Super-resolution and quality enhancement of 1.5\,T brain MRI are normally validated with image-fidelity metrics, although their purpose is to improve downstream analysis. We study whether enhancement improves tissue segmentation, and for which segmenters. We propose an unpaired, physics-guided training pipeline for a lightweight ($\le$2.5\,M parameter) recurrent convolutional enhancer: a six-module stochastic 1.5\,T degradation operator, a residual adversarial network that adds scanner-specific texture without moving anatomy, and a cycle-consistent objective with an anti-identity penalty that rules out the copy solution. We then train U-Net, Swin-UNet and wavelet token-mixing segmenters \citep{jeevan2023wavemix} from scratch on either raw or enhanced 1.5\,T images of the same subjects, using identical labels and subject-level splits, for three enhancer variants and two datasets. On ABIDE (41 held-out subjects, FreeSurfer labels) enhancement significantly improves the wavelet segmenter (mean Dice $+0.014$, Wilcoxon $p=3.5\times10^{-5}$; CSF $+0.018$, grey matter $+0.013$), significantly degrades the U-Net ($-0.008$, $p=5.1\times10^{-4}$) and leaves Swin-UNet unchanged. On IXI, whose labels come from FSL-FAST, enhancement lowers Dice for all nine pairings, almost entirely through CSF; we trace this to spatially implausible CSF voxels in the labels that penalise smoother predictions. Enhancement of low-field MRI should therefore be validated per downstream model and against reliable labels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39083
We investigate whether predicted Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) can reliably support system-level comparisons of speech enhancement (SE) methods by introducing system-level preference accuracy (SPA). Although MOS prediction models are widely used to evaluate SE systems, their performance is typically assessed by correlation with human-rated MOS, which does not guarantee agreement on which system is better. SPA addresses this gap by directly evaluating whether predicted and human-rated MOS yield the same system preferences. Using SPA, we systematically evaluate three settings: single prediction models, ensembling, and domain adaptation. Through experiments, SPA varies substantially across single prediction models, from 9.4% to 76.8%. Even the best model disagrees with human judgments in approximately 23% of system comparisons. Ensembling yields only limited improvement, while domain adaptation tends to substantially improve SPA in the closed condition but brings only modest gains in the more practical open condition, where neither the target systems nor the speakers are known. These results suggest that SPA can reveal errors correlation-based evaluation alone does not expose, and that predicted MOS alone can lead to unreliable conclusions in practical SE system comparison.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39032
Non-intrusive MOS predictors are widely used instead of subjective listening tests to evaluate and rank speech enhancement (SE) systems. If they accurately reflect perceived quality, raising their scores should lead to higher-quality speech. We present the first comprehensive analysis of test-time optimization for the SE task, which directly modifies the enhanced signal to raise the average of multiple MOS predictor scores. On seven systems from the URGENT 2026 challenge, we find that 1)~all the optimized predicted scores increase while reference-based metrics remain nearly unchanged, 2)~a non-optimized predicted score does not increase, and 3)~a MUSHRA listening test shows no improvement in perceived quality. These findings reveal a risk that such optimization can distort evaluations, e.g., biasing comparisons of SE systems regardless of their perceived quality. We believe these findings can inform future evaluation practices: they suggest that predictors used for optimization should not be used for evaluation, and that challenges should keep the predictors used for ranking undisclosed.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39028
Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to produce a pixel-accurate mask sequence for an object specified by natural language. Sa2VA combines a multimodal large language model with SAM2 for grounded segmentation; however, its inference typically grounds the query from a small fixed set of initial keyframes and then relies on propagation. In long or dynamic videos, this can cause stale grounding and persistent false positives when the object composition changes (e.g., distractors enter or the target disappears/re-appears). We propose Event-Driven Refresh + Recurrence Memory (EDRRM), an enhancement that selectively re-invokes Sa2VA only at stable change points. EDRRM triggers refresh boundaries using an EMA-smoothed event score computed from tracking-derived cues (births/deaths and coarse composition/layout changes) with temporal constraints. A recurrence memory further retrieves anchor frames via CLIP similarity to re-condition the model on re-appearance events. Experiments on Ref-DAVIS17, MeViS, and ReVOS show that EDRRM achieves a competitive accuracy-efficiency trade-off relative to fixed-window and FrameDiff-SSIM baselines, maintaining comparable or superior J&F scores at substantially lower average refresh-call budgets and reducing false-positive failures. End-to-end runtime analysis further confirms that the overhead introduced by tracking, CLIP-based recurrence matching, and the identifiability gate remains modest relative to the dominant Sa2VA inference cost, thereby validating the efficiency of the proposed pipeline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38758
Group synchronization (GS) is the problem of estimating a set of $N$ unknown elements $g_1,\ldots, g_N \in \mathcal{G}$ in a group $\mathcal{G}$, given noisy measurements of a subset of their pairwise ratios $g_i^{-1} g_j$. GS problems lie at the core of many state estimation tasks in robotics and computer vision, including 3D vision, robotic mapping, inertial navigation, and molecular reconstruction. Unfortunately, GS problems are typically both high-dimensional and non-convex, and therefore hard to solve in general. In this paper, we present Fast-Sync, a fast linear approximation method for GS that is suitable for initializing local manifold-based optimizers or certifiable global methods. Our approach generalizes chordal initialization to arbitrary matrix Lie groups, and additionally proposes two new key algorithmic enhancements: we show how to exploit both the Kronecker-product structure in the problem data matrix and the topology of the synchronization graph to improve speed, scalability, and accuracy. Experimental evaluation across several GS tasks demonstrates that Fast-Sync provides high-quality initializations that enable local optimizers to efficiently recover globally optimal GS solutions, achieving high success rates even with considerable measurement noise.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38594
The ByteTrack algorithm is a widely used and computationally efficient multi-object tracking architecture. Its core innovation lies in the combination of lenient bounding box associations with tracklet similarity matching to robustly deal with object occlusions. However, this strategy is nevertheless vulnerable to erroneous track reclassification and identity switching, as detection confidence scores dictate association priority. To address this, I present a simple enhancement of the ByteTrack architecture, named ByteTraX, that optimises track continuity via a single unified matching threshold, while penalising identity switches through stringent track initiation criteria. This approach achieves consistently improved performance across a range of diverse benchmarks including GMOT-40, LC-MOT, SportsMOT, TeamTrack, DAMUNT, and DeepSea-MOT, while simultaneously increasing processing speed by >10%. Specifically, results demonstrate a >40% reduction in identity switches, accompanied by mean increases in HOTA of 3.6, IDF1 of 5.6, and FPS of 6.3. As such, adoption of the ByteTraX algorithm has the potential to substantially enhance tracking performance over the ByteTrack baseline, while retaining the efficiency needed for real-time deployment. To facilitate usage, I provide the source code, integration functionality for the YOLO family of object detection models, and deployment instructions via an open source repository.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37801
Modern coding agents can deliver increasingly large repository-level changes, and recent benchmarks reflect this by emphasizing long-horizon tasks with large reference implementations. Many benchmarks evaluate coding agents' implementation capability to produce correct code edits from detailed specifications. However, practical modular development tasks also require the perception capability of grounding user intent and high-level design to derive a specification. We introduce LoLBench to evaluate both capabilities through the entire proposal-to-implementation process on large software systems. It is a multilingual benchmark of 100 tasks across 29 software systems in five domains. Each task provides a human-written enhancement proposal with user intent and high-level design. On average, proposals contain about 5,000 words, software systems contain 2.4 million source lines of code (LoC), and implementation pull requests (PRs) change approximately 5,500 LoC. Across 28 agents we evaluated, the best agent resolves only 14% of tasks and achieves a 52.7% Fail-to-Pass (F2P) pass rate. Failure analysis identifies incomplete code localization as a major bottleneck, while providing reference-derived file trees alongside API specifications improves resolved rates by 16--22 percentage points (2.4--17$\times$), reaching at most 34%. These results show that both perception and implementation remain central challenges for coding agents in practical modular development on large software systems. LoLBench is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37143
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a state-of-the-art technique for 3D scene rendering, offering high efficiency and excellent visual quality. However, because 3DGS relies on an initial sparse point set from Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and view-dependent properties, it can suffer from geometric inaccuracies and visual artifacts, particularly in complex scenes. To address these challenges, we propose an improved 3DGS approach that regularizes the optimization process by integrating geometric priors, including surface normals and dense depth information. Surface normal regularization improves geometric consistency by aligning Gaussian covariance with local surface structures, while dense depth priors combined with an initial points from SfM enhance per-pixel depth estimation, increasing accuracy and reducing ambiguities. These enhancements enable robust handling of diverse and complex real-world scenarios, minimizing visual distortions and improving reconstruction quality across various environments. To validate our method, we evaluate it on challenging datasets, including street-view scenes and highly reflective environments, while testing it across multiple SfM pipelines. Our results demonstrate compatibility across diverse environments and highlight the robustness of our approach. Experimental findings further show that our method enhances geometric accuracy and visual quality, establishing a reliable solution for real-time 3D scene rendering in complex environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36969
As a fundamental image processing task, object Re-Identification (ReID) aims to retrieve objects across non-overlapping cameras. Recently, with the development of deep learning, significant advancements have been made in object ReID. However, most existing methods suffer from generalization due to the limited size and diversity of ReID datasets. Meanwhile, current models tend to focus on extracting semantic patterns rather than learning identity-aware feature distributions. To address these issues, we propose a novel feature learning framework named \textbf{DiffReID} for object ReID. It leverages a discriminative diffusion model to gradually learn identity-aware distributions and generate identity-invariant features. More specifically, with the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, we first obtain identity-aware text features by prompt tuning. Then, we propose a Vision-guided Noise Generator (VNG) to initialize probabilistic noises and gradually corrupt identity-aware text features. Afterwards, we take visual features as conditions and propose a Light Weight Denoiser (LWD) to denoise the corrupted text features step-by-step for identity-aware distribution learning. To obtain discriminative features, we further generate identity-invariant guided features from randomly sampling visual-guided noises. Finally, we propose a Mutual Enhancement Constraint (MEC) to facilitate mutual learning between visual features and guided features to enhance the representation robustness and discrimination. Extensive experiments on five object ReID benchmarks demonstrate that our method shows better results than most state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36894
Long-context reasoning in large language models incurs substantial computation and memory costs. Visual text compression (VTC) reduces input length by rendering text as images, but fixed-resolution rendering creates a compression-performance trade-off: low DPI saves tokens at the expense of legibility, whereas high DPI spends tokens on irrelevant content. We introduce FocusVTC, which breaks this trade-off through adaptive resolution while preserving general multimodal capabilities. It combines compressed low-DPI global views with selective region enhancement, integrating enhanced views into ongoing reasoning. We construct 29.4K high-quality Reasoning-Evidence Localization (REL) chain-of-thought examples (REL-CoT) that link reasoning traces to page indices and bounding boxes. Multi-resolution REL supervised fine-tuning (REL-SFT) teaches the model to localize relevant regions, and Group Relative Policy Optimization learns when to enhance resolution and how to use the resulting observations, without a separate continual-pretraining stage. At 72 DPI on RULER v1, FocusVTC scores 87.4 at $2.9\times$ input compression, including tool observations, versus 57.5 for Glyph at $3.0\times$ input compression. It surpasses its text-input backbone on LongBench (56.40 versus 55.86), improves the MRCR macro-average by 13.91 points, and achieves a 51.19 macro-average on VTCBench. The MRCR latency evaluation also shows a $2.79\times$ online end-to-end speedup over Text. General multimodal capabilities are preserved, with MMMU increasing from 65.12 to 66.73 and MME from 2424.02 to 2457.62.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36651
Text-to-image users often provide concise and underspecified prompts, whereas generative models benefit from detailed textual conditions for reliable instruction following. Existing systems bridge this gap with Prompt Enhancers (PEs) that rewrite raw prompts at inference time, introducing additional latency and leaving prompt elaboration external to the generator. We instead view enhanced prompts as privileged training information and ask whether their benefits can be internalized. We propose Prompt-Enhanced On-Policy Self-Distillation (PE-OPSD) for text-to-image flow-matching models. During training, a raw-prompt student follows its own generation trajectory, while an enhanced-prompt teacher provides vector-field targets at the states visited by the student. This on-policy supervision distills the behavior induced by enhanced prompts into the raw-prompt student without requiring additional text--image pairs. At inference, both the PE and teacher are removed, and the student generates directly from raw prompts. Across multiple model families, PEs, and benchmarks, PE-OPSD achieves the strongest aggregate prompt fidelity among the evaluated baselines, yields positive aggregate visual appeal gains, and retains the base-model inference efficiency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36638
Audio large language models (ALLMs) can reason about the content of audio recordings to perform complex tasks. However, these capabilities usually collapse in real-world environments when background noise and competing sources mix the target sound. Inspired by long-term memory in human listening, we propose Long-Term Memory-Guided Audio Enhancement (LTM-AE) to improve selective target perception by refining the audio representations of ALLMs without training. LTM-AE extracts representations in hidden states from separate clean reference recordings as long-term memory for each category, guiding enhancement toward a user-specified listening target. We reconstruct incoming audio tokens in the selected category long-term memory and interpolate the reconstructions with the original tokens before language backbone decoding. This interpolation controls the influence of stored auditory experience while keeping all ALLM parameters fixed. Diagnostic readouts across twenty sound categories and three ALLMs show that LTM-AE strengthens responses to a specified target amid three interfering sources. Averaged over constrained and free-form classification, accuracy gains over raw mixtures range from 29.53 to 46.15 percentage points across multiple open source models. For speech content recovery, LTM-AE with an additional learned token-level gate reduces Qwen2-Audio's word error rate from 23.07% to 14.77%. This work takes an initial step toward using principles of human long-term memory to enhance ALLMs for real-world listening. Our code is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36577
Functional Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (FunKAN) achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on MRI Gibbs artifact removal and anatomical segmentation, but their 11.6 M parameters and 8.7 GFLOPs are too large for edge medical devices. We present FunKANLite, a two-stage, hardware-aware compression of FunKAN for point-of-care use. FunKANLite-TR reduces the spatial prior and replaces the ResBlock offset predictor with a depthwise-separable block. It has 1.9x fewer parameters than FunKAN and no loss in accuracy. We then distill FunKANLite-TR into FunKANLite-ST, which lowers the Hermite basis rank, factorizes the spatial prior into a low-rank form, and halves the filter widths. FunKANLite-ST has 5.6x fewer parameters and 3.7x fewer GFLOPs than FunKAN. It stays within 1.4 percentage points IoU of FunKAN on BUSI, GlaS, and CVC-ClinicDB, and reaches 33.95 dB PSNR on IXI. On an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and a Raspberry Pi 5, FunKANLite-ST reduces energy per inference by up to 68% and raises throughput by 2.9x.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36134
LLM-as-a-judge has become the de facto standard for scalable, subjective evaluation, yet current leaderboards compensate for systematic measurement bias by running ever more comparisons, an approach that is both statistically unsound and computationally wasteful. The root cause is an incomplete measurement model, treating LLM judges as neutral, interchangeable instruments ignores documented biases like position bias, verbosity bias, judge severity, and self-enhancement, that no volume of additional data can eliminate. We propose a unified latent variable framework that jointly models pairwise and ordinal data while explicitly correcting for these confounders, recovering reliable rankings from substantially fewer comparisons. Because fitting this model costs negligible compute relative to a single round of LLM inference, bias correction is not only more statistically rigorous but also a more sustainable approach to trustworthy evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31184
We propose a self-supervised approach for learning room impulse response (RIR) representations from single-channel noisy-reverberant speech. It consists of first training on reverberant data, then on noisy-reverberant data, and finally with a teacher-student approach, where the student learns to replicate the teacher's embeddings when given a noisy version of the reverberant input. We assess their representational capabilities by estimating acoustic room parameters from them. Conditioning a discriminative speech enhancement model on the derived embeddings yields consistent gains across all evaluated metrics, including downstream word error rate, for both reverberant and noisy-reverberant speech.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31041
Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) remains challenging for lightweight models because illumination restoration and color fidelity are difficult to optimize simultaneously in the RGB color space. Although recent color-decoupled methods separate luminance and chrominance representations, they primarily optimize luminance as an enhancement target, leaving its potential as an explicit guidance prior largely unexplored during feature reconstruction. To address this limitation, we propose IDM-Net, a lightweight Illumination-Decoupled Modulation Network for low-light image enhancement. IDM-Net adopts a dual-encoder architecture consisting of a structure encoder that extracts multi-scale appearance features from the RGB image and a lightweight illumination encoder that learns illumination priors from the decoupled luminance (Y) channel. To effectively exploit these priors, we introduce an Illumination-Guided Modulation (IGM) module that injects multi-scale illumination cues into the decoder through spatially adaptive affine modulation, enabling accurate brightness restoration while preserving natural color consistency. Furthermore, we design a lightweight Feature Refinement Block (FRB) to progressively suppress degradation artifacts and recover fine-grained image details during reconstruction. Extensive experiments on multiple standard low-light image enhancement benchmarks demonstrate that IDM-Net achieves competitive performance among lightweight LLIE methods while maintaining an excellent balance between restoration quality and computational efficiency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30962
The utility of flexible continuum mechanisms for dexterous navigation is often impaired by their low stiffness, making them ineffective at manipulation in high-force scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel continuum mechanism that achieves both flexible and rigid behavior by antagonistic extension and contraction of a rod-driven continuum helical structure. The helical design combines variable-length capacity with force locking for workspace and stiffness enhancement. In this article, we present the detailed design of the proposed mechanism and characterize its performance through experiments that quantify bending and stiffness. The results demonstrate 180 degree bending range of motion with an average distal positioning error of <10%. Further tests demonstrate that force locking directly improves axial stiffness and thus indirectly increases bending stiffness anisotropically, with maximum bending stiffness along load paths with a large axial component. Tensioning the driving rods provides additional stiffness tunability in the force-locked state, where increasing rod tension proportionally increases bending stiffness with a dimensionless gain of 0.56.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30759
Online audio-visual target-speaker extraction aims to remove competing voices while preserving speech quality and bounding lookahead. Existing extractors are built and evaluated for separation on synthetic mixtures, leaving listening quality and meeting behavior largely untested. We introduce Audio-Visual Personalized Voice Quality Enhancement (AV-PVQE), which approaches these requirements from the other direction. We start from a personalized speech enhancement model that reconstructs a requested voice at high quality but confuses the target in 46% of two-speaker mixtures despite clean enrollment. Adding mouth features at its speaker-conditioning input and jointly fine-tuning the visual and reconstruction networks reduces this rate to 1.6%, with no future frames and 20 ms of algorithmic delay. Compared with an online autoregressive audio-visual extractor, AV-PVQE yields separation gains on two synthetic benchmarks and larger gains on recorded meetings, and keeps its advantage on excerpts with more speakers than the fine-tuning mixtures. In personalized P.835 listening tests on two meeting corpora, it improves overall quality over this extractor by 0.57 and 0.63 MOS, with similar mean rating relative to the starting model. Preservation and rejection tests show that it keeps the target intact when no competing voice is present and suppresses competing speech when the target is absent.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30631
Video generation begins in text space by authoring a cinematic screenplay, then materializes into pixels. As contemporary video generators scale to 30 seconds and faithfully follow complex conditions, the textual prompt largely directs the production, planning how actions, camera trajectories, lighting, and sound unfold across multi-shot sequences. In this paper, we present WanPE, a 397B-parameter prompt enhancement model trained on 1.05M real-world videos to master director-level cinematic planning. WanPE formulates shot-level cinematic plans via video-grounded reverse construction and employs Semantic-Consistency GRPO (SC-GRPO) to faithfully preserve user requirements across shots and over time. To benchmark this capability, we curate WanPEval, a human-annotated testbed covering durations from 5 to 30 seconds across varying intent granularities, supported by approximately 11K blind pairwise assessments. When powering Wan3.0's video generator, WanPE-397B boosts human preference over raw user prompts by 10.66-18.84 points at 5-15 seconds and by a dramatic 50.86 points in the 30-second arena. Ablation studies show that reverse construction demonstrates clear superiority over forward rewriting, while SC-GRPO robustly preserves semantic fidelity across model scales. Ultimately, WanPE leads all evaluated commercial offerings at 5-15 seconds and remains competitive with Seedance 2.5 at 30 seconds.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30221
Deep learning-based speech enhancement is increasingly deployed on-device in hearing aids, headsets, and earbuds. Most of these devices, however, can only accelerate static int8 graphs, so a depth-varying network must be implemented as several graphs, orchestrated by a policy. In this paper, we supervise every intermediate depth of one causal model, then we fine-tune its output heads to guarantee that deeper outputs are never worse than shallower ones. Using this training protocol, we can derive a family of static models that are more Pareto-efficient than their equivalently-sized counterparts trained from scratch on the same budget. Specifically, we achieve up to 0.11 higher PESQ for equivalent compute, and match the best PESQ at 30% less compute. We then quantize the models to int8 and measure the latency-quality frontier on an STM32N6 microcontroller. On VoiceBank-DEMAND, the dynamic enhancer lies on the same frontier as the static models, rather than trading quality for dynamic execution. Running the policy on the companion Cortex-M55 takes only 26 $\mu$s per frame, while splitting the enhancer into separate NPU graphs adds 2.2% latency overhead. The cost of dynamic execution is therefore small.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29867