Search: “image-artifacts”

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Mi-Ripple: Restoring Images Degraded by Iterative AI Editing

Mi-Ripple is a diagnosis-guided restoration workflow that removes digital ripple artifacts introduced by iterative AI image editing while preserving structure.

Iterative reference-conditioned image editing can introduce grid-like and granular textures known as digital ripple. Mi-Ripple separates periodic lattice artifacts from content-entangled granular texture, then applies selective spectral notching, structure-aware smoothing, and cleaned-reference regeneration. In fourteen notch-only executions, whole-image residual standard deviation was 0.08-0.44 in CIELAB lightness units, and reference cleaning reduced output debris density by 45% in a paired example.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

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Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled pure-autoregressive testbed shows task-specific validation losses rank image tokenizers differently, with I2T loss the most consistent signal.

Researchers built a controlled pure-autoregressive testbed and tracked task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They find losses should be analyzed per task because they exhibit distinct scaling behavior and rank tokenizers differently, and that the loss-performance relationship depends on the predicted token space. I2T loss, computed over a shared text vocabulary, correlates consistently with both generation and visual understanding performance after supervised finetuning. Case studies revisit the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size as tokenizer design axes.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:57 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

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Why AI food looks like that

Experts explain why AI-generated food images look unappetizing, citing diffusion model limitations, weak structural reasoning, and stylized training data.

The Verge examines why AI-generated food imagery from restaurants and brands often appears grotesque, citing researchers from Oxford, Naples, Zurich, and London. Diffusion models recover coarse structure before fine texture, so structural errors like extra fingers or donut shrimp get baked in early. Researchers note the models are weak at thin, continuous, terminating structures such as noodles, and reproduce the glossy conventions of professional food photography without understanding the objects. Odd internet imagery and memes in training data further skew outputs toward strange textures and clustered holes.

The Verge · AI·Sep 4, 11:00 UTC · 12d agoAI research

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Anatomical Grounding and Leakage-Aware Multimodal Contrastive Learning for Alzheimer's Disease Classification from Structural MRI

Study of label leakage and anatomical grounding in multimodal MRI models for Alzheimer's staging shows cognitive-score fusion accuracy of 87.3% is leakage-driven.

The authors train a ResNet18 slice-based encoder with a one-layer Transformer on 1,075 ADNI-1 T1 MRI scans, using FastSurfer segmentations and YOLOv8 localization (mAP_50 above 0.96) as anatomical reference. Grad-CAM shows the image-only classifier often attends to skull and background rather than disease-relevant structures. A CLIP-style image-tabular contrastive framework organized along a label-leakage spectrum yields 87.3% three-way accuracy with cognitive scores versus 73.0% with regional volumes, and cropping to the medial temporal lobe raises image-only accuracy from 58.7% to 65.1%. Results come from single runs on a small balanced test set with reported confidence intervals.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 17:13 UTC · 1d agoAI research1

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Feature Recovery for Object Understanding After Irreversible Fire Damage

TRACE benchmark with 21.4K scenes studies post-fire object understanding; a Feature Recovery Module improves degraded-image retrieval by 12.5% and material recovery by 20.1%.

The paper introduces TRACE, a transformation-aware benchmark with 21.4K real-image-grounded synthetic scenes, 499 object identities across 189 categories, and five tasks covering degraded-object detection, pristine-state recovery, material recovery, description generation, and functional reasoning. Existing models degrade sharply: RF-DETR mAP falls 71% relative from least to most severe level, and InternVL3.5 retrieval R@1 drops from 93.85 to 28.11. The proposed Feature Recovery Module maps degraded encoder features to pristine-aligned representations while keeping the host model frozen, averaging relative gains of 12.5% for retrieval and 20.1% for material recovery across VLM hosts and severity levels.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

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Forging Tree-Ring: Reproducing and Instrumenting Black-Box Semantic Watermark Forgery

Reprompt watermark forgery reproduces on Stable Diffusion XL using free-tier T4 GPUs, with forged images accepted by the genuine detector 5 of 6 times.

The authors reproduce the Reprompt forgery attack of Müller et al. against Tree-Ring watermarking on Stable Diffusion XL using the released code on free-tier dual T4 GPUs with 14.6 GB usable memory, versus the A40 hardware of the original study. Over six trials, the genuine detector flagged genuine images 6/6, clean images 0/6, and forged images 5/6, at 325-332 seconds per attack. They also recovered the detector's discarded non-central chi-square statistic and built two natural scores separating forged images from the clean null at AUC 0.861 and 0.972. The notebook, pinned fork, and all measurement artifacts are released with the paper.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 11, 14:35 UTC · 4d agoResearch

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OracleZoom: On-Policy Self-Distillation Inspired Reference-Constrained Recursive Image Super Resolution

OracleZoom enables recursive extreme-scale image super-resolution via reference-constrained on-policy distillation, reducing hallucinations at deep zoom scales.

OracleZoom tackles recursive super-resolution, where repeated feeding of predictions back into the same model leaves deeper-scale outputs unsupervised as required source resolution grows geometrically. The framework trains on its own trajectory while carrying the last ground-truth evidence beyond the supervision boundary, combining direct and cross-scale supervision, a no-reference quality objective, a KL-constrained pretrained latent prior, and EMA consistency. Across seven datasets it achieves state-of-the-art SR quality across zoom scales, averaging 0.713 CLIPIQA with larger gains at deeper scales and significantly reduced hallucinations. Code, data, and models are publicly released.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 5, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

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What Breaks Local Watermarks? A Robustness Benchmark for Local Invisible Image Watermarking

First systematic robustness benchmark of five local invisible image watermarking methods across 55 transformations finds all are vulnerable, with inpainting and geometric misalignment completely breaking payload…

The paper presents the first systematic robustness benchmark for local invisible image watermarks, covering 55 image transformations across signal distortions, coordinate alignment changes, indirect local edits, and direct watermark edits. It evaluates five methods: MaskWM, WAM, OmniGuard, TrustMark, and PixelSeal, all supporting localization natively or with minimal adaptation. Results show every method is vulnerable to some transformation; MaskWM offers the strongest payload recovery and localization but the lowest clean-image quality, and synchronization further improves its recovery under geometric transformations. Geometric misalignment and generative local edits such as inpainting and outpainting can completely impair payload recovery, while signal distortions are often tolerated.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 08:30 UTC · 1d agoResearch

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Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled autoregressive testbed shows validation losses must be analyzed per task, and image tokenizer choice affects joint multimodal text modeling.

Researchers built a pure-autoregressive testbed to study image tokenizers as the 'visual language' of unified multimodal models, tracking task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They found that losses exhibit distinct scaling behavior per task and rank tokenizers differently, and that I2T loss over a shared text vocabulary gives a more consistent loss–performance signal than T2I loss. Better reconstruction does not necessarily yield lower task-specific losses or stronger downstream performance, and tokenizer choice can affect text modeling under joint optimization. Case studies examine the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size design axes.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

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UniH^3: Unifying Hierarchical Homogeneity and Heterogeneity for All-in-One Medical Image Restoration

UniH3 unifies hierarchical homogeneity and heterogeneity modeling for all-in-one medical image restoration across modalities and degradation types.

UniH3 introduces a Hierarchical Homogeneity Memory module that distills shared anatomical priors from high-quality images, injected via a Homogeneity-Guided Attention mechanism. A Hierarchical Heterogeneity Balancer mitigates inter- and intra-task conflicts during multi-task optimization. It achieves state-of-the-art on MedIR-2D-500K and MedIR-3D-3D benchmarks for both all-in-one and single-task restoration, with code released on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

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Recursive Code World Models: Building Complex Worlds through Recursive Scene Programs

RCWM reconstructs complex 3D worlds as executable code from a single image using recursive scene programs with global-local-global solver recursion.

The paper introduces Recursive Code World Models, coupling a Recursive Scene Program representation with a recursive construction solver for image-to-3D-world reconstruction. Each solver call establishes the whole scene, recursively reconstructs unresolved parts, and revisits the whole to refine composition, while a vision-language coding agent compares reference images with scene renders to guide refinement. RCWM outperforms prior code-based image-to-scene reconstruction methods, and ablations show deeper recursive calls improve fine-scale reconstruction.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research1

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USN-8739-1: ImageMagick vulnerabilities

Canonical released USN-8739-1 fixing five ImageMagick flaws that could cause denial of service or arbitrary code execution.

Ubuntu security notice USN-8739-1 patches five ImageMagick vulnerabilities: CVE-2026-56366, CVE-2026-56368, CVE-2026-56371, and CVE-2026-56373 allow denial of service via crafted images on Ubuntu 14.04 through 22.04 LTS. CVE-2026-56370 affects Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and 26.04 LTS and could allow denial of service or arbitrary code execution. Users should apply the updated ImageMagick packages to affected releases.

Ubuntu Security Notices·Sep 8, 18:30 UTC · 7d agoAdvisoryCVE-2026-56366CVE-2026-56368CVE-2026-56370+2 CVEs

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VeriScene: Reconstructing Crime Scenes from Legal Evidence via World-Model Agent

Researchers present VeriScene, a world-model agent that reconstructs crime scenes from forensic photos and witness statements with traceable, physically plausible output.

VeriScene orchestrates a world model to fuse forensic photographs and witness statements of varying reliability into cited narratives and physically plausible re-enactment videos. On a 25-scenario benchmark with planted unreliable testimony, it reaches 0.9014 evidence coverage and 0.7217 factual consistency on 20 test scenes. It outperforms an end-to-end multimodal-LLM baseline by 20.35% in factual consistency and 34.88% in temporal coherence at USD 1.82 per scene.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 8, 07:14 UTC · 8d agoAI research

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VoT: Vision-of-Thought for Unified Multimodal Representation Alignment

Researchers propose Vision-of-Thought (VoT), a discrete visual-planning token layer between VLMs and diffusion transformers improving text-to-image semantic alignment.

VoT introduces a discrete visual-thinking layer between vision-language models and diffusion transformers, letting the VLM act as a multimodal planner that emits tokens describing objects and layouts before pixel generation. A specialized VoT tokenizer is trained with VLM alignment, feature reconstruction, and vector-quantization losses. Experiments show improved semantic alignment and a structured, interpretable interface for controllable generation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:53 UTC · 8d agoAI research

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When a PNG Isn’t a PNG: WordPress Patches an Author-Level Imagick RCE

WordPress 7.0.4 patches an author-level RCE in how uploaded media is handed to ImageMagick.

WordPress maintenance release 7.0.4 includes a security fix that changes how uploaded media is passed to ImageMagick, closing a path that let a logged-in author turn a crafted image upload into remote code execution. Patchstack's analysis explains the flaw as a file-type handling issue where a PNG may not be treated as a PNG. The text does not mention a CVE ID or observed exploitation, but the flaw affects extremely widely deployed software.

Patchstack·Aug 12, 15:32 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Vulnerability

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Does Your Agent's Memory Survive a Model Upgrade? A Controlled Study of Memory Portability

A controlled study finds agent memory portability varies sharply: fixed-schema knowledge graphs survive model swaps while compressed notes degrade.

The study compares preserving an agent's history as raw long context, RAG chunks, compressed natural-language notes, or fixed-schema knowledge graphs across model upgrades, using 48 synthetic histories and two open-weight sub-10B-parameter models. Fixed-schema KG accuracy changed by only +0.0004 ± 0.0020 after a writer swap, while compressed NOTES shifted asymmetrically by +9.91 or -13.28 percentage points depending on migration direction. Mixed 50/50 embedding migrations captured only 4.96 of an 11.90-point RAG re-embedding gain; 80% of the NOTES deficit came from information lost at construction, and 81% of the RAG deficit from retrieval failures. Store-only repair of NOTES failed to reach 90% recovery in all 48 cases, while retaining raw histories enabled recovery in 34 of 48 for one direction.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:44 UTC · 11d agoAI research1

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Understanding the Impact of Model Pruning on Long-Tail Forgetting and Explanation Reliability in Medical Imaging

Systematic study finds model pruning causes frequency-dependent long-tail forgetting in medical imaging and that gradient-informed methods best preserve explanations.

Across two long-tailed medical imaging datasets, two CNN architectures, four pruning methods, and sparsity up to 95%, the study measures predictive performance, explanation stability, and faithfulness. Rare classes degrade earlier and more severely than frequent ones, while explanation reliability depends mainly on the pruning strategy, with gradient-informed methods degrading least. Mechanistic analysis ties explanation collapse to loss of class-discriminative gradients rather than vanishing feature activations, recommending class- and explanation-aware evaluation of compression.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:44 UTC · 8d agoAI research

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Diffusion TV: Experiencing Diffusion Models through Tangible, Embodied Interaction

Researchers present Diffusion TV, a CRT-based installation where antenna manipulation lets audiences physically experience diffusion model denoising.

Diffusion TV is an interactive installation built around a modified CRT television where turning the antenna controls the clarity of AI-generated images and sounds, mirroring the denoising process of diffusion models. Three channels present AI-generated animals from the past, present, and future within a temporal and ecological narrative. The authors frame the work as an embodied, non-verbal alternative to explainable AI that highlights intermediate generative states rather than final outputs.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:51 UTC · 11d agoAI research

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VDiff-Bench: A Challenging Benchmark for Fine-Grained Image Difference Identification

VDiff-Bench, a 1,756-question benchmark, shows multimodal LLMs struggle with fine-grained image-difference identification, scoring as low as 8.7% on low-level changes.

VDiff-Bench is a multiple-choice benchmark of 1,756 four-way questions over image pairs covering 10 change categories including position, motion, color, texture, OCR/text and illumination, with curated hard negatives. Evaluation of 11 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source MLLMs shows fine-grained visual comparison remains brittle: 7-8B-scale open-source models score 52.5-70.6% on semantic changes but only 8.7-33.3% on low-level changes like noise and texture. Notably, Grok 4.3 shows a sharp performance drop on noise and texture differences, falling behind large open-source models like Kimi K2.5 and K3.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 4, 20:00 UTC · 11d agoAI research

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USN-8739-2: ImageMagick vulnerabilities

Ubuntu releases USN-8739-2, extending ImageMagick fixes for four CVEs including possible arbitrary code execution to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

USN-8739-2 provides the ImageMagick fixes from USN-8739-1 for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The flaws stem from incorrect handling of certain images that could allow an attacker to cause a denial of service or possibly execute arbitrary code. The affected CVEs are CVE-2026-56366, CVE-2026-56368, CVE-2026-56371, and CVE-2026-56373.

Ubuntu Security Notices·Sep 14, 18:22 UTC · 1d agoAdvisoryCVE-2026-56366CVE-2026-56368CVE-2026-56371+1 CVEs

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DRIFT: Removing Diffusion Watermarks by Deflecting the Generative Trajectory

Introduces DRIFT, a black-box attack removing diffusion watermarks by deflecting generative trajectories, achieving 98-100% success across nine watermarking schemes.

Researchers propose DRIFT, a black-box watermark removal attack combining partial forward diffusion with stochastic reverse resampling to break trajectory-dependent verification. The paper derives information-theoretic and Wasserstein source-dependence bounds and shows the first verifier-rejected rung is least distorted among rejected rungs. Across nine watermarks spanning three paradigms, DRIFT achieves 98-100% attack success with the best image quality among compared attacks, without secret keys, verifier internals, or per-image gradient optimization.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 8, 03:54 UTC · 8d agoResearch

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What Makes Adversarial Examples Transfer Across Deepfake Detectors?

A controlled study of 60 deepfake detectors shows adversarial example transfer depends heavily on source-target compatibility, with source averaging understating vulnerability.

The study evaluates adversarial example transferability across 60 deepfake detectors spanning six backbones, two pretraining regimes, and five training-data configurations, using AutoAttack (AA) and Carlini-Wagner with Expectation over Transformation (CW-EOT). Transfer rises sharply when source and target share an exact backbone, architecture family, pretraining regime, or training data, with the dominant factor depending on the attack. Mean attack success rate is 7.21% under AA and 19.52% under CW-EOT for single sources, while a multi-source oracle reaches 64.48% after excluding exact matches, showing source averaging can substantially understate target vulnerability. The authors release 240,000 adversarially perturbed images, pairwise transfer results, detector configurations, and evaluation code.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 10:28 UTC · 7d agoAI safety & security

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Reason Through the Latent! Making Latent Visual Reasoning Necessary

Researchers introduce CVRR, forcing multimodal models to rely on recurrent latent computation rather than accessible image tokens, validated via causal interventions and benchmarks.

The paper presents Causal Visual Recurrent Reasoning (CVRR), which makes recurrent hidden-state computation the required image-conditioned path for prediction in vision-language models. Before decoding, visual states and the original multimodal KV cache are removed so only the final recurrent state carries image information to the answer. CVRR retains strong performance on V*, MMVP, BLINK, and MME-RealWorld-Lite while comparable latent reasoners fail under the same constraint. Causal interventions show predictions remain sensitive to recurrent content and that persistent visual evidence causally revises the recurrent trajectory.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 5, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

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[AINews] DeepSeek v4.1-Flash: 763B-P8B-D16B novel causal Encoder–Decoder architecture with vision marks the Return of the Whale

DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash, an open-weight 763B-parameter model with a novel causal encoder-decoder architecture, 1M context, vision input, and MIT license.

DeepSeek launched V4.1-Flash, an open-weight MIT-licensed model using a novel causal encoder-decoder architecture with 763B total parameters and asymmetric active parameters: 8B for prefill and 16B for decode. It supports 1M-token context and text+image input, priced at $0.30 per 1M input and $1.20 per 1M output tokens with a 50% off-peak discount. Artificial Analysis scored it 40 on its Intelligence Index, above DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, and Vals ranked it the #1 open-weight model ahead of Kimi K3. Baseten shipped day-0 support and Ollama began rolling it out to paid subscribers.

Latent Space·Sep 12, 05:56 UTC · 4d agoModel release 6 sources1

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BVB: Benchmarking Agentic Video Understanding via Programmatic Reconstruction in Blender

Blender-VideoBench evaluates agentic video understanding by having agents programmatically reconstruct real videos in Blender scenes.

BVB (Blender-VideoBench) tests whether multimodal agents truly understand videos by requiring programmatic reconstruction of real-world videos as animated Blender scenes via a lightweight Mini-BVB harness under identical sandbox and cost constraints. Evaluation uses Dual VQA for spatiotemporal fact preservation and Latent Similarity for perceptual match, combined in a square-root mean overall score. Across 51 configurations from 10 model families, the best model reaches 88.6 Latent Similarity but retains only 53.7% of source-correct spatiotemporal answers, showing semantic retention remains the main challenge.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 2d agoAI research

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Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party

Meta filed a patent for AI glasses that identify people via facial recognition and auto-generate highlight reels of events like dinner parties.

A newly published Meta patent describes smartglasses that use facial recognition to detect people in frame, capture video clips of their actions, and compile highlight reels. The filing signals Meta's continued, controversial push to combine facial recognition with its AI glasses line. The patent was published Thursday and offers granular detail on Meta's product plans, though it does not confirm a shipping feature.

404 Media·Aug 14, 14:17 UTC · Aug 14, 2026AI industry

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Mask Forcing: Improving Autoregressive Video Diffusion Distillation via Dual-Noise Masking Rollout

Researchers propose Mask Forcing, a dual-noise masking rollout that mitigates mode collapse in autoregressive video diffusion distillation.

The paper targets over-saturation and over-smoothing in autoregressive video diffusion models distilled via Distribution Matching Distillation, attributed to reverse-KL mode-seeking behavior. Mask Forcing perturbs the student self-rollout with random masks along spatial and temporal axes, injecting cleaner tokens that act as denoising guidance for noisier tokens. Experiments show improved visual quality across multiple distillation methods without using real video data or extra post-training stages.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research

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RelightFormer: Feed-forward Generative Transformer for Multiview Object Relighting

RelightFormer is a feed-forward generative transformer for photorealistic single- and multi-view object relighting, trained on a 90K-object dataset.

Researchers introduce RelightFormer, a feed-forward generative transformer adapted from a video foundation model that performs direct image relighting without explicit intrinsic property estimation. The architecture injects target environment maps via a latent illumination module with cross-attention and uses permutation-invariant positional encodings for unordered multi-view inputs. Training relies on the newly constructed Laval Objaverse Dataset (LOD) with 90K objects and 39K unique illuminations, and the model shows state-of-the-art quality with strong zero-shot generalization across single-view, multi-view, and novel-view relighting.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research

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FreeFlow: A Bias-free Hierarchical Transformer for Optical Flow Estimation

FreeFlow is a bias-free hierarchical transformer achieving state-of-the-art optical flow results on Sintel, KITTI-2015, and Spring benchmarks.

FreeFlow replaces task-specific inductive biases like correlation volumes and iterative warping with a single feed-forward encoder-decoder combining window, shifted-window, and reduced-resolution global attention. It reaches 0.68/1.48 EPE on Sintel Clean/Final, 3.23 Fl-all on KITTI-2015, and 3.192 1px on Spring. The architecture scales consistently from small to large variants and remains memory efficient at 1080p inference.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

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TransNormal-2: Geometry-Grounded Rectified Flow with Edge-Aware Decoding for Precise Normal Estimation

TransNormal-2 improves monocular surface-normal estimation by fixing VAE edge degradation with geometry-aware losses and refinement, matching MoGe-2 with 1.4% of annotations.

TransNormal-2 is a FLUX.2-based rectified-flow framework for monocular surface-normal estimation with single-step deterministic inference. The authors quantify that VAE 8x spatial compression introduces 1.3-8.5 degrees of mean angular error even on ground-truth normals, with edge error up to 2.8x the global error. The method adds geometry-aware pixel-space losses and an RGB-guided Geometric Refinement Module to correct boundary-localized decoding errors. It matches or exceeds MoGe-2 on all eight reported metrics using only 1.4% as many task-specific annotations, and cuts transparent-object MAE by 4.2 degrees on ClearGrasp and 3.1 degrees on ClearPose.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 5, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

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