Inpainting
-
Region-Level Black-Box Defense Against Stealthy Embedding-Space Backdoors in CLIP
2026-09-25 17:26:02Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed ElmahallawyAbstract
Contrastive Language--Image Pretraining (CLIP) has emerged as a dominant vision backbone due to its strong transferability and zero-shot capabilities. However, recent studies reveal a critical vulnerability: embedding-space backdoor attacks. By poisoning only a tiny fraction of image--text pairs, adversaries can implant stealthy triggers that induce targeted shifts in CLIP's joint embedding space. Unlike conventional backdoors that manipulate classifier logits, these attacks corrupt representations directly, making them highly effective under extremely low poisoning ratios and difficult to detect. Existing defenses require access to model parameters, gradients, logits, or clean validation data---assumptions that rarely hold in realistic black-box deployments. Moreover, current black-box methods struggle to accurately localize small or out-of-distribution triggers. We propose CLIPGuard, a lightweight and fully black-box defense specifically designed to mitigate embedding-space backdoors in CLIP encoders. CLIPGuard identifies malicious regions by measuring segment-wise embedding perturbations and selectively purifies only suspicious segments via semantic inpainting, preserving benign visual content and alignment quality. Extensive experiments on STL-10, ImageNet, and diverse trigger families---including BadCLIP, BadNets, blended, patch-based, and typographic attacks---demonstrate that CLIPGuard reduces attack success rates to as low as 1.05% while maintaining clean accuracy up to 86.34%, consistently outperforming existing black-box defenses, including CleanCLIP and CleanerCLIP. Our code is available this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31558
PDF
-
Combining General and Domain-Specific Pretext Tasks for Brain MR Image Segmentation
2026-09-25 02:36:20Tasneem Nasser, Susanne Schmid, Roberto Souza, Naser El-SheimyAbstract
A key challenge in medical image analysis is the scarcity of large annotated datasets for specific populations and diseases. As deep learning models rely heavily on labeled data, effective transfer learning strategies are needed to reduce the dependence on manual annotations. Self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising approach for developing foundation models by enabling the learning of transferable feature representations from large-scale unlabeled medical imaging datasets. In this study, we investigate voxel-level brain age prediction as a domain-specific self-supervised pretext task and compare it with image inpainting, a widely used non-domain-specific alternative. We further propose a multitask self-supervised pretraining framework that jointly optimizes both objectives to learn complementary neuroimaging representations. The pretrained models are evaluated on three downstream magnetic resonance image segmentation tasks: multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation, ischemic stroke lesion segmentation, and cortical brain structure segmentation. Overall, the proposed multitask pretraining framework consistently outperformed the single-task pretrained models and training from scratch across most experimental settings, demonstrating the benefit of combining domain-specific and general self-supervised learning pretext tasks for the development of generalizable neuroimaging foundation models.\ Code Availability: The source code used in this study is publicly available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30708
PDF
-
Zero-Shot Object Removal via Attention Masking, Latent Anchoring, and Refinement
2026-09-23 16:19:31Arman Taghizadeh (Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabr\"uck University, Osnabr\"uck, Germany), Ulf Krumnack (Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabr\"uck University, Osnabr\"uck, Germany), Kai-Uwe K\"uhnberger (Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabr\"uck University, Osnabr\"uck, Germany)Abstract
Removing an object from a real image requires more than synthesizing plausible content within a mask: the method must suppress residual object features, preserve the unedited scene, and generate replacement content that is consistent with the surrounding background. This paper approaches object removal from a stage-based perspective and proposes a zero-shot framework for constrained latent inpainting with a frozen pretrained Stable Diffusion model, requiring no task-specific training or model fine-tuning. The method integrates SAM-based mask construction, BLIP image-caption conditioning, DDIM inversion, background-weighted masked null-text optimization, decoder self-attention masking, hard outside-mask latent anchoring, and localized renoise--denoise refinement into a unified pipeline. The method is evaluated through qualitative examples, quantitative local-consistency metrics, and ablation studies. The results demonstrate effective object removal and context-consistent replacement content. The ablations indicate that background-weighted masked NTI is particularly beneficial for structurally complex backgrounds, whereas the no-NTI variant is sufficient in other evaluated examples. Repeated refinement further reduces object remnants and boundary artifacts remaining after the primary editing pass.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28342
PDF
-
TV-AudioRemover: Joint Text-Visual Guided Sound Removal with Multi-Task Hard-Mixture Curriculum
2026-09-22 08:29:41Xinyue Guo, Jianxuan Yang, Daiguo Zhou, Jiagao Hu, Yuxuan Chen, Fei Wang, Jian LuanAbstract
Visual object removal can eliminate a target from video frames, yet its acoustic trace persists in the soundtrack, causing obvious audio-visual inconsistency. Existing video inpainting models operate solely on pixels, while audio editing models, especially for the sound removal task, are typically driven by text and therefore rely on limited single-modal control, which is less effective than multimodal guidance that provides stronger semantic grounding and temporal synchronization cues. In this paper, we present Text-Visual Guided Sound Removal (TV-AudioRemover), a target sound removal framework that leverages the visually edited video together with a natural-language instruction to suppress the sound associated with the removed visual object from the original audio mixture. To acquire high-quality training data, we devise a pipeline to construct a million-scale dataset of single-object audio-visual aligned samples, from which we synthesize mixture-target pairs customized for model training. To effectively leverage visual context and follow instruction intent, we augment the model architecture with task tokens, generalizable instruction modeling, and modality-specific global guidance. We further adopt multi-task training to strengthen task-role comprehension, and employ a hard-mixture curriculum that leverages semantically similar acoustic mixtures during fine-tuning to enhance fine-grained source discrimination. To support evaluation, we present AV-Remove-Bench, a comprehensive audio-visual object removal benchmark, along with dedicated objective metrics and an MLLM-based evaluation protocol. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both subjective and objective metrics. Project page: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25864
PDF
-
SRF-SVB: Style-Consistent Singing Voice Beautifying via Rectified Flow
2026-09-22 03:07:36Wenhui Li, Biao Dong, Liwei Hu, Jiqing Han, Yongjun HeAbstract
Singing voice beautifying (SVB) aims to correct pitch and rhythm of amateur singing while enhancing vocal quality, preserving lyrics and the singer's timbre. Existing methods, however, suffer from limited generation quality and efficiency, and tend to neglect the preservation of the singer's style. We propose SRF-SVB, a style-consistent model for SVB via rectified flow, which achieves high-fidelity and efficient beautification covering pitch and rhythm correction. Furthermore, we design a context-guided masked mel-spectrogram inpainting mechanism that effectively preserves the amateur singer's style, including unique timbre and expressive patterns. Experiments on both English and Chinese test sets show that SRF-SVB outperforms baseline models in most objective and subjective metrics.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25610
PDF
-
CoaG: Cylinders on a Grid: Coarse 3D Layout Control for Video Generation
2026-09-21 07:28:10Zhangsihao Yang, Mengyi ShanAbstract
We ask how little geometry a person has to draw to control both where people stand and where the camera moves in a generated video. Our answer is a ground plane and one cylinder per person. A user draws a grid on the ground, places one cylinder where each person should stand, moves the cylinders and the camera over 81 frames, and the model renders a photoreal video in which the people occupy the cylinders' positions, move as the cylinders move, and are seen from the drawn camera. Appearance comes from a text prompt and a background reference image; layout and motion come from the geometry. Because no dataset pairs such a signal with video, we build the pairs ourselves: an automatic engine writes 2000 captions from a combinatorial seed, generates a clip for each with a text-to-video model, and lifts every clip back to its geometry with person tracking, background inpainting, an agentic ground-mask loop, feed-forward multi-view reconstruction and a plane fit, with no real footage and no manual labels. A LoRA on Wan2.2-Fun-Control trained on 1935 such tuples follows drawn layouts and camera paths on hold-out clips: the generated people match the cylinders' count, order, position and height, the text changes who they are, the reference image changes where they are, and dolly-in, orbit, pan and crane paths are followed, dolly-out only weakly.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24208
PDF
-
Patch-to-Global: Random Patch Diffusion for Globally Consistent Megapixel Artifact Inpainting in Whole Slide Images
2026-09-21 05:12:46Hyeseong Lee, Eunsu Kim, D M Bappy, Ho Heon Kim, Youngsuk Lee, Se Young Chun, Jang-Hwan Choi, Sung Hak Lee, Sangjeong AhnAbstract
Although deep learning has advanced Whole Slide Image (WSI) Analysis, tissue artifacts like bubbles and folds often cause silent failures by concealing essential morphology. Current pathology image restoration methods are mostly restricted to small patches, struggling to maintain global structural coherence at a megapixel scale. We introduce RestorePath, a framework for globally consistent megapixel scale inpainting that reconstructs diagnostic structures in histological image to prevent incorrect high-confidence predictions and lower error rates. Our model utilizes a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) conditioned on Pathology Foundation Model (PFM) embeddings, integrating Large Kernel Attention (LKA) to manage long-range dependencies during random patch diffusion. Enhanced by Distance-Weighted Interpolation (DWI) and an Adaptive Guidance Scale (AGS), RestorePath ensures structural consistency and fidelity by modulating information from surrounding patches. Evaluations across TCGA-BRCA, BACH, and Camelyon16 datasets for images ranging from 512 to 4608 pixels demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in maintaining histological consistency. RestorePath significantly improves downstream Computational Pathology (CP) tasks, outperforming both raw artifact images and the conventional Detect-and-Discard (D&D) approach. The code is available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24116
PDF
-
AniPrO: Interpretable Anime Image Provenance Detection via Multi-Dimensional Semantic Reasoning
2026-09-20 04:15:15Yan Liu, Baoxiang Huang, Zi'an Wang, Wenbo XieAbstract
As generative AI becomes increasingly used in anime-style image creation, distinguishing human-drawn, AI-inpainted, and text-to-image images is important for copyright attribution, visual provenance, and content governance. Existing AI-generated image detectors mainly target real-world photographs and often overlook anime-specific cues such as flat coloring, exaggerated structures, and artistic line control. To address this gap, we propose AniPrO, a multi-dimensional description-enhanced framework for interpretable anime image provenance. Built upon AnimeDL-2M, AniPrO contains 15,000 balanced samples from a 35,000-image candidate pool, covering Real, Inpainting, and Text2Image categories with structured five-dimensional descriptions. We further introduce AniPrO-SFD-Bench and AniPrO-MFR-Bench to evaluate provenance detection from statistical feature discrimination and multimodal fusion reasoning perspectives. Experiments show that structured semantic guidance reveals systematic AI-generation biases, such as the gap between global visual plausibility and local detail coherence, and improves the detection of challenging inpainting samples. The dataset and code will be released at: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23345
PDF
-
C$^{2}$-INR: Customized Convolutional Implicit Neural Representation
2026-09-19 06:17:17Jinglei Shi, Xinran Chang, Jiaqi Cui, Yingjie Xia, Zhaolin Xiao, Chongyi LiAbstract
Implicit Neural Representation (INR) leverages neural networks to represent discrete signals such as images as continuous ones, where the network weights serve as a compact form of the signal itself. Most existing INR methods adopt Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) as their backbone. Since these models render each pixel independently, they inherently fail to exploit the spatial correlations that exist between neighboring pixels. In contrast,convolutional INRs can process pixels in parallel while inherently accounting for inter-pixel dependencies, making them a more natural fit for representing images. Nevertheless, convolutional INRs remain relatively underexplored, and the majority of them rely on fixed architectural settings, leaving little room for image-specific adaptation. In this paper, we investigate network customization for convolutional INRs. We replace conventional filters with irregular directional kernels, whose allocation is guided by the directional energy in the image spectrum, i.e., directions exhibiting stronger energy are assigned a larger number of kernels, enabling content-tailored convolution settings. These kernels are further reformulated via an orthogonal basis to achieve a superior sparse representation. Moreover, we introduce an annealed Gumbel-Softmax-based mechanism for kernel-level activation function selection, which gives the most suitable activation function for each convolution kernel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, namely C$^{2}$-INR, achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art approaches under comparable parameter budgets across a wide range of image processing tasks, including representation, inpainting, and super-resolution.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22807
PDF
-
Diffusion-Based Tumor Inpainting for Renal Segmentation under Clinical Data Scarcity
2026-09-18 12:34:49Ekaterina Sedykh, Salme Ussanov, Dmytro Fedorenko, Dmytro FishmanAbstract
Deep learning segmentation of renal tumors requires large annotated datasets, yet clinical deployments typically offer only a handful of tumor-positive cases from the target site. We propose a diffusion-based inpainting framework that synthesizes anatomically plausible renal tumors within healthy CT scans, requiring no additional annotation, and provide the first systematic comparison of 2D, 2.5D, and full 3D (MAISI) synthesis strategies for this task. Training the diffusion model on public data (KiTS23, KIRC) and evaluating nnU-Net segmentation on a internal cohort across three low-data regimes, we find that 2.5D and 3D augmentation substantially reduce false positives (from $\sim$18--20\% to $\sim$3--6\%) while maintaining Dice, whereas 2D provides no consistent benefit. Crucially, the proposed 2.5D method matches full 3D synthesis on every metric at substantially lower computational cost, indicating that local volumetric consistency alone is sufficient for effective augmentation in data- and resource-scarce clinical settings.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21698
PDF
-
Fragment-Aware Vision Transformers for Fresco-Fragment Style Classification
2026-09-17 19:07:52Sara Miketek, Biagio Barchielli, Nadeem Iqbal Kajla, Sinem AslanAbstract
Artistic style classification is usually studied on complete artworks, where models can exploit global composition, spatial organisation, and iconographic structure. In archaeological settings, however, artworks often survive only as fragmented remains, forcing recognition from incomplete, irregular, and context-limited visual evidence. We study fresco-fragment style classification using a progressive transformer-based framework. Starting from a ViT-B/16 baseline, we introduce foreground-guided masking to suppress background-only tokens, inpainting-based geometric regularisation to align irregular fragment supports with the ViT patch grid, and a supervised contrastive objective that operates on predictive distributions through a Kullback-Leibler similarity and consistently improves every branch. We combine the branches with a deliberately simple learnable logit ensemble. Experiments on CLEOPATRA and POMPAAF show that fragment-aware modelling improves over the standard ViT baseline, with the ensemble increasing accuracy from 0.604 to 0.656 and macro-F1 from 0.596 to 0.648 on CLEOPATRA, and outperforming the best single branch in four of six fragmentation settings on POMPAAF. We additionally evaluate a more complex graph-fusion variant and find that it matches the simple ensemble on POMPAAF while offering only a small, dataset-specific gain on CLEOPATRA, which does not justify its added complexity. Beyond these empirical gains, our contribution is twofold: a distribution-level contrastive objective that consistently sharpens single-branch recognition, and an interpretability analysis that verifies the models exploit genuine painted evidence, while quantifying that the inpainting-based branch draws part of its attribution from the synthesised surround.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21012
PDF
-
DR.WILSS: Diffusion-Based Replay for Weakly Supervised Continual Semantic Segmentation
2026-09-16 10:33:51Leon Arthur Marx, Francesco Barbato, Matteo Caligiuri, Pietro ZanuttighAbstract
Weakly supervised class-incremental semantic segmentation (WILSS) aims to train a segmentation model over multiple steps, each introducing new concepts to be learned with only image-level supervision. We introduce this http URL, an innovative approach to address catastrophic forgetting in continual learning using diffusion-based generative replay. Our framework leverages language clues to guide the diffusion process, employing self-inpainting and regularization techniques to efficiently produce replay data, aiding the learning process. By generating high-quality replay data, the information from previously learned classes can be preserved during continual updates, a critical challenge in incremental learning scenarios. To further align the statistics of replay data with those of training samples, we apply LoRAs to the generative model. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks and generative architectures, while avoiding storage of training data and the use of additional resource-demanding tools during training. The proposed technique enables an optimal tradeoff between training complexity and inference-time accuracy, making this http URL a promising solution for real-world applications.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18444
PDF
-
ORCA: Occlusion-Aware Refinement and Completion for Novel View Synthesis
2026-09-15 16:53:54Weronika Jakubowska, Maciej Zi\k{e}ba, Przemys{\l}aw SpurekAbstract
Novel-view synthesis from a single image is a fundamentally ambiguous problem. As the camera moves away from the input viewpoint, previously hidden regions become visible, exposing missing geometry and holes in the reconstructed scene. Existing methods often rely on generative models to complete such regions. However, many of these artifacts are small gaps near depth boundaries and do not require generating new scene content. In order to eliminate expensive process of generating image we introduce ORCA, an occlusion-aware method for reconstructing and completing explorable 3D scenes from a single image. ORCA first introduces 3D structure into a Gaussian-anchor representation using monocular depth while preserving the original camera-ray correspondence. During scene exploration, missing regions are handled based on their size and structure. Small disocclusions are repaired using RGB-D information already available in the reconstruction, while generative inpainting is reserved for larger regions that cannot be reliably recovered from the scene. New Gaussian anchors are added and optimized locally without modifying the existing representation. By reducing unnecessary reliance on generative inpainting, ORCA limits generation-induced hallucinations and better preserves the content and structure of the original scene. On DIV2K, ORCA improves novel-view quality over VistaDream across all reported metrics, increasing MUSIQ from 61.60 to 68.71 and CLIP-IQA from 0.474 to 0.574. These results show that many novel-view artifacts can be repaired effectively by reusing information already present in the reconstructed scene.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17450
PDF
-
Quantum-Inspired Trainable and Parameter-Efficient Tensor Networks for Image Inpainting
2026-09-15 15:09:01Shiwen An, Konstantinos SlavakisAbstract
This work introduces quantum-inspired tensor-network circuits as trainable transforms for image inpainting. Among the proposed architectures, the diagonal quantum Fourier transform (QFT) relaxation is invertible with $O(N^2 \log N)$ computational cost for $N\times N$ images, inherently preserving minimum coherence throughout training via its circuit structure and eliminating the need for explicit coherence penalties. Unconstrained gradient-based phase optimization (Riemannian-optimization free) enables efficient learning from randomly sampled training data, allowing the learned transform to generalize to test images observed through fixed sampling masks. Numerical tests show that the learned models outperform fixed transforms and per-image optimization while matching the performance of much larger unitary architectures, yet with far fewer parameters.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17298
PDF
-
What Breaks Local Watermarks? A Robustness Benchmark for Local Invisible Image Watermarking
2026-09-15 08:30:39Kai Yao, Bence Szil\'agyi, Sebesty\'en Kamp, M\'at\'e Po\'or, M\'at\'e Szilveszter, Matyas K. Zsoldos, Marc JuarezAbstract
Local image watermarking embeds an invisible signal into selected image regions rather than spreading it across the entire image, enabling payload recovery from specific objects or regions without perceptibly altering the image. Existing studies evaluate the robustness of payload recovery and localization under image transformations, but they often focus on their own proposed method, resulting in narrow evaluations with inconsistent choices of transformations, datasets, and metrics. These inconsistencies across studies limit direct comparisons across methods and muddle the overall picture of local watermark robustness. To address this gap, we present the first systematic robustness benchmark for local watermarks across 55 image transformations, including (i) signal distortions, (ii) changes in image coordinate alignment, (iii) indirect local edits, and (iv) direct watermark edits. The benchmark evaluates MaskWM, WAM, OmniGuard, TrustMark, and PixelSeal, all methods that either provide native localization or require minimal adaptation to support it. Our results show that all evaluated methods are vulnerable to some transformation, with MaskWM standing out as offering the strongest payload recovery and localization, although it has the lowest image quality in the clean setting. Synchronization further improves MaskWM's payload recovery under several geometric transformations, albeit at an additional cost to image quality. A key finding is that local watermark robustness depends strongly on the nature of the transformation: signal distortions are often tolerated by the strongest methods, while geometric misalignment and generative local edits, such as inpainting and outpainting, can completely impair payload recovery. We observe that payload recovery and localization are related but not interchangeable, and both strongly depend on the transformation's impact on the watermark region.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16832
PDF
-
Context-Aware Mutual Learning for Blind Image Inpainting and Beyond
2026-09-13 11:33:01Haoru Zhao, Yufeng Wang, Zhaorui Gu, Bing Zheng, Haiyong ZhengAbstract
Blind image inpainting, aiming to recover contaminated images in the case of unknown masks, is a challenging task. Motivated by the perspective of human vision and knowledge, blind image inpainting can be decomposed into two stages: mask estimation and image inpainting based on the estimated mask. The two-stage idea exhibits evident advantages in enhancing inpainting quality and augmenting the generalization capability of unknown real-world contamination by explicitly employing the estimated mask for image inpainting compared to one-stage scheme. This two-stage idea has also been intuitively implemented. However, existing two-stage methods excessively emphasize the unilateral relationship of mask estimation to image inpainting, and may overlook the mutual relations between them. Specifically, mask estimation can provide more contextual semantics for image inpainting to strengthen the understanding of semantics, and image inpainting can offer more contextual details (e.g., textures and edges) for mask estimation to improve the learning of details. In this work, we propose a novel Context-Aware Mutual Learning (CAML) framework for blind image inpainting that joints mask estimation and image inpainting to mutually exploit contextual information. In the CAML framework, we design the Inpainting-Guided Context-Mutual (IGCM) learner to acquire the complementary contextual details from image inpainting for assisting mask estimation, and the Estimation-Guided Context-Mutual (EGCM) learner to strengthen the understanding of contextual semantics from mask estimation for assisting image inpainting. Ablation studies validate the efficacy of our CAML. Extensive experiments show that our CAML achieves state-of-the-art performance on both blind image inpainting and additional vision tasks, i.e., snow removal, shadow removal, and watermark removal, indicating its superiority.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14439
PDF
-
Rethinking Camouflage Image Generation towards a Training-Free Paradigm
2026-09-13 08:24:45Haodong Yang, Zhongling Huang, Gong ChengAbstract
Camouflage image generation (CIG) aims to synthesize realistic camouflaged images by blending foreground objects into concealment-compatible background contexts. Achieving this objective requires jointly satisfying three coupled requirements: foreground preservation to retain target integrity, semantic compatibility to select plausible concealment contexts, and appearance assimilation to reduce visual discrepancies. Recent approaches predominantly rely on task-specific training on camouflage datasets to address these requirements, incurring substantial computational cost and limiting generalization beyond the training domain. To address these limitations, we formulate training-free CIG as a concealment-oriented paradigm that preserves the target while reducing its perceptual separability from the synthesized surroundings, rather than maintaining its visual prominence, without parameter updates. We instantiate this paradigm with FreeCam based on a frozen inpainting diffusion framework to preserve the foreground. Within this framework, a Contextual Reasoning Module exploits frozen multimodal priors to infer an environment favorable to concealment, thereby promoting semantic compatibility, while an Intrinsic Appearance Module extracts low-level color and texture cues from the foreground to guide background synthesis toward appearance assimilation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeCam achieves state-of-the-art generation quality and camouflage effectiveness without task-specific training, while its generated images provide synthetic supervision for camouflaged object detection and reduce target detectability under general object detectors.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14377
PDF
-
Robust low-rank tensor completion via factorized weighted tensor schatten-p norm minimization
2026-09-13 06:02:35Binghao Wang, Feng Zhang, Wendong Wang, Jianjun WangAbstract
Low-rank tensor factorization provides a flexible framework for completing multidimensional data from incomplete and corrupted observations. However, unweighted spectral regularizers impose a common shrinkage profile across singular components, which may excessively attenuate dominant low-rank components, and factorized variants either lack component-specific weighting or require costly singular value decompositions (SVDs). This paper proposes two weighted Schatten-$p$ tensor factorization models, termed \WSpTFI{} and \WSpTFII{}, under the tensor-tensor product (t-product) framework to address these limitations. \WSpTFI{} is motivated by a factorized weighted tensor Schatten-$p$ norm identity and permits flexible, possibly asymmetric factor exponents. \WSpTFII{} constructs a regularizer from transform-domain column-pair energies, yielding SVD-free main factor updates and a column-pruning mechanism for reducing redundant rank components. This paper further develops an iteratively reweighted alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-type scheme for \WSpTFI{} and an iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS)--block successive upper-bound minimization (BSUM) scheme for \WSpTFII{}. Theoretical analysis establishes the weighted factorization relation and provides a conditional limiting Karush--Kuhn--Tucker (KKT) characterization for \WSpTFI{}. For \WSpTFII{}, the actual damped quadratic block updates yield a quantitative sufficient-decrease mechanism for the fixed-$\delta$ smoothed factor objective. This implies asymptotic regularity, and every accumulation point of the fixed-dimensional tail is stationary. Experiments on synthetic tensor completion, color-image restoration, hyperspectral inpainting, and printed-circuit-board defect detection demonstrate competitive reconstruction quality and robustness under various degradation conditions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14307
PDF
-
An End-to-End Automated Pipeline for Controllable Crack Data Synthesis
2026-09-11 04:40:01Conghui Li, Muxin Pu, Chern Hong Lim, Weiyao Lin, Xin WangAbstract
Automated crack inspection increasingly relies on deep learning, yet its reliability is limited by scarce and weakly controllable defect data. Existing generative augmentation methods often treat crack synthesis as a generic image-generation task, offering insufficient control over morphology, boundary fidelity, and scene context. This paper proposes an end-to-end automated pipeline for controllable crack data synthesis that formalizes crack geometry and inspection context into reusable computational constraints. First, procedurally sampled Bézier-curve skeletons are translated into realistic crack masks using a GAN, enabling scalable generation of diverse crack morphologies without manual mask design. Second, a dual-ControlNet diffusion framework disentangles appearance guidance from geometric guidance, with an edge-based branch enforcing strict boundary consistency. The framework supports both background-free synthesis and context-aware inpainting. Experiments on CRACK500 and CrackTree200 show consistent gains over existing augmentation baselines, demonstrating a scalable engineering informatics workflow for automated crack-inspection data generation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12431
PDF
-
SEED-UMI: Sharing the Exoskeleton between human and robot for onE-to-one Dexterous demonstration
2026-09-10 16:08:58Tengbo Yu, Jiahao Wu, Daohan Li, Bingxu Chen, Hao Liu, Xiaojian Ma, Hangxin LiuAbstract
Imitation learning for dexterous hands is bottlenecked by the difficulty of collecting contact-rich demonstrations that transfer faithfully to the robot. Prior wearable-exoskeleton systems record only on the human side and retarget via open-loop mappings calibrated in free space, which degrade under contact. We present SEED-UMI, a framework in which both the human and the robot wear the same exoskeleton: joint encoders become a physically shared measurement, and wrist cameras mounted to the exoskeleton observe the same outer mechanism during both human data collection and robot policy rollouts. This turns retargeting into paired cross-embodiment supervision and lets policies train directly on raw exoskeleton-centric wrist images, without segmentation or inpainting. On five contact-rich tasks, SEED-UMI achieves 3.0x greater data collection efficiency than exoskeleton-based teleoperation and a 70.0% average rollout success rate.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11753
PDF
