Bias in the Picture: Benchmarking VLMs with Social-Cue News Images and LLM-as-Judge Assessment

Restora-Flow has been introduced as a training-free method for image restoration that utilizes flow matching sampling guided by a degradation mask. This innovative approach aims to enhance the quality of image restoration tasks such as inpainting, super-resolution, and denoising while addressing the long processing times and over-smoothing issues faced by existing methods.

RobustMerge has been introduced as a parameter-efficient model merging method designed for multi-task learning in machine learning language models (MLLMs), emphasizing direction robustness during the merging process. This approach addresses the challenges of merging expert models without data leakage, which has become increasingly important as model sizes and data complexity grow.

The recent introduction of EmoFeedback$^2$ aims to enhance continuous emotional image generation (C-EICG) by utilizing a large vision-language model (LVLM) to provide reward and textual feedback, addressing the limitations of existing methods that struggle with emotional continuity and fidelity. This paradigm allows for better alignment of generated images with user emotional descriptions.

A new study has introduced a diffusion-based inpainting model adapted for image layer decomposition, addressing the challenges of separating images into distinct layers for independent editing. This model employs lightweight finetuning and a multi-modal context fusion module to enhance detail preservation in the latent space, achieving superior results in object removal and occlusion recovery using a synthetic dataset.

A new benchmark called CaptionQA has been introduced to evaluate the utility of model-generated captions in supporting downstream tasks across various domains, including Natural, Document, E-commerce, and Embodied AI. This benchmark consists of 33,027 annotated multiple-choice questions that require visual information to answer, aiming to assess whether captions can effectively replace images in multimodal systems.

A novel framework for Trustworthy Multi-View Classification (TMVC) has been proposed, addressing the challenges of reliable decision-making in scenarios with heterogeneous and conflicting multi-source information. This framework introduces prototypes to represent neighbor structures of each view, simplifying the learning of intra-view relations and enhancing consistency across inter-view relationships.

PG-ControlNet has been introduced as a novel framework for spatially varying image deblurring, addressing the challenges posed by complex motion and noise. This approach reconciles model-based deep unrolling methods with generative models, capturing minute variations in degradation patterns through a dense continuum of high-dimensional compressed kernels.

A novel image generation method has been developed for long-term prediction of Alzheimer's Disease (AD), utilizing a temporal parameter estimation model based on the Normal Inverse Gamma Distribution. This approach addresses challenges in maintaining disease-related characteristics in sequential data with irregular time intervals, allowing for the generation of intermediate and future brain images to aid in diagnosis.