools have made it significantly easier to create fake imagery. Learning to detect such manipulations, however, remains a challenging problem due to the lack of sufficient amounts of manipulated training data. In this paper, we propose a learning algorithm for detecting visual image manipulations that is trained only using a large dataset of real photographs. The algorithm uses the automatically recorded photo EXIF metadata as supervisory signal for training a model to determine whether an image is self-consistent -- that is, whether its content could have been produced by a single imaging pipeline. We apply this self-consistency model to the task of detecting and localizing image splices. The proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance on several image forensics benchmarks, despite never seeing any manipulated images at training. That said, it is merely a step in the long quest for a truly general purpose visual forensics tool.

Depth-of-field control is essential in photography, but getting the perfect focus often takes several tries or special equipment. Single-image refocusing is still difficult. It involves recovering sharp content and creating realistic bokeh. Current methods have significant drawbacks. They need all-in-focus inputs, depend on synthetic data from simulators, and have limited control over aperture. We introduce Generative Refocusing, a two-step process that uses DeblurNet to recover all-in-focus images from various inputs and BokehNet for creating controllable bokeh. Our main innovation is semi-supervised training. This method combines synthetic paired data with unpaired real bokeh images, using EXIF metadata to capture real optical characteristics beyond what simulators can provide. Our experiments show we achieve top performance in defocus deblurring, bokeh synthesis, and refocusing benchmarks. Additionally, our Generative Refocusing allows text-guided adjustments and custom aperture shapes.

Depth-of-field control is a fundamental tool in photography, yet post-capture bokeh editing from a single image remains challenging. A practical editor should handle images captured under arbitrary focus and aperture settings. Existing methods typically assume an all-in-focus input, or first recover an all-in-focus image before rendering new bokeh. Such pipelines can discard useful blur cues from the source image and propagate reconstruction artifacts into the final edit. We introduce AnyBokeh, a physics-guided framework for any-to-any bokeh editing. Instead of treating source blur merely as a degradation to be removed, AnyBokeh estimates the source blur state with a signed circle-of-confusion map and a disparity map. By modeling the linear relation between signed circle of confusion and disparity difference, AnyBokeh estimates a source-specific optical fingerprint and transfers the source optical characteristics to the desired focus and aperture setting. A generative editor conditioned on both source and target circle-of-confusion maps then performs relative blur synthesis, enabling spatially adaptive deblurring, preservation, and defocus rendering. To support physically supervised learning, we further construct a high-fidelity synthetic dataset with accurate depth, focus distance, and full EXIF metadata. Experiments on real-world benchmarks show that AnyBokeh achieves faithful and controllable editing across any-to-any bokeh editing, all-in-focus-to-bokeh rendering, and defocus deblurring, while avoiding all-in-focus reconstruction and test-time bokeh-level calibration commonly required by existing approaches. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/itsmag11/AnyBokeh.

In this paper, we address the challenges of automatic metadata annotation in the domain of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) by introducing a novel dataset, EUFCC340K, collected from the Europeana portal. Comprising over 340,000 images, the EUFCC340K dataset is organized across multiple facets: Materials, Object Types, Disciplines, and Subjects, following a hierarchical structure based on the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). We developed several baseline models, incorporating multiple heads on a ConvNeXT backbone for multi-label image tagging on these facets, and fine-tuning a CLIP model with our image text pairs. Our experiments to evaluate model robustness and generalization capabilities in two different test scenarios demonstrate the utility of the dataset in improving multi-label classification tools that have the potential to alleviate cataloging tasks in the cultural heritage sector.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) is an approach that has advanced research and applications in computer vision, fueling modern recognition systems and generative models. We believe that the main ingredient to the success of CLIP is its data and not the model architecture or pre-training objective. However, CLIP only provides very limited information about its data and how it has been collected, leading to works that aim to reproduce CLIP's data by filtering with its model parameters. In this work, we intend to reveal CLIP's data curation approach and in our pursuit of making it open to the community introduce Metadata-Curated Language-Image Pre-training (MetaCLIP). MetaCLIP takes a raw data pool and metadata (derived from CLIP's concepts) and yields a balanced subset over the metadata distribution. Our experimental study rigorously isolates the model and training settings, concentrating solely on data. MetaCLIP applied to CommonCrawl with 400M image-text data pairs outperforms CLIP's data on multiple standard benchmarks. In zero-shot ImageNet classification, MetaCLIP achieves 70.8% accuracy, surpassing CLIP's 68.3% on ViT-B models. Scaling to 1B data, while maintaining the same training budget, attains 72.4%. Our observations hold across various model sizes, exemplified by ViT-H achieving 80.5%, without any bells-and-whistles. Curation code and training data distribution on metadata is made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/MetaCLIP.

We present two large datasets of labelled plant-images that are suited towards the training of machine learning and computer vision models. The first dataset encompasses as the day of writing over 1.2 million images of indoor-grown crops and weeds common to the Canadian Prairies and many US states. The second dataset consists of over 540,000 images of plants imaged in farmland. All indoor plant images are labelled by species and we provide rich etadata on the level of individual images. This comprehensive database allows to filter the datasets under user-defined specifications such as for example the crop-type or the age of the plant. Furthermore, the indoor dataset contains images of plants taken from a wide variety of angles, including profile shots, top-down shots, and angled perspectives. The images taken from plants in fields are all from a top-down perspective and contain usually multiple plants per image. For these images metadata is also available. In this paper we describe both datasets' characteristics with respect to plant variety, plant age, and number of images. We further introduce an open-access sample of the indoor-dataset that contains 1,000 images of each species covered in our dataset. These, in total 14,000 images, had been selected, such that they form a representative sample with respect to plant age and ndividual plants per species. This sample serves as a quick entry point for new users to the dataset, allowing them to explore the data on a small scale and find the parameters of data most useful for their application without having to deal with hundreds of thousands of individual images.

Incorporating metadata in Large Language Models (LLMs) pretraining has recently emerged as a promising approach to accelerate training. However prior work highlighted only one useful signal-URLs, leaving open the question of whether other forms of metadata could yield greater benefits. In this study, we investigate a wider range of metadata types and find other types of metadata, such as fine-grained indicators of document quality that can also accelerate pretraining when prepended. We identify a common feature among effective metadata: they encode information at a finer granularity. We further introduce metadata appending as a means of improving training efficiency, where predicting an appropriate metadata as auxiliary task can help speed up pretraining. In addition, learnable meta-tokens trained with masked loss can recover part of the speedup by inducing quality-aware latent structure. Using probing, we analyze latent representations to understand how metadata shapes learning. Together, these results yield practical guidelines for integrating metadata to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of LLM pretraining.

Retinal foundation models have significantly advanced retinal image analysis by leveraging self-supervised learning to reduce dependence on labeled data while achieving strong generalization. Many recent approaches enhance retinal image understanding using report supervision, but obtaining clinical reports is often costly and challenging. In contrast, metadata (e.g., age, gender) is widely available and serves as a valuable resource for analyzing disease progression. To effectively incorporate patient-specific information, we propose PRETI, a retinal foundation model that integrates metadata-aware learning with robust self-supervised representation learning. We introduce Learnable Metadata Embedding (LME), which dynamically refines metadata representations. Additionally, we construct patient-level data pairs, associating images from the same individual to improve robustness against non-clinical variations. To further optimize retinal image representation, we propose Retina-Aware Adaptive Masking (RAAM), a strategy that selectively applies masking within the retinal region and dynamically adjusts the masking ratio during training. PRETI captures both global structures and fine-grained pathological details, resulting in superior diagnostic performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PRETI achieves state-of-the-art results across diverse diseases and biomarker predictions using in-house and public data, indicating the importance of metadata-guided foundation models in retinal disease analysis. Our code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/MICV-yonsei/PRETI

We propose a label-free approach to adapt powerful but generic vision foundation models to specialized scientific domains. Standard supervised fine-tuning is often ill-suited to these settings: labels are scarce, and task-specific training can collapse the model's generality and hurt robustness. We instead leverage metadata to adapt representations to new domains in a self-supervised manner. Our method, FINO, combines a standard self-supervised objective with flexible metadata guidance that handles both highly granular discrete metadata and continuous metadata. It encourages the representation to preserve informative factors while suppressing spurious ones. Across subcellular fluorescence microscopy, Earth observation, wildlife monitoring, and medical imaging, FINO consistently outperforms standard unsupervised domain adaptation and fully supervised adaptation. It also exceeds highly-specialized domain-specific state of the art, while using no task labels for backbone adaptation and only lightweight probes for supervision.

Metadata extraction is essential for cataloging and preserving datasets, enabling effective research discovery and reproducibility, especially given the current exponential growth in scientific research. While Masader (Alyafeai et al.,2021) laid the groundwork for extracting a wide range of metadata attributes from Arabic NLP datasets' scholarly articles, it relies heavily on manual annotation. In this paper, we present MOLE, a framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically extract metadata attributes from scientific papers covering datasets of languages other than Arabic. Our schema-driven methodology processes entire documents across multiple input formats and incorporates robust validation mechanisms for consistent output. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark to evaluate the research progress on this task. Through systematic analysis of context length, few-shot learning, and web browsing integration, we demonstrate that modern LLMs show promising results in automating this task, highlighting the need for further future work improvements to ensure consistent and reliable performance. We release the code: https://github.com/IVUL-KAUST/MOLE and dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/IVUL-KAUST/MOLE for the research community.

We present a new dataset, Functional Map of the World (fMoW), which aims to inspire the development of machine learning models capable of predicting the functional purpose of buildings and land use from temporal sequences of satellite images and a rich set of metadata features. The metadata provided with each image enables reasoning about location, time, sun angles, physical sizes, and other features when making predictions about objects in the image. Our dataset consists of over 1 million images from over 200 countries. For each image, we provide at least one bounding box annotation containing one of 63 categories, including a "false detection" category. We present an analysis of the dataset along with baseline approaches that reason about metadata and temporal views. Our data, code, and pretrained models have been made publicly available.

We introduce Latent Meaning Cells, a deep latent variable model which learns contextualized representations of words by combining local lexical context and metadata. Metadata can refer to granular context, such as section type, or to more global context, such as unique document ids. Reliance on metadata for contextualized representation learning is apropos in the clinical domain where text is semi-structured and expresses high variation in topics. We evaluate the LMC model on the task of zero-shot clinical acronym expansion across three datasets. The LMC significantly outperforms a diverse set of baselines at a fraction of the pre-training cost and learns clinically coherent representations. We demonstrate that not only is metadata itself very helpful for the task, but that the LMC inference algorithm provides an additional large benefit.

Foundation models have revolutionized artificial intelligence across numerous domains, yet their transformative potential remains largely untapped in Extreme Multi-label Classification (XMC). Queries in XMC are associated with relevant labels from extremely large label spaces, where it is critical to strike a balance between efficiency and performance. Therefore, many recent approaches efficiently pose XMC as a maximum inner product search between embeddings learned from small encoder-only transformer architectures. In this paper, we address two important aspects in XMC: how to effectively harness larger decoder-only models, and how to exploit visual information while maintaining computational efficiency. We demonstrate that both play a critical role in XMC separately and can be combined for improved performance. We show that a few billion-size decoder can deliver substantial improvements while keeping computational overhead manageable. Furthermore, our Vision-enhanced eXtreme Multi-label Learning framework (ViXML) efficiently integrates foundation vision models by pooling a single embedding per image. This limits computational growth while unlocking multi-modal capabilities. Remarkably, ViXML with small encoders outperforms text-only decoder in most cases, showing that an image is worth billions of parameters. Finally, we present an extension of existing text-only datasets to exploit visual metadata and make them available for future benchmarking. Comprehensive experiments across four public text-only datasets and their corresponding image enhanced versions validate our proposals' effectiveness, surpassing previous state-of-the-art by up to +8.21\% in P@1 on the largest dataset. ViXML's code is available at https://github.com/DiegoOrtego/vixml.

Macro photography (MP) is a specialized field of photography that captures objects at an extremely close range, revealing tiny details. Although an accurate macro photography image quality assessment (MPIQA) metric can benefit macro photograph capturing, which is vital in some domains such as scientific research and medical applications, the lack of MPIQA data limits the development of MPIQA metrics. To address this limitation, we conducted a large-scale MPIQA study. Specifically, to ensure diversity both in content and quality, we sampled 2,000 MP images from 15,700 MP images, collected from three public image websites. For each MP image, 17 (out of 21 after outlier removal) quality ratings and a detailed quality report of distortion magnitudes, types, and positions are gathered by a lab study. The images, quality ratings, and quality reports form our novel multi-labeled MPIQA database, MMP-2k. Experimental results showed that the state-of-the-art generic IQA metrics underperform on MP images. The database and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/Future-IQA/MMP-2k.

Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) benefit from visual information, yet large-scale image collection is hard to curate and often excludes ambiguous but relevant visuals (e.g., logos, symbols, abstract scenes). We present Beyond Images, an automatic data-centric enrichment pipeline with optional human auditing. This pipeline operates in three stages: (1) large-scale retrieval of additional entity-related images, (2) conversion of all visual inputs into textual descriptions to ensure that ambiguous images contribute usable semantics rather than noise, and (3) fusion of multi-source descriptions using a large language model (LLM) to generate concise, entity-aligned summaries. These summaries replace or augment the text modality in standard MMKG models without changing their architectures or loss functions. Across three public MMKG datasets and multiple baseline models, we observe consistent gains (up to 7% Hits@1 overall). Furthermore, on a challenging subset of entities with visually ambiguous logos and symbols, converting images into text yields large improvements (201.35% MRR and 333.33% Hits@1). Additionally, we release a lightweight Text-Image Consistency Check Interface for optional targeted audits, improving description quality and dataset reliability. Our results show that scaling image coverage and converting ambiguous visuals into text is a practical path to stronger MMKG completion. Code, datasets, and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/pengyu-zhang/Beyond-Images.

We propose a metadata-aware self-supervised learning~(SSL)~framework useful for fine-grained classification and ecological mapping of bird species around the world. Our framework unifies two SSL strategies: Contrastive Learning~(CL) and Masked Image Modeling~(MIM), while also enriching the embedding space with metadata available with ground-level imagery of birds. We separately train uni-modal and cross-modal ViT on a novel cross-view global bird species dataset containing ground-level imagery, metadata (location, time), and corresponding satellite imagery. We demonstrate that our models learn fine-grained and geographically conditioned features of birds, by evaluating on two downstream tasks: fine-grained visual classification~(FGVC) and cross-modal retrieval. Pre-trained models learned using our framework achieve SotA performance on FGVC of iNAT-2021 birds and in transfer learning settings for CUB-200-2011 and NABirds datasets. Moreover, the impressive cross-modal retrieval performance of our model enables the creation of species distribution maps across any geographic region. The dataset and source code will be released at https://github.com/mvrl/BirdSAT}.

Historical maps contain detailed geographic information difficult to find elsewhere covering long-periods of time (e.g., 125 years for the historical topographic maps in the US). However, these maps typically exist as scanned images without searchable metadata. Existing approaches making historical maps searchable rely on tedious manual work (including crowd-sourcing) to generate the metadata (e.g., geolocations and keywords). Optical character recognition (OCR) software could alleviate the required manual work, but the recognition results are individual words instead of location phrases (e.g., "Black" and "Mountain" vs. "Black Mountain"). This paper presents an end-to-end approach to address the real-world problem of finding and indexing historical map images. This approach automatically processes historical map images to extract their text content and generates a set of metadata that is linked to large external geospatial knowledge bases. The linked metadata in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format support complex queries for finding and indexing historical maps, such as retrieving all historical maps covering mountain peaks higher than 1,000 meters in California. We have implemented the approach in a system called mapKurator. We have evaluated mapKurator using historical maps from several sources with various map styles, scales, and coverage. Our results show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. The code has been made publicly available as modules of the Kartta Labs project at https://github.com/kartta-labs/Project.

Modern Text-to-Image (T2I) Diffusion models have revolutionized image editing by enabling the generation of high-quality photorealistic images. While the de facto method for performing edits with T2I models is through text instructions, this approach non-trivial due to the complex many-to-many mapping between natural language and images. In this work, we address exemplar-based image editing -- the task of transferring an edit from an exemplar pair to a content image(s). We propose ReEdit, a modular and efficient end-to-end framework that captures edits in both text and image modalities while ensuring the fidelity of the edited image. We validate the effectiveness of ReEdit through extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art baselines and sensitivity analyses of key design choices. Our results demonstrate that ReEdit consistently outperforms contemporary approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively. Additionally, ReEdit boasts high practical applicability, as it does not require any task-specific optimization and is four times faster than the next best baseline.

Due to their highly structured characteristics, faces are easier to recover than natural scenes for blind image super-resolution. Therefore, we can extract the degradation representation of an image from the low-quality and recovered face pairs. Using the degradation representation, realistic low-quality images can then be synthesized to fine-tune the super-resolution model for the real-world low-quality image. However, such a procedure is time-consuming and laborious, and the gaps between recovered faces and the ground-truths further increase the optimization uncertainty. To facilitate efficient model adaptation towards image-specific degradations, we propose a method dubbed MetaF2N, which leverages the contained Faces to fine-tune model parameters for adapting to the whole Natural image in a Meta-learning framework. The degradation extraction and low-quality image synthesis steps are thus circumvented in our MetaF2N, and it requires only one fine-tuning step to get decent performance. Considering the gaps between the recovered faces and ground-truths, we further deploy a MaskNet for adaptively predicting loss weights at different positions to reduce the impact of low-confidence areas. To evaluate our proposed MetaF2N, we have collected a real-world low-quality dataset with one or multiple faces in each image, and our MetaF2N achieves superior performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Source code, pre-trained models, and collected datasets are available at https://github.com/yinzhicun/MetaF2N.

Metadata plays a critical role in indexing, documenting, and analyzing scientific literature, yet extracting it accurately and efficiently remains a challenging task. Traditional approaches often rely on rule-based or task-specific models, which struggle to generalize across domains and schema variations. In this paper, we present MeXtract, a family of lightweight language models designed for metadata extraction from scientific papers. The models, ranging from 0.5B to 3B parameters, are built by fine-tuning Qwen 2.5 counterparts. In their size family, MeXtract achieves state-of-the-art performance on metadata extraction on the MOLE benchmark. To further support evaluation, we extend the MOLE benchmark to incorporate model-specific metadata, providing an out-of-domain challenging subset. Our experiments show that fine-tuning on a given schema not only yields high accuracy but also transfers effectively to unseen schemas, demonstrating the robustness and adaptability of our approach. We release all the code, datasets, and models openly for the research community.

Recent advances in text-to-image generation have enabled the creation of high-quality images with diverse applications. However, accurately describing desired visual attributes can be challenging, especially for non-experts in art and photography. An intuitive solution involves adopting favorable attributes from the source images. Current methods attempt to distill identity and style from source images. However, "style" is a broad concept that includes texture, color, and artistic elements, but does not cover other important attributes such as lighting and dynamics. Additionally, a simplified "style" adaptation prevents combining multiple attributes from different sources into one generated image. In this work, we formulate a more effective approach to decompose the aesthetics of a picture into specific visual attributes, allowing users to apply characteristics such as lighting, texture, and dynamics from different images. To achieve this goal, we constructed the first fine-grained visual attributes dataset (FiVA) to the best of our knowledge. This FiVA dataset features a well-organized taxonomy for visual attributes and includes around 1 M high-quality generated images with visual attribute annotations. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a fine-grained visual attribute adaptation framework (FiVA-Adapter), which decouples and adapts visual attributes from one or more source images into a generated one. This approach enhances user-friendly customization, allowing users to selectively apply desired attributes to create images that meet their unique preferences and specific content requirements.

While large text-to-image models are able to synthesize "novel" images, these images are necessarily a reflection of the training data. The problem of data attribution in such models -- which of the images in the training set are most responsible for the appearance of a given generated image -- is a difficult yet important one. As an initial step toward this problem, we evaluate attribution through "customization" methods, which tune an existing large-scale model toward a given exemplar object or style. Our key insight is that this allows us to efficiently create synthetic images that are computationally influenced by the exemplar by construction. With our new dataset of such exemplar-influenced images, we are able to evaluate various data attribution algorithms and different possible feature spaces. Furthermore, by training on our dataset, we can tune standard models, such as DINO, CLIP, and ViT, toward the attribution problem. Even though the procedure is tuned towards small exemplar sets, we show generalization to larger sets. Finally, by taking into account the inherent uncertainty of the problem, we can assign soft attribution scores over a set of training images.

Generating text descriptions of objects in 3D indoor scenes is an important building block of embodied understanding. Existing methods do this by describing objects at a single level of detail, which often does not capture fine-grained details such as varying textures, materials, and shapes of the parts of objects. We propose the task of expressive 3D captioning: given an input 3D scene, describe objects at multiple levels of detail: a high-level object description, and a low-level description of the properties of its parts. To produce such captions, we present ExCap3D, an expressive 3D captioning model which takes as input a 3D scan, and for each detected object in the scan, generates a fine-grained collective description of the parts of the object, along with an object-level description conditioned on the part-level description. We design ExCap3D to encourage semantic consistency between the generated text descriptions, as well as textual similarity in the latent space, to further increase the quality of the generated captions. To enable this task, we generated the ExCap3D Dataset by leveraging a visual-language model (VLM) for multi-view captioning. The ExCap3D Dataset contains captions on the ScanNet++ dataset with varying levels of detail, comprising 190k text descriptions of 34k 3D objects in 947 indoor scenes. Our experiments show that the object- and part-level of detail captions generated by ExCap3D are of higher quality than those produced by state-of-the-art methods, with a Cider score improvement of 17% and 124% for object- and part-level details respectively. Our code, dataset and models will be made publicly available.

Exemplar-guided image translation, synthesizing photo-realistic images that conform to both structural control and style exemplars, is attracting attention due to its ability to enhance user control over style manipulation. Previous methodologies have predominantly depended on establishing dense correspondences across cross-domain inputs. Despite these efforts, they incur quadratic memory and computational costs for establishing dense correspondence, resulting in limited versatility and performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach termed Exemplar-guided Image Translation with Brownian-Bridge Diffusion Models (EBDM). Our method formulates the task as a stochastic Brownian bridge process, a diffusion process with a fixed initial point as structure control and translates into the corresponding photo-realistic image while being conditioned solely on the given exemplar image. To efficiently guide the diffusion process toward the style of exemplar, we delineate three pivotal components: the Global Encoder, the Exemplar Network, and the Exemplar Attention Module to incorporate global and detailed texture information from exemplar images. Leveraging Bridge diffusion, the network can translate images from structure control while exclusively conditioned on the exemplar style, leading to more robust training and inference processes. We illustrate the superiority of our method over competing approaches through comprehensive benchmark evaluations and visual results.

The vast diversity of styles, domains, and quality levels present in language model pre-training corpora is essential in developing general model capabilities, but efficiently learning and deploying the correct behaviors exemplified in each of these heterogeneous data sources is challenging. To address this, we propose a new method, termed Metadata Conditioning then Cooldown (MeCo), to incorporate additional learning cues during pre-training. MeCo first provides metadata (e.g., URLs like en.wikipedia.org) alongside the text during training and later uses a cooldown phase with only the standard text, thereby enabling the model to function normally even without metadata. MeCo significantly accelerates pre-training across different model scales (600M to 8B parameters) and training sources (C4, RefinedWeb, and DCLM). For instance, a 1.6B language model trained with MeCo matches the downstream task performance of standard pre-training while using 33% less data. Additionally, MeCo enables us to steer language models by conditioning the inference prompt on either real or fabricated metadata that encodes the desired properties of the output: for example, prepending wikipedia.org to reduce harmful generations or factquizmaster.com (fabricated) to improve common knowledge task performance. We also demonstrate that MeCo is compatible with different types of metadata, such as model-generated topics. MeCo is remarkably simple, adds no computational overhead, and demonstrates promise in producing more capable and steerable language models.

We show that the GPS tags contained in photo metadata provide a useful control signal for image generation. We train GPS-to-image models and use them for tasks that require a fine-grained understanding of how images vary within a city. In particular, we train a diffusion model to generate images conditioned on both GPS and text. The learned model generates images that capture the distinctive appearance of different neighborhoods, parks, and landmarks. We also extract 3D models from 2D GPS-to-image models through score distillation sampling, using GPS conditioning to constrain the appearance of the reconstruction from each viewpoint. Our evaluations suggest that our GPS-conditioned models successfully learn to generate images that vary based on location, and that GPS conditioning improves estimated 3D structure.

We introduce a novel Image Quality Assessment (IQA) dataset comprising 6073 UHD-1 (4K) images, annotated at a fixed width of 3840 pixels. Contrary to existing No-Reference (NR) IQA datasets, ours focuses on highly aesthetic photos of high technical quality, filling a gap in the literature. The images, carefully curated to exclude synthetic content, are sufficiently diverse to train general NR-IQA models. Importantly, the dataset is annotated with perceptual quality ratings obtained through a crowdsourcing study. Ten expert raters, comprising photographers and graphics artists, assessed each image at least twice in multiple sessions spanning several days, resulting in 20 highly reliable ratings per image. Annotators were rigorously selected based on several metrics, including self-consistency, to ensure their reliability. The dataset includes rich metadata with user and machine-generated tags from over 5,000 categories and popularity indicators such as favorites, likes, downloads, and views. With its unique characteristics, such as its focus on high-quality images, reliable crowdsourced annotations, and high annotation resolution, our dataset opens up new opportunities for advancing perceptual image quality assessment research and developing practical NR-IQA models that apply to modern photos. Our dataset is available at https://database.mmsp-kn.de/uhd-iqa-benchmark-database.html

We introduce MatSynth, a dataset of 4,000+ CC0 ultra-high resolution PBR materials. Materials are crucial components of virtual relightable assets, defining the interaction of light at the surface of geometries. Given their importance, significant research effort was dedicated to their representation, creation and acquisition. However, in the past 6 years, most research in material acquisiton or generation relied either on the same unique dataset, or on company-owned huge library of procedural materials. With this dataset we propose a significantly larger, more diverse, and higher resolution set of materials than previously publicly available. We carefully discuss the data collection process and demonstrate the benefits of this dataset on material acquisition and generation applications. The complete data further contains metadata with each material's origin, license, category, tags, creation method and, when available, descriptions and physical size, as well as 3M+ renderings of the augmented materials, in 1K, under various environment lightings. The MatSynth dataset is released through the project page at: https://www.gvecchio.com/matsynth.

Finding scientifically interesting phenomena through slow, manual labeling campaigns severely limits our ability to explore the billions of galaxy images produced by telescopes. In this work, we develop a pipeline to create a semantic search engine from completely unlabeled image data. Our method leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate descriptions for galaxy images, then contrastively aligns a pre-trained multimodal astronomy foundation model with these embedded descriptions to produce searchable embeddings at scale. We find that current VLMs provide descriptions that are sufficiently informative to train a semantic search model that outperforms direct image similarity search. Our model, AION-Search, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on finding rare phenomena despite training on randomly selected images with no deliberate curation for rare cases. Furthermore, we introduce a VLM-based re-ranking method that nearly doubles the recall for our most challenging targets in the top-100 results. For the first time, AION-Search enables flexible semantic search scalable to 140 million galaxy images, enabling discovery from previously infeasible searches. More broadly, our work provides an approach for making large, unlabeled scientific image archives semantically searchable, expanding data exploration capabilities in fields from Earth observation to microscopy. The code, data, and app are publicly available at https://github.com/NolanKoblischke/AION-Search

Manual digitization of bibliographic metadata is time consuming and labor intensive, especially for historical and real-world archives with highly variable formatting across documents. Despite advances in machine learning, the absence of dedicated datasets for metadata extraction hinders automation. To address this gap, we introduce BiblioPage, a dataset of scanned title pages annotated with structured bibliographic metadata. The dataset consists of approximately 2,000 monograph title pages collected from 14 Czech libraries, spanning a wide range of publication periods, typographic styles, and layout structures. Each title page is annotated with 16 bibliographic attributes, including title, contributors, and publication metadata, along with precise positional information in the form of bounding boxes. To extract structured information from this dataset, we valuated object detection models such as YOLO and DETR combined with transformer-based OCR, achieving a maximum mAP of 52 and an F1 score of 59. Additionally, we assess the performance of various visual large language models, including LlamA 3.2-Vision and GPT-4o, with the best model reaching an F1 score of 67. BiblioPage serves as a real-world benchmark for bibliographic metadata extraction, contributing to document understanding, document question answering, and document information extraction. Dataset and evaluation scripts are availible at: https://github.com/DCGM/biblio-dataset

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain domain knowledge that can be used for many digital library tasks, such as analyzing citation networks and predicting research trends. Automatic metadata extraction is important to build scalable digital library search engines. Most existing methods are designed for born-digital documents, so they often fail to extract metadata from scanned documents such as for ETDs. Traditional sequence tagging methods mainly rely on text-based features. In this paper, we propose a conditional random field (CRF) model that combines text-based and visual features. To verify the robustness of our model, we extended an existing corpus and created a new ground truth corpus consisting of 500 ETD cover pages with human validated metadata. Our experiments show that CRF with visual features outperformed both a heuristic and a CRF model with only text-based features. The proposed model achieved 81.3%-96% F1 measure on seven metadata fields. The data and source code are publicly available on Google Drive (https://tinyurl.com/y8kxzwrp) and a GitHub repository (https://github.com/lamps-lab/ETDMiner/tree/master/etd_crf), respectively.

How can we verify whether copyrighted content was used to train a large vision-language model (VLM) without direct access to its training data? Motivated by the hypothesis that a VLM is able to recognize images from its training corpus, we propose DIS-CO, a novel approach to infer the inclusion of copyrighted content during the model's development. By repeatedly querying a VLM with specific frames from targeted copyrighted material, DIS-CO extracts the content's identity through free-form text completions. To assess its effectiveness, we introduce MovieTection, a benchmark comprising 14,000 frames paired with detailed captions, drawn from films released both before and after a model's training cutoff. Our results show that DIS-CO significantly improves detection performance, nearly doubling the average AUC of the best prior method on models with logits available. Our findings also highlight a broader concern: all tested models appear to have been exposed to some extent to copyrighted content. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/avduarte333/DIS-CO

This paper explores the feasibility of using text-to-image models in a zero-shot setup to generate images for taxonomy concepts. While text-based methods for taxonomy enrichment are well-established, the potential of the visual dimension remains unexplored. To address this, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for Taxonomy Image Generation that assesses models' abilities to understand taxonomy concepts and generate relevant, high-quality images. The benchmark includes common-sense and randomly sampled WordNet concepts, alongside the LLM generated predictions. The 12 models are evaluated using 9 novel taxonomy-related text-to-image metrics and human feedback. Moreover, we pioneer the use of pairwise evaluation with GPT-4 feedback for image generation. Experimental results show that the ranking of models differs significantly from standard T2I tasks. Playground-v2 and FLUX consistently outperform across metrics and subsets and the retrieval-based approach performs poorly. These findings highlight the potential for automating the curation of structured data resources.

Exemplar-based semantic image synthesis aims to generate images aligned with given semantic content while preserving the appearance of an exemplar image. Conventional structure-guidance models, such as ControlNet, are limited in that they cannot directly utilize exemplar images as input, relying instead solely on text prompts to control appearance. Recent tuning-free approaches address this limitation by transferring local appearance from the exemplar image to the synthesized image through implicit cross-image matching in the augmented self-attention mechanism of pre-trained diffusion models. However, these methods face challenges when applied to content-rich scenes with significant geometric deformations, such as driving scenes. In this paper, we propose the Appearance Matching Adapter (AM-Adapter), a learnable framework that enhances cross-image matching within augmented self-attention by incorporating semantic information from segmentation maps. To effectively disentangle generation and matching processes, we adopt a stage-wise training approach. Initially, we train the structure-guidance and generation networks, followed by training the AM-Adapter while keeping the other networks frozen. During inference, we introduce an automated exemplar retrieval method to efficiently select exemplar image-segmentation pairs. Despite utilizing a limited number of learnable parameters, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, excelling in both semantic alignment preservation and local appearance fidelity. Extensive ablation studies further validate our design choices. Code and pre-trained weights will be publicly available.: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/AM-Adapter/

This work investigates descriptive captions as an additional source of supervision for biological multimodal foundation models. Images and captions can be viewed as complementary samples from the latent morphospace of a species, each capturing certain biological traits. Incorporating captions during training encourages alignment with this shared latent structure, emphasizing potentially diagnostic characters while suppressing spurious correlations. The main challenge, however, lies in obtaining faithful, instance-specific captions at scale. This requirement has limited the utilization of natural language supervision in organismal biology compared with many other scientific domains. We complement this gap by generating synthetic captions with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), guided by Wikipedia-derived visual information and taxon-tailored format examples. These domain-specific contexts help reduce hallucination and yield accurate, instance-based descriptive captions. Using these captions, we train BIOCAP (i.e., BIOCLIP with Captions), a biological foundation model that captures rich semantics and achieves strong performance in species classification and text-image retrieval. These results demonstrate the value of descriptive captions beyond labels in bridging biological images with multimodal foundation models.

Pre-training decoder-only language models relies on vast amounts of high-quality data, yet the availability of such data is increasingly reaching its limits. While metadata is commonly used to create and curate these datasets, its potential as a direct training signal remains under-explored. We challenge this status quo and propose LIME (Linguistic Metadata Embeddings), a method that enriches token embeddings with metadata capturing syntax, semantics, and contextual properties. LIME substantially improves pre-training efficiency. Specifically, it adapts up to 56% faster to the training data distribution, while introducing only 0.01% additional parameters at negligible compute overhead. Beyond efficiency, LIME improves tokenization, leading to remarkably stronger language modeling capabilities and generative task performance. These benefits persist across model scales (500M to 2B). In addition, we develop a variant with shifted metadata, LIME+1, that can guide token generation. Given prior metadata for the next token, LIME+1 improves reasoning performance by up to 38% and arithmetic accuracy by up to 35%.

Editing materials of objects in images based on exemplar images is an active area of research in computer vision and graphics. We propose MARBLE, a method for performing material blending and recomposing fine-grained material properties by finding material embeddings in CLIP-space and using that to control pre-trained text-to-image models. We improve exemplar-based material editing by finding a block in the denoising UNet responsible for material attribution. Given two material exemplar-images, we find directions in the CLIP-space for blending the materials. Further, we can achieve parametric control over fine-grained material attributes such as roughness, metallic, transparency, and glow using a shallow network to predict the direction for the desired material attribute change. We perform qualitative and quantitative analysis to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method. We also present the ability of our method to perform multiple edits in a single forward pass and applicability to painting. Project Page: https://marblecontrol.github.io/

Since the beginning of rephotography in the middle of the 19th century, techniques in registration, conservation, presentation, and sharing of rephotographs have come a long way. Here, we will present existing digital approaches to rephotography and discuss future approaches and requirements for digital mass rephotography. We present re.photos, an existing web portal for rephotography, featuring methods for collaborative rephotography, interactive image registration, as well as retrieval, organization, and sharing of rephotographs. For mass rephotography additional requirements must be met. Batches of template images and rephotographs must be handled simultaneously, image registration must be automated, and intuitive smartphone apps for rephotography must be available. Long--term storage with persistent identifiers, automatic or mass georeferencing, as well as gamification and social media integration are further requirements we will discuss in this paper.

Long exposure photography produces stunning imagery, representing moving elements in a scene with motion-blur. It is generally employed in two modalities, producing either a foreground or a background blur effect. Foreground blur images are traditionally captured on a tripod-mounted camera and portray blurred moving foreground elements, such as silky water or light trails, over a perfectly sharp background landscape. Background blur images, also called panning photography, are captured while the camera is tracking a moving subject, to produce an image of a sharp subject over a background blurred by relative motion. Both techniques are notoriously challenging and require additional equipment and advanced skills. In this paper, we describe a computational burst photography system that operates in a hand-held smartphone camera app, and achieves these effects fully automatically, at the tap of the shutter button. Our approach first detects and segments the salient subject. We track the scene motion over multiple frames and align the images in order to preserve desired sharpness and to produce aesthetically pleasing motion streaks. We capture an under-exposed burst and select the subset of input frames that will produce blur trails of controlled length, regardless of scene or camera motion velocity. We predict inter-frame motion and synthesize motion-blur to fill the temporal gaps between the input frames. Finally, we composite the blurred image with the sharp regular exposure to protect the sharpness of faces or areas of the scene that are barely moving, and produce a final high resolution and high dynamic range (HDR) photograph. Our system democratizes a capability previously reserved to professionals, and makes this creative style accessible to most casual photographers. More information and supplementary material can be found on our project webpage: https://motion-mode.github.io/

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) is a popular foundation model, supporting from zero-shot classification, retrieval to encoders for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Although CLIP is successfully trained on billion-scale image-text pairs from the English world, scaling CLIP's training further to learning from the worldwide web data is still challenging: (1) no curation method is available to handle data points from non-English world; (2) the English performance from existing multilingual CLIP is worse than its English-only counterpart, i.e., "curse of multilinguality" that is common in LLMs. Here, we present MetaCLIP 2, the first recipe training CLIP from scratch on worldwide web-scale image-text pairs. To generalize our findings, we conduct rigorous ablations with minimal changes that are necessary to address the above challenges and present a recipe enabling mutual benefits from English and non-English world data. In zero-shot ImageNet classification, MetaCLIP 2 ViT-H/14 surpasses its English-only counterpart by 0.8% and mSigLIP by 0.7%, and surprisingly sets new state-of-the-art without system-level confounding factors (e.g., translation, bespoke architecture changes) on multilingual benchmarks, such as CVQA with 57.4%, Babel-ImageNet with 50.2% and XM3600 with 64.3% on image-to-text retrieval.

We present EMMa, an Extensible, Multimodal dataset of Amazon product listings that contains rich Material annotations. It contains more than 2.8 million objects, each with image(s), listing text, mass, price, product ratings, and position in Amazon's product-category taxonomy. We also design a comprehensive taxonomy of 182 physical materials (e.g., Plastic rightarrow Thermoplastic rightarrow Acrylic). Objects are annotated with one or more materials from this taxonomy. With the numerous attributes available for each object, we develop a Smart Labeling framework to quickly add new binary labels to all objects with very little manual labeling effort, making the dataset extensible. Each object attribute in our dataset can be included in either the model inputs or outputs, leading to combinatorial possibilities in task configurations. For example, we can train a model to predict the object category from the listing text, or the mass and price from the product listing image. EMMa offers a new benchmark for multi-task learning in computer vision and NLP, and allows practitioners to efficiently add new tasks and object attributes at scale.

The recent CLIP-based methods have shown promising zero-shot and few-shot performance on image classification tasks. Existing approaches such as CoOp and Tip-Adapter only focus on high-level visual features that are fully aligned with textual features representing the ``Summary" of the image. However, the goal of few-shot learning is to classify unseen images of the same category with few labeled samples. Especially, in contrast to high-level representations, local representations (LRs) at low-level are more consistent between seen and unseen samples. Based on this point, we propose the Meta-Feature Adaption method (MF-Adapter) that combines the complementary strengths of both LRs and high-level semantic representations. Specifically, we introduce the Meta-Feature Unit (MF-Unit), which is a simple yet effective local similarity metric to measure category-consistent local context in an inductive manner. Then we train an MF-Adapter to map image features to MF-Unit for adequately generalizing the intra-class knowledge between unseen images and the support set. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art CLIP downstream few-shot classification methods, even showing stronger performance on a set of challenging visual classification tasks.

Images of the natural world, collected by a variety of cameras, from drones to individual phones, are increasingly abundant sources of biological information. There is an explosion of computational methods and tools, particularly computer vision, for extracting biologically relevant information from images for science and conservation. Yet most of these are bespoke approaches designed for a specific task and are not easily adaptable or extendable to new questions, contexts, and datasets. A vision model for general organismal biology questions on images is of timely need. To approach this, we curate and release TreeOfLife-10M, the largest and most diverse ML-ready dataset of biology images. We then develop BioCLIP, a foundation model for the tree of life, leveraging the unique properties of biology captured by TreeOfLife-10M, namely the abundance and variety of images of plants, animals, and fungi, together with the availability of rich structured biological knowledge. We rigorously benchmark our approach on diverse fine-grained biology classification tasks, and find that BioCLIP consistently and substantially outperforms existing baselines (by 17% to 20% absolute). Intrinsic evaluation reveals that BioCLIP has learned a hierarchical representation conforming to the tree of life, shedding light on its strong generalizability. Our code, models and data will be made available at https://github.com/Imageomics/bioclip.

For improving image composition and aesthetic quality, most existing methods modulate the captured images by striking out redundant content near the image borders. However, such image cropping methods are limited in the range of image views. Some methods have been suggested to extrapolate the images and predict cropping boxes from the extrapolated image. Nonetheless, the synthesized extrapolated regions may be included in the cropped image, making the image composition result not real and potentially with degraded image quality. In this paper, we circumvent this issue by presenting a joint framework for both unbounded recommendation of camera view and image composition (i.e., UNIC). In this way, the cropped image is a sub-image of the image acquired by the predicted camera view, and thus can be guaranteed to be real and consistent in image quality. Specifically, our framework takes the current camera preview frame as input and provides a recommendation for view adjustment, which contains operations unlimited by the image borders, such as zooming in or out and camera movement. To improve the prediction accuracy of view adjustment prediction, we further extend the field of view by feature extrapolation. After one or several times of view adjustments, our method converges and results in both a camera view and a bounding box showing the image composition recommendation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the datasets constructed upon existing image cropping datasets, showing the effectiveness of our UNIC in unbounded recommendation of camera view and image composition. The source code, dataset, and pretrained models is available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/UNIC.

High-quality, "rich" metadata are essential for making research data findable, interoperable, and reusable. The Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR) has long addressed this need by providing tools to design machine-actionable metadata templates that encode community standards in a computable form. To make these capabilities more accessible within real-world research workflows, we have developed the CEDAR Embeddable Editor (CEE)-a lightweight, interoperable Web Component that brings structured, standards-based metadata authoring directly into third-party platforms. The CEE dynamically renders metadata forms from machine-actionable templates and produces semantically rich metadata in JSON-LD format. It supports ontology-based value selection via the BioPortal ontology repository, and it includes external authority resolution for persistent identifiers such as ORCIDs for individuals and RORs for research organizations. Crucially, the CEE requires no custom user-interface development, allowing deployment across diverse platforms. The CEE has been successfully integrated into generalist scientific data repositories such as Dryad and the Open Science Framework, demonstrating its ability to support discipline-specific metadata creation. By supporting the embedding of metadata authoring within existing research environments, the CEE can facilitate the adoption of community standards and help improve metadata quality across scientific disciplines.

Images as an artistic medium often rely on specific camera angles and lens distortions to convey ideas or emotions; however, such precise control is missing in current text-to-image models. We propose an efficient and general solution that allows precise control over the camera when generating both photographic and artistic images. Unlike prior methods that rely on predefined shots, we rely solely on four simple extrinsic and intrinsic camera parameters, removing the need for pre-existing geometry, reference 3D objects, and multi-view data. We also present a novel dataset with more than 57,000 images, along with their text prompts and ground-truth camera parameters. Our evaluation shows precise camera control in text-to-image generation, surpassing traditional prompt engineering approaches. Our data, model, and code are publicly available at https://graphics.unizar.es/projects/PreciseCam2024.

Real-world video restoration is plagued by complex degradations from motion coupled with dynamically varying exposure - a key challenge largely overlooked by prior works and a common artifact of auto-exposure or low-light capture. We present FMA-Net++, a framework for joint video super-resolution and deblurring that explicitly models this coupled effect of motion and dynamically varying exposure. FMA-Net++ adopts a sequence-level architecture built from Hierarchical Refinement with Bidirectional Propagation blocks, enabling parallel, long-range temporal modeling. Within each block, an Exposure Time-aware Modulation layer conditions features on per-frame exposure, which in turn drives an exposure-aware Flow-Guided Dynamic Filtering module to infer motion- and exposure-aware degradation kernels. FMA-Net++ decouples degradation learning from restoration: the former predicts exposure- and motion-aware priors to guide the latter, improving both accuracy and efficiency. To evaluate under realistic capture conditions, we introduce REDS-ME (multi-exposure) and REDS-RE (random-exposure) benchmarks. Trained solely on synthetic data, FMA-Net++ achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and temporal consistency on our new benchmarks and GoPro, outperforming recent methods in both restoration quality and inference speed, and generalizes well to challenging real-world videos.

This report introduces a solution to the Topic 1 Zero-shot Image Captioning of 2024 NICE : New frontiers for zero-shot Image Captioning Evaluation. In contrast to NICE 2023 datasets, this challenge involves new annotations by humans with significant differences in caption style and content. Therefore, we enhance image captions effectively through retrieval augmentation and caption grading methods. At the data level, we utilize high-quality captions generated by image caption models as training data to address the gap in text styles. At the model level, we employ OFA (a large-scale visual-language pre-training model based on handcrafted templates) to perform the image captioning task. Subsequently, we propose caption-level strategy for the high-quality caption data generated by the image caption models and integrate them with retrieval augmentation strategy into the template to compel the model to generate higher quality, more matching, and semantically enriched captions based on the retrieval augmentation prompts. Our approach achieves a CIDEr score of 234.11.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly pretrained on vast corpora of text without utilizing contextual metadata such as source, quality, or topic, leading to a context-free learning paradigm. While recent studies suggest that adding metadata like URL information as context (i.e., auxiliary inputs not used in the loss calculation) can improve training efficiency and downstream performance, they offer limited understanding of which types of metadata are truly effective and under what conditions. In this work, we conduct a systematic evaluation and find that not all metadata types contribute equally. Only URL context speeds up training, whereas quality scores and topic/format domain information offer no clear benefit. Furthermore, the improved downstream performances of URL conditioning emerge only when longer prompts are used at inference time. In addition, we demonstrate that context-aware pretraining enables more controllable generation than context-free pretraining, in a classifier-free guidance fashion. Although topic and format metadata do not accelerate training, they are effective for steering outputs, offering human-interpretable control over generation.

Text-guided diffusion models have greatly advanced image editing and generation. However, achieving physically consistent image retouching with precise parameter control (e.g., exposure, white balance, zoom) remains challenging. Existing methods either rely solely on ambiguous and entangled text prompts, which hinders precise camera control, or train separate heads/weights for parameter adjustment, which compromises scalability, multi-parameter composition, and sensitivity to subtle variations. To address these limitations, we propose CameraMaster, a unified camera-aware framework for image retouching. The key idea is to explicitly decouple the camera directive and then coherently integrate two critical information streams: a directive representation that captures the photographer's intent, and a parameter embedding that encodes precise camera settings. CameraMaster first uses the camera parameter embedding to modulate both the camera directive and the content semantics. The modulated directive is then injected into the content features via cross-attention, yielding a strongly camera-sensitive semantic context. In addition, the directive and camera embeddings are injected as conditioning and gating signals into the time embedding, enabling unified, layer-wise modulation throughout the denoising process and enforcing tight semantic-parameter alignment. To train and evaluate CameraMaster, we construct a large-scale dataset of 78K image-prompt pairs annotated with camera parameters. Extensive experiments show that CameraMaster produces monotonic and near-linear responses to parameter variations, supports seamless multi-parameter composition, and significantly outperforms existing methods.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) facilitates image retrieval through a multimodal query consisting of a reference image and modification text. The reference image defines the retrieval context, while the modification text specifies desired alterations. However, existing CIR datasets predominantly employ coarse-grained modification text (CoarseMT), which inadequately captures fine-grained retrieval intents. This limitation introduces two key challenges: (1) ignoring detailed differences leads to imprecise positive samples, and (2) greater ambiguity arises when retrieving visually similar images. These issues degrade retrieval accuracy, necessitating manual result filtering or repeated queries. To address these limitations, we develop a robust fine-grained CIR data annotation pipeline that minimizes imprecise positive samples and enhances CIR systems' ability to discern modification intents accurately. Using this pipeline, we refine the FashionIQ and CIRR datasets to create two fine-grained CIR datasets: Fine-FashionIQ and Fine-CIRR. Furthermore, we introduce FineCIR, the first CIR framework explicitly designed to parse the modification text. FineCIR effectively captures fine-grained modification semantics and aligns them with ambiguous visual entities, enhancing retrieval precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FineCIR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CIR baselines on both fine-grained and traditional CIR benchmark datasets. Our FineCIR code and fine-grained CIR datasets are available at https://github.com/SDU-L/FineCIR.git.

Curation methods for massive vision-language datasets trade off between dataset size and quality. However, even the highest quality of available curated captions are far too short to capture the rich visual detail in an image. To show the value of dense and highly-aligned image-text pairs, we collect the Densely Captioned Images (DCI) dataset, containing 8012 natural images human-annotated with mask-aligned descriptions averaging above 1000 words each. With precise and reliable captions associated with specific parts of an image, we can evaluate vision-language models' (VLMs) understanding of image content with a novel task that matches each caption with its corresponding subcrop. As current models are often limited to 77 text tokens, we also introduce a summarized version (sDCI) in which each caption length is limited. We show that modern techniques that make progress on standard benchmarks do not correspond with significant improvement on our sDCI based benchmark. Lastly, we finetune CLIP using sDCI and show significant improvements over the baseline despite a small training set. By releasing the first human annotated dense image captioning dataset, we hope to enable the development of new benchmarks or fine-tuning recipes for the next generation of VLMs to come.

Within the past few decades we have witnessed digital revolution, which moved scholarly communication to electronic media and also resulted in a substantial increase in its volume. Nowadays keeping track with the latest scientific achievements poses a major challenge for the researchers. Scientific information overload is a severe problem that slows down scholarly communication and knowledge propagation across the academia. Modern research infrastructures facilitate studying scientific literature by providing intelligent search tools, proposing similar and related documents, visualizing citation and author networks, assessing the quality and impact of the articles, and so on. In order to provide such high quality services the system requires the access not only to the text content of stored documents, but also to their machine-readable metadata. Since in practice good quality metadata is not always available, there is a strong demand for a reliable automatic method of extracting machine-readable metadata directly from source documents. This research addresses these problems by proposing an automatic, accurate and flexible algorithm for extracting wide range of metadata directly from scientific articles in born-digital form. Extracted information includes basic document metadata, structured full text and bibliography section. Designed as a universal solution, proposed algorithm is able to handle a vast variety of publication layouts with high precision and thus is well-suited for analyzing heterogeneous document collections. This was achieved by employing supervised and unsupervised machine-learning algorithms trained on large, diverse datasets. The evaluation we conducted showed good performance of proposed metadata extraction algorithm. The comparison with other similar solutions also proved our algorithm performs better than competition for most metadata types.

Image captioning has long been regarded as a fundamental task in visual understanding. Recently, however, few large vision-language model (LVLM) research discusses model's image captioning performance because of the outdated short-caption benchmarks and unreliable evaluation metrics. In this work, we propose to benchmark detail image caption task by curating high-quality evaluation datasets annotated by human experts, GPT-4V and Gemini-1.5-Pro. We also design a more reliable caption evaluation metric called CAPTURE (CAPtion evaluation by exTracting and coUpling coRE information). CAPTURE extracts visual elements, e.g., objects, attributes and relations from captions, and then matches these elements through three stages, achieving the highest consistency with expert judgements over other rule-based or model-based caption metrics. The proposed benchmark and metric provide reliable evaluation for LVLM's detailed image captioning ability. Guided by this evaluation, we further explore to unleash LVLM's detail caption capabilities by synthesizing high-quality data through a five-stage data construction pipeline. Our pipeline only uses a given LVLM itself and other open-source tools, without any human or GPT-4V annotation in the loop. Experiments show that the proposed data construction strategy significantly improves model-generated detail caption data quality for LVLMs with leading performance, and the data quality can be further improved in a self-looping paradigm. All code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/foundation-multimodal-models/CAPTURE.

Composition matters during the photo-taking process, yet many casual users struggle to frame well-composed images. To provide composition guidance, we introduce PhotoFramer, a multi-modal composition instruction framework. Given a poorly composed image, PhotoFramer first describes how to improve the composition in natural language and then generates a well-composed example image. To train such a model, we curate a large-scale dataset. Inspired by how humans take photos, we organize composition guidance into a hierarchy of sub-tasks: shift, zoom-in, and view-change tasks. Shift and zoom-in data are sampled from existing cropping datasets, while view-change data are obtained via a two-stage pipeline. First, we sample pairs with varying viewpoints from multi-view datasets, and train a degradation model to transform well-composed photos into poorly composed ones. Second, we apply this degradation model to expert-taken photos to synthesize poor images to form training pairs. Using this dataset, we finetune a model that jointly processes and generates both text and images, enabling actionable textual guidance with illustrative examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that textual instructions effectively steer image composition, and coupling them with exemplars yields consistent improvements over exemplar-only baselines. PhotoFramer offers a practical step toward composition assistants that make expert photographic priors accessible to everyday users. Codes, model weights, and datasets have been released in https://zhiyuanyou.github.io/photoframer.

Modern machine learning research relies on relatively few carefully curated datasets. Even in these datasets, and typically in `untidy' or raw data, practitioners are faced with significant issues of data quality and diversity which can be prohibitively labor intensive to address. Existing methods for dealing with these challenges tend to make strong assumptions about the particular issues at play, and often require a priori knowledge or metadata such as domain labels. Our work is orthogonal to these methods: we instead focus on providing a unified and efficient framework for Metadata Archaeology -- uncovering and inferring metadata of examples in a dataset. We curate different subsets of data that might exist in a dataset (e.g. mislabeled, atypical, or out-of-distribution examples) using simple transformations, and leverage differences in learning dynamics between these probe suites to infer metadata of interest. Our method is on par with far more sophisticated mitigation methods across different tasks: identifying and correcting mislabeled examples, classifying minority-group samples, prioritizing points relevant for training and enabling scalable human auditing of relevant examples.

Recent multimodal image generators such as GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Gemini 2.5 Pro excel at following complex instructions, editing images and maintaining concept consistency. However, they are still evaluated by disjoint toolkits: text-to-image (T2I) benchmarks that lacks multi-modal conditioning, and customized image generation benchmarks that overlook compositional semantics and common knowledge. We propose MMIG-Bench, a comprehensive Multi-Modal Image Generation Benchmark that unifies these tasks by pairing 4,850 richly annotated text prompts with 1,750 multi-view reference images across 380 subjects, spanning humans, animals, objects, and artistic styles. MMIG-Bench is equipped with a three-level evaluation framework: (1) low-level metrics for visual artifacts and identity preservation of objects; (2) novel Aspect Matching Score (AMS): a VQA-based mid-level metric that delivers fine-grained prompt-image alignment and shows strong correlation with human judgments; and (3) high-level metrics for aesthetics and human preference. Using MMIG-Bench, we benchmark 17 state-of-the-art models, including Gemini 2.5 Pro, FLUX, DreamBooth, and IP-Adapter, and validate our metrics with 32k human ratings, yielding in-depth insights into architecture and data design. We will release the dataset and evaluation code to foster rigorous, unified evaluation and accelerate future innovations in multi-modal image generation.

Photovoltaic (PV) energy generation plays a crucial role in the energy transition. Small-scale PV installations are deployed at an unprecedented pace, and their integration into the grid can be challenging since public authorities often lack quality data about them. Overhead imagery is increasingly used to improve the knowledge of residential PV installations with machine learning models capable of automatically mapping these installations. However, these models cannot be easily transferred from one region or data source to another due to differences in image acquisition. To address this issue known as domain shift and foster the development of PV array mapping pipelines, we propose a dataset containing aerial images, annotations, and segmentation masks. We provide installation metadata for more than 28,000 installations. We provide ground truth segmentation masks for 13,000 installations, including 7,000 with annotations for two different image providers. Finally, we provide installation metadata that matches the annotation for more than 8,000 installations. Dataset applications include end-to-end PV registry construction, robust PV installations mapping, and analysis of crowdsourced datasets.

Text-to-video generation has evolved rapidly in recent years, delivering remarkable results. Training typically relies on video-caption paired data, which plays a crucial role in enhancing generation performance. However, current video captions often suffer from insufficient details, hallucinations and imprecise motion depiction, affecting the fidelity and consistency of generated videos. In this work, we propose a novel instance-aware structured caption framework, termed InstanceCap, to achieve instance-level and fine-grained video caption for the first time. Based on this scheme, we design an auxiliary models cluster to convert original video into instances to enhance instance fidelity. Video instances are further used to refine dense prompts into structured phrases, achieving concise yet precise descriptions. Furthermore, a 22K InstanceVid dataset is curated for training, and an enhancement pipeline that tailored to InstanceCap structure is proposed for inference. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed InstanceCap significantly outperform previous models, ensuring high fidelity between captions and videos while reducing hallucinations.

This paper explores the usage of multimodal image-to-text models to enhance text-based item retrieval. We propose utilizing pre-trained image captioning and tagging models, such as instructBLIP and CLIP, to generate text-based product descriptions which are combined with existing text descriptions. Our work is particularly impactful for smaller eCommerce businesses who are unable to maintain the high-quality text descriptions necessary to effectively perform item retrieval for search and recommendation use cases. We evaluate the searchability of ground-truth text, image-generated text, and combinations of both texts on several subsets of Amazon's publicly available ESCI dataset. The results demonstrate the dual capability of our proposed models to enhance the retrieval of existing text and generate highly-searchable standalone descriptions.

Digital cameras digitize scene light into linear raw representations, which the image signal processor (ISP) converts into display-ready outputs. While raw data preserves full sensor information--valuable for editing and vision tasks--formats such as Digital Negative (DNG) require large storage, making them impractical in constrained scenarios. In contrast, JPEG is a widely supported format, offering high compression efficiency and broad compatibility, but it is not well-suited for raw storage. This paper presents RawJPEG Adapter, a lightweight, learnable, and invertible preprocessing pipeline that adapts raw images for standard JPEG compression. Our method applies spatial and optional frequency-domain transforms, with compact parameters stored in the JPEG comment field, enabling accurate raw reconstruction. Experiments across multiple datasets show that our method achieves higher fidelity than direct JPEG storage, supports other codecs, and provides a favorable trade-off between compression ratio and reconstruction accuracy.

Exemplar-based image translation refers to the task of generating images with the desired style, while conditioning on certain input image. Most of the current methods learn the correspondence between two input domains and lack the mining of information within the domains. In this paper, we propose a more general learning approach by considering two domain features as a whole and learning both inter-domain correspondence and intra-domain potential information interactions. Specifically, we propose a Cross-domain Feature Fusion Transformer (CFFT) to learn inter- and intra-domain feature fusion. Based on CFFT, the proposed CFFT-GAN works well on exemplar-based image translation. Moreover, CFFT-GAN is able to decouple and fuse features from multiple domains by cascading CFFT modules. We conduct rich quantitative and qualitative experiments on several image translation tasks, and the results demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies show the importance of our proposed CFFT. Application experimental results reflect the potential of our method.

The rise of personalized generative models raises a central question: how should we evaluate identity preservation? Given a reference image (e.g., one's pet), we expect the generated image to retain precise details attached to the subject's identity. However, current generative evaluation metrics emphasize the overall semantic similarity between the reference and the output, and overlook these fine-grained discriminative details. We introduce Finer-Personalization Rank, an evaluation protocol tailored to identity preservation. Instead of pairwise similarity, Finer-Personalization Rank adopts a ranking view: it treats each generated image as a query against an identity-labeled gallery consisting of visually similar real images. Retrieval metrics (e.g., mean average precision) measure performance, where higher scores indicate that identity-specific details (e.g., a distinctive head spot) are preserved. We assess identity at multiple granularities -- from fine-grained categories (e.g., bird species, car models) to individual instances (e.g., re-identification). Across CUB, Stanford Cars, and animal Re-ID benchmarks, Finer-Personalization Rank more faithfully reflects identity retention than semantic-only metrics and reveals substantial identity drift in several popular personalization methods. These results position the gallery-based protocol as a principled and practical evaluation for personalized generation.

High-resolution datasets are essential for advancing super-resolution (SR) and text-to-image (T2I) diffusion research. However, current publicly available datasets lack both the native 4K resolution and the extensive scale necessary for training state-of-the-art models. To address this gap, we introduce a 4K Large Scale Dataset and Benchmark (4KLSDB), a large-scale, diverse dataset consisting of 129,484 carefully curated 4K resolution images spanning multiple categories such as nature, urban scenes, people, food, artwork, and CGI, alongside distinct validation and test sets containing 2,000 and 1,984 images respectively. Images were sourced from established open datasets including Photo Concept Bucket, Laion2B, and PD12M. 4KLSDB underwent rigorous multi-stage automated filtering and annotation pipelines involving both human annotators and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to ensure high aesthetic quality and dataset consistency. We demonstrate 4KLSDB's effectiveness by training representative super-resolution and diffusion models, observing significant improvements in performance on native 4K benchmarks. Comprehensive experiments illustrate a positive correlation between training on true 4K resolution data and improved fidelity in image restoration task, especially on 4K resolution. We provide the research community a valuable resource to drive progress toward genuinely high-fidelity image synthesis and restoration by providing 4KLSDB. Our project page is available at: https://4klsdb.github.io/.

Most existing image restoration methods use neural networks to learn strong image-level priors from huge data to estimate the lost information. However, these works still struggle in cases when images have severe information deficits. Introducing external priors or using reference images to provide information also have limitations in the application domain. In contrast, text input is more readily available and provides information with higher flexibility. In this work, we design an effective framework that allows the user to control the restoration process of degraded images with text descriptions. We use the text-image feature compatibility of the CLIP to alleviate the difficulty of fusing text and image features. Our framework can be used for various image restoration tasks, including image inpainting, image super-resolution, and image colorization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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

Web-crawled datasets are pivotal to the success of pre-training vision-language models, exemplified by CLIP. However, web-crawled AltTexts can be noisy and potentially irrelevant to images, thereby undermining the crucial image-text alignment. Existing methods for rewriting captions using large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on small, curated datasets like CC3M and CC12M. Nevertheless, their efficacy on massive web-captured captions is constrained by the inherent noise and randomness in such data. In this study, we address this limitation by focusing on two key aspects: data quality and data variety. Unlike recent LLM rewriting techniques, we emphasize exploiting visual concepts and their integration into the captions to improve data quality. For data variety, we propose a novel mixed training scheme that optimally leverages AltTexts alongside newly generated Visual-enriched Captions (VeC). We use CLIP as one example and adapt the method for CLIP training on large-scale web-crawled datasets, named VeCLIP. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of VeCLIP across small, medium, and large scales of raw data. Our results show significant advantages in image-text alignment and overall model performance, underscoring the effectiveness of VeCLIP in improving CLIP training. For example, VeCLIP achieves a remarkable over 20% improvement in COCO and Flickr30k retrieval tasks under the 12M setting. For data efficiency, we also achieve a notable over 3% improvement while using only 14% of the data employed in the vanilla CLIP and 11% in ALIGN.

This paper discusses the benefits of including metadata when training language models on historical collections. Using 19th-century newspapers as a case study, we extend the time-masking approach proposed by Rosin et al., 2022 and compare different strategies for inserting temporal, political and geographical information into a Masked Language Model. After fine-tuning several DistilBERT on enhanced input data, we provide a systematic evaluation of these models on a set of evaluation tasks: pseudo-perplexity, metadata mask-filling and supervised classification. We find that showing relevant metadata to a language model has a beneficial impact and may even produce more robust and fairer models.

Perspective distortion (PD) causes unprecedented changes in shape, size, orientation, angles, and other spatial relationships of visual concepts in images. Precisely estimating camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters is a challenging task that prevents synthesizing perspective distortion. Non-availability of dedicated training data poses a critical barrier to developing robust computer vision methods. Additionally, distortion correction methods make other computer vision tasks a multi-step approach and lack performance. In this work, we propose mitigating perspective distortion (MPD) by employing a fine-grained parameter control on a specific family of M\"obius transform to model real-world distortion without estimating camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters and without the need for actual distorted data. Also, we present a dedicated perspectively distorted benchmark dataset, ImageNet-PD, to benchmark the robustness of deep learning models against this new dataset. The proposed method outperforms existing benchmarks, ImageNet-E and ImageNet-X. Additionally, it significantly improves performance on ImageNet-PD while consistently performing on standard data distribution. Notably, our method shows improved performance on three PD-affected real-world applications crowd counting, fisheye image recognition, and person re-identification and one PD-affected challenging CV task: object detection. The source code, dataset, and models are available on the project webpage at https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/mpd.

Marine plankton underpin aquatic food webs and play a key role in global CO2 sequestration, making reliable species identification critical for understanding ocean health and climate feedbacks. Existing classification models perform well on individual collections but fail to generalize across instruments and environments due to isolated training datasets and inconsistent labels. To address this, we introduce Planktonzilla-17M, a unified dataset consolidating publicly available plankton image collections spanning thirteen imaging systems. It comprises 17.4 million images with standardized taxonomy and geo-environmental metadata, including 3.74 million plankton images spanning over 602 taxonomic classes, of which 201 are identified at the species level, making it the largest and most comprehensive plankton image dataset to date. Using this large-scale dataset, we perform a controlled comparison between supervised and CLIP-style image--text training on a shared ViT backbone. We find that a supervised classifier matches or exceeds CLIP-style training when trained using taxonomic lineage as text. We further observe that BioCLIP and BioCLIP2 perform poorly on plankton in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Leveraging Planktonzilla-17M improves plankton classification performance, highlighting the limitations of current biological foundation models in marine imaging domains.

Advances in diffusion, autoregressive, and hybrid models have enabled high-quality image synthesis for tasks such as text-to-image, editing, and reference-guided composition. Yet, existing benchmarks remain limited, either focus on isolated tasks, cover only narrow domains, or provide opaque scores without explaining failure modes. We introduce ImagenWorld, a benchmark of 3.6K condition sets spanning six core tasks (generation and editing, with single or multiple references) and six topical domains (artworks, photorealistic images, information graphics, textual graphics, computer graphics, and screenshots). The benchmark is supported by 20K fine-grained human annotations and an explainable evaluation schema that tags localized object-level and segment-level errors, complementing automated VLM-based metrics. Our large-scale evaluation of 14 models yields several insights: (1) models typically struggle more in editing tasks than in generation tasks, especially in local edits. (2) models excel in artistic and photorealistic settings but struggle with symbolic and text-heavy domains such as screenshots and information graphics. (3) closed-source systems lead overall, while targeted data curation (e.g., Qwen-Image) narrows the gap in text-heavy cases. (4) modern VLM-based metrics achieve Kendall accuracies up to 0.79, approximating human ranking, but fall short of fine-grained, explainable error attribution. ImagenWorld provides both a rigorous benchmark and a diagnostic tool to advance robust image generation.

The recent breakthroughs in OpenAI's GPT4o model have demonstrated surprisingly good capabilities in image generation and editing, resulting in significant excitement in the community. This technical report presents the first-look evaluation benchmark (named GPT-ImgEval), quantitatively and qualitatively diagnosing GPT-4o's performance across three critical dimensions: (1) generation quality, (2) editing proficiency, and (3) world knowledge-informed semantic synthesis. Across all three tasks, GPT-4o demonstrates strong performance, significantly surpassing existing methods in both image generation control and output quality, while also showcasing exceptional knowledge reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, based on the GPT-4o's generated data, we propose a classification-model-based approach to investigate the underlying architecture of GPT-4o, where our empirical results suggest the model consists of an auto-regressive (AR) combined with a diffusion-based head for image decoding, rather than the VAR-like architectures. We also provide a complete speculation on GPT-4o's overall architecture. In addition, we conduct a series of analyses to identify and visualize GPT-4o's specific limitations and the synthetic artifacts commonly observed in its image generation. We also present a comparative study of multi-round image editing between GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash, and discuss the safety implications of GPT-4o's outputs, particularly their detectability by existing image forensic models. We hope that our work can offer valuable insight and provide a reliable benchmark to guide future research, foster reproducibility, and accelerate innovation in the field of image generation and beyond. The codes and datasets used for evaluating GPT-4o can be found at https://github.com/PicoTrex/GPT-ImgEval.

With the rapid development of mobile devices, modern widely-used mobile phones typically allow users to capture 4K resolution (i.e., ultra-high-definition) images. However, for image demoireing, a challenging task in low-level vision, existing works are generally carried out on low-resolution or synthetic images. Hence, the effectiveness of these methods on 4K resolution images is still unknown. In this paper, we explore moire pattern removal for ultra-high-definition images. To this end, we propose the first ultra-high-definition demoireing dataset (UHDM), which contains 5,000 real-world 4K resolution image pairs, and conduct a benchmark study on current state-of-the-art methods. Further, we present an efficient baseline model ESDNet for tackling 4K moire images, wherein we build a semantic-aligned scale-aware module to address the scale variation of moire patterns. Extensive experiments manifest the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin while being much more lightweight. Code and dataset are available at https://xinyu-andy.github.io/uhdm-page.

While text-guided image editing has made remarkable progress, it remains limited in structural portrait retouching. Textual descriptions struggle to convey fine-grained changes to facial features and body proportions. To address this gap, we introduce Exemplar-Based Portrait Photo Retouching, where the model is given an exemplar pair and tasked with inferring and applying the same retouching operations to a new query image. Existing exemplar-based editing methods primarily focus on tasks with pronounced visual transformations. In contrast, structural portrait retouching involves extremely delicate and localized modifications, making accurate extraction and transfer of these edits challenging. To tackle this, we propose MirrorPPR, a novel framework designed to capture and transfer subtle structural retouching operations. Our method uses a Retouching Operation Extractor to capture the subtle differences from the exemplar pair. The extracted representations are then injected into a pre-trained Diffusion Transformer (DiT) through a connector and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules. Furthermore, constructing perfectly aligned cross-identity training pairs is severely hindered by operation misalignment. To overcome this, we propose an advanced data self-augmentation paradigm that ensures strictly aligned retouching operations. To alleviate data scarcity and support this novel task, we introduce MirrorPPR47M, a large-scale dataset with over 47 million retouched pairs. By structuring the dataset into simulated and professional subsets, we enable progressive curriculum learning to smoothly optimize the network. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MirrorPPR significantly outperforms existing baselines in both retouching quality and identity preservation. The project page is available at https://sjtu-deng-lab.github.io/MirrorPPR.

We introduce CameraBench, a large-scale dataset and benchmark designed to assess and improve camera motion understanding. CameraBench consists of ~3,000 diverse internet videos, annotated by experts through a rigorous multi-stage quality control process. One of our contributions is a taxonomy of camera motion primitives, designed in collaboration with cinematographers. We find, for example, that some motions like "follow" (or tracking) require understanding scene content like moving subjects. We conduct a large-scale human study to quantify human annotation performance, revealing that domain expertise and tutorial-based training can significantly enhance accuracy. For example, a novice may confuse zoom-in (a change of intrinsics) with translating forward (a change of extrinsics), but can be trained to differentiate the two. Using CameraBench, we evaluate Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Video-Language Models (VLMs), finding that SfM models struggle to capture semantic primitives that depend on scene content, while VLMs struggle to capture geometric primitives that require precise estimation of trajectories. We then fine-tune a generative VLM on CameraBench to achieve the best of both worlds and showcase its applications, including motion-augmented captioning, video question answering, and video-text retrieval. We hope our taxonomy, benchmark, and tutorials will drive future efforts towards the ultimate goal of understanding camera motions in any video.

Zero-shot Image Captioning (ZIC) increasingly utilizes synthetic datasets generated by text-to-image (T2I) models to mitigate the need for costly manual annotation. However, these T2I models often produce images that exhibit semantic misalignments with their corresponding input captions (e.g., missing objects, incorrect attributes), resulting in noisy synthetic image-caption pairs that can hinder model training. Existing dataset pruning techniques are largely designed for removing noisy text in web-crawled data. However, these methods are ill-suited for the distinct challenges of synthetic data, where captions are typically well-formed, but images may be inaccurate representations. To address this gap, we introduce SynC, a novel framework specifically designed to refine synthetic image-caption datasets for ZIC. Instead of conventional filtering or regeneration, SynC focuses on reassigning captions to the most semantically aligned images already present within the synthetic image pool. Our approach employs a one-to-many mapping strategy by initially retrieving multiple relevant candidate images for each caption. We then apply a cycle-consistency-inspired alignment scorer that selects the best image by verifying its ability to retrieve the original caption via image-to-text retrieval. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SynC consistently and significantly improves performance across various ZIC models on standard benchmarks (MS-COCO, Flickr30k, NoCaps), achieving state-of-the-art results in several scenarios. SynC offers an effective strategy for curating refined synthetic data to enhance ZIC.

Despite the rapidly growing demand for multimodal retrieval, progress in this field remains severely constrained by a lack of training data. In this paper, we introduce MegaPairs, a novel data synthesis method that leverages vision language models (VLMs) and open-domain images, together with a massive synthetic dataset generated from this method. Our empirical analysis shows that MegaPairs generates high-quality data, enabling the multimodal retriever to significantly outperform the baseline model trained on 70times more data from existing datasets. Moreover, since MegaPairs solely relies on general image corpora and open-source VLMs, it can be easily scaled up, enabling continuous improvements in retrieval performance. In this stage, we produced more than 26 million training instances and trained several models of varying sizes using this data. These new models achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across 4 popular composed image retrieval (CIR) benchmarks and the highest overall performance on the 36 datasets provided by MMEB. They also demonstrate notable performance improvements with additional downstream fine-tuning. Our produced dataset, well-trained models, and data synthesis pipeline will be made publicly available to facilitate the future development of this field.

Capturing photographs with wrong exposures remains a major source of errors in camera-based imaging. Exposure problems are categorized as either: (i) overexposed, where the camera exposure was too long, resulting in bright and washed-out image regions, or (ii) underexposed, where the exposure was too short, resulting in dark regions. Both under- and overexposure greatly reduce the contrast and visual appeal of an image. Prior work mainly focuses on underexposed images or general image enhancement. In contrast, our proposed method targets both over- and underexposure errors in photographs. We formulate the exposure correction problem as two main sub-problems: (i) color enhancement and (ii) detail enhancement. Accordingly, we propose a coarse-to-fine deep neural network (DNN) model, trainable in an end-to-end manner, that addresses each sub-problem separately. A key aspect of our solution is a new dataset of over 24,000 images exhibiting the broadest range of exposure values to date with a corresponding properly exposed image. Our method achieves results on par with existing state-of-the-art methods on underexposed images and yields significant improvements for images suffering from overexposure errors.

We introduce EditCLIP, a novel representation-learning approach for image editing. Our method learns a unified representation of edits by jointly encoding an input image and its edited counterpart, effectively capturing their transformation. To evaluate its effectiveness, we employ EditCLIP to solve two tasks: exemplar-based image editing and automated edit evaluation. In exemplar-based image editing, we replace text-based instructions in InstructPix2Pix with EditCLIP embeddings computed from a reference exemplar image pair. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods while being more efficient and versatile. For automated evaluation, EditCLIP assesses image edits by measuring the similarity between the EditCLIP embedding of a given image pair and either a textual editing instruction or the EditCLIP embedding of another reference image pair. Experiments show that EditCLIP aligns more closely with human judgments than existing CLIP-based metrics, providing a reliable measure of edit quality and structural preservation.

Exemplar-based image editing applies a transformation defined by a source-target image pair to a new query image. Existing methods rely on a pair-of-pairs supervision paradigm, requiring two image pairs sharing the same edit semantics to learn the target transformation. This constraint makes training data difficult to curate at scale and limits generalization across diverse edit types. We propose Delta-Adapter, a method that learns transferable editing semantics under single-pair supervision, requiring no textual guidance. Rather than directly exposing the exemplar pair to the model, we leverage a pre-trained vision encoder to extract a semantic delta that encodes the visual transformation between the two images. This semantic delta is injected into a pre-trained image editing model via a Perceiver-based adapter. Since the target image is never directly visible to the model, it can serve as the prediction target, enabling single-pair supervision without requiring additional exemplar pairs. This formulation allows us to leverage existing large-scale editing datasets for training. To further promote faithful transformation transfer, we introduce a semantic delta consistency loss that aligns the semantic change of the generated output with the ground-truth semantic delta extracted from the exemplar pair. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Delta-Adapter consistently improves both editing accuracy and content consistency over four strong baselines on seen editing tasks, while also generalizing more effectively to unseen editing tasks. Code will be available at https://delta-adapter.github.io.

We present SImProv - a scalable image provenance framework to match a query image back to a trusted database of originals and identify possible manipulations on the query. SImProv consists of three stages: a scalable search stage for retrieving top-k most similar images; a re-ranking and near-duplicated detection stage for identifying the original among the candidates; and finally a manipulation detection and visualization stage for localizing regions within the query that may have been manipulated to differ from the original. SImProv is robust to benign image transformations that commonly occur during online redistribution, such as artifacts due to noise and recompression degradation, as well as out-of-place transformations due to image padding, warping, and changes in size and shape. Robustness towards out-of-place transformations is achieved via the end-to-end training of a differentiable warping module within the comparator architecture. We demonstrate effective retrieval and manipulation detection over a dataset of 100 million images.

We present the first systematic investigation of supervised scaling laws outside of an ImageNet-like context - on images of galaxies. We use 840k galaxy images and over 100M annotations by Galaxy Zoo volunteers, comparable in scale to Imagenet-1K. We find that adding annotated galaxy images provides a power law improvement in performance across all architectures and all tasks, while adding trainable parameters is effective only for some (typically more subjectively challenging) tasks. We then compare the downstream performance of finetuned models pretrained on either ImageNet-12k alone vs. additionally pretrained on our galaxy images. We achieve an average relative error rate reduction of 31% across 5 downstream tasks of scientific interest. Our finetuned models are more label-efficient and, unlike their ImageNet-12k-pretrained equivalents, often achieve linear transfer performance equal to that of end-to-end finetuning. We find relatively modest additional downstream benefits from scaling model size, implying that scaling alone is not sufficient to address our domain gap, and suggest that practitioners with qualitatively different images might benefit more from in-domain adaption followed by targeted downstream labelling.

Recent breakthroughs in large multimodal models (LMMs) have significantly advanced both text-to-image (T2I) generation and image-to-text (I2T) interpretation. However, many generated images still suffer from issues related to perceptual quality and text-image alignment. Given the high cost and inefficiency of manual evaluation, an automatic metric that aligns with human preferences is desirable. To this end, we present EvalMi-50K, a comprehensive dataset and benchmark for evaluating large-multimodal image generation, which features (i) comprehensive tasks, encompassing 2,100 extensive prompts across 20 fine-grained task dimensions, and (ii) large-scale human-preference annotations, including 100K mean-opinion scores (MOSs) and 50K question-answering (QA) pairs annotated on 50,400 images generated from 24 T2I models. Based on EvalMi-50K, we propose LMM4LMM, an LMM-based metric for evaluating large multimodal T2I generation from multiple dimensions including perception, text-image correspondence, and task-specific accuracy. Extensive experimental results show that LMM4LMM achieves state-of-the-art performance on EvalMi-50K, and exhibits strong generalization ability on other AI-generated image evaluation benchmark datasets, manifesting the generality of both the EvalMi-50K dataset and LMM4LMM metric. Both EvalMi-50K and LMM4LMM will be released at https://github.com/IntMeGroup/LMM4LMM.

Image Captioning for state-of-the-art VLMs has significantly improved over time; however, this comes at the cost of increased computational complexity, making them less accessible for resource-constrained applications such as mobile devices and assistive technologies. Alternatively, smaller VLMs prioritize high-level scene descriptions, overlooking finer details that contribute to a richer understanding of an image. In this paper, we introduce a training-free framework that enhances caption diversity and informativeness by explicitly attending to distinct image regions using a comparably small VLM, BLIP, as the backbone. Our approach leverages structured segmentation to produce hierarchical representations that capture both global and localized semantics. Without requiring additional model training, we demonstrate that our method allows smaller VLMs to achieve performance comparable to larger models in terms of image-caption alignment, semantic integrity, and diversity. We evaluate our framework on MSCOCO, Flickr30k, and Nocaps test datasets, achieving a Div-2 score of 0.735, 0.750, and 0.748 for each dataset respectively, while maintaining strong image-caption relevancy and semantic integrity with the human-annotated captions.

We introduce Alterbute, a diffusion-based method for editing an object's intrinsic attributes in an image. We allow changing color, texture, material, and even the shape of an object, while preserving its perceived identity and scene context. Existing approaches either rely on unsupervised priors that often fail to preserve identity or use overly restrictive supervision that prevents meaningful intrinsic variations. Our method relies on: (i) a relaxed training objective that allows the model to change both intrinsic and extrinsic attributes conditioned on an identity reference image, a textual prompt describing the target intrinsic attributes, and a background image and object mask defining the extrinsic context. At inference, we restrict extrinsic changes by reusing the original background and object mask, thereby ensuring that only the desired intrinsic attributes are altered; (ii) Visual Named Entities (VNEs) - fine-grained visual identity categories (e.g., ''Porsche 911 Carrera'') that group objects sharing identity-defining features while allowing variation in intrinsic attributes. We use a vision-language model to automatically extract VNE labels and intrinsic attribute descriptions from a large public image dataset, enabling scalable, identity-preserving supervision. Alterbute outperforms existing methods on identity-preserving object intrinsic attribute editing.

The performance of unified multimodal models for image generation and editing is fundamentally constrained by the quality and comprehensiveness of their training data. While existing datasets have covered basic tasks like style transfer and simple object manipulation, they often lack the systematic structure and challenging scenarios required for real-world applications. To address this bottleneck, we introduce OpenGPT-4o-Image, a large-scale dataset constructed using a novel methodology that combines hierarchical task taxonomy with automated data generation. Our taxonomy not only includes fundamental capabilities such as text rendering and style control but also introduces highly practical yet challenging categories like scientific imagery for chemistry illustrations and complex instruction editing requiring simultaneous execution of multiple operations. Through an automated pipeline leveraging structured resource pools and GPT-4o, we generate 80k high-quality instruction-image pairs with controlled diversity, covering 11 major domains and 51 subtasks. Extensive experiments show that fine-tuning leading models on our dataset achieves significant performance gains across multiple benchmarks, with improvements of up to 18\% on editing tasks (UniWorld-V1 on ImgEdit-Bench) and 13% on generation tasks (Harmon on GenEval). Our work demonstrates that systematic data construction is key to advancing multimodal AI capabilities.

We extend first-order model agnostic meta-learning algorithms (including FOMAML and Reptile) to image segmentation, present a novel neural network architecture built for fast learning which we call EfficientLab, and leverage a formal definition of the test error of meta-learning algorithms to decrease error on out of distribution tasks. We show state of the art results on the FSS-1000 dataset by meta-training EfficientLab with FOMAML and using Bayesian optimization to infer the optimal test-time adaptation routine hyperparameters. We also construct a small benchmark dataset, FP-k, for the empirical study of how meta-learning systems perform in both few- and many-shot settings. On the FP-k dataset, we show that meta-learned initializations provide value for canonical few-shot image segmentation but their performance is quickly matched by conventional transfer learning with performance being equal beyond 10 labeled examples. Our code, meta-learned model, and the FP-k dataset are available at https://github.com/ml4ai/mliis .

The NLP pipeline has evolved dramatically in the last few years. The first step in the pipeline is to find suitable annotated datasets to evaluate the tasks we are trying to solve. Unfortunately, most of the published datasets lack metadata annotations that describe their attributes. Not to mention, the absence of a public catalogue that indexes all the publicly available datasets related to specific regions or languages. When we consider low-resource dialectical languages, for example, this issue becomes more prominent. In this paper we create Masader, the largest public catalogue for Arabic NLP datasets, which consists of 200 datasets annotated with 25 attributes. Furthermore, We develop a metadata annotation strategy that could be extended to other languages. We also make remarks and highlight some issues about the current status of Arabic NLP datasets and suggest recommendations to address them.

Large-scale but noisy image-text pair data have paved the way for the success of Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP). As the foundation vision encoder, CLIP in turn serves as the cornerstone for most large vision-language models (LVLMs). This interdependence naturally raises an interesting question: Can we reciprocally leverage LVLMs to enhance the quality of image-text pair data, thereby opening the possibility of a self-reinforcing cycle for continuous improvement? In this work, we take a significant step toward this vision by introducing an LVLM-driven data refinement pipeline. Our framework leverages LVLMs to process images and their raw alt-text, generating four complementary textual formulas: long positive descriptions, long negative descriptions, short positive tags, and short negative tags. Applying this pipeline to the curated DFN-Large dataset yields VLM-150M, a refined dataset enriched with multi-grained annotations. Based on this dataset, we further propose a training paradigm that extends conventional contrastive learning by incorporating negative descriptions and short tags as additional supervised signals. The resulting model, namely HQ-CLIP, demonstrates remarkable improvements across diverse benchmarks. Within a comparable training data scale, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot classification, cross-modal retrieval, and fine-grained visual understanding tasks. In retrieval benchmarks, HQ-CLIP even surpasses standard CLIP models trained on the DFN-2B dataset, which contains 10times more training data than ours. All code, data, and models are available at https://zxwei.site/hqclip.

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

Referenceless metrics (e.g., CLIPScore) use pretrained vision--language models to assess image descriptions directly without costly ground-truth reference texts. Such methods can facilitate rapid progress, but only if they truly align with human preference judgments. In this paper, we introduce ContextRef, a benchmark for assessing referenceless metrics for such alignment. ContextRef has two components: human ratings along a variety of established quality dimensions, and ten diverse robustness checks designed to uncover fundamental weaknesses. A crucial aspect of ContextRef is that images and descriptions are presented in context, reflecting prior work showing that context is important for description quality. Using ContextRef, we assess a variety of pretrained models, scoring functions, and techniques for incorporating context. None of the methods is successful with ContextRef, but we show that careful fine-tuning yields substantial improvements. ContextRef remains a challenging benchmark though, in large part due to the challenge of context dependence.

Generative models are now widely used by graphic designers and artists. Prior works have shown that these models remember and often replicate content from their training data during generation. Hence as their proliferation increases, it has become important to perform a database search to determine whether the properties of the image are attributable to specific training data, every time before a generated image is used for professional purposes. Existing tools for this purpose focus on retrieving images of similar semantic content. Meanwhile, many artists are concerned with style replication in text-to-image models. We present a framework for understanding and extracting style descriptors from images. Our framework comprises a new dataset curated using the insight that style is a subjective property of an image that captures complex yet meaningful interactions of factors including but not limited to colors, textures, shapes, etc. We also propose a method to extract style descriptors that can be used to attribute style of a generated image to the images used in the training dataset of a text-to-image model. We showcase promising results in various style retrieval tasks. We also quantitatively and qualitatively analyze style attribution and matching in the Stable Diffusion model. Code and artifacts are available at https://github.com/learn2phoenix/CSD.

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.

Camera traps are valuable tools in animal ecology for biodiversity monitoring and conservation. However, challenges like poor generalization to deployment at new unseen locations limit their practical application. Images are naturally associated with heterogeneous forms of context possibly in different modalities. In this work, we leverage the structured context associated with the camera trap images to improve out-of-distribution generalization for the task of species identification in camera traps. For example, a photo of a wild animal may be associated with information about where and when it was taken, as well as structured biology knowledge about the animal species. While typically overlooked by existing work, bringing back such context offers several potential benefits for better image understanding, such as addressing data scarcity and enhancing generalization. However, effectively integrating such heterogeneous context into the visual domain is a challenging problem. To address this, we propose a novel framework that reformulates species classification as link prediction in a multimodal knowledge graph (KG). This framework seamlessly integrates various forms of multimodal context for visual recognition. We apply this framework for out-of-distribution species classification on the iWildCam2020-WILDS and Snapshot Mountain Zebra datasets and achieve competitive performance with state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, our framework successfully incorporates biological taxonomy for improved generalization and enhances sample efficiency for recognizing under-represented species.

Recent advancements in image captioning have explored text-only training methods to overcome the limitations of paired image-text data. However, existing text-only training methods often overlook the modality gap between using text data during training and employing images during inference. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called Image-like Retrieval, which aligns text features with visually relevant features to mitigate the modality gap. Our method further enhances the accuracy of generated captions by designing a Fusion Module that integrates retrieved captions with input features. Additionally, we introduce a Frequency-based Entity Filtering technique that significantly improves caption quality. We integrate these methods into a unified framework, which we refer to as IFCap (Image-like Retrieval and Frequency-based Entity Filtering for Zero-shot Captioning). Through extensive experimentation, our straightforward yet powerful approach has demonstrated its efficacy, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin in both image captioning and video captioning compared to zero-shot captioning based on text-only training.

Masader (Alyafeai et al., 2021) created a metadata structure to be used for cataloguing Arabic NLP datasets. However, developing an easy way to explore such a catalogue is a challenging task. In order to give the optimal experience for users and researchers exploring the catalogue, several design and user experience challenges must be resolved. Furthermore, user interactions with the website may provide an easy approach to improve the catalogue. In this paper, we introduce Masader Plus, a web interface for users to browse Masader. We demonstrate data exploration, filtration, and a simple API that allows users to examine datasets from the backend. Masader Plus can be explored using this link https://arbml.github.io/masader. A video recording explaining the interface can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEtdlSeqchk.

In recent years, large-scale data collection efforts have prioritized the amount of data collected in order to improve the modeling capabilities of large language models. This prioritization, however, has resulted in concerns with respect to the rights of data subjects represented in data collections, particularly when considering the difficulty in interrogating these collections due to insufficient documentation and tools for analysis. Mindful of these pitfalls, we present our methodology for a documentation-first, human-centered data collection project as part of the BigScience initiative. We identified a geographically diverse set of target language groups (Arabic, Basque, Chinese, Catalan, English, French, Indic languages, Indonesian, Niger-Congo languages, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese, as well as programming languages) for which to collect metadata on potential data sources. To structure this effort, we developed our online catalogue as a supporting tool for gathering metadata through organized public hackathons. We present our development process; analyses of the resulting resource metadata, including distributions over languages, regions, and resource types; and our lessons learned in this endeavor.

Computer vision analysis of camera trap video footage is essential for wildlife conservation, as captured behaviours offer some of the earliest indicators of changes in population health. Recently, several high-impact animal behaviour datasets and methods have been introduced to encourage their use; however, the role of behaviour-correlated background information and its significant effect on out-of-distribution generalisation remain unexplored. In response, we present the PanAf-FGBG dataset, featuring 20 hours of wild chimpanzee behaviours, recorded at over 350 individual camera locations. Uniquely, it pairs every video with a chimpanzee (referred to as a foreground video) with a corresponding background video (with no chimpanzee) from the same camera location. We present two views of the dataset: one with overlapping camera locations and one with disjoint locations. This setup enables, for the first time, direct evaluation of in-distribution and out-of-distribution conditions, and for the impact of backgrounds on behaviour recognition models to be quantified. All clips come with rich behavioural annotations and metadata including unique camera IDs and detailed textual scene descriptions. Additionally, we establish several baselines and present a highly effective latent-space normalisation technique that boosts out-of-distribution performance by +5.42% mAP for convolutional and +3.75% mAP for transformer-based models. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis on the role of backgrounds in out-of-distribution behaviour recognition, including the so far unexplored impact of background durations (i.e., the count of background frames within foreground videos).

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress in instruction following and aesthetics. However, a persistent challenge is the prevalence of physical artifacts, such as anatomical and structural flaws, which severely degrade perceptual quality and limit application. Given the diversity and complexity of these artifacts, a systematic and fine-grained evaluation framework is required, which is lacking in current benchmarks. To fill this gap, we introduce MagicMirror, a comprehensive framework for artifacts assessment. We first establish a detailed taxonomy of generated image artifacts. Guided by this taxonomy, we manually annotate MagicData340K, the first human-annotated large-scale dataset of 340K generated images with fine-grained artifact labels. Building on this dataset, we train MagicAssessor, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) that provides detailed assessments and corresponding labels. To overcome challenges like class imbalance and reward hacking, we design a novel data sampling strategy and a multi-level reward system for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Finally, we leverage MagicAssessor to construct MagicBench, an automated benchmark for evaluating the image artifacts of current T2I models. Our evaluation with MagicBench reveals that despite their widespread adoption, even top-tier models like GPT-image-1 are consistently plagued by significant artifacts, highlighting artifact reduction as a critical frontier for future T2I development. Project page: https://wj-inf.github.io/MagicMirror-page/.

Recent advancements in multimodal models highlight the value of rewritten captions for improving performance, yet key challenges remain. For example, while synthetic captions often provide superior quality and image-text alignment, it is not clear whether they can fully replace AltTexts: the role of synthetic captions and their interaction with original web-crawled AltTexts in pre-training is still not well understood. Moreover, different multimodal foundation models may have unique preferences for specific caption formats, but efforts to identify the optimal captions for each model remain limited. In this work, we propose a novel, controllable, and scalable captioning pipeline designed to generate diverse caption formats tailored to various multimodal models. By examining Short Synthetic Captions (SSC) towards Dense Synthetic Captions (DSC+) as case studies, we systematically explore their effects and interactions with AltTexts across models such as CLIP, multimodal LLMs, and diffusion models. Our findings reveal that a hybrid approach that keeps both synthetic captions and AltTexts can outperform the use of synthetic captions alone, improving both alignment and performance, with each model demonstrating preferences for particular caption formats. This comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights into optimizing captioning strategies, thereby advancing the pre-training of multimodal foundation models.

Large-scale vision-language pre-training has achieved promising results on downstream tasks. Existing methods highly rely on the assumption that the image-text pairs crawled from the Internet are in perfect one-to-one correspondence. However, in real scenarios, this assumption can be difficult to hold: the text description, obtained by crawling the affiliated metadata of the image, often suffers from the semantic mismatch and the mutual compatibility. To address these issues, we introduce PyramidCLIP, which constructs an input pyramid with different semantic levels for each modality, and aligns visual elements and linguistic elements in the form of hierarchy via peer-level semantics alignment and cross-level relation alignment. Furthermore, we soften the loss of negative samples (unpaired samples) so as to weaken the strict constraint during the pre-training stage, thus mitigating the risk of forcing the model to distinguish compatible negative pairs. Experiments on five downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PyramidCLIP. In particular, with the same amount of 15 million pre-training image-text pairs, PyramidCLIP exceeds CLIP on ImageNet zero-shot classification top-1 accuracy by 10.6%/13.2%/10.0% with ResNet50/ViT-B32/ViT-B16 based image encoder respectively. When scaling to larger datasets, PyramidCLIP achieves the state-of-the-art results on several downstream tasks. In particular, the results of PyramidCLIP-ResNet50 trained on 143M image-text pairs surpass that of CLIP using 400M data on ImageNet zero-shot classification task, significantly improving the data efficiency of CLIP.

While recent advancements in multimodal language models have enabled image generation from expressive multi-image instructions, existing methods struggle to maintain performance under complex interleaved instructions. This limitation stems from the structural separation of images and text in current paradigms, which forces models to bridge difficult long-range dependencies to match descriptions with visual targets. To address these challenges, we propose Images iN SEnTences (a.k.a, INSET), a unified generation model that seamlessly embeds images as native vocabulary within textual instructions. By positioning visual features directly at their corresponding semantic slots, INSET leverages the contextual locality of transformers for precise object binding, effectively treating images as dense, expressive language tokens. Furthermore, we introduce a scalable data engine that synthesizes 15M high-quality interleaved samples from standard image and video datasets, utilizing VLMs and LLMs to construct rich, long-horizon sequences. Evaluation results on InterleaveBench demonstrate that INSET significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multi-image consistency and text alignment, with performance gaps widening as input complexity increases. Beyond standard generation, our approach inherently extends to multimodal image editing, integrating visual content as part of the instruction to facilitate highly expressive and creative visual manipulations.

Image captioning systems are unable to generate fine-grained captions as they are trained on data that is either noisy (alt-text) or generic (human annotations). This is further exacerbated by maximum likelihood training that encourages generation of frequently occurring phrases. Previous works have tried to address this limitation by fine-tuning captioners with a self-retrieval (SR) reward. However, we find that SR fine-tuning has a tendency to reduce caption faithfulness and even hallucinate. In this work, we circumvent this bottleneck by improving the MLE initialization of the captioning system and designing a curriculum for the SR fine-tuning process. To this extent, we present (1) Visual Caption Boosting, a novel framework to instill fine-grainedness in generic image captioning datasets while remaining anchored in human annotations; and (2) BagCurri, a carefully designed training curriculum that more optimally leverages the contrastive nature of the self-retrieval reward. Jointly, they enable the captioner to describe fine-grained aspects in the image while preserving faithfulness to ground-truth captions. Our approach outperforms previous work by +8.9% on SR against 99 random distractors (RD100) (Dessi et al., 2023); and +7.6% on ImageCoDe. Additionally, existing metrics to evaluate captioning systems fail to reward diversity or evaluate a model's fine-grained understanding ability. Our third contribution addresses this by proposing self-retrieval from the lens of evaluation. We introduce TrueMatch, a benchmark comprising bags of highly similar images that uses SR to assess the captioner's ability to capture subtle visual distinctions. We evaluate and compare several state-of-the-art open-source MLLMs on TrueMatch, and find that our SR approach outperforms them all by a significant margin (e.g. +4.8% - 7.1% over Cambrian) while having 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer parameters.

Exposure errors in an image cause a degradation in the contrast and low visibility in the content. In this paper, we address this problem and propose an end-to-end exposure correction model in order to handle both under- and overexposure errors with a single model. Our model contains an image encoder, consecutive residual blocks, and image decoder to synthesize the corrected image. We utilize perceptual loss, feature matching loss, and multi-scale discriminator to increase the quality of the generated image as well as to make the training more stable. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of proposed model. We achieve the state-of-the-art result on a large-scale exposure dataset. Besides, we investigate the effect of exposure setting of the image on the portrait matting task. We find that under- and overexposed images cause severe degradation in the performance of the portrait matting models. We show that after applying exposure correction with the proposed model, the portrait matting quality increases significantly. https://github.com/yamand16/ExposureCorrection

Image captions serve as efficient surrogates for visual content in multimodal systems such as retrieval, recommendation, and multi-step agentic inference pipelines. Yet current evaluation practices miss a fundamental question: Can captions stand-in for images in real downstream tasks? We propose a utility-based benchmark, CaptionQA, to evaluate model-generated captions, where caption quality is measured by how well it supports downstream tasks. CaptionQA is an extensible domain-dependent benchmark covering 4 domains--Natural, Document, E-commerce, and Embodied AI--each with fine-grained taxonomies (25 top-level and 69 subcategories) that identify useful information for domain-specific tasks. CaptionQA builds 33,027 densely annotated multiple-choice questions (50.3 per image on average) that explicitly require visual information to answer, providing a comprehensive probe of caption utility. In our evaluation protocol, an LLM answers these questions using captions alone, directly measuring whether captions preserve image-level utility and are utilizable by a downstream LLM. Evaluating state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals substantial gaps between the image and its caption utility. Notably, models nearly identical on traditional image-QA benchmarks lower by up to 32% in caption utility. We release CaptionQA along with an open-source pipeline for extension to new domains. The code is available at https://github.com/bronyayang/CaptionQA.

The emergence of advanced AI-based tools to generate realistic images poses significant challenges for forensic detection and source attribution, especially as new generative techniques appear rapidly. Traditional methods often fail to generalize to unseen generators due to reliance on features specific to known sources during training. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that explicitly models forensic microstructures - subtle, pixel-level patterns unique to the image creation process. Using only real images in a self-supervised manner, we learn a set of diverse predictive filters to extract residuals that capture different aspects of these microstructures. By jointly modeling these residuals across multiple scales, we obtain a compact model whose parameters constitute a unique forensic self-description for each image. This self-description enables us to perform zero-shot detection of synthetic images, open-set source attribution of images, and clustering based on source without prior knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy and adaptability compared to competing techniques, advancing the state of the art in synthetic media forensics.

Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in image captioning, visual question answering, and visual reasoning. Yet they remain prone to vision-language misalignment, often producing overly generic or hallucinated descriptions. Existing approaches address this via instruction tuning-requiring costly, large-scale annotated datasets or via complex test-time frameworks for caption refinement. In this work, we revisit image-text alignment through the lens of cycle consistency: given an image and a caption generated by an image-to-text model, the backward mapping through a text-to-image model should reconstruct an image that closely matches the original. In our setup, a VLM serves as the image-to-text component, while a pre-trained text-to-image model closes the loop by reconstructing the image from the generated caption. Building on this, we introduce CycleCap, a fine-tuning scheme to improve image captioning using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a reward based on the similarity between the original and reconstructed images, computed on-the-fly. Unlike previous work that uses cycle consistency loss for preference dataset construction, our method leverages cycle consistency directly as a self-supervised training signal. This enables the use of raw images alone, eliminating the need for curated image-text datasets, while steering the VLM to produce more accurate and grounded text descriptions. Applied to four VLMs ranging from 1B to 7B parameters, CycleCap yields consistent improvements across captioning and hallucination benchmarks, surpassing state-of-the-art methods that rely on supervised cycle consistency training.

Image-to-text generation aims to describe images using natural language. Recently, zero-shot image captioning based on pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) has made significant progress. However, we have observed and empirically demonstrated that these methods are susceptible to modality bias induced by LLMs and tend to generate descriptions containing objects (entities) that do not actually exist in the image but frequently appear during training (i.e., object hallucination). In this paper, we propose ViECap, a transferable decoding model that leverages entity-aware decoding to generate descriptions in both seen and unseen scenarios. ViECap incorporates entity-aware hard prompts to guide LLMs' attention toward the visual entities present in the image, enabling coherent caption generation across diverse scenes. With entity-aware hard prompts, ViECap is capable of maintaining performance when transferring from in-domain to out-of-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViECap sets a new state-of-the-art cross-domain (transferable) captioning and performs competitively in-domain captioning compared to previous VLMs-based zero-shot methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/FeiElysia/ViECap

In this paper, we introduce a new approach for high-quality multi-exposure image fusion (MEF). We show that the fusion weights of an exposure can be encoded into a 1D lookup table (LUT), which takes pixel intensity value as input and produces fusion weight as output. We learn one 1D LUT for each exposure, then all the pixels from different exposures can query 1D LUT of that exposure independently for high-quality and efficient fusion. Specifically, to learn these 1D LUTs, we involve attention mechanism in various dimensions including frame, channel and spatial ones into the MEF task so as to bring us significant quality improvement over the state-of-the-art (SOTA). In addition, we collect a new MEF dataset consisting of 960 samples, 155 of which are manually tuned by professionals as ground-truth for evaluation. Our network is trained by this dataset in an unsupervised manner. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of all the newly proposed components, and results show that our approach outperforms the SOTA in our and another representative dataset SICE, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover, our 1D LUT approach takes less than 4ms to run a 4K image on a PC GPU. Given its high quality, efficiency and robustness, our method has been shipped into millions of Android mobiles across multiple brands world-wide. Code is available at: https://github.com/Hedlen/MEFLUT.

Bytes form the basis of the digital world and thus are a promising building block for multimodal foundation models. Recently, Byte Language Models (BLMs) have emerged to overcome tokenization, yet the excessive length of bytestreams requires new architectural paradigms. Therefore, we present the Multiscale Byte Language Model (MBLM), a model-agnostic hierarchical decoder stack that allows training with context windows of 5M bytes on single GPU in full model precision. We thoroughly examine MBLM's performance with Transformer and Mamba blocks on both unimodal and multimodal tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that hybrid architectures are efficient in handling extremely long byte sequences during training while achieving near-linear generational efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first evaluation of BLMs on visual Q\&A tasks and find that, despite serializing images and the absence of an encoder, a MBLM with pure next token prediction can match custom CNN-LSTM architectures with designated classification heads. We show that MBLMs exhibit strong adaptability in integrating diverse data representations, including pixel and image filestream bytes, underlining their potential toward omnimodal foundation models. Source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ai4sd/multiscale-byte-lm

The EXO-POPP project aims to establish a comprehensive database comprising 300,000 marriage records from Paris and its suburbs, spanning the years 1880 to 1940, which are preserved in over 130,000 scans of double pages. Each marriage record may encompass up to 118 distinct types of information that require extraction from plain text. In this paper, we introduce the M-POPP dataset, a subset of the M-POPP database with annotations for full-page text recognition and information extraction in both handwritten and printed documents, and which is now publicly available. We present a fully end-to-end architecture adapted from the DAN, designed to perform both handwritten text recognition and information extraction directly from page images without the need for explicit segmentation. We showcase the information extraction capabilities of this architecture by achieving a new state of the art for full-page Information Extraction on Esposalles and we use this architecture as a baseline for the M-POPP dataset. We also assess and compare how different encoding strategies for named entities in the text affect the performance of jointly recognizing handwritten text and extracting information, from full pages.

Text-based image editing has advanced significantly in recent years. With the rise of diffusion models, image editing via textual instructions has become ubiquitous. Unfortunately, current models lack the ability to customize the quantity of the change per pixel or per image fragment, resorting to changing the entire image in an equal amount, or editing a specific region using a binary mask. In this paper, we suggest a new framework which enables the user to customize the quantity of change for each image fragment, thereby enhancing the flexibility and verbosity of modern diffusion models. Our framework does not require model training or fine-tuning, but instead performs everything at inference time, making it easily applicable to an existing model. We show both qualitatively and quantitatively that our method allows better controllability and can produce results which are unattainable by existing models. Our code is available at: https://github.com/exx8/differential-diffusion

Data plays the most prominent role in how language models acquire skills and knowledge. The lack of massive, well-organized pre-training datasets results in costly and inaccessible data pipelines. We present Essential-Web v1.0, a 24-trillion-token dataset in which every document is annotated with a twelve-category taxonomy covering topic, format, content complexity, and quality. Taxonomy labels are produced by EAI-Distill-0.5b, a fine-tuned 0.5b-parameter model that achieves an annotator agreement within 3% of Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct. With nothing more than SQL-style filters, we obtain competitive web-curated datasets in math (-8.0% relative to SOTA), web code (+14.3%), STEM (+24.5%) and medical (+8.6%). Essential-Web v1.0 is available on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/datasets/EssentialAI/essential-web-v1.0

Real-world photography requires capture-time guidance for both camera framing and subject pose. Yet existing aesthetic cropping benchmarks mainly evaluate post-hoc crop prediction and overlook subject-side recommendations, leaving the capture-time guidance capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce CaptureGuide-Bench, a benchmark with two complementary tasks: photographer-side composition decision and refinement, and subject-side scene-conditioned pose recommendation. Our evaluation reveals limitations: general-purpose MLLMs can make composition decisions but lack precise refinement localization, while specialized aesthetic cropping models localize crops effectively but are limited to refinement; neither provides actionable pose guidance. To support model development, we further construct CaptureGuide-Dataset, comprising 130K samples with textual rationales and structured visual annotations, and develop ShutterMuse, a unified MLLM trained with supervised and reinforcement fine-tuning. Experiments on CaptureGuide-Bench show that ShutterMuse achieves the best overall photographer-side performance among evaluated baselines and competitive subject-side pose recommendation with substantially lower inference cost, demonstrating the potential of MLLMs as interactive assistants for photography during image capture.

Recently, unsupervised exemplar-based image-to-image translation, conditioned on a given exemplar without the paired data, has accomplished substantial advancements. In order to transfer the information from an exemplar to an input image, existing methods often use a normalization technique, e.g., adaptive instance normalization, that controls the channel-wise statistics of an input activation map at a particular layer, such as the mean and the variance. Meanwhile, style transfer approaches similar task to image translation by nature, demonstrated superior performance by using the higher-order statistics such as covariance among channels in representing a style. In detail, it works via whitening (given a zero-mean input feature, transforming its covariance matrix into the identity). followed by coloring (changing the covariance matrix of the whitened feature to those of the style feature). However, applying this approach in image translation is computationally intensive and error-prone due to the expensive time complexity and its non-trivial backpropagation. In response, this paper proposes an end-to-end approach tailored for image translation that efficiently approximates this transformation with our novel regularization methods. We further extend our approach to a group-wise form for memory and time efficiency as well as image quality. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is fast, both in training and inference, and highly effective in reflecting the style of an exemplar. Finally, our code is available at https://github.com/WonwoongCho/GDWCT.

We study professional image generation, where a model must synthesize information-dense, scientifically precise illustrations from technical descriptions rather than merely produce visually plausible pictures. To quantify the progress, we introduce ProImage-Bench, a rubric-based benchmark that targets biology schematics, engineering/patent drawings, and general scientific diagrams. For 654 figures collected from real textbooks and technical reports, we construct detailed image instructions and a hierarchy of rubrics that decompose correctness into 6,076 criteria and 44,131 binary checks. Rubrics are derived from surrounding text and reference figures using large multimodal models, and are evaluated by an automated LMM-based judge with a principled penalty scheme that aggregates sub-question outcomes into interpretable criterion scores. We benchmark several representative text-to-image models on ProImage-Bench and find that, despite strong open-domain performance, the best base model reaches only 0.791 rubric accuracy and 0.553 criterion score overall, revealing substantial gaps in fine-grained scientific fidelity. Finally, we show that the same rubrics provide actionable supervision: feeding failed checks back into an editing model for iterative refinement boosts a strong generator from 0.653 to 0.865 in rubric accuracy and from 0.388 to 0.697 in criterion score. ProImage-Bench thus offers both a rigorous diagnostic for professional image generation and a scalable signal for improving specification-faithful scientific illustrations.

Recent advancements in language-guided diffusion models for image editing are often bottle-necked by cumbersome prompt engineering to precisely articulate desired changes. An intuitive alternative calls on guidance from in-the-wild image exemplars to help users bring their imagined edits to life. Contemporary exemplar-based editing methods shy away from leveraging the rich latent space learnt by pre-existing large text-to-image (TTI) models and fall back on training with curated objective functions to achieve the task. Though somewhat effective, this demands significant computational resources and lacks compatibility with diverse base models and arbitrary exemplar count. On further investigation, we also find that these techniques restrict user control to only applying uniform global changes over the entire edited region. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for progressive exemplar-driven editing with off-the-shelf diffusion models, dubbed PIXELS, to enable customization by providing granular control over edits, allowing adjustments at the pixel or region level. Our method operates solely during inference to facilitate imitative editing, enabling users to draw inspiration from a dynamic number of reference images, or multimodal prompts, and progressively incorporate all the desired changes without retraining or fine-tuning existing TTI models. This capability of fine-grained control opens up a range of new possibilities, including selective modification of individual objects and specifying gradual spatial changes. We demonstrate that PIXELS delivers high-quality edits efficiently, leading to a notable improvement in quantitative metrics as well as human evaluation. By making high-quality image editing more accessible, PIXELS has the potential to enable professional-grade edits to a wider audience with the ease of using any open-source image generation model.

Contemporary image rescaling aims at embedding a high-resolution (HR) image into a low-resolution (LR) thumbnail image that contains embedded information for HR image reconstruction. Unlike traditional image super-resolution, this enables high-fidelity HR image restoration faithful to the original one, given the embedded information in the LR thumbnail. However, state-of-the-art image rescaling methods do not optimize the LR image file size for efficient sharing and fall short of real-time performance for ultra-high-resolution (e.g., 6K) image reconstruction. To address these two challenges, we propose a novel framework (HyperThumbnail) for real-time 6K rate-distortion-aware image rescaling. Our framework first embeds an HR image into a JPEG LR thumbnail by an encoder with our proposed quantization prediction module, which minimizes the file size of the embedding LR JPEG thumbnail while maximizing HR reconstruction quality. Then, an efficient frequency-aware decoder reconstructs a high-fidelity HR image from the LR one in real time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms previous image rescaling baselines in rate-distortion performance and can perform 6K image reconstruction in real time.

We present MatSwap, a method to transfer materials to designated surfaces in an image photorealistically. Such a task is non-trivial due to the large entanglement of material appearance, geometry, and lighting in a photograph. In the literature, material editing methods typically rely on either cumbersome text engineering or extensive manual annotations requiring artist knowledge and 3D scene properties that are impractical to obtain. In contrast, we propose to directly learn the relationship between the input material -- as observed on a flat surface -- and its appearance within the scene, without the need for explicit UV mapping. To achieve this, we rely on a custom light- and geometry-aware diffusion model. We fine-tune a large-scale pre-trained text-to-image model for material transfer using our synthetic dataset, preserving its strong priors to ensure effective generalization to real images. As a result, our method seamlessly integrates a desired material into the target location in the photograph while retaining the identity of the scene. We evaluate our method on synthetic and real images and show that it compares favorably to recent work both qualitatively and quantitatively. We will release our code and data upon publication.