Conditional memory expands language-model capacity through selective lookup, but the full embedding table must remain available for every possible input. We introduce Conditional Program (CP), a compressed representation that reconstructs only the rows an input requests. CP represents each row by a short code and a local scale, with a reconstruction program shared across the table. We instantiate this representation with a Gaussian trellis, norm restoration and independently decodable row records. CP's two-bit code lowers output KL by 41--63\% relative to 2-bit round-to-nearest. Analysis across three trained n-gram memory families shows that Gaussian-like coordinate statistics coexist with learned relationships among rows; at matched storage budgets, the shared trellis outperforms the fitted codebooks and low-rank residual variants we test. For DeepSeek, it reduces table storage from 203GB to 51GB, leaving room for larger workloads when the table is kept on GPU.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21810
Generative low-light enhancers recover plausible texture but may hallucinate structure; restoration networks preserve structure but can leave regions under-enhanced, and neither advantage is spatially uniform. Therefore, we formulate selective generative enhancement as a decision problem: determine where overriding a frozen base expert is beneficial and refuse to switch when the evidence is insufficient. We propose VetoNet, an auditable regional routing framework centered on a certified veto. It first measures the complementary strengths and routing direction of a frozen restoration generative pair, then predicts the utility of regional overrides from deployment-available signals alone and admits an override only when a distribution-free harm-budget certificate says the perceptual (LPIPS) risk budget allows it. Experiments across multiple expert pairs and domains show that VetoNet adapts its routing behavior to the strength and reliability of the available evidence. When expert complementarity is sufficiently predictable, it achieves statistically significant certified gains; when the relative strengths of the experts change, it correspondingly reverses the routing direction; and when routing evidence is weak or affected by cross-domain shift, it conservatively vetoes switching.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21335
Agents for mixed-degradation image restoration typically learn what a tool does to an image only after running it: failed calls waste computation and harmful outputs go unnoticed until too late. We propose PreActIR, an agentic restoration framework that predicts tool consequences before execution. For each candidate tool, a tool-conditioned world model forecasts changes in residual degradation, image quality, and fidelity, together with the risk of harm and the uncertainty of the prediction. The agent executes the top-ranked candidate, and an independent verifier commits or rolls back its output before the agent replans from the observed state. PreActIR also audits whether performance is limited by the selector or by the candidate space, and studies targeted tool adaptation as a controlled way to expand that space. In a controlled evaluation that fixes the candidate pool, verifier, and budget and employs reference-annotated degradation states, PreActIR uses 42.5% fewer real tool calls and 63.4% fewer rejected calls than reactive, execute-then-evaluate trial and error, while improving Y-PSNR by 0.92 dB.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20384
Physics-guided networks for underwater image restoration predict transmission and backscatter and invert the image-formation model, yet rarely test whether this physics does any work. We audit one representative design, PhysGuide-Net, with four controlled experiments: five-seed ablations on UIEB with zero-shot evaluation on the complete LSUI (4279 pairs) and AUIED3K (3000 pairs) sets; a data-efficiency study with a capacity-matched control that removes the formation model; and a validation of the predicted maps against measured range on Sea-thru. With all 800 training images the physics module gives no zero-shot gain (mean PSNR differences of at most 0.16 dB; all 95% intervals include zero) at 3.4x the FLOPs. With 80 images it helps more (+0.65 dB on UIEB, +1.48 dB on AUIED3K; seed-to-seed s.d. on AUIED3K from 1.3 to 0.5 dB), although not individually significant after correction, and the control does not reproduce this (0.8-1.0 dB lower). Yet the predicted transmission does not behave like a physical quantity: its correlation with range is no stronger than for the range map of a different image (pooled difference +0.02, versus -0.06 for the dark-channel prior), and a Beer-Lambert fit explains 0.4% of its variance. The effect of the module also changes sign with degradation severity between datasets. The benefit thus comes from a physics-shaped inductive bias, not from physics. We further show that single-run ablations can reverse sign and document implementation defects that invalidate loss ablations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19763
Recent video super-resolution (VSR) models achieve efficient one-step generation through diffusion distillation. However, high-resolution inference remains costly, and distilled models are difficult to align with human preferences. These challenges call for improvements in both model architecture and training strategy. We present \textbf{FlashVSR+} to address both limitations. On the architecture side, we introduce hybrid attention based on the strong locality observed in pretrained VSR models, while retaining sparse global interaction for long-range consistency. It achieves up to $2\times$ DiT speedup and 45\% lower peak memory, enabling spatially untiled 4K VSR on a single 24GB RTX 4090. On the training side, we propose Reward-Yield Distribution Matching Distillation (Ry-DMD) for preference-aligned one-step generation. Ry-DMD uses reward-weighted teacher rollouts to incorporate black-box rewards into distribution matching, without backpropagating through the reward model. We further show that Ry-DMD generalizes beyond VSR to T2I generation. Together, FlashVSR+ delivers stronger restoration quality and substantially improves high-resolution efficiency, with consistent gains in user preference. We release our code, models, and training data at \href{this https URL}{\textcolor{FlashBlue}{\textbf{this http URL}}}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17552
Compressed music restoration aims to recover high-fidelity audio from lossy codecs such as MP3 by restoring missing spectral content and reducing coding artifacts. Recently, generative adversarial networks and band-split models have made progress in compressed music restoration. However, existing methods either operate without explicitly modeling phase or rely on predefined frequency partitions, which may limit restoration performance and the use of input-dependent frequency information. To address these issues, we propose MPASCNet, a Magnitude-Phase-Aware Adaptive Spectral Compression network. Instead of using fixed bands, MPASCNet combines magnitude and phase features to guide cross-attention, adaptively compressing full-resolution spectral features into compact tokens. These tokens are then processed by a spectro-temporal backbone to model spectral-temporal dependencies. Finally, separate decoder branches reconstruct the full-resolution magnitude and wrapped phase spectra. Experiments on MP3 restoration show that MPASCNet outperforms the Apollo and AEROMamba baselines across multiple restoration metrics while using only 6.49 M parameters. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16416
Mamba-based super-resolution models are efficient alternatives to Transformer-based restoration backbones, but their low-bit post-training quantization remains challenging because selective scan, Mamba's input-dependent state-space operator, induces different activation ranges across spatial tokens. Thus, a single layer-wise clipping range poorly matches all tokens. We propose Token-Group Quantization, a hardware-friendly activation PTQ framework that statically approximates a hardware-unfriendly post-scan grouping oracle, where tokens with similar preferred clipping ranges are assigned to the same group. To avoid runtime post-scan grouping in static low-bit inference, a lightweight predictor infers the groups from pre-scan features available before the quantized scan path. During calibration, we form pseudo-labels by clustering post-scan activation descriptors that capture similar rounding--clipping behavior. At inference, the frozen predictor maps pre-scan features to groups and selects entries from offline-calibrated group-wise clipping-bound tables, without runtime statistics collection, dynamic clipping updates, or post-scan group assignment. To address low-bit restoration degradation, we further introduce a Frequency-Preserving Refinement (FPR) objective for clipping-bound calibration. FPR aligns Fourier amplitude and phase between full-precision teacher and quantized student outputs to preserve high-frequency structures. Across PTQ protocols, bit-widths, backbones, and tasks, our method consistently outperforms prior Mamba and SR PTQ baselines, transfers to Transformer SR and Vision Mamba classification, composes with rotation-based quantization, and achieves 2.23x speedup on Jetson Orin Nano over FP16. Code is available here.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16261
Vision Mamba has recently emerged as an efficient alternative to convolutional and Transformer-based architectures by modeling long-range spatial dependencies through recurrent state evolution. Existing studies primarily improve token serialization, scanning strategies, or expert routing, yet largely overlook a state level question question: how should recurrent states be organized for spatially heterogeneous visual restoration? In this paper, we show that forcing tokens with heterogeneous update behaviors to recurrently modify a shared hidden state leads to persistent cross-content interference, which we term \textbf{State Contention}. We further argue that effective recurrent modeling should organize state evolution according to token compatibility rather than token ordering. Based on this observation, we introduce \textbf{State Isolation}, a new recurrent state organization principle for Vision Mamba,tokens with compatible state-update tendencies evolve within independent recurrent state streams. To instantiate this principle, we propose \textbf{IsoMamba}, a $\Delta$-guided architecture that constructs model-intrinsic update representations, discovers update-compatible token groups through label-free clustering, and routes them to isolated Mamba experts following a \textbf{cluster--route--isolate} paradigm. In addition, we develop a dynamic channel-wise reweighting objective to compensate for wavelength-dependent reconstruction difficulty in underwater images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IsoMamba consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple underwater image enhancement benchmarks while providing cleaner hidden state responses, validating the effectiveness of state isolated recurrent modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13720
Pretrained diffusion Transformers provide powerful generative priors for image restoration, yet adapting them to structure-sensitive tasks remains challenging. Existing methods mainly rely on dense low-resolution features as conditions, which often entangle salient objects with dominant backgrounds and provide limited abstraction for recurring structures across scales and samples. We propose MOSAIC, an object-centric representation learning framework that learns compact structural conditions for generative model adaptation. MOSAIC organizes degraded observations into structural slots that capture complementary object-level and layout-level evidence, integrates them across resolutions, and retrieves recurring priors from a shared prototype memory to complement incomplete image-specific information. The resulting representations are injected into selected layers of a frozen diffusion Transformer through lightweight residual modulation, preserving its pretrained generative prior. We instantiate MOSAIC for remote sensing image super-resolution, where small objects, repetitive structures, and large-scale variation provide a challenging testbed. Experiments on UCMerced, AID, and RSSCN7 show consistent PSNR improvements across $\times 2$ and $\times 4$ settings and favorable LPIPS results at $\times 4$. Qualitative results further demonstrate improved preservation of small objects, structural boundaries, and repetitive spatial patterns.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13547
Fast rollout generation for long-context reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) requires reducing KV-cache traffic without changing the response groups used for policy optimization. In our profiled RLVR workloads, attention accounts for 72--76\% of autoregressive decoding kernel time. Sparse attention reduces these reads, but sampling directly from a sparse policy changes the response groups used for learning. For group-relative optimization, we show that even exact response-wise reweighting does not generally recover the expected dense-policy update because the advantage of each response depends on the rewards of other group members. We propose Self-Sparse Speculative Rollouts (S$^3$R). It uses sparse attention to propose tokens, then generates responses through full-attention verification and exact speculative sampling. Drafting and verification share the same policy parameter, eliminating the need to train or update a separate drafter. The resulting response groups follow the dense-policy distribution. Under S$^3$R, we characterize speedup conditions and the costs of drafting and verification. We found that dense verification still requires the complete historical KV cache. A KV-aware scheduler therefore limits KV-cache repeated offloading and restoration while maintaining rollout parallelism. % OR thrashing In a matched ablation with an aggressive sparse drafting budget, S$^3$R maintains stable training while direct sparse sampling with training-side correction becomes unstable. On long-context mathematical reasoning, S$^3$R achieves $1.39\times~1.35\times$ the end-to-end training throughput of autoregressive rollouts on Qwen3 model, with comparable task performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13202
Existing image fusion methods struggle to balance visual quality and semantic attributes due to the inherent conflict between their optimization objectives. To address this challenge, we propose an attack-defense semantic reinforcement framework for multi-modal image fusion, termed AD-SRF. By decoupling the optimization of these two aspects and then losslessly reintegrating them, this framework injects rich semantic attributes into the fused image without compromising its visual quality. First, we develop a transformer-based restorative visual fusion network as a strong visual baseline. Equipped with the cross-modal retrieval module and the information restoration-fusion collaborative loss, it produces highly visible fused images even under degraded conditions. Second, we introduce an attack-defense game mechanism to strengthen the semantic attributes of the fused images. The attacker learns perturbation patterns that impair downstream segmentation, whereas the defender restores missing semantics from the original inputs and reintegrates them into the fused image through an imperceptible semantic map. Through iterative adversarial interaction, this mechanism drives the defender to continually strengthen the fused image's semantic attributes, boosting downstream segmentation performance without compromising visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AD-SRF achieves a win-win performance in both visual quality and semantic attributes. The code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12897
Existing multi-modal image fusion (MMIF) methods generally face an optimization gap between the visual and semantic domains, limiting the enhancement of perception capabilities. To overcome this long-standing barrier, this work proposes W2F, a new visual-semantic mutual reinforcing paradigm for MMIF. First, we reinforce the foundation for visual-semantic collaboration by amplifying feature complementarity through two targeted designs. Specifically, the segmentation-guided fusion loss introduces object-aware structural guidance into visual fusion, while the embedded information restoration prior strengthens the ability of visual fusion to provide reliable perceptual evidence for the semantic branch under degraded conditions. Then, we introduce a strong multi-modal information interaction mechanism composed of interactive gated mixed attention (IGM-Att) and progressive coupling attention (PC-Att). These modules ensure comprehensive scene representation from both local and global perspectives, providing informational support for visual-semantic collaboration. Finally, we construct a collaborative mechanism to couple visual fusion and semantic fusion. It employs a feature search module to extract complementary key features from both tasks, enriching the representational potential of visual and semantic information. Meanwhile, a gradient correction strategy ensures collaboration from the optimization perspective, enhancing performance for both visual and semantic fusion through consistency learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that W2F surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both visual appeal and decision accuracy. The code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12887
Anatomical continuity provides complementary information for medical image restoration, but its use requires accounting for local anatomy and variations in slice sampling. We introduce ContiLNN, which augments two-dimensional restoration backbones with bidirectional closed-form continuous-time (Bi-CfC) modules for cross-slice modeling while retaining in-plane feature extraction. Slice-index intervals modulate gates determined by local features and hidden states, enabling propagation to respond to sampling variations without numerical ODE integration. Reference-guided consistency aligns first- and second-order cross-slice intensity differences to preserve anatomical variation, while distillation from a frozen backbone helps retain in-plane fidelity. Across five training seeds, ContiLNN improves mean PSNR over Restore-RWKV by 0.1907, 1.0176, and 1.2482 dB for CT denoising, MRI super-resolution, and reduced-count PET restoration, respectively, with lower RMSE in all three tasks. CT results are descriptive for one held-out patient. PET ablations support ordered propagation beyond additional pointwise capacity. Under contiguous training, Bi-CfC achieves higher fidelity than a Bi-GRU with similar parameter counts and arithmetic costs across all tested sampling conditions. Matched seven-slice profiling shows 52.8% lower latency and 57.0% lower peak GPU memory use than Bi-GRU. Mixed-gap training improves sparse and irregular-context performance for both operators, without a uniform ranking across metrics and contexts. Experiments with fewer training patients and a second backbone further support data efficiency and backbone compatibility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12337
A robot that assists people must often act on what a person has shown rather than said: which of several identical cartons was pointed at, or which box was handled. The plan is executed from the final scene, whereas the evidence occurs earlier, possibly on objects that have since moved. We propose instance-anchored interaction evidence (IAE), which registers every object of the final scene to its public identifier, keeps each identity through the video by backward mask propagation, and describes every frame by the geometry between hands, forearms and these instances. An evidence network trained only from task outcomes scores the instances. For pointing tasks, a grammar-constrained dynamic program trained with a structured loss decodes object-destination programs; symbolic programs handle reference disambiguation and, without learning, episodic tasks. On 1,255 WatchAct benchmark requests, scored by symbolic execution, IAE reaches 64.2% plan success on implicit-intent tasks against 27.5% for a 32B vision-language model (strict success 49.7% against 15.4%), and 46.4% against 27.0% on restoration, reversal and imitation without task-specific training. Controls with the same perception overlays, the same 32 frames, forward tracking, or a relation model trained on the same labels do not explain the gain. Given IAE's evidence as text with its meaning explained, the same language model reaches 57.4%: most of the gain comes from the instance-anchored evidence, and the explicit programs add 6.8 points at a fraction of the cost. Pointing remains the hardest case, with 16.9% strict success. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12157
In this paper, we introduce a metric-guided dynamic loss controller (DLC) for multi-objective image restoration. Conventional image restoration pipelines usually train with a fixed weighted combination of multiple losses, without changing the relative importance of fidelity, perceptual similarity, and no-reference quality during optimization. DLC is an architecture- and loss-term-agnostic training-time controller: it does not modify the restoration architecture or introduce new differentiable loss terms, but dynamically reweights the existing training losses. During training, DLC periodically evaluates the current model on a small fixed feedback subset and uses the resulting quality metrics to update the loss-weight vector through an LLM-based controller. Because DLC operates on existing loss terms rather than task-specific architectures, the same controller formulation can be instantiated across diverse image restoration training pipelines. We evaluate DLC on three restoration domains: low-light image enhancement, deraining, and real-world super-resolution, using both reference-based and no-reference quality metrics. Across these settings, DLC considers metric-dependent trade-offs during optimization and guides training toward balanced operating points across fidelity and perceptual quality. The results show that DLC can move models toward more favorable operating points across different restoration domains, supporting its role as a practical plug-in controller for multi-objective image restoration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11433
Long-horizon robotic manipulation is often built by chaining independently trained skills. Although each skill can be reliable in isolation, performance degrades sharply when skills are chained: each downstream skill must start from the state its predecessor leaves behind rather than from its training distribution. We study this failure mode, Observation-Space Shift (OSS), and ask what causes these skill-seam failures. Using privileged simulator resets, we find that the dominant shift comes from displaced scene state (e.g., an open drawer or secondary objects left behind by earlier skills), not from the robot's joint configuration or the object the downstream skill manipulates. To test this diagnosis, we build a fully learned detect-restore-resume system: a task-progress monitor detects the stall, a learned policy restores the displaced scene components, and seam-robust fine-tuning lets the skill resume. It recovers the seam where every tested alternative fails, which we treat as evidence for the diagnosis rather than as a general-purpose method. On the BOSS-44 benchmark, the system improves full-chain success from 7.6% to 26.5%, a 3.5x improvement over the base policy and 51% of a privileged restoration oracle, whereas best-of-K resampling, a Diffusion Policy, and world-model baselines fail to recover from the evaluated seam states. On a real Franka arm running a fine-tuned $\pi_{0.5}$ policy, the same monitor is limited by exterior-camera observability, yet closing the loop still recovers some otherwise-terminal failures, motivating wrist and gripper sensing. These results suggest that some long-horizon composition failures are better addressed by restoring the scene before resuming the policy than by retrying from an off-support state.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10810
Eyeglass reflection removal is important across smartphone imaging, video conferencing, and other face-centric visual applications. The task is challenging because reflections range from mild photometric contamination to severe ocular occlusion, requiring selective correction and plausible reconstruction without altering identity or natural appearance. Existing datasets cover limited reflection conditions, constraining generalization to complex real-world scenes and systematic evaluation. We introduce \textbf{OcuBench}, a multi-source benchmark comprising 10,280 controllable synthetic pairs, 732 real-input pseudo-pairs, and 458 independent real-world test images, supporting both paired evaluation and assessment beyond generated supervision. We further propose \textbf{OcuFlow}, an ocular-adaptive pixel MeanFlow (pMF) framework for efficient, detail-preserving restoration. It combines geometry-adaptive representation with one-step pMF to focus reconstruction on reflection-obscured ocular regions, together with native-resolution frequency-preserving synthesis to retain reliable observed details. Experiments across diverse reflection conditions demonstrate that OcuFlow achieves consistent advantages in reflection removal quality, ocular fidelity, and efficiency. In a blind user study, it receives $67.32\%$ of selections, $6.2\times$ the next-best share. Both the code and dataset will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10703
Real-world low-quality images suffer from complex mixed degradations, including but not limited to noise, blur, atmospheric effects, etc. Recent agentic methods usually model real-world image restoration (Real-IR) as a sequential tool calling problem over task-specific single-degradation restoration models. This paradigm, however, is fundamentally limited because complex real-world degradations cannot be cleanly undone degradation by degradation, and the tool used for task-specific models caps the capability of the agent system. In this work, we present HarnessIR, an agentic framework for Real-IR by harnessing a multimodal foundation model (MFM) as the executor. HarnessIR consists of five stages: perception and diagnosis, on-demand tool invocation, prompt composition, execution, and verification-driven refinement. Unlike prior agentic Real-IR methods that rely on tool chains assembled from task-specific models, HarnessIR feeds the restoration requirements, the perceptual diagnosis, and the evidence into an MFM that performs restoration in a single pass, followed by verification stages to determine whether the result warrants further processing. Under our harness, off-the-shelf MFMs handle restoration tasks remarkably well, achieving state-of-the-art results on the widely used MiO100 synthetic benchmark. More importantly, by exploiting the strong generalization ability of MFMs, HarnessIR delivers compelling restoration quality on challenging real-world scenes where previous agentic IR systems often struggle. Codes is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10133
Pixel-space diffusion models avoid the lossy VAE of latent models, which suggests an advantage on downstream tasks where fine-grained detail matters. We test this claim along both routes to a pixel-space backbone. We pretrain Iris-3B, a 3B-parameter pixel-space text-to-image transformer, from scratch through a $256\to512\to1024$ curriculum, after first ablating the prediction target and representation alignment at $256^2$ to decide what to scale. We also convert a pretrained latent model, FLUX.2 Klein base 4B, to pixel space. We fine-tune both families for monocular depth estimation and for image restoration/super-resolution. We find no significant improvement from using a pixel-space generative prior. Fine-tuned for depth with one matched direct-regression recipe, Iris-3B is level with the latent FLUX.2 Klein and the converted pixel FLUX.2 Klein falls behind it, and on $4\times$ DIV2K restoration neither pixel model beats a latent FLUX.2 Klein fine-tune, the converted one trailing it slightly. We document the recipes, the failure modes and the remaining confounds behind this negative result. Nevertheless, Iris-3B shows that pixel-space pretraining with the pixel-transformer (PiT) head of PixelDiT scales to 3B parameters and to text-to-image quality competitive with latent models, matching Qwen-Image on OneIG under the official evaluators at $1024^2$. We release its weights and training code in the hope that they help pave the way for further work on pixel-space generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09450
Ancient script image restoration is a fundamental problem in computer vision, as it directly affects the reliable analysis and interpretation of historical documents and inscriptions. Ashokan Brahmi is an ancient script extensively used during the reign of Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BC, primarily for inscriptions in Prakrit. These inscriptions, including major and minor rock and pillar edicts, constitute a valuable yet largely unexplored source of data for computational analysis. The degraded nature of inscription imagery and the lack of standardized digital resources pose significant challenges for automated processing. We present an end-to-end AI-based framework for understanding ancient inscriptions that encompasses image enhancement, optical character recognition (OCR), transliteration, and neural machine translation (NMT). The proposed pipeline processes low-quality images captured directly from stone inscriptions, performs image restoration and Brahmi script character recognition, maps the recognized characters to the Roman script, and finally translates the resulting Prakrit text into English. We also introduce two new datasets: (i) InscriptionOCR Dataset: the largest publicly usable digital OCR dataset for Brahmi script to date, consisting of over 200,000 character images across about 600 classes, and (ii) a bilingual Prakrit-English parallel corpus comprising over 2,000 sentence pairs for NMT. We believe that the proposed framework and datasets will facilitate future research in ancient script analysis, low-resource OCR, and digital epigraphy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09439