Daily Papers

Image restoration aims to reconstruct degraded images, e.g., denoising or deblurring. Existing works focus on designing task-specific methods and there are inadequate attempts at universal methods. However, simply unifying multiple tasks into one universal architecture suffers from uncontrollable and undesired predictions. To address those issues, we explore prompt learning in universal architectures for image restoration tasks. In this paper, we present Degradation-aware Visual Prompts, which encode various types of image degradation, e.g., noise and blur, into unified visual prompts. These degradation-aware prompts provide control over image processing and allow weighted combinations for customized image restoration. We then leverage degradation-aware visual prompts to establish a controllable and universal model for image restoration, called ProRes, which is applicable to an extensive range of image restoration tasks. ProRes leverages the vanilla Vision Transformer (ViT) without any task-specific designs. Furthermore, the pre-trained ProRes can easily adapt to new tasks through efficient prompt tuning with only a few images. Without bells and whistles, ProRes achieves competitive performance compared to task-specific methods and experiments can demonstrate its ability for controllable restoration and adaptation for new tasks. The code and models will be released in https://github.com/leonmakise/ProRes.

Image restoration, which aims to retrieve and enhance degraded images, is fundamental across a wide range of applications. While conventional deep learning approaches have notably improved the image quality across various tasks, they still suffer from (i) the high storage cost needed for various task-specific models and (ii) the lack of interactivity and flexibility, hindering their wider application. Drawing inspiration from the pronounced success of prompts in both linguistic and visual domains, we propose novel Prompt-In-Prompt learning for universal image restoration, named PIP. First, we present two novel prompts, a degradation-aware prompt to encode high-level degradation knowledge and a basic restoration prompt to provide essential low-level information. Second, we devise a novel prompt-to-prompt interaction module to fuse these two prompts into a universal restoration prompt. Third, we introduce a selective prompt-to-feature interaction module to modulate the degradation-related feature. By doing so, the resultant PIP works as a plug-and-play module to enhance existing restoration models for universal image restoration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of PIP on multiple restoration tasks, including image denoising, deraining, dehazing, deblurring, and low-light enhancement. Remarkably, PIP is interpretable, flexible, efficient, and easy-to-use, showing promising potential for real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/longzilicart/pip_universal.

Vision-language models (VLMs) can couple visual perception with open-ended clinical reasoning, making them attractive for computational histopathology. However, fine-tuning billions of parameters on scarce, expert-annotated pathology data is prohibitive, while in-context learning (ICL), which conditions the VLM on demonstrative image-text pairs without parameter updates, suffers from high sensitivity to which examples are selected and how the query is phrased, producing unreliable diagnostics. Existing selection strategies rely on query-dependent nearest-neighbour retrieval that ignores global data structure, require costly parameter updates, or disregard the joint vision-text embedding geometry of VLMs. We propose GAUC, a training-free coreset selection method operating directly in the pre-trained multimodal embedding space. GAUC jointly optimises three objectives: (1) a Maximum Mean Discrepancy term enforcing distributional fidelity between coreset and full dataset, (2) an Effective Mutual Information Difference regulariser bounding performance degradation under prompt paraphrases by exploiting the VLM's joint vision-text alignment, and (3) a predictive-variance penalty suppressing overconfident, unstable outputs. On CRC-100K and MHIST across multiple open-source VLM architectures, GAUC consistently improves accuracy, calibration, and prompt robustness over recent ICL selection methods and dataset-distillation baselines, all without a single gradient update.

Image restoration has always been a cutting-edge topic in the academic and industrial fields of computer vision. Since degradation signals are often random and diverse, "all-in-one" models that can do blind image restoration have been concerned in recent years. Early works require training specialized headers and tails to handle each degradation of concern, which are manually cumbersome. Recent works focus on learning visual prompts from data distribution to identify degradation type. However, the prompts employed in most of models are non-text, lacking sufficient emphasis on the importance of human-in-the-loop. In this paper, an effective textual prompt guided image restoration model has been proposed. In this model, task-specific BERT is fine-tuned to accurately understand user's instructions and generating textual prompt guidance. Depth-wise multi-head transposed attentions and gated convolution modules are designed to bridge the gap between textual prompts and visual features. The proposed model has innovatively introduced semantic prompts into low-level visual domain. It highlights the potential to provide a natural, precise, and controllable way to perform image restoration tasks. Extensive experiments have been done on public denoising, dehazing and deraining datasets. The experiment results demonstrate that, compared with popular state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model can obtain much more superior performance, achieving accurate recognition and removal of degradation without increasing model's complexity. Related source codes and data will be publicly available on github site https://github.com/MoTong-AI-studio/TextPromptIR.

All-in-One Image Restoration (AiOIR), which addresses diverse degradation types with a unified model, presents significant challenges in designing task-aware prompts that effectively guide restoration across multiple degradation scenarios. While adaptive prompt learning enables end-to-end optimization, it often yields overlapping or redundant task representations. Conversely, explicit prompts derived from pretrained classifiers enhance discriminability but discard critical visual information needed for reconstruction. To address these limitations, we introduce Contrastive Prompt Learning (CPL), a framework that aims to improve prompt-task alignment through two complementary components: a Sparse Prompt Module (SPM) that efficiently captures degradation-aware representations while reducing redundancy, and a Contrastive Prompt Regularization (CPR) that explicitly strengthens task boundaries by incorporating negative prompt samples across different degradation types. Unlike previous approaches that focus primarily on degradation classification, CPL directly optimizes the interaction between prompts and the restoration model. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks show that CPL consistently boosts the performance of strong AiOIR baselines across diverse scenarios. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art average performance on these benchmarks, providing a general and robust solution for AiOIR. The code is available at https://github.com/Aitical/CPLIR

Owe to the powerful generative priors, the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have become increasingly popular in solving the real-world image super-resolution problem. However, as a consequence of the heavy quality degradation of input low-resolution (LR) images, the destruction of local structures can lead to ambiguous image semantics. As a result, the content of reproduced high-resolution image may have semantic errors, deteriorating the super-resolution performance. To address this issue, we present a semantics-aware approach to better preserve the semantic fidelity of generative real-world image super-resolution. First, we train a degradation-aware prompt extractor, which can generate accurate soft and hard semantic prompts even under strong degradation. The hard semantic prompts refer to the image tags, aiming to enhance the local perception ability of the T2I model, while the soft semantic prompts compensate for the hard ones to provide additional representation information. These semantic prompts encourage the T2I model to generate detailed and semantically accurate results. Furthermore, during the inference process, we integrate the LR images into the initial sampling noise to mitigate the diffusion model's tendency to generate excessive random details. The experiments show that our method can reproduce more realistic image details and hold better the semantics. The source code of our method can be found at https://github.com/cswry/SeeSR.

Image super-resolution (SR) methods typically model degradation to improve reconstruction accuracy in complex and unknown degradation scenarios. However, extracting degradation information from low-resolution images is challenging, which limits the model performance. To boost image SR performance, one feasible approach is to introduce additional priors. Inspired by advancements in multi-modal methods and text prompt image processing, we introduce text prompts to image SR to provide degradation priors. Specifically, we first design a text-image generation pipeline to integrate text into SR dataset through the text degradation representation and degradation model. The text representation applies a discretization manner based on the binning method to describe the degradation abstractly. This representation method can also maintain the flexibility of language. Meanwhile, we propose the PromptSR to realize the text prompt SR. The PromptSR employs the diffusion model and the pre-trained language model (e.g., T5 and CLIP). We train the model on the generated text-image dataset. Extensive experiments indicate that introducing text prompts into image SR, yields excellent results on both synthetic and real-world images. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/PromptSR.

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly pushed the boundaries of Visual Question Answering (VQA).However,high-resolution details can sometimes become noise that leads to hallucinations or reasoning errors. In this paper,we propose Degradation-Driven Prompting (DDP), a novel framework that improves VQA performance by strategically reducing image fidelity to force models to focus on essential structural information. We evaluate DDP across two distinct tasks. Physical attributes targets images prone to human misjudgment, where DDP employs a combination of 80p downsampling, structural visual aids (white background masks and orthometric lines), and In-Context Learning (ICL) to calibrate the model's focus. Perceptual phenomena addresses various machine-susceptible visual anomalies and illusions, including Visual Anomaly (VA), Color (CI), Motion(MI),Gestalt (GI), Geometric (GSI), and Visual Illusions (VI).For this task, DDP integrates a task-classification stage with specialized tools such as blur masks and contrast enhancement alongside downsampling. Our experimental results demonstrate that less is more: by intentionally degrading visual inputs and providing targeted structural prompts, DDP enables VLMs to bypass distracting textures and achieve superior reasoning accuracy on challenging visual benchmarks.

Measuring the perception of visual content is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Many mathematical models have been developed to evaluate the look or quality of an image. Despite the effectiveness of such tools in quantifying degradations such as noise and blurriness levels, such quantification is loosely coupled with human language. When it comes to more abstract perception about the feel of visual content, existing methods can only rely on supervised models that are explicitly trained with labeled data collected via laborious user study. In this paper, we go beyond the conventional paradigms by exploring the rich visual language prior encapsulated in Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models for assessing both the quality perception (look) and abstract perception (feel) of images in a zero-shot manner. In particular, we discuss effective prompt designs and show an effective prompt pairing strategy to harness the prior. We also provide extensive experiments on controlled datasets and Image Quality Assessment (IQA) benchmarks. Our results show that CLIP captures meaningful priors that generalize well to different perceptual assessments. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/IceClear/CLIP-IQA.

Image restoration involves recovering a high-quality clean image from its degraded version. Deep learning-based methods have significantly improved image restoration performance, however, they have limited generalization ability to different degradation types and levels. This restricts their real-world application since it requires training individual models for each specific degradation and knowing the input degradation type to apply the relevant model. We present a prompt-based learning approach, PromptIR, for All-In-One image restoration that can effectively restore images from various types and levels of degradation. In particular, our method uses prompts to encode degradation-specific information, which is then used to dynamically guide the restoration network. This allows our method to generalize to different degradation types and levels, while still achieving state-of-the-art results on image denoising, deraining, and dehazing. Overall, PromptIR offers a generic and efficient plugin module with few lightweight prompts that can be used to restore images of various types and levels of degradation with no prior information on the corruptions present in the image. Our code and pretrained models are available here: https://github.com/va1shn9v/PromptIR

Real-world images often suffer from spatially diverse degradations such as haze, rain, snow, and low-light, significantly impacting visual quality and downstream vision tasks. Existing all-in-one restoration (AIR) approaches either depend on external text prompts or embed hand-crafted architectural priors (e.g., frequency heuristics); both impose discrete, brittle assumptions that weaken generalization to unseen or mixed degradations. To address this limitation, we propose to reframe AIR as learned latent prior inference, where degradation-aware representations are automatically inferred from the input without explicit task cues. Based on latent priors, we formulate AIR as a structured reasoning paradigm: (1) which features to route (adaptive feature selection), (2) where to restore (spatial localization), and (3) what to restore (degradation semantics). We design a lightweight decoding module that efficiently leverages these latent encoded cues for spatially-adaptive restoration. Extensive experiments across six common degradation tasks, five compound settings, and previously unseen degradations demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches, achieving an average PSNR improvement of 1.68 dB while being three times more efficient.

Image degradation from blur, noise, compression, and poor illumination severely undermines multimodal understanding in real-world settings. Unified multimodal models that combine understanding and generation within a single architecture are a natural fit for this challenge, as their generative pathway can model the fine-grained visual structure that degradation destroys. Yet these models fail to leverage their own generative capacity on degraded inputs. We trace this disconnect to two compounding factors: existing training regimes never ask the model to invoke generation during reasoning, and the standard decode-reencode pathway does not support effective joint optimization. We present CLEAR, a framework that connects the two capabilities through three progressive steps: (1) supervised fine-tuning on a degradation-aware dataset to establish the generate-then-answer reasoning pattern; (2) a Latent Representation Bridge that replaces the decode-reencode detour with a direct, optimizable connection between generation and reasoning; (3) Interleaved GRPO, a reinforcement learning method that jointly optimizes text reasoning and visual generation under answer-correctness rewards. We construct MMD-Bench, covering three degradation severity levels across six standard multimodal benchmarks. Experiments show that CLEAR substantially improves robustness on degraded inputs while preserving clean-image performance. Our analysis further reveals that removing pixel-level reconstruction supervision leads to intermediate visual states with higher perceptual quality, suggesting that task-driven optimization and visual quality are naturally aligned.

The notable gap between user-provided and model-preferred prompts poses a significant challenge for generating high-quality images with text-to-image models, compelling the need for prompt engineering. Current studies on prompt engineering can effectively enhance the style and aesthetics of generated images. However, they often neglect the semantic alignment between generated images and user descriptions, resulting in visually appealing but content-wise unsatisfying outputs. In this work, we propose VisualPrompter, a novel training-free prompt engineering framework that refines user inputs to model-preferred sentences. VisualPrompter utilizes an automatic self-reflection module that identifies absent concepts in the generated images, followed by a target-specific prompt optimization mechanism that revises the prompts in a fine-grained manner. By deconstructing prompts, introducing new elements at the atomic semantic level, and then reassembling them, our framework is able to maintain semantic consistency and integrity throughout the optimization process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VisualPrompter, which achieves new state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks for text-image alignment evaluation. Additionally, our framework features a plug-and-play design, making it highly adaptable to various generative models. Our code is available at https://github.com/teheperinko541/VisualPrompter.

Object detectors achieve strong performance under nominal imaging conditions but can fail silently when exposed to blur, noise, compression, adverse weather, or resolution changes. In safety-critical settings, it is therefore insufficient to produce predictions without assessing whether the input remains within the detector's nominal operating regime. We refer to this capability as self-aware object detection. We introduce a degradation-aware self-awareness framework based on degradation manifolds, which explicitly structure a detector's feature space according to image degradation rather than semantic content. Our method augments a standard detection backbone with a lightweight embedding head trained via multi-layer contrastive learning. Images sharing the same degradation composition are pulled together, while differing degradation configurations are pushed apart, yielding a geometrically organized representation that captures degradation type and severity without requiring degradation labels or explicit density modeling. To anchor the learned geometry, we estimate a pristine prototype from clean training embeddings, defining a nominal operating point in representation space. Self-awareness emerges as geometric deviation from this reference, providing an intrinsic, image-level signal of degradation-induced shift that is independent of detection confidence. Extensive experiments on synthetic corruption benchmarks, cross-dataset zero-shot transfer, and natural weather-induced distribution shifts demonstrate strong pristine-degraded separability, consistent behavior across multiple detector architectures, and robust generalization under semantic shift. These results suggest that degradation-aware representation geometry provides a practical and detector-agnostic foundation.

In real-world scenarios, image impairments often manifest as composite degradations, presenting a complex interplay of elements such as low light, haze, rain, and snow. Despite this reality, existing restoration methods typically target isolated degradation types, thereby falling short in environments where multiple degrading factors coexist. To bridge this gap, our study proposes a versatile imaging model that consolidates four physical corruption paradigms to accurately represent complex, composite degradation scenarios. In this context, we propose OneRestore, a novel transformer-based framework designed for adaptive, controllable scene restoration. The proposed framework leverages a unique cross-attention mechanism, merging degraded scene descriptors with image features, allowing for nuanced restoration. Our model allows versatile input scene descriptors, ranging from manual text embeddings to automatic extractions based on visual attributes. Our methodology is further enhanced through a composite degradation restoration loss, using extra degraded images as negative samples to fortify model constraints. Comparative results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate OneRestore as a superior solution, significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in addressing complex, composite degradations.

Despite impressive recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models, obtaining high-quality images often requires prompt engineering by humans who have developed expertise in using them. In this work, we present NeuroPrompts, an adaptive framework that automatically enhances a user's prompt to improve the quality of generations produced by text-to-image models. Our framework utilizes constrained text decoding with a pre-trained language model that has been adapted to generate prompts similar to those produced by human prompt engineers. This approach enables higher-quality text-to-image generations and provides user control over stylistic features via constraint set specification. We demonstrate the utility of our framework by creating an interactive application for prompt enhancement and image generation using Stable Diffusion. Additionally, we conduct experiments utilizing a large dataset of human-engineered prompts for text-to-image generation and show that our approach automatically produces enhanced prompts that result in superior image quality. We make our code, a screencast video demo and a live demo instance of NeuroPrompts publicly available.

Achieving precise alignment between user intent and generated visuals remains a central challenge in text-to-visual generation, as a single attempt often fails to produce the desired output. To handle this, prior approaches mainly scale the visual generation process (e.g., increasing sampling steps or seeds), but this quickly leads to a quality plateau. This limitation arises because the prompt, crucial for guiding generation, is kept fixed. To address this, we propose Prompt Redesign for Inference-time Scaling, coined PRIS, a framework that adaptively revises the prompt during inference in response to the scaled visual generations. The core idea of PRIS is to review the generated visuals, identify recurring failure patterns across visuals, and redesign the prompt accordingly before regenerating the visuals with the revised prompt. To provide precise alignment feedback for prompt revision, we introduce a new verifier, element-level factual correction, which evaluates the alignment between prompt attributes and generated visuals at a fine-grained level, achieving more accurate and interpretable assessments than holistic measures. Extensive experiments on both text-to-image and text-to-video benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, including a 15% gain on VBench 2.0. These results highlight that jointly scaling prompts and visuals is key to fully leveraging scaling laws at inference-time. Visualizations are available at the website: https://subin-kim-cv.github.io/PRIS.

Low-level enhancement and high-level visual understanding in low-light vision have traditionally been treated separately. Low-light enhancement improves image quality for downstream tasks, but existing methods rely on physical or geometric priors, limiting generalization. Evaluation mainly focuses on visual quality rather than downstream performance. Low-light visual understanding, constrained by scarce labeled data, primarily uses task-specific domain adaptation, which lacks scalability. To address these challenges, we build a generalized bridge between low-light enhancement and low-light understanding, which we term Generalized Enhancement For Understanding (GEFU). This paradigm improves both generalization and scalability. To address the diverse causes of low-light degradation, we leverage pretrained generative diffusion models to optimize images, achieving zero-shot generalization performance. Building on this, we propose Semantically Consistent Unsupervised Fine-tuning (SCUF). Specifically, to overcome text prompt limitations, we introduce an illumination-aware image prompt to explicitly guide image generation and propose a cycle-attention adapter to maximize its semantic potential. To mitigate semantic degradation in unsupervised training, we propose caption and reflectance consistency to learn high-level semantics and image-level spatial semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in traditional image quality and GEFU tasks including classification, detection, and semantic segmentation.

Impressive advances in text-to-image (T2I) generative models have yielded a plethora of high performing models which are able to generate aesthetically appealing, photorealistic images. Despite the progress, these models still struggle to produce images that are consistent with the input prompt, oftentimes failing to capture object quantities, relations and attributes properly. Existing solutions to improve prompt-image consistency suffer from the following challenges: (1) they oftentimes require model fine-tuning, (2) they only focus on nearby prompt samples, and (3) they are affected by unfavorable trade-offs among image quality, representation diversity, and prompt-image consistency. In this paper, we address these challenges and introduce a T2I optimization-by-prompting framework, OPT2I, which leverages a large language model (LLM) to improve prompt-image consistency in T2I models. Our framework starts from a user prompt and iteratively generates revised prompts with the goal of maximizing a consistency score. Our extensive validation on two datasets, MSCOCO and PartiPrompts, shows that OPT2I can boost the initial consistency score by up to 24.9% in terms of DSG score while preserving the FID and increasing the recall between generated and real data. Our work paves the way toward building more reliable and robust T2I systems by harnessing the power of LLMs.

Despite significant progress in the field, it is still challenging to create personalized visual representations that align closely with the desires and preferences of individual users. This process requires users to articulate their ideas in words that are both comprehensible to the models and accurately capture their vision, posing difficulties for many users. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by leveraging historical user interactions with the system to enhance user prompts. We propose a novel approach that involves rewriting user prompts based on a newly collected large-scale text-to-image dataset with over 300k prompts from 3115 users. Our rewriting model enhances the expressiveness and alignment of user prompts with their intended visual outputs. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methods over baseline approaches, as evidenced in our new offline evaluation method and online tests. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zzjchen/Tailored-Visions .

Text-guided image-to-video (TI2V) generation has recently achieved remarkable progress, particularly in maintaining subject consistency and temporal coherence. However, existing methods still struggle to adhere to fine-grained prompt semantics, especially when prompts entail substantial transformations of the input image (e.g., object addition, deletion, or modification), a shortcoming we term semantic negligence. In a pilot study, we find that applying a Gaussian blur to the input image improves semantic adherence. Analyzing attention maps, we observe clearer foreground-background separation. From an energy perspective, this corresponds to a lower-entropy cross-attention distribution. Motivated by this, we introduce AlignVid, a training-free framework with two components: (i) Attention Scaling Modulation (ASM), which directly reweights attention via lightweight Q or K scaling, and (ii) Guidance Scheduling (GS), which applies ASM selectively across transformer blocks and denoising steps to reduce visual quality degradation. This minimal intervention improves prompt adherence while limiting aesthetic degradation. In addition, we introduce OmitI2V to evaluate semantic negligence in TI2V generation, comprising 367 human-annotated samples that span addition, deletion, and modification scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlignVid can enhance semantic fidelity.

Image restoration is a fundamental problem that involves recovering a high-quality clean image from its degraded observation. All-In-One image restoration models can effectively restore images from various types and levels of degradation using degradation-specific information as prompts to guide the restoration model. In this work, we present the first approach that uses human-written instructions to guide the image restoration model. Given natural language prompts, our model can recover high-quality images from their degraded counterparts, considering multiple degradation types. Our method, InstructIR, achieves state-of-the-art results on several restoration tasks including image denoising, deraining, deblurring, dehazing, and (low-light) image enhancement. InstructIR improves +1dB over previous all-in-one restoration methods. Moreover, our dataset and results represent a novel benchmark for new research on text-guided image restoration and enhancement. Our code, datasets and models are available at: https://github.com/mv-lab/InstructIR

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) often suffer from diverse and unknown degradations during imaging, leading to severe spectral and spatial distortions. Existing HSI restoration methods typically rely on specific degradation assumptions, limiting their effectiveness in complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose MP-HSIR, a novel multi-prompt framework that effectively integrates spectral, textual, and visual prompts to achieve universal HSI restoration across diverse degradation types and intensities. Specifically, we develop a prompt-guided spatial-spectral transformer, which incorporates spatial self-attention and a prompt-guided dual-branch spectral self-attention. Since degradations affect spectral features differently, we introduce spectral prompts in the local spectral branch to provide universal low-rank spectral patterns as prior knowledge for enhancing spectral reconstruction. Furthermore, the text-visual synergistic prompt fuses high-level semantic representations with fine-grained visual features to encode degradation information, thereby guiding the restoration process. Extensive experiments on 9 HSI restoration tasks, including all-in-one scenarios, generalization tests, and real-world cases, demonstrate that MP-HSIR not only consistently outperforms existing all-in-one methods but also surpasses state-of-the-art task-specific approaches across multiple tasks. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/ZhehuiWu/MP-HSIR.

Multimodal Large Language Models struggle to maintain reliable performance under extreme real-world visual degradations, which impede their practical robustness. Existing robust MLLMs predominantly rely on implicit training/adaptation that focuses solely on visual encoder generalization, suffering from limited interpretability and isolated optimization. To overcome these limitations, we propose Robust-R1, a novel framework that explicitly models visual degradations through structured reasoning chains. Our approach integrates: (i) supervised fine-tuning for degradation-aware reasoning foundations, (ii) reward-driven alignment for accurately perceiving degradation parameters, and (iii) dynamic reasoning depth scaling adapted to degradation intensity. To facilitate this approach, we introduce a specialized 11K dataset featuring realistic degradations synthesized across four critical real-world visual processing stages, each annotated with structured chains connecting degradation parameters, perceptual influence, pristine semantic reasoning chain, and conclusion. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness: Robust-R1 outperforms all general and robust baselines on the real-world degradation benchmark R-Bench, while maintaining superior anti-degradation performance under multi-intensity adversarial degradations on MMMB, MMStar, and RealWorldQA.

Vision-language models such as CLIP have shown great impact on diverse downstream tasks for zero-shot or label-free predictions. However, when it comes to low-level vision such as image restoration their performance deteriorates dramatically due to corrupted inputs. In this paper, we present a degradation-aware vision-language model (DA-CLIP) to better transfer pretrained vision-language models to low-level vision tasks as a universal framework for image restoration. More specifically, DA-CLIP trains an additional controller that adapts the fixed CLIP image encoder to predict high-quality feature embeddings. By integrating the embedding into an image restoration network via cross-attention, we are able to pilot the model to learn a high-fidelity image reconstruction. The controller itself will also output a degradation feature that matches the real corruptions of the input, yielding a natural classifier for different degradation types. In addition, we construct a mixed degradation dataset with synthetic captions for DA-CLIP training. Our approach advances state-of-the-art performance on both degradation-specific and unified image restoration tasks, showing a promising direction of prompting image restoration with large-scale pretrained vision-language models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Algolzw/daclip-uir.

Recent text-to-video models have demonstrated strong temporal generation capabilities, yet their potential for image restoration remains underexplored. In this work, we repurpose CogVideo for progressive visual restoration tasks by fine-tuning it to generate restoration trajectories rather than natural video motion. Specifically, we construct synthetic datasets for super-resolution, deblurring, and low-light enhancement, where each sample depicts a gradual transition from degraded to clean frames. Two prompting strategies are compared: a uniform text prompt shared across all samples, and a scene-specific prompting scheme generated via LLaVA multi-modal LLM and refined with ChatGPT. Our fine-tuned model learns to associate temporal progression with restoration quality, producing sequences that improve perceptual metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS across frames. Extensive experiments show that CogVideo effectively restores spatial detail and illumination consistency while maintaining temporal coherence. Moreover, the model generalizes to real-world scenarios on the ReLoBlur dataset without additional training, demonstrating strong zero-shot robustness and interpretability through temporal restoration.

Prompt engineering is a powerful tool used to enhance the performance of pre-trained models on downstream tasks. For example, providing the prompt ``Let's think step by step" improved GPT-3's reasoning accuracy to 63% on MutiArith while prompting ``a photo of" filled with a class name enables CLIP to achieve 80\% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet. While previous research has explored prompt learning for the visual modality, analyzing what constitutes a good visual prompt specifically for image recognition is limited. In addition, existing visual prompt tuning methods' generalization ability is worse than text-only prompting tuning. This paper explores our key insight: synthetic text images are good visual prompts for vision-language models! To achieve that, we propose our LoGoPrompt, which reformulates the classification objective to the visual prompt selection and addresses the chicken-and-egg challenge of first adding synthetic text images as class-wise visual prompts or predicting the class first. Without any trainable visual prompt parameters, experimental results on 16 datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in few-shot learning, base-to-new generalization, and domain generalization.

Diffusion models have become widely adopted in image completion tasks, with text prompts commonly employed to ensure semantic coherence by providing high-level guidance. However, a persistent challenge arises when an object is partially obscured in the damaged region, yet its remaining parts are still visible in the background. While text prompts offer semantic direction, they often fail to precisely recover fine-grained structural details, such as the object's overall posture, ensuring alignment with the visible object information in the background. This limitation stems from the inability of text prompts to provide pixel-level specificity. To address this, we propose supplementing text-based guidance with a novel visual aid: a casual sketch, which can be roughly drawn by anyone based on visible object parts. This sketch supplies critical structural cues, enabling the generative model to produce an object structure that seamlessly integrates with the existing background. We introduce the Visual Sketch Self-Aware (VSSA) model, which integrates the casual sketch into each iterative step of the diffusion process, offering distinct advantages for partially corrupted scenarios. By blending sketch-derived features with those of the corrupted image, and leveraging text prompt guidance, the VSSA assists the diffusion model in generating images that preserve both the intended object semantics and structural consistency across the restored objects and original regions. To support this research, we created two datasets, CUB-sketch and MSCOCO-sketch, each combining images, sketches, and text. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.

We introduce a method for composing object-level visual prompts within a text-to-image diffusion model. Our approach addresses the task of generating semantically coherent compositions across diverse scenes and styles, similar to the versatility and expressiveness offered by text prompts. A key challenge in this task is to preserve the identity of the objects depicted in the input visual prompts, while also generating diverse compositions across different images. To address this challenge, we introduce a new KV-mixed cross-attention mechanism, in which keys and values are learned from distinct visual representations. The keys are derived from an encoder with a small bottleneck for layout control, whereas the values come from a larger bottleneck encoder that captures fine-grained appearance details. By mixing keys and values from these complementary sources, our model preserves the identity of the visual prompts while supporting flexible variations in object arrangement, pose, and composition. During inference, we further propose object-level compositional guidance to improve the method's identity preservation and layout correctness. Results show that our technique produces diverse scene compositions that preserve the unique characteristics of each visual prompt, expanding the creative potential of text-to-image generation.

We introduce SUPIR (Scaling-UP Image Restoration), a groundbreaking image restoration method that harnesses generative prior and the power of model scaling up. Leveraging multi-modal techniques and advanced generative prior, SUPIR marks a significant advance in intelligent and realistic image restoration. As a pivotal catalyst within SUPIR, model scaling dramatically enhances its capabilities and demonstrates new potential for image restoration. We collect a dataset comprising 20 million high-resolution, high-quality images for model training, each enriched with descriptive text annotations. SUPIR provides the capability to restore images guided by textual prompts, broadening its application scope and potential. Moreover, we introduce negative-quality prompts to further improve perceptual quality. We also develop a restoration-guided sampling method to suppress the fidelity issue encountered in generative-based restoration. Experiments demonstrate SUPIR's exceptional restoration effects and its novel capacity to manipulate restoration through textual prompts.

Text-to-image synthesis (T2I) has advanced remarkably with the emergence of large-scale diffusion models. In the conventional setup, the text prompt provides explicit, user-defined guidance, directing the generation process by denoising a randomly sampled Gaussian noise. In this work, we reveal that the often-overlooked noise itself encodes inherent generative tendencies, acting as a "silent prompt" that implicitly guides the output. This implicit guidance, embedded in the noise scheduler design of diffusion model formulations and their training stages, generalizes across a wide range of T2I models and backbones. Building on this insight, we introduce NoiseQuery, a novel strategy that selects optimal initial noise from a pre-built noise library to meet diverse user needs. Our approach not only enhances high-level semantic alignment with text prompts, but also allows for nuanced adjustments of low-level visual attributes, such as texture, sharpness, shape, and color, which are typically challenging to control through text alone. Extensive experiments across various models and target attributes demonstrate the strong performance and zero-shot transferability of our approach, requiring no additional optimization.

Pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP have remarkably adapted to various downstream tasks. Nonetheless, their performance heavily depends on the specificity of the input text prompts, which requires skillful prompt template engineering. Instead, current approaches to prompt optimization learn the prompts through gradient descent, where the prompts are treated as adjustable parameters. However, these methods tend to lead to overfitting of the base classes seen during training and produce prompts that are no longer understandable by humans. This paper introduces a simple but interpretable prompt optimizer (IPO), that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to generate textual prompts dynamically. We introduce a Prompt Optimization Prompt that not only guides LLMs in creating effective prompts but also stores past prompts with their performance metrics, providing rich in-context information. Additionally, we incorporate a large multimodal model (LMM) to condition on visual content by generating image descriptions, which enhance the interaction between textual and visual modalities. This allows for thae creation of dataset-specific prompts that improve generalization performance, while maintaining human comprehension. Extensive testing across 11 datasets reveals that IPO not only improves the accuracy of existing gradient-descent-based prompt learning methods but also considerably enhances the interpretability of the generated prompts. By leveraging the strengths of LLMs, our approach ensures that the prompts remain human-understandable, thereby facilitating better transparency and oversight for vision-language models.

Recent text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable visual fidelity but often struggle with semantic alignment to complex prompts. We introduce CritiFusion, a novel inference-time framework that integrates a multimodal semantic critique mechanism with frequency-domain refinement to improve text-to-image consistency and detail. The proposed CritiCore module leverages a vision-language model and multiple large language models to enrich the prompt context and produce high-level semantic feedback, guiding the diffusion process to better align generated content with the prompt's intent. Additionally, SpecFusion merges intermediate generation states in the spectral domain, injecting coarse structural information while preserving high-frequency details. No additional model training is required. CritiFusion serves as a plug-in refinement stage compatible with existing diffusion backbones. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our method notably improves human-aligned metrics of text-to-image correspondence and visual quality. CritiFusion consistently boosts performance on human preference scores and aesthetic evaluations, achieving results on par with state-of-the-art reward optimization approaches. Qualitative results further demonstrate superior detail, realism, and prompt fidelity, indicating the effectiveness of our semantic critique and spectral alignment strategy.

The web is littered with images, once created for human consumption and now increasingly interpreted by agents using vision-language models (VLMs). These agents make visual decisions at scale, deciding what to click, recommend, or buy. Yet, we know little about the structure of their visual preferences. We introduce a framework for studying this by placing VLMs in controlled image-based choice tasks and systematically perturbing their inputs. Our key idea is to treat the agent's decision function as a latent visual utility that can be inferred through revealed preference: choices between systematically edited images. Starting from common images, such as product photos, we propose methods for visual prompt optimization, adapting text optimization methods to iteratively propose and apply visually plausible modifications using an image generation model (such as in composition, lighting, or background). We then evaluate which edits increase selection probability. Through large-scale experiments on frontier VLMs, we demonstrate that optimized edits significantly shift choice probabilities in head-to-head comparisons. We develop an automatic interpretability pipeline to explain these preferences, identifying consistent visual themes that drive selection. We argue that this approach offers a practical and efficient way to surface visual vulnerabilities, safety concerns that might otherwise be discovered implicitly in the wild, supporting more proactive auditing and governance of image-based AI agents.

Text-conditioned image editing has emerged as a powerful tool for editing images. However, in many situations, language can be ambiguous and ineffective in describing specific image edits. When faced with such challenges, visual prompts can be a more informative and intuitive way to convey ideas. We present a method for image editing via visual prompting. Given pairs of example that represent the "before" and "after" images of an edit, our goal is to learn a text-based editing direction that can be used to perform the same edit on new images. We leverage the rich, pretrained editing capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models by inverting visual prompts into editing instructions. Our results show that with just one example pair, we can achieve competitive results compared to state-of-the-art text-conditioned image editing frameworks.

Blind face restoration aims to recover high-quality facial images from various unidentified sources of degradation, posing significant challenges due to the minimal information retrievable from the degraded images. Prior knowledge-based methods, leveraging geometric priors and facial features, have led to advancements in face restoration but often fall short of capturing fine details. To address this, we introduce a visual style prompt learning framework that utilizes diffusion probabilistic models to explicitly generate visual prompts within the latent space of pre-trained generative models. These prompts are designed to guide the restoration process. To fully utilize the visual prompts and enhance the extraction of informative and rich patterns, we introduce a style-modulated aggregation transformation layer. Extensive experiments and applications demonstrate the superiority of our method in achieving high-quality blind face restoration. The source code is available at https://github.com/LonglongaaaGo/VSPBFR{https://github.com/LonglongaaaGo/VSPBFR}.

Well-designed prompts have demonstrated the potential to guide text-to-image models in generating amazing images. Although existing prompt engineering methods can provide high-level guidance, it is challenging for novice users to achieve the desired results by manually entering prompts due to a discrepancy between novice-user-input prompts and the model-preferred prompts. To bridge the distribution gap between user input behavior and model training datasets, we first construct a novel Coarse-Fine Granularity Prompts dataset (CFP) and propose a novel User-Friendly Fine-Grained Text Generation framework (UF-FGTG) for automated prompt optimization. For CFP, we construct a novel dataset for text-to-image tasks that combines coarse and fine-grained prompts to facilitate the development of automated prompt generation methods. For UF-FGTG, we propose a novel framework that automatically translates user-input prompts into model-preferred prompts. Specifically, we propose a prompt refiner that continually rewrites prompts to empower users to select results that align with their unique needs. Meanwhile, we integrate image-related loss functions from the text-to-image model into the training process of text generation to generate model-preferred prompts. Additionally, we propose an adaptive feature extraction module to ensure diversity in the generated results. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is capable of generating more visually appealing and diverse images than previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average improvement of 5% across six quality and aesthetic metrics.

Optical flow models trained on high-quality data often degrade severely when confronted with real-world corruptions such as blur, noise, and compression artifacts. To overcome this limitation, we formulate Degradation-Aware Optical Flow, a new task targeting accurate dense correspondence estimation from real-world corrupted videos. Our key insight is that the intermediate representations of image restoration diffusion models are inherently corruption-aware but lack temporal awareness. To address this limitation, we lift the model to attend across adjacent frames via full spatio-temporal attention, and empirically demonstrate that the resulting features exhibit zero-shot correspondence capabilities. Based on this finding, we present DA-Flow, a hybrid architecture that fuses these diffusion features with convolutional features within an iterative refinement framework. DA-Flow substantially outperforms existing optical flow methods under severe degradation across multiple benchmarks.

Recently, textual prompt tuning has shown inspirational performance in adapting Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models to natural image quality assessment. However, such uni-modal prompt learning method only tunes the language branch of CLIP models. This is not enough for adapting CLIP models to AI generated image quality assessment (AGIQA) since AGIs visually differ from natural images. In addition, the consistency between AGIs and user input text prompts, which correlates with the perceptual quality of AGIs, is not investigated to guide AGIQA. In this letter, we propose vision-language consistency guided multi-modal prompt learning for blind AGIQA, dubbed CLIP-AGIQA. Specifically, we introduce learnable textual and visual prompts in language and vision branches of CLIP models, respectively. Moreover, we design a text-to-image alignment quality prediction task, whose learned vision-language consistency knowledge is used to guide the optimization of the above multi-modal prompts. Experimental results on two public AGIQA datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art quality assessment models. The source code is available at https://github.com/JunFu1995/CLIP-AGIQA.

Despite recent progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation, existing models often struggle to faithfully capture user intentions from short and under-specified prompts. While prior work has attempted to enhance prompts using large language models (LLMs), these methods frequently generate stylistic or unrealistic content due to insufficient grounding in visual semantics and real-world composition. Inspired by recent advances in reasoning for language model, we propose RePrompt, a novel reprompting framework that introduces explicit reasoning into the prompt enhancement process via reinforcement learning. Instead of relying on handcrafted rules or stylistic rewrites, our method trains a language model to generate structured, self-reflective prompts by optimizing for image-level outcomes. The tailored reward models assesse the generated images in terms of human preference, semantic alignment, and visual composition, providing indirect supervision to refine prompt generation. Our approach enables end-to-end training without human-annotated data. Experiments on GenEval and T2I-Compbench show that RePrompt significantly boosts spatial layout fidelity and compositional generalization across diverse T2I backbones, establishing new state-of-the-art results.

Prompt learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for adapting vision-language models such as CLIP to downstream tasks. However, existing methods often overfit to seen data, leading to significant performance degradation when generalizing to novel classes or unseen domains. To address this limitation, we propose DiSa, a Directional Saliency-Aware Prompt Learning framework that integrates two complementary regularization strategies to enhance generalization. First, our Cross-Interactive Regularization (CIR) fosters cross-modal alignment by enabling cooperative learning between prompted and frozen encoders. Within CIR, a saliency-aware masking strategy guides the image encoder to prioritize semantically critical image regions, reducing reliance on less informative patches. Second, we introduce a directional regularization strategy that aligns visual embeddings with class-wise prototype features in a directional manner to prioritize consistency in feature orientation over strict proximity. This approach ensures robust generalization by leveraging stable prototype directions derived from class-mean statistics. Extensive evaluations on 11 diverse image classification benchmarks demonstrate that DiSa consistently outperforms state-of-the-art prompt learning methods across various settings, including base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset transfer, domain generalization, and few-shot learning.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating high-quality images given a text prompt. However, ensuring the prompt-image alignment remains a considerable challenge, i.e., generating images that faithfully align with the prompt's semantics. Recent works attempt to improve the faithfulness by optimizing the latent code, which potentially could cause the latent code to go out-of-distribution and thus produce unrealistic images. In this paper, we propose FRAP, a simple, yet effective approach based on adaptively adjusting the per-token prompt weights to improve prompt-image alignment and authenticity of the generated images. We design an online algorithm to adaptively update each token's weight coefficient, which is achieved by minimizing a unified objective function that encourages object presence and the binding of object-modifier pairs. Through extensive evaluations, we show FRAP generates images with significantly higher prompt-image alignment to prompts from complex datasets, while having a lower average latency compared to recent latent code optimization methods, e.g., 4 seconds faster than D&B on the COCO-Subject dataset. Furthermore, through visual comparisons and evaluation on the CLIP-IQA-Real metric, we show that FRAP not only improves prompt-image alignment but also generates more authentic images with realistic appearances. We also explore combining FRAP with prompt rewriting LLM to recover their degraded prompt-image alignment, where we observe improvements in both prompt-image alignment and image quality.

We present Prompt Diffusion, a framework for enabling in-context learning in diffusion-based generative models. Given a pair of task-specific example images, such as depth from/to image and scribble from/to image, and a text guidance, our model automatically understands the underlying task and performs the same task on a new query image following the text guidance. To achieve this, we propose a vision-language prompt that can model a wide range of vision-language tasks and a diffusion model that takes it as input. The diffusion model is trained jointly over six different tasks using these prompts. The resulting Prompt Diffusion model is the first diffusion-based vision-language foundation model capable of in-context learning. It demonstrates high-quality in-context generation on the trained tasks and generalizes effectively to new, unseen vision tasks with their respective prompts. Our model also shows compelling text-guided image editing results. Our framework, with code publicly available at https://github.com/Zhendong-Wang/Prompt-Diffusion, aims to facilitate research into in-context learning for computer vision.

This paper presents a simple and effective visual prompting method for adapting pre-trained models to downstream recognition tasks. Our method includes two key designs. First, rather than directly adding together the prompt and the image, we treat the prompt as an extra and independent learnable component. We show that the strategy of reconciling the prompt and the image matters, and find that warping the prompt around a properly shrinked image empirically works the best. Second, we re-introduce two "old tricks" commonly used in building transferable adversarial examples, i.e., input diversity and gradient normalization, into visual prompting. These techniques improve optimization and enable the prompt to generalize better. We provide extensive experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Using a CLIP model, our prompting method sets a new record of 82.8% average accuracy across 12 popular classification datasets, substantially surpassing the prior art by +5.6%. It is worth noting that this prompting performance already outperforms linear probing by +2.1% and can even match fully fine-tuning in certain datasets. In addition, our prompting method shows competitive performance across different data scales and against distribution shifts. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/EVP.

Text-to-image (T2I) research has grown explosively in the past year, owing to the large-scale pre-trained diffusion models and many emerging personalization and editing approaches. Yet, one pain point persists: the text prompt engineering, and searching high-quality text prompts for customized results is more art than science. Moreover, as commonly argued: "an image is worth a thousand words" - the attempt to describe a desired image with texts often ends up being ambiguous and cannot comprehensively cover delicate visual details, hence necessitating more additional controls from the visual domain. In this paper, we take a bold step forward: taking "Text" out of a pre-trained T2I diffusion model, to reduce the burdensome prompt engineering efforts for users. Our proposed framework, Prompt-Free Diffusion, relies on only visual inputs to generate new images: it takes a reference image as "context", an optional image structural conditioning, and an initial noise, with absolutely no text prompt. The core architecture behind the scene is Semantic Context Encoder (SeeCoder), substituting the commonly used CLIP-based or LLM-based text encoder. The reusability of SeeCoder also makes it a convenient drop-in component: one can also pre-train a SeeCoder in one T2I model and reuse it for another. Through extensive experiments, Prompt-Free Diffusion is experimentally found to (i) outperform prior exemplar-based image synthesis approaches; (ii) perform on par with state-of-the-art T2I models using prompts following the best practice; and (iii) be naturally extensible to other downstream applications such as anime figure generation and virtual try-on, with promising quality. Our code and models are open-sourced at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Prompt-Free-Diffusion.

Images produced by text-to-image diffusion models might not always faithfully represent the semantic intent of the provided text prompt, where the model might overlook or entirely fail to produce certain objects. Existing solutions often require customly tailored functions for each of these problems, leading to sub-optimal results, especially for complex prompts. Our work introduces a novel perspective by tackling this challenge in a contrastive context. Our approach intuitively promotes the segregation of objects in attention maps while also maintaining that pairs of related attributes are kept close to each other. We conduct extensive experiments across a wide variety of scenarios, each involving unique combinations of objects, attributes, and scenes. These experiments effectively showcase the versatility, efficiency, and flexibility of our method in working with both latent and pixel-based diffusion models, including Stable Diffusion and Imagen. Moreover, we publicly share our source code to facilitate further research.

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown impressive capabilities in generating realistic visuals from natural-language prompts, yet they often struggle with accurately binding attributes to corresponding objects, especially in prompts containing multiple attribute-object pairs. This challenge primarily arises from the limitations of commonly used text encoders, such as CLIP, which can fail to encode complex linguistic relationships and modifiers effectively. Existing approaches have attempted to mitigate these issues through attention map control during inference and the use of layout information or fine-tuning during training, yet they face performance drops with increased prompt complexity. In this work, we introduce a novel compositional generation method that leverages pairwise image embeddings to improve attribute-object binding. Our approach decomposes complex prompts into sub-prompts, generates corresponding images, and computes visual prototypes that fuse with text embeddings to enhance representation. By applying segmentation-based localization training, we address cross-attention misalignment, achieving improved accuracy in binding multiple attributes to objects. Our approaches outperform existing compositional text-to-image diffusion models on the benchmark T2I CompBench, achieving better image quality, evaluated by humans, and emerging robustness under scaling number of binding pairs in the prompt.

Text-to-image models are powerful for producing high-quality images based on given text prompts, but crafting these prompts often requires specialized vocabulary. To address this, existing methods train rewriting models with supervision from large amounts of manually annotated data and trained aesthetic assessment models. To alleviate the dependence on data scale for model training and the biases introduced by trained models, we propose a novel prompt optimization framework, designed to rephrase a simple user prompt into a sophisticated prompt to a text-to-image model. Specifically, we employ the large vision language models (LVLMs) as the solver to rewrite the user prompt, and concurrently, employ LVLMs as a reward model to score the aesthetics and alignment of the images generated by the optimized prompt. Instead of laborious human feedback, we exploit the prior knowledge of the LVLM to provide rewards, i.e., AI feedback. Simultaneously, the solver and the reward model are unified into one model and iterated in reinforcement learning to achieve self-improvement by giving a solution and judging itself. Results on two popular datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other strong competitors.

Text-to-image generative models often struggle with long prompts detailing complex scenes, diverse objects with distinct visual characteristics and spatial relationships. In this work, we propose SCoPE (Scheduled interpolation of Coarse-to-fine Prompt Embeddings), a training-free method to improve text-to-image alignment by progressively refining the input prompt in a coarse-to-fine-grained manner. Given a detailed input prompt, we first decompose it into multiple sub-prompts which evolve from describing broad scene layout to highly intricate details. During inference, we interpolate between these sub-prompts and thus progressively introduce finer-grained details into the generated image. Our training-free plug-and-play approach significantly enhances prompt alignment, achieves an average improvement of more than +8 in Visual Question Answering (VQA) scores over the Stable Diffusion baselines on 83% of the prompts from the GenAI-Bench dataset.

Metalenses offer significant potential for ultra-compact computational imaging but face challenges from complex optical degradation and computational restoration difficulties. Existing methods typically rely on precise optical calibration or massive paired datasets, which are non-trivial for real-world imaging systems. Furthermore, a lack of control over the inference process often results in undesirable hallucinated artifacts. We introduce Degradation-Modeled Multipath Diffusion for tunable metalens photography, leveraging powerful natural image priors from pretrained models instead of large datasets. Our framework uses positive, neutral, and negative-prompt paths to balance high-frequency detail generation, structural fidelity, and suppression of metalens-specific degradation, alongside pseudo data augmentation. A tunable decoder enables controlled trade-offs between fidelity and perceptual quality. Additionally, a spatially varying degradation-aware attention (SVDA) module adaptively models complex optical and sensor-induced degradation. Finally, we design and build a millimeter-scale MetaCamera for real-world validation. Extensive results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving high-fidelity and sharp image reconstruction. More materials: https://dmdiff.github.io/.

Multimodal Diffusion Transformers (MMDiTs) for text-to-image generation maintain separate text and image branches, with bidirectional information flow between text tokens and visual latents throughout denoising. In this setting, we observe a prompt forgetting phenomenon: the semantics of the prompt representation in the text branch is progressively forgotten as depth increases. We further verify this effect on three representative MMDiTs--SD3, SD3.5, and FLUX.1 by probing linguistic attributes of the representations over the layers in the text branch. Motivated by these findings, we introduce a training-free approach, prompt reinjection, which reinjects prompt representations from early layers into later layers to alleviate this forgetting. Experiments on GenEval, DPG, and T2I-CompBench++ show consistent gains in instruction-following capability, along with improvements on metrics capturing preference, aesthetics, and overall text--image generation quality.

Diffusion models have become a powerful backbone for text-to-image generation, producing high-quality visuals from natural language prompts. However, when prompts involve multiple objects alongside global or local style instructions, the outputs often drift in style and lose spatial coherence, limiting their reliability for controlled, style-consistent scene generation. We present Local Prompt Adaptation (LPA), a lightweight, training-free method that splits the prompt into content and style tokens, then injects them selectively into the U-Net's attention layers at chosen timesteps. By conditioning object tokens early and style tokens later in the denoising process, LPA improves both layout control and stylistic uniformity without additional training cost. We conduct extensive ablations across parser settings and injection windows, finding that the best configuration -- lpa late only with a 300-650 step window -- delivers the strongest balance of prompt alignment and style consistency. On the T2I benchmark, LPA improves CLIP-prompt alignment over vanilla SDXL by +0.41% and over SD1.5 by +0.34%, with no diversity loss. On our custom 50-prompt style-rich benchmark, LPA achieves +0.09% CLIP-prompt and +0.08% CLIP-style gains over baseline. Our method is model-agnostic, easy to integrate, and requires only a single configuration change, making it a practical choice for controllable, style-consistent multi-object generation.

Diffusion models are the state of the art in text-to-image generation, but their perceptual variability remains understudied. In this paper, we examine how prompts affect image variability in black-box diffusion-based models. We propose W1KP, a human-calibrated measure of variability in a set of images, bootstrapped from existing image-pair perceptual distances. Current datasets do not cover recent diffusion models, thus we curate three test sets for evaluation. Our best perceptual distance outperforms nine baselines by up to 18 points in accuracy, and our calibration matches graded human judgements 78% of the time. Using W1KP, we study prompt reusability and show that Imagen prompts can be reused for 10-50 random seeds before new images become too similar to already generated images, while Stable Diffusion XL and DALL-E 3 can be reused 50-200 times. Lastly, we analyze 56 linguistic features of real prompts, finding that the prompt's length, CLIP embedding norm, concreteness, and word senses influence variability most. As far as we are aware, we are the first to analyze diffusion variability from a visuolinguistic perspective. Our project page is at http://w1kp.com.

Textual prompt tuning has demonstrated significant performance improvements in adapting natural language processing models to a variety of downstream tasks by treating hand-engineered prompts as trainable parameters. Inspired by the success of textual prompting, several studies have investigated the efficacy of visual prompt tuning. In this work, we present Visual Prompt Adaptation (VPA), the first framework that generalizes visual prompting with test-time adaptation. VPA introduces a small number of learnable tokens, enabling fully test-time and storage-efficient adaptation without necessitating source-domain information. We examine our VPA design under diverse adaptation settings, encompassing single-image, batched-image, and pseudo-label adaptation. We evaluate VPA on multiple tasks, including out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, corruption robustness, and domain adaptation. Experimental results reveal that VPA effectively enhances OOD generalization by 3.3% across various models, surpassing previous test-time approaches. Furthermore, we show that VPA improves corruption robustness by 6.5% compared to strong baselines. Finally, we demonstrate that VPA also boosts domain adaptation performance by relatively 5.2%. Our VPA also exhibits marked effectiveness in improving the robustness of zero-shot recognition for vision-language models.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in spatial intelligence, yet existing spatial reasoning benchmarks largely assume pristine visual inputs and overlook the degradations that commonly occur in real-world deployment, such as motion blur, low light, adverse weather, lens distortion, and compression artifacts. This raises a fundamental question: how robust is the spatial intelligence of current MLLMs when visual observations are imperfect? To answer this question, we introduce SpaceDG, the first large-scale dataset for degradation-aware spatial understanding. It is constructed with a physically grounded degradation synthesis engine that embeds degradation formation process into 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) rendering, enabling realistic simulation of nine degradation types. The resulting dataset contains approximately 1M QA pairs from nearly 1,000 indoor scenes. We further introduce SpaceDG-Bench, an human-verified benchmark with 1,102 questions spanning 11 reasoning categories and 9 visual degradation types, yielding over 10K VQA instances. Evaluating 25 open- and closed-source MLLMs reveals that visual degradations consistently and substantially impair spatial reasoning, exposing a critical robustness gap. Finally, we show that finetuning on SpaceDG markedly improves degradation robustness and can even surpass human performance under degraded conditions without any performance drop on clean images, highlighting the promise of degradation-aware training for robust spatial intelligence.

Aligning text-to-image generation with user intent remains challenging, for users who provide ambiguous inputs and struggle with model idiosyncrasies. We propose Adaptive Prompt Elicitation (APE), a technique that adaptively asks visual queries to help users refine prompts without extensive writing. Our technical contribution is a formulation of interactive intent inference under an information-theoretic framework. APE represents latent intent as interpretable feature requirements using language model priors, adaptively generates visual queries, and compiles elicited requirements into effective prompts. Evaluation on IDEA-Bench and DesignBench shows that APE achieves stronger alignment with improved efficiency. A user study with challenging user-defined tasks demonstrates 19.8% higher alignment without workload overhead. Our work contributes a principled approach to prompting that, for general users, offers an effective and efficient complement to the prevailing prompt-based interaction paradigm with text-to-image models.

Evaluating text-to-image and text-to-video models is challenging due to a fundamental disconnect: established metrics fail to jointly measure visual quality and semantic alignment with text, leading to a poor correlation with human judgments. To address this critical issue, we propose cFreD, a general metric based on a Conditional Fréchet Distance that unifies the assessment of visual fidelity and text-prompt consistency into a single score. Existing metrics such as Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) capture image quality but ignore text conditioning while alignment scores such as CLIPScore are insensitive to visual quality. Furthermore, learned preference models require constant retraining and are unlikely to generalize to novel architectures or out-of-distribution prompts. Through extensive experiments across multiple recently proposed text-to-image models and diverse prompt datasets, cFreD exhibits a higher correlation with human judgments compared to statistical metrics , including metrics trained with human preferences. Our findings validate cFreD as a robust, future-proof metric for the systematic evaluation of text conditioned models, standardizing benchmarking in this rapidly evolving field. We release our evaluation toolkit and benchmark.

We propose a novel unsupervised backlit image enhancement method, abbreviated as CLIP-LIT, by exploring the potential of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) for pixel-level image enhancement. We show that the open-world CLIP prior not only aids in distinguishing between backlit and well-lit images, but also in perceiving heterogeneous regions with different luminance, facilitating the optimization of the enhancement network. Unlike high-level and image manipulation tasks, directly applying CLIP to enhancement tasks is non-trivial, owing to the difficulty in finding accurate prompts. To solve this issue, we devise a prompt learning framework that first learns an initial prompt pair by constraining the text-image similarity between the prompt (negative/positive sample) and the corresponding image (backlit image/well-lit image) in the CLIP latent space. Then, we train the enhancement network based on the text-image similarity between the enhanced result and the initial prompt pair. To further improve the accuracy of the initial prompt pair, we iteratively fine-tune the prompt learning framework to reduce the distribution gaps between the backlit images, enhanced results, and well-lit images via rank learning, boosting the enhancement performance. Our method alternates between updating the prompt learning framework and enhancement network until visually pleasing results are achieved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and generalization ability, without requiring any paired data.

Prompt learning has emerged as an efficient and effective approach for transferring foundational Vision-Language Models (e.g., CLIP) to downstream tasks. However, current methods tend to overfit to seen categories, thereby limiting their generalization ability for unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a new method, Decoupled Prompt Learning (DPL), which reformulates the attention in prompt learning to alleviate this problem. Specifically, we theoretically investigate the collaborative process between prompts and instances (i.e., image patches/text tokens) by reformulating the original self-attention into four separate sub-processes. Through detailed analysis, we observe that certain sub-processes can be strengthened to bolster robustness and generalizability by some approximation techniques. Furthermore, we introduce language-conditioned textual prompting based on decoupled attention to naturally preserve the generalization of text input. Our approach is flexible for both visual and textual modalities, making it easily extendable to multi-modal prompt learning. By combining the proposed techniques, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on three representative benchmarks encompassing 15 image recognition datasets, while maintaining parameter-efficient. Moreover, our DPL does not rely on any auxiliary regularization task or extra training data, further demonstrating its remarkable generalization ability.

Text-to-video models have made remarkable advancements through optimization on high-quality text-video pairs, where the textual prompts play a pivotal role in determining quality of output videos. However, achieving the desired output often entails multiple revisions and iterative inference to refine user-provided prompts. Current automatic methods for refining prompts encounter challenges such as Modality-Inconsistency, Cost-Discrepancy, and Model-Unaware when applied to text-to-video diffusion models. To address these problem, we introduce an LLM-based prompt adaptation framework, termed as Prompt-A-Video, which excels in crafting Video-Centric, Labor-Free and Preference-Aligned prompts tailored to specific video diffusion model. Our approach involves a meticulously crafted two-stage optimization and alignment system. Initially, we conduct a reward-guided prompt evolution pipeline to automatically create optimal prompts pool and leverage them for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of the LLM. Then multi-dimensional rewards are employed to generate pairwise data for the SFT model, followed by the direct preference optimization (DPO) algorithm to further facilitate preference alignment. Through extensive experimentation and comparative analyses, we validate the effectiveness of Prompt-A-Video across diverse generation models, highlighting its potential to push the boundaries of video generation.

Text-to-Image (T2I) models have made remarkable progress in generating images from text prompts, but their output quality and safety still depend heavily on how prompts are phrased. Existing safety methods typically refine prompts using large language models (LLMs), but they overlook the images produced, which can result in unsafe outputs or unnecessary changes to already safe prompts. To address this, we propose an iterative prompt refinement algorithm that uses Vision Language Models (VLMs) to analyze both the input prompts and the generated images. By leveraging visual feedback, our method refines prompts more effectively, improving safety while maintaining user intent and reliability comparable to existing LLM-based approaches. Additionally, we introduce a new dataset labeled with both textual and visual safety signals using off-the-shelf multi-modal LLM, enabling supervised fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach produces safer outputs without compromising alignment with user intent, offering a practical solution for generating safer T2I content. Our code is available at https://github.com/ku-dmlab/IPR. \textcolor{redWARNING: This paper contains examples of harmful or inappropriate images generated by models.

Text-to-image (T2I) generative models such as Stable Diffusion and FLUX can synthesize realistic, high-quality images directly from textual prompts. The resulting image quality depends critically on well-crafted prompts that specify both subjects and stylistic modifiers, which have become valuable digital assets. However, the rising value and ubiquity of high-quality prompts expose them to security and intellectual-property risks. One key threat is the prompt stealing attack, i.e., the task of recovering the textual prompt that generated a given image. Prompt stealing enables unauthorized extraction and reuse of carefully engineered prompts, yet it can also support beneficial applications such as data attribution, model provenance analysis, and watermarking validation. Existing approaches often assume white-box gradient access, require large-scale labeled datasets for supervised training, or rely solely on captioning without explicit optimization, limiting their practicality and adaptability. To address these challenges, we propose PROMPTMINER, a black-box prompt stealing framework that decouples the task into two phases: (1) a reinforcement learning-based optimization phase to reconstruct the primary subject, and (2) a fuzzing-driven search phase to recover stylistic modifiers. Experiments across multiple datasets and diffusion backbones demonstrate that PROMPTMINER achieves superior results, with CLIP similarity up to 0.958 and textual alignment with SBERT up to 0.751, surpassing all baselines. Even when applied to in-the-wild images with unknown generators, it outperforms the strongest baseline by 7.5 percent in CLIP similarity, demonstrating better generalization. Finally, PROMPTMINER maintains strong performance under defensive perturbations, highlighting remarkable robustness. Code: https://github.com/aaFrostnova/PromptMiner

Large-scale Vision-Language Models, such as CLIP, learn powerful image-text representations that have found numerous applications, from zero-shot classification to text-to-image generation. Despite that, their capabilities for solving novel discriminative tasks via prompting fall behind those of large language models, such as GPT-3. Here we explore the idea of visual prompt engineering for solving computer vision tasks beyond classification by editing in image space instead of text. In particular, we discover an emergent ability of CLIP, where, by simply drawing a red circle around an object, we can direct the model's attention to that region, while also maintaining global information. We show the power of this simple approach by achieving state-of-the-art in zero-shot referring expressions comprehension and strong performance in keypoint localization tasks. Finally, we draw attention to some potential ethical concerns of large language-vision models.

Large-scale text-to-image generative models have been a ground-breaking development in generative AI, with diffusion models showing their astounding ability to synthesize convincing images following an input text prompt. The goal of image editing research is to give users control over the generated images by modifying the text prompt. Current image editing techniques are susceptible to unintended modifications of regions outside the targeted area, such as on the background or on distractor objects which have some semantic or visual relationship with the targeted object. According to our experimental findings, inaccurate cross-attention maps are at the root of this problem. Based on this observation, we propose Dynamic Prompt Learning (DPL) to force cross-attention maps to focus on correct noun words in the text prompt. By updating the dynamic tokens for nouns in the textual input with the proposed leakage repairment losses, we achieve fine-grained image editing over particular objects while preventing undesired changes to other image regions. Our method DPL, based on the publicly available Stable Diffusion, is extensively evaluated on a wide range of images, and consistently obtains superior results both quantitatively (CLIP score, Structure-Dist) and qualitatively (on user-evaluation). We show improved prompt editing results for Word-Swap, Prompt Refinement, and Attention Re-weighting, especially for complex multi-object scenes.

All-in-one image restoration, which aims to address diverse degradations within a unified framework, is critical for practical applications. However, existing methods rely on predicting and integrating degradation conditions, which can misactivate degradation-specific features in complex scenarios, limiting their restoration performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel all-in-one image restoration framework guided by Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), named HOGformer. By leveraging the degradation-discriminative capability of HOG descriptors, HOGformer employs a dynamic self-attention mechanism that adaptively attends to long-range spatial dependencies based on degradation-aware HOG cues. To enhance the degradation sensitivity of attention inputs, we design a HOG-guided local dynamic-range convolution module that captures long-range degradation similarities while maintaining awareness of global structural information. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic interaction feed-forward module, efficiently increasing the model capacity to adapt to different degradations through channel-spatial interactions. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks, including adverse weather and natural degradations, demonstrate that HOGformer achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes effectively to complex real-world degradations. Code is available at https://github.com/Fire-friend/HOGformer.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in downstream tasks that require quantitative concepts such as facial age estimation and image quality assessment, enabling VLMs to explore applications like image ranking and retrieval. However, existing studies typically focus on the reasoning based on a single image and heavily depend on text prompting, limiting their ability to learn comprehensive understanding from multiple images. To address this, we propose an effective yet efficient approach that reframes the CLIP model into a learning-to-rank task and introduces a lightweight adapter to augment CLIP for text-guided image ranking. Specifically, our approach incorporates learnable prompts to adapt to new instructions for ranking purposes and an auxiliary branch with ranking-aware attention, leveraging text-conditioned visual differences for additional supervision in image ranking. Our ranking-aware adapter consistently outperforms fine-tuned CLIPs on various tasks and achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art models designed for specific tasks like facial age estimation and image quality assessment. Overall, our approach primarily focuses on ranking images with a single instruction, which provides a natural and generalized way of learning from visual differences across images, bypassing the need for extensive text prompts tailored to individual tasks. Code is available: github.com/uynaes/RankingAwareCLIP.

Large-scale Visual-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural visual tasks, yet their application to industrial defect detection remains challenging due to two fundamental limitations: (i) the scarcity of large-scale industrial datasets that cover diverse defect categories across multiple domains, and (ii) the reliance on manual prompts (points, boxes, masks) that introduce subjective noise and lack text-visual interaction for fine-grained understanding. To address these challenges, we introduce a Large-Scale Multi-Modal Industrial Open-Closed benchmark (MMIOC-1M) containing over one million samples across 14 super-categories, 29 industrial scenes, and 351 defect subcategories. To our knowledge, MMIOC-1M is the first unified largest benchmark supporting both open-vocabulary and closed-set industrial detection, providing valuable pre-training data for LVLMs in industrial scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a Refined Text-Visual Prompt Network (RTVPNet) that incorporates three key innovations: (1) an expert-assisted domain projection mechanism that enables rapid adaptation of general vision models to industrial domains, (2) an energy-based sparse sampling strategy that automatically generates refined visual prompts without manual intervention, and (3) a bidirectional text-visual interaction module that enhances cross-modal semantic alignment and understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RTVPNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on MMIOC-1M, LVIS, and COCO benchmarks while maintaining computational efficiency. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/hellozzk/MMIO.

The concept of negative prompts, emerging from conditional generation models like Stable Diffusion, allows users to specify what to exclude from the generated images.%, demonstrating significant practical efficacy. Despite the widespread use of negative prompts, their intrinsic mechanisms remain largely unexplored. This paper presents the first comprehensive study to uncover how and when negative prompts take effect. Our extensive empirical analysis identifies two primary behaviors of negative prompts. Delayed Effect: The impact of negative prompts is observed after positive prompts render corresponding content. Deletion Through Neutralization: Negative prompts delete concepts from the generated image through a mutual cancellation effect in latent space with positive prompts. These insights reveal significant potential real-world applications; for example, we demonstrate that negative prompts can facilitate object inpainting with minimal alterations to the background via a simple adaptive algorithm. We believe our findings will offer valuable insights for the community in capitalizing on the potential of negative prompts.

In the domain of text-to-image generation, diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools. Recently, studies on visual prompting, where images are used as prompts, have enabled more precise control over style and content. However, existing methods often suffer from content leakage, where undesired elements of the visual style prompt are transferred along with the intended style. To address this issue, we 1) extend classifier-free guidance (CFG) to utilize swapping self-attention and propose 2) negative visual query guidance (NVQG) to reduce the transfer of unwanted contents. NVQG employs negative score by intentionally simulating content leakage scenarios that swap queries instead of key and values of self-attention layers from visual style prompts. This simple yet effective method significantly reduces content leakage. Furthermore, we provide careful solutions for using a real image as visual style prompts. Through extensive evaluation across various styles and text prompts, our method demonstrates superiority over existing approaches, reflecting the style of the references, and ensuring that resulting images match the text prompts. Our code is available https://github.com/naver-ai/StyleKeeper{here}.

Prompt tuning, a parameter- and data-efficient transfer learning paradigm that tunes only a small number of parameters in a model's input space, has become a trend in the vision community since the emergence of large vision-language models like CLIP. We present a systematic study on two representative prompt tuning methods, namely text prompt tuning and visual prompt tuning. A major finding is that none of the unimodal prompt tuning methods performs consistently well: text prompt tuning fails on data with high intra-class visual variances while visual prompt tuning cannot handle low inter-class variances. To combine the best from both worlds, we propose a simple approach called Unified Prompt Tuning (UPT), which essentially learns a tiny neural network to jointly optimize prompts across different modalities. Extensive experiments on over 11 vision datasets show that UPT achieves a better trade-off than the unimodal counterparts on few-shot learning benchmarks, as well as on domain generalization benchmarks. Code and models will be released to facilitate future research.

While existing large vision-language multimodal models focus on whole image understanding, there is a prominent gap in achieving region-specific comprehension. Current approaches that use textual coordinates or spatial encodings often fail to provide a user-friendly interface for visual prompting. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multimodal model capable of decoding arbitrary visual prompts. This allows users to intuitively mark images and interact with the model using natural cues like a "red bounding box" or "pointed arrow". Our simple design directly overlays visual markers onto the RGB image, eliminating the need for complex region encodings, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on region-understanding tasks like Visual7W, PointQA, and Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, we present ViP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark to assess the capability of models in understanding visual prompts across multiple dimensions, enabling future research in this domain. Code, data, and model are publicly available.

Visual prompt engineering is a fundamental technology in the field of visual and image Artificial General Intelligence, serving as a key component for achieving zero-shot capabilities. As the development of large vision models progresses, the importance of prompt engineering becomes increasingly evident. Designing suitable prompts for specific visual tasks has emerged as a meaningful research direction. This review aims to summarize the methods employed in the computer vision domain for large vision models and visual prompt engineering, exploring the latest advancements in visual prompt engineering. We present influential large models in the visual domain and a range of prompt engineering methods employed on these models. It is our hope that this review provides a comprehensive and systematic description of prompt engineering methods based on large visual models, offering valuable insights for future researchers in their exploration of this field.

Prompt engineering is a technique that involves augmenting a large pre-trained model with task-specific hints, known as prompts, to adapt the model to new tasks. Prompts can be created manually as natural language instructions or generated automatically as either natural language instructions or vector representations. Prompt engineering enables the ability to perform predictions based solely on prompts without updating model parameters, and the easier application of large pre-trained models in real-world tasks. In past years, Prompt engineering has been well-studied in natural language processing. Recently, it has also been intensively studied in vision-language modeling. However, there is currently a lack of a systematic overview of prompt engineering on pre-trained vision-language models. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge research in prompt engineering on three types of vision-language models: multimodal-to-text generation models (e.g. Flamingo), image-text matching models (e.g. CLIP), and text-to-image generation models (e.g. Stable Diffusion). For each type of model, a brief model summary, prompting methods, prompting-based applications, and the corresponding responsibility and integrity issues are summarized and discussed. Furthermore, the commonalities and differences between prompting on vision-language models, language models, and vision models are also discussed. The challenges, future directions, and research opportunities are summarized to foster future research on this topic.

The progress in the generation of synthetic images has made it crucial to assess their quality. While several metrics have been proposed to assess the rendering of images, it is crucial for Text-to-Image (T2I) models, which generate images based on a prompt, to consider additional aspects such as to which extent the generated image matches the important content of the prompt. Moreover, although the generated images usually result from a random starting point, the influence of this one is generally not considered. In this article, we propose a new metric based on prompt templates to study the alignment between the content specified in the prompt and the corresponding generated images. It allows us to better characterize the alignment in terms of the type of the specified objects, their number, and their color. We conducted a study on several recent T2I models about various aspects. An additional interesting result we obtained with our approach is that image quality can vary drastically depending on the latent noise used as a seed for the images. We also quantify the influence of the number of concepts in the prompt, their order as well as their (color) attributes. Finally, our method allows us to identify some latent seeds that produce better images than others, opening novel directions of research on this understudied topic.

We investigate the efficacy of visual prompting to adapt large-scale models in vision. Following the recent approach from prompt tuning and adversarial reprogramming, we learn a single image perturbation such that a frozen model prompted with this perturbation performs a new task. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that visual prompting is particularly effective for CLIP and robust to distribution shift, achieving performance competitive with standard linear probes. We further analyze properties of the downstream dataset, prompt design, and output transformation in regard to adaptation performance. The surprising effectiveness of visual prompting provides a new perspective on adapting pre-trained models in vision. Code is available at http://hjbahng.github.io/visual_prompting .

Recent developments in the field of diffusion models have demonstrated an exceptional capacity to generate high-quality prompt-conditioned image edits. Nevertheless, previous approaches have primarily relied on textual prompts for image editing, which tend to be less effective when making precise edits to specific objects or fine-grained regions within a scene containing single/multiple objects. We introduce a novel framework for zero-shot localized multi-object editing through a multi-diffusion process to overcome this challenge. This framework empowers users to perform various operations on objects within an image, such as adding, replacing, or editing many objects in a complex scene in one pass. Our approach leverages foreground masks and corresponding simple text prompts that exert localized influences on the target regions resulting in high-fidelity image editing. A combination of cross-attention and background preservation losses within the latent space ensures that the characteristics of the object being edited are preserved while simultaneously achieving a high-quality, seamless reconstruction of the background with fewer artifacts compared to the current methods. We also curate and release a dataset dedicated to multi-object editing, named LoMOE-Bench. Our experiments against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the improved effectiveness of our approach in terms of both image editing quality and inference speed.

CLIP-based prompt tuning enables pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to efficiently adapt to downstream tasks. Although existing studies have made significant progress, they pay limited attention to changes in the internal attention representations of VLMs during the tuning process. In this paper, we attribute the failure modes of prompt tuning predictions to shifts in foreground attention of the visual encoder, and propose Foreground View-Guided Prompt Tuning (FVG-PT), an adaptive plug-and-play foreground attention guidance module, to alleviate the shifts. Concretely, FVG-PT introduces a learnable Foreground Reliability Gate to automatically enhance the foreground view quality, applies a Foreground Distillation Compensation module to guide visual attention toward the foreground, and further introduces a Prior Calibration module to mitigate generalization degradation caused by excessive focus on the foreground. Experiments on multiple backbone models and datasets show the effectiveness and compatibility of FVG-PT. Codes are available at: https://github.com/JREion/FVG-PT

A significant research effort is focused on exploiting the amazing capacities of pretrained diffusion models for the editing of images. They either finetune the model, or invert the image in the latent space of the pretrained model. However, they suffer from two problems: (1) Unsatisfying results for selected regions, and unexpected changes in nonselected regions. (2) They require careful text prompt editing where the prompt should include all visual objects in the input image. To address this, we propose two improvements: (1) Only optimizing the input of the value linear network in the cross-attention layers, is sufficiently powerful to reconstruct a real image. (2) We propose attention regularization to preserve the object-like attention maps after editing, enabling us to obtain accurate style editing without invoking significant structural changes. We further improve the editing technique which is used for the unconditional branch of classifier-free guidance, as well as the conditional one as used by P2P. Extensive experimental prompt-editing results on a variety of images, demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively that our method has superior editing capabilities than existing and concurrent works.

Text-to-image generation models are powerful but difficult to use. Users craft specific prompts to get better images, though the images can be repetitive. This paper proposes a Prompt Expansion framework that helps users generate high-quality, diverse images with less effort. The Prompt Expansion model takes a text query as input and outputs a set of expanded text prompts that are optimized such that when passed to a text-to-image model, generates a wider variety of appealing images. We conduct a human evaluation study that shows that images generated through Prompt Expansion are more aesthetically pleasing and diverse than those generated by baseline methods. Overall, this paper presents a novel and effective approach to improving the text-to-image generation experience.

We introduce Style Tailoring, a recipe to finetune Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) in a distinct domain with high visual quality, prompt alignment and scene diversity. We choose sticker image generation as the target domain, as the images significantly differ from photorealistic samples typically generated by large-scale LDMs. We start with a competent text-to-image model, like Emu, and show that relying on prompt engineering with a photorealistic model to generate stickers leads to poor prompt alignment and scene diversity. To overcome these drawbacks, we first finetune Emu on millions of sticker-like images collected using weak supervision to elicit diversity. Next, we curate human-in-the-loop (HITL) Alignment and Style datasets from model generations, and finetune to improve prompt alignment and style alignment respectively. Sequential finetuning on these datasets poses a tradeoff between better style alignment and prompt alignment gains. To address this tradeoff, we propose a novel fine-tuning method called Style Tailoring, which jointly fits the content and style distribution and achieves best tradeoff. Evaluation results show our method improves visual quality by 14%, prompt alignment by 16.2% and scene diversity by 15.3%, compared to prompt engineering the base Emu model for stickers generation.

Pre-trained vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, working with manually designed prompts have demonstrated great capacity of transfer learning. Recently, learnable prompts achieve state-of-the-art performance, which however are prone to overfit to seen classes, failing to generalize to unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Aware Prompt Tuning (KAPT) framework for vision-language models. Our approach takes inspiration from human intelligence in which external knowledge is usually incorporated into recognizing novel categories of objects. Specifically, we design two complementary types of knowledge-aware prompts for the text encoder to leverage the distinctive characteristics of category-related external knowledge. The discrete prompt extracts the key information from descriptions of an object category, and the learned continuous prompt captures overall contexts. We further design an adaptation head for the visual encoder to aggregate salient attentive visual cues, which establishes discriminative and task-aware visual representations. We conduct extensive experiments on 11 widely-used benchmark datasets and the results verify the effectiveness in few-shot image classification, especially in generalizing to unseen categories. Compared with the state-of-the-art CoCoOp method, KAPT exhibits favorable performance and achieves an absolute gain of 3.22% on new classes and 2.57% in terms of harmonic mean.

Prompt learning has become one of the most efficient paradigms for adapting large pre-trained vision-language models to downstream tasks. Current state-of-the-art methods, like CoOp and ProDA, tend to adopt soft prompts to learn an appropriate prompt for each specific task. Recent CoCoOp further boosts the base-to-new generalization performance via an image-conditional prompt. However, it directly fuses identical image semantics to prompts of different labels and significantly weakens the discrimination among different classes as shown in our experiments. Motivated by this observation, we first propose a class-aware text prompt (CTP) to enrich generated prompts with label-related image information. Unlike CoCoOp, CTP can effectively involve image semantics and avoid introducing extra ambiguities into different prompts. On the other hand, instead of reserving the complete image representations, we propose text-guided feature tuning (TFT) to make the image branch attend to class-related representation. A contrastive loss is employed to align such augmented text and image representations on downstream tasks. In this way, the image-to-text CTP and text-to-image TFT can be mutually promoted to enhance the adaptation of VLMs for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing methods by a significant margin. Especially, compared to CoCoOp, we achieve an average improvement of 4.03% on new classes and 3.19% on harmonic-mean over eleven classification benchmarks.

Large pre-trained vision-language models such as CLIP have demonstrated great potential in zero-shot transferability to downstream tasks. However, to attain optimal performance, the manual selection of prompts is necessary to improve alignment between the downstream image distribution and the textual class descriptions. This manual prompt engineering is the major challenge for deploying such models in practice since it requires domain expertise and is extremely time-consuming. To avoid non-trivial prompt engineering, recent work Context Optimization (CoOp) introduced the concept of prompt learning to the vision domain using learnable textual tokens. While CoOp can achieve substantial improvements over manual prompts, its learned context is worse generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset. In this work, we present Prompt Learning with Reparameterization Encoder (PRE) - a simple and efficient method that enhances the generalization ability of the learnable prompt to unseen classes while maintaining the capacity to learn Base classes. Instead of directly optimizing the prompts, PRE employs a prompt encoder to reparameterize the input prompt embeddings, enhancing the exploration of task-specific knowledge from few-shot samples. Experiments and extensive ablation studies on 8 benchmarks demonstrate that our approach is an efficient method for prompt learning. Specifically, PRE achieves a notable enhancement of 5.60% in average accuracy on New classes and 3% in Harmonic mean compared to CoOp in the 16-shot setting, all achieved within a good training time.

We present T-Rex2, a highly practical model for open-set object detection. Previous open-set object detection methods relying on text prompts effectively encapsulate the abstract concept of common objects, but struggle with rare or complex object representation due to data scarcity and descriptive limitations. Conversely, visual prompts excel in depicting novel objects through concrete visual examples, but fall short in conveying the abstract concept of objects as effectively as text prompts. Recognizing the complementary strengths and weaknesses of both text and visual prompts, we introduce T-Rex2 that synergizes both prompts within a single model through contrastive learning. T-Rex2 accepts inputs in diverse formats, including text prompts, visual prompts, and the combination of both, so that it can handle different scenarios by switching between the two prompt modalities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that T-Rex2 exhibits remarkable zero-shot object detection capabilities across a wide spectrum of scenarios. We show that text prompts and visual prompts can benefit from each other within the synergy, which is essential to cover massive and complicated real-world scenarios and pave the way towards generic object detection. Model API is now available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/T-Rex.

Achieving high-quality versatile image inpainting, where user-specified regions are filled with plausible content according to user intent, presents a significant challenge. Existing methods face difficulties in simultaneously addressing context-aware image inpainting and text-guided object inpainting due to the distinct optimal training strategies required. To overcome this challenge, we introduce PowerPaint, the first high-quality and versatile inpainting model that excels in both tasks. First, we introduce learnable task prompts along with tailored fine-tuning strategies to guide the model's focus on different inpainting targets explicitly. This enables PowerPaint to accomplish various inpainting tasks by utilizing different task prompts, resulting in state-of-the-art performance. Second, we demonstrate the versatility of the task prompt in PowerPaint by showcasing its effectiveness as a negative prompt for object removal. Additionally, we leverage prompt interpolation techniques to enable controllable shape-guided object inpainting. Finally, we extensively evaluate PowerPaint on various inpainting benchmarks to demonstrate its superior performance for versatile image inpainting. We release our codes and models on our project page: https://powerpaint.github.io/.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently rely on language priors, producing confident answers that are weakly grounded in visual evidence. While this behavior is widely observed, its internal mechanisms and its impact on benchmark evaluation remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we study language-prior reliance from both mechanistic and behavioral perspectives. Internally, we combine counterfactual layer replacement with supervised layer-wise MLP probing to trace how ground-truth visual semantics and language-prior semantics compete across the language decoder. Our analysis reveals a multi-stage bottleneck: intermediate layers often fail to effectively retrieve visual information, while later layers can further suppress surviving visual signals in favor of text-space biases. Externally, we introduce a progressive visual decay metric based on multi-step Gaussian blurring, which identifies instances whose answers remain invariant even as visual content is increasingly destroyed. Across twelve visual question-answering benchmarks and three representative VLMs, we find that a substantial fraction of examples remain answerable under severe or total visual obfuscation, indicating that current benchmarks can inadvertently reward visual ignorance. These findings demonstrate that language-prior reliance is a systematic routing failure affecting both model internals and benchmark validity. Finally, we outline critical pathways for future research, highlighting the necessity of designing training distributions and evaluation protocols built on structurally isolated or counterfactual data to enforce genuine cross-modal grounding.

We present a novel methodology aimed at optimizing the application of frozen large language models (LLMs) for resource-intensive vision-language (VL) pre-training. The current paradigm uses visual features as prompts to guide language models, with a focus on determining the most relevant visual features for corresponding text. Our approach diverges by concentrating on the language component, specifically identifying the optimal prompts to align with visual features. We introduce the Prompt-Transformer (P-Former), a model that predicts these ideal prompts, which is trained exclusively on linguistic data, bypassing the need for image-text pairings. This strategy subtly bifurcates the end-to-end VL training process into an additional, separate stage. Our experiments reveal that our framework significantly enhances the performance of a robust image-to-text baseline (BLIP-2), and effectively narrows the performance gap between models trained with either 4M or 129M image-text pairs. Importantly, our framework is modality-agnostic and flexible in terms of architectural design, as validated by its successful application in a video learning task using varied base modules. The code is available at https://github.com/yiren-jian/BLIText

While large-scale datasets have driven significant progress in Text-to-Video (T2V) generative models, these models remain highly sensitive to input prompts, demonstrating that prompt design is critical to generation quality. Current methods for improving video output often fall short: they either depend on complex, post-editing models, risking the introduction of artifacts, or require expensive fine-tuning of the core generator, which severely limits both scalability and accessibility. In this work, we introduce 3R, a novel RAG based prompt optimization framework. 3R utilizes the power of current state-of-the-art T2V diffusion model and vision language model. It can be used with any T2V model without any kind of model training. The framework leverages three key strategies: RAG-based modifiers extraction for enriched contextual grounding, diffusion-based Preference Optimization for aligning outputs with human preferences, and temporal frame interpolation for producing temporally consistent visual contents. Together, these components enable more accurate, efficient, and contextually aligned text-to-video generation. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of 3R in enhancing the static fidelity and dynamic coherence of generated videos, underscoring the importance of optimizing user prompts.

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have achieved remarkable visual outcomes through large-scale rectified flow models. However, how these models behave under long prompts remains underexplored. Long prompts encode rich content, spatial, and stylistic information that enhances fidelity but often suppresses diversity, leading to repetitive and less creative outputs. In this work, we systematically study this fidelity-diversity dilemma and reveal that state-of-the-art models exhibit a clear drop in diversity as prompt length increases. To enable consistent evaluation, we introduce LPD-Bench, a benchmark designed for assessing both fidelity and diversity in long-prompt generation. Building on our analysis, we develop a theoretical framework that increases sampling entropy through prompt reformulation and propose a training-free method, PromptMoG, which samples prompt embeddings from a Mixture-of-Gaussians in the embedding space to enhance diversity while preserving semantics. Extensive experiments on four state-of-the-art models, SD3.5-Large, Flux.1-Krea-Dev, CogView4, and Qwen-Image, demonstrate that PromptMoG consistently improves long-prompt generation diversity without semantic drifting.

How does one adapt a pre-trained visual model to novel downstream tasks without task-specific finetuning or any model modification? Inspired by prompting in NLP, this paper investigates visual prompting: given input-output image example(s) of a new task at test time and a new input image, the goal is to automatically produce the output image, consistent with the given examples. We show that posing this problem as simple image inpainting - literally just filling in a hole in a concatenated visual prompt image - turns out to be surprisingly effective, provided that the inpainting algorithm has been trained on the right data. We train masked auto-encoders on a new dataset that we curated - 88k unlabeled figures from academic papers sources on Arxiv. We apply visual prompting to these pretrained models and demonstrate results on various downstream image-to-image tasks, including foreground segmentation, single object detection, colorization, edge detection, etc.

Prompt tuning (PT), as an emerging resource-efficient fine-tuning paradigm, has showcased remarkable effectiveness in improving the task-specific transferability of vision-language models. This paper delves into a previously overlooked information asymmetry issue in PT, where the visual modality mostly conveys more context than the object-oriented textual modality. Correspondingly, coarsely aligning these two modalities could result in the biased attention, driving the model to merely focus on the context area. To address this, we propose DAPT, an effective PT framework based on an intuitive decouple-before-align concept. First, we propose to explicitly decouple the visual modality into the foreground and background representation via exploiting coarse-and-fine visual segmenting cues, and then both of these decoupled patterns are aligned with the original foreground texts and the hand-crafted background classes, thereby symmetrically strengthening the modal alignment. To further enhance the visual concentration, we propose a visual pull-push regularization tailored for the foreground-background patterns, directing the original visual representation towards unbiased attention on the region-of-interest object. We demonstrate the power of architecture-free DAPT through few-shot learning, base-to-novel generalization, and data-efficient learning, all of which yield superior performance across prevailing benchmarks. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Ferenas/DAPT.

State-of-the-art text-to-image models produce visually impressive results but often struggle with precise alignment to text prompts, leading to missing critical elements or unintended blending of distinct concepts. We propose a novel approach that learns a high-success-rate distribution conditioned on a target prompt, ensuring that generated images faithfully reflect the corresponding prompts. Our method explicitly models the signal component during the denoising process, offering fine-grained control that mitigates over-optimization and out-of-distribution artifacts. Moreover, our framework is training-free and seamlessly integrates with both existing diffusion and flow matching architectures. It also supports additional conditioning modalities -- such as bounding boxes -- for enhanced spatial alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/grimalPaul/gsn-factory.

Language has emerged as a natural interface for image editing. In this paper, we introduce a method for region-based image editing driven by textual prompts, without the need for user-provided masks or sketches. Specifically, our approach leverages an existing pretrained text-to-image model and introduces a bounding box generator to find the edit regions that are aligned with the textual prompts. We show that this simple approach enables flexible editing that is compatible with current image generation models, and is able to handle complex prompts featuring multiple objects, complex sentences or long paragraphs. We conduct an extensive user study to compare our method against state-of-the-art methods. Experiments demonstrate the competitive performance of our method in manipulating images with high fidelity and realism that align with the language descriptions provided. Our project webpage: https://yuanze-lin.me/LearnableRegions_page.

Today's image generation systems are capable of producing realistic and high-quality images. However, user prompts often contain ambiguities, making it difficult for these systems to interpret users' actual intentions. Consequently, many users must modify their prompts several times to ensure the generated images meet their expectations. While some methods focus on enhancing prompts to make the generated images fit user needs, the model is still hard to understand users' real needs, especially for non-expert users. In this research, we aim to enhance the visual parameter-tuning process, making the model user-friendly for individuals without specialized knowledge and better understand user needs. We propose a human-machine co-adaption strategy using mutual information between the user's prompts and the pictures under modification as the optimizing target to make the system better adapt to user needs. We find that an improved model can reduce the necessity for multiple rounds of adjustments. We also collect multi-round dialogue datasets with prompts and images pairs and user intent. Various experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in our proposed dataset. Our annotation tools and several examples of our dataset are available at https://zenodo.org/records/14876029 for easier review. We will make open source our full dataset and code.

Recent RGB-guided depth super-resolution methods have achieved impressive performance under the assumption of fixed and known degradation (e.g., bicubic downsampling). However, in real-world scenarios, captured depth data often suffer from unconventional and unknown degradation due to sensor limitations and complex imaging environments (e.g., low reflective surfaces, varying illumination). Consequently, the performance of these methods significantly declines when real-world degradation deviate from their assumptions. In this paper, we propose the Degradation Oriented and Regularized Network (DORNet), a novel framework designed to adaptively address unknown degradation in real-world scenes through implicit degradation representations. Our approach begins with the development of a self-supervised degradation learning strategy, which models the degradation representations of low-resolution depth data using routing selection-based degradation regularization. To facilitate effective RGB-D fusion, we further introduce a degradation-oriented feature transformation module that selectively propagates RGB content into the depth data based on the learned degradation priors. Extensive experimental results on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our DORNet in handling unknown degradation, outperforming existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/yanzq95/DORNet.

Recent advances in diffusion models have enhanced multimodal-guided visual generation, enabling customized subject insertion that seamlessly "brushes" user-specified objects into a given image guided by textual prompts. However, existing methods often struggle to insert customized subjects with high fidelity and align results with the user's intent through textual prompts. In this work, we propose "In-Context Brush", a zero-shot framework for customized subject insertion by reformulating the task within the paradigm of in-context learning. Without loss of generality, we formulate the object image and the textual prompts as cross-modal demonstrations, and the target image with the masked region as the query. The goal is to inpaint the target image with the subject aligning textual prompts without model tuning. Building upon a pretrained MMDiT-based inpainting network, we perform test-time enhancement via dual-level latent space manipulation: intra-head "latent feature shifting" within each attention head that dynamically shifts attention outputs to reflect the desired subject semantics and inter-head "attention reweighting" across different heads that amplifies prompt controllability through differential attention prioritization. Extensive experiments and applications demonstrate that our approach achieves superior identity preservation, text alignment, and image quality compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, without requiring dedicated training or additional data collection.

The strength of modern generative models lies in their ability to be controlled through text-based prompts. Typical "hard" prompts are made from interpretable words and tokens, and must be hand-crafted by humans. There are also "soft" prompts, which consist of continuous feature vectors. These can be discovered using powerful optimization methods, but they cannot be easily interpreted, re-used across models, or plugged into a text-based interface. We describe an approach to robustly optimize hard text prompts through efficient gradient-based optimization. Our approach automatically generates hard text-based prompts for both text-to-image and text-to-text applications. In the text-to-image setting, the method creates hard prompts for diffusion models, allowing API users to easily generate, discover, and mix and match image concepts without prior knowledge on how to prompt the model. In the text-to-text setting, we show that hard prompts can be automatically discovered that are effective in tuning LMs for classification.

Despite recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models, they often fail to faithfully render all elements of complex prompts, frequently omitting or misrepresenting specific objects and attributes. Test-time optimization has emerged as a promising approach to address this limitation by refining generation without the need for retraining. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained test-time optimization framework that enhances compositional faithfulness in T2I generation. Unlike most of prior approaches that rely solely on a global image/text similarity score, our method decomposes the input prompt into semantic concepts and evaluates alignment at both the global and concept levels. A fine-grained variant of CLIP is used to compute concept-level correspondence, producing detailed feedback on missing or inaccurate concepts. This feedback is fed into an iterative prompt refinement loop, enabling the large language model to propose improved prompts. Experiments on DrawBench and CompBench prompts demonstrate that our method significantly improves concept coverage and human-judged faithfulness over both standard test-time optimization and the base T2I model. Code is available at: https://github.com/AmirMansurian/NoConceptLeftBehind

Recent state-of-the-art image restoration methods mostly adopt latent diffusion models with U-Net backbones, yet still facing challenges in achieving high-quality restoration due to their limited capabilities. Diffusion transformers (DiTs), like SD3, are emerging as a promising alternative because of their better quality with scalability. In this paper, we introduce DPIR (Dual Prompting Image Restoration), a novel image restoration method that effectivly extracts conditional information of low-quality images from multiple perspectives. Specifically, DPIR consits of two branches: a low-quality image conditioning branch and a dual prompting control branch. The first branch utilizes a lightweight module to incorporate image priors into the DiT with high efficiency. More importantly, we believe that in image restoration, textual description alone cannot fully capture its rich visual characteristics. Therefore, a dual prompting module is designed to provide DiT with additional visual cues, capturing both global context and local appearance. The extracted global-local visual prompts as extra conditional control, alongside textual prompts to form dual prompts, greatly enhance the quality of the restoration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DPIR delivers superior image restoration performance.

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.

Prompt learning has become a dominant paradigm for adapting vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP to downstream tasks without modifying pretrained weights. While extending prompts to both vision and text encoders across multiple transformer layers significantly boosts performance, it dramatically increases the number of trainable parameters, with state-of-the-art methods requiring millions of parameters and abandoning the parameter efficiency that makes prompt tuning attractive. In this work, we propose MMLoP (Multi-Modal Low-Rank Prompting), a framework that achieves deep multi-modal prompting with only 11.5K trainable parameters, comparable to early text-only methods like CoOp. MMLoP parameterizes vision and text prompts at each transformer layer through a low-rank factorization that constrains prompts to a compact subspace, providing parameter efficiency while motivating the need for our complementary regularization components. To further close the accuracy gap with state-of-the-art methods, we introduce three complementary components: a self-regulating consistency loss that anchors prompted representations to frozen zero-shot CLIP features at both the feature and logit levels, a uniform drift correction that removes the global embedding shift induced by prompt tuning to preserve class-discriminative structure, and a shared up-projection that couples vision and text prompts through a common low-rank factor to enforce cross-modal alignment. Extensive experiments across three benchmarks and 11 diverse datasets demonstrate that MMLoP achieves a highly favorable accuracy-efficiency tradeoff, outperforming the majority of existing methods including those with orders of magnitude more parameters, while achieving a harmonic mean of 79.70\% on base-to-novel generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/sajjad-ucsb/MMLoP.

Video generation models have achieved remarkable progress in text-to-video tasks. These models are typically trained on text-video pairs with highly detailed and carefully crafted descriptions, while real-world user inputs during inference are often concise, vague, or poorly structured. This gap makes prompt optimization crucial for generating high-quality videos. Current methods often rely on large language models (LLMs) to refine prompts through in-context learning, but suffer from several limitations: they may distort user intent, omit critical details, or introduce safety risks. Moreover, they optimize prompts without considering the impact on the final video quality, which can lead to suboptimal results. To address these issues, we introduce VPO, a principled framework that optimizes prompts based on three core principles: harmlessness, accuracy, and helpfulness. The generated prompts faithfully preserve user intents and, more importantly, enhance the safety and quality of generated videos. To achieve this, VPO employs a two-stage optimization approach. First, we construct and refine a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset based on principles of safety and alignment. Second, we introduce both text-level and video-level feedback to further optimize the SFT model with preference learning. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that VPO significantly improves safety, alignment, and video quality compared to baseline methods. Moreover, VPO shows strong generalization across video generation models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that VPO could outperform and be combined with RLHF methods on video generation models, underscoring the effectiveness of VPO in aligning video generation models. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/thu-coai/VPO.

In this paper we propose a novel modification of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) guidance for the task of unsupervised backlit image enhancement. Our work builds on the state-of-the-art CLIP-LIT approach, which learns a prompt pair by constraining the text-image similarity between a prompt (negative/positive sample) and a corresponding image (backlit image/well-lit image) in the CLIP embedding space. Learned prompts then guide an image enhancement network. Based on the CLIP-LIT framework, we propose two novel methods for CLIP guidance. First, we show that instead of tuning prompts in the space of text embeddings, it is possible to directly tune their embeddings in the latent space without any loss in quality. This accelerates training and potentially enables the use of additional encoders that do not have a text encoder. Second, we propose a novel approach that does not require any prompt tuning. Instead, based on CLIP embeddings of backlit and well-lit images from training data, we compute the residual vector in the embedding space as a simple difference between the mean embeddings of the well-lit and backlit images. This vector then guides the enhancement network during training, pushing a backlit image towards the space of well-lit images. This approach further dramatically reduces training time, stabilizes training and produces high quality enhanced images without artifacts, both in supervised and unsupervised training regimes. Additionally, we show that residual vectors can be interpreted, revealing biases in training data, and thereby enabling potential bias correction.

In this paper, we propose a novel parameter-efficient adaptation method for No- Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) using visual prompts optimized in pixel-space. Unlike full fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), our approach trains only 600K parameters at most (< 0.01% of the base model), while keeping the underlying model fully frozen. During inference, these visual prompts are combined with images via addition and processed by mPLUG-Owl2 with the textual query "Rate the technical quality of the image." Evaluations across distortion types (synthetic, realistic, AI-generated) on KADID- 10k, KonIQ-10k, and AGIQA-3k demonstrate competitive performance against full finetuned methods and specialized NR-IQA models, achieving 0.93 SRCC on KADID-10k. To our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage pixel-space visual prompts for NR-IQA, enabling efficient MLLM adaptation for low-level vision tasks. The source code is publicly available at https: // github. com/ yahya-ben/ mplug2-vp-for-nriqa .

Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on web-scale datasets have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on downstream tasks when fine-tuned with minimal data. However, many VLMs rely on proprietary data and are not open-source, which restricts the use of white-box approaches for fine-tuning. As such, we aim to develop a black-box approach to optimize VLMs through natural language prompts, thereby avoiding the need to access model parameters, feature embeddings, or even output logits. We propose employing chat-based LLMs to search for the best text prompt for VLMs. Specifically, we adopt an automatic hill-climbing procedure that converges to an effective prompt by evaluating the performance of current prompts and asking LLMs to refine them based on textual feedback, all within a conversational process without human-in-the-loop. In a challenging 1-shot image classification setup, our simple approach surpasses the white-box continuous prompting method (CoOp) by an average of 1.5% across 11 datasets including ImageNet. Our approach also outperforms both human-engineered and LLM-generated prompts. We highlight the advantage of conversational feedback that incorporates both positive and negative prompts, suggesting that LLMs can utilize the implicit gradient direction in textual feedback for a more efficient search. In addition, we find that the text prompts generated through our strategy are not only more interpretable but also transfer well across different VLM architectures in a black-box manner. Lastly, we demonstrate our framework on a state-of-the-art black-box VLM (DALL-E 3) for text-to-image optimization.

Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation but encounter challenges when processing lengthy and intricate text prompts describing complex scenes with multiple objects. While excelling in generating images from short, single-object descriptions, these models often struggle to faithfully capture all the nuanced details within longer and more elaborate textual inputs. In response, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract critical components from text prompts, including bounding box coordinates for foreground objects, detailed textual descriptions for individual objects, and a succinct background context. These components form the foundation of our layout-to-image generation model, which operates in two phases. The initial Global Scene Generation utilizes object layouts and background context to create an initial scene but often falls short in faithfully representing object characteristics as specified in the prompts. To address this limitation, we introduce an Iterative Refinement Scheme that iteratively evaluates and refines box-level content to align them with their textual descriptions, recomposing objects as needed to ensure consistency. Our evaluation on complex prompts featuring multiple objects demonstrates a substantial improvement in recall compared to baseline diffusion models. This is further validated by a user study, underscoring the efficacy of our approach in generating coherent and detailed scenes from intricate textual inputs.

In the creative practice of text-to-image (TTI) generation, images are synthesized from textual prompts. By design, TTI models always yield an output, even if the prompt contains unknown terms. In this case, the model may generate default images: images that closely resemble each other across many unrelated prompts. Studying default images is valuable for designing better solutions for prompt engineering and TTI generation. We present the first investigation into default images on Midjourney. We describe an initial study in which we manually created input prompts triggering default images, and several ablation studies. Building on these, we conduct a computational analysis of over 750,000 images, revealing consistent default images across unrelated prompts. We also conduct an online user study investigating how default images may affect user satisfaction. Our work lays the foundation for understanding default images in TTI generation, highlighting their practical relevance as well as challenges and future research directions.

Vision generation remains a challenging frontier in artificial intelligence, requiring seamless integration of visual understanding and generative capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Vision-Driven Prompt Optimization (VDPO), that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to dynamically generate textual prompts from visual inputs, guiding high-fidelity image synthesis. VDPO combines a visual embedding prompt tuner, a textual instruction generator, and a vision generation module to achieve state-of-the-art performance in diverse vision generation tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as COCO and Sketchy demonstrate that VDPO consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving significant improvements in FID, LPIPS, and BLEU/CIDEr scores. Additional analyses reveal the scalability, robustness, and generalization capabilities of VDPO, making it a versatile solution for in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. Human evaluations further validate the practical superiority of VDPO in generating visually appealing and semantically coherent outputs.

In the evolving domain of text-to-image generation, diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools in content creation. Despite their remarkable capability, existing models still face challenges in achieving controlled generation with a consistent style, requiring costly fine-tuning or often inadequately transferring the visual elements due to content leakage. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach, \ours, to produce a diverse range of images while maintaining specific style elements and nuances. During the denoising process, we keep the query from original features while swapping the key and value with those from reference features in the late self-attention layers. This approach allows for the visual style prompting without any fine-tuning, ensuring that generated images maintain a faithful style. Through extensive evaluation across various styles and text prompts, our method demonstrates superiority over existing approaches, best reflecting the style of the references and ensuring that resulting images match the text prompts most accurately. Our project page is available https://curryjung.github.io/VisualStylePrompt/.

Recent advances in diffusion models have demonstrated impressive capability in generating high-quality images for simple prompts. However, when confronted with complex prompts involving multiple objects and hierarchical structures, existing models struggle to accurately follow instructions, leading to issues such as concept omission, confusion, and poor compositionality. To address these limitations, we propose a Hierarchical Compositional Generative framework (HiCoGen) built upon a novel Chain of Synthesis (CoS) paradigm. Instead of monolithic generation, HiCoGen first leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to decompose complex prompts into minimal semantic units. It then synthesizes these units iteratively, where the image generated in each step provides crucial visual context for the next, ensuring all textual concepts are faithfully constructed into the final scene. To further optimize this process, we introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Crucially, we identify that the limited exploration of standard diffusion samplers hinders effective RL. We theoretically prove that sample diversity is maximized by concentrating stochasticity in the early generation stages and, based on this insight, propose a novel Decaying Stochasticity Schedule to enhance exploration. Our RL algorithm is then guided by a hierarchical reward mechanism that jointly evaluates the image at the global, subject, and relationship levels. We also construct HiCoPrompt, a new text-to-image benchmark with hierarchical prompts for rigorous evaluation. Experiments show our approach significantly outperforms existing methods in both concept coverage and compositional accuracy.

Various stuff and things in visual data possess specific traits, which can be learned by deep neural networks and are implicitly represented as the visual prior, e.g., object location and shape, in the model. Such prior potentially impacts many vision tasks. For example, in conditional image synthesis, spatial conditions failing to adhere to the prior can result in visually inaccurate synthetic results. This work aims to explicitly learn the visual prior and enable the customization of sampling. Inspired by advances in language modeling, we propose to learn Visual prior via Generative Pre-Training, dubbed VisorGPT. By discretizing visual locations of objects, e.g., bounding boxes, human pose, and instance masks, into sequences, \our~can model visual prior through likelihood maximization. Besides, prompt engineering is investigated to unify various visual locations and enable customized sampling of sequential outputs from the learned prior. Experimental results demonstrate that \our~can effectively model the visual prior, which can be employed for many vision tasks, such as customizing accurate human pose for conditional image synthesis models like ControlNet. Code will be released at https://github.com/Sierkinhane/VisorGPT.

In text-to-image generation, using negative prompts, which describe undesirable image characteristics, can significantly boost image quality. However, producing good negative prompts is manual and tedious. To address this, we propose NegOpt, a novel method for optimizing negative prompt generation toward enhanced image generation, using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Our combined approach results in a substantial increase of 25% in Inception Score compared to other approaches and surpasses ground-truth negative prompts from the test set. Furthermore, with NegOpt we can preferentially optimize the metrics most important to us. Finally, we construct Negative Prompts DB, a dataset of negative prompts.

Prompt design plays a crucial role in text-to-video (T2V) generation, yet user-provided prompts are often short, unstructured, and misaligned with training data, limiting the generative potential of diffusion-based T2V models. We present RAPO++, a cross-stage prompt optimization framework that unifies training-data--aligned refinement, test-time iterative scaling, and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning to substantially improve T2V generation without modifying the underlying generative backbone. In Stage 1, Retrieval-Augmented Prompt Optimization (RAPO) enriches user prompts with semantically relevant modifiers retrieved from a relation graph and refactors them to match training distributions, enhancing compositionality and multi-object fidelity. Stage 2 introduces Sample-Specific Prompt Optimization (SSPO), a closed-loop mechanism that iteratively refines prompts using multi-source feedback -- including semantic alignment, spatial fidelity, temporal coherence, and task-specific signals such as optical flow -- yielding progressively improved video generation quality. Stage 3 leverages optimized prompt pairs from SSPO to fine-tune the rewriter LLM, internalizing task-specific optimization patterns and enabling efficient, high-quality prompt generation even before inference. Extensive experiments across five state-of-the-art T2V models and five benchmarks demonstrate that RAPO++ achieves significant gains in semantic alignment, compositional reasoning, temporal stability, and physical plausibility, outperforming existing methods by large margins. Our results highlight RAPO++ as a model-agnostic, cost-efficient, and scalable solution that sets a new standard for prompt optimization in T2V generation. The code is available at https://github.com/Vchitect/RAPO.

In this work, we present SEEM, a promptable and interactive model for segmenting everything everywhere all at once in an image, as shown in Fig.1. In SEEM, we propose a novel decoding mechanism that enables diverse prompting for all types of segmentation tasks, aiming at a universal segmentation interface that behaves like large language models (LLMs). More specifically, SEEM is designed with four desiderata: i) Versatility. We introduce a new visual prompt to unify different spatial queries including points, boxes, scribbles and masks, which can further generalize to a different referring image; ii) Compositionality. We learn a joint visual-semantic space between text and visual prompts, which facilitates the dynamic composition of two prompt types required for various segmentation tasks; iii) Interactivity. We further incorporate learnable memory prompts into the decoder to retain segmentation history through mask-guided cross-attention from decoder to image features; and iv) Semantic-awareness. We use a text encoder to encode text queries and mask labels into the same semantic space for open-vocabulary segmentation. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study to validate the effectiveness of SEEM across diverse segmentation tasks. Notably, our single SEEM model achieves competitive performance across interactive segmentation, generic segmentation, referring segmentation, and video object segmentation on 9 datasets with minimum 1/100 supervision. Furthermore, SEEM showcases a remarkable capacity for generalization to novel prompts or their combinations, rendering it a readily universal image segmentation interface.

Visual-prompt-guided edit transfer aims to learn image transformations directly from example pairs, offering more precise and controllable editing than purely text-driven approaches. However, existing diffusion transformer-based methods often fail to faithfully reproduce the demonstrated edits due to structural mismatches between the task and the backbone, including a pretrained bias toward textual conditioning and inherent stochastic instability during sampling. To bridge this gap, we present EditTransfer++, a framework that combines progressively structured training with an efficient conditioning scheme to improve both visual prompt faithfulness and inference efficiency. We first mitigate textual dominance with a text-decoupled training strategy that removes text conditioning during fine-tuning, compelling the model to infer transformations solely from visual evidence while still supporting optional text guidance at inference. On top of this visually grounded model, a best-worst contrastive refinement mechanism reshapes the denoising trajectories to suppress unfaithful generations and improve consistency across random seeds. To alleviate the computational bottleneck of high-resolution in-context editing, we further introduce a condition compression and reuse strategy that reduces token redundancy and enables efficient generation of images with a 1024-pixel long edge. Extensive experiments on existing benchmarks and the proposed EditTransfer-Bench show that EditTransfer++ achieves state-of-the-art visual prompt faithfulness with substantially faster inference than prior methods, suggesting a promising direction for scalable prompt-guided image editing and broader visual in-context learning.

Recent advancements in human preference optimization, originally developed for Large Language Models (LLMs), have shown significant potential in improving text-to-image diffusion models. These methods aim to learn the distribution of preferred samples while distinguishing them from less preferred ones. However, existing preference datasets often exhibit overlap between these distributions, leading to a conflict distribution. Additionally, we identified that input prompts contain irrelevant information for less preferred images, limiting the denoising network's ability to accurately predict noise in preference optimization methods, known as the irrelevant prompt issue. To address these challenges, we propose Dual Caption Preference Optimization (DCPO), a novel approach that utilizes two distinct captions to mitigate irrelevant prompts. To tackle conflict distribution, we introduce the Pick-Double Caption dataset, a modified version of Pick-a-Pic v2 with separate captions for preferred and less preferred images. We further propose three different strategies for generating distinct captions: captioning, perturbation, and hybrid methods. Our experiments show that DCPO significantly improves image quality and relevance to prompts, outperforming Stable Diffusion (SD) 2.1, SFT_Chosen, Diffusion-DPO, and MaPO across multiple metrics, including Pickscore, HPSv2.1, GenEval, CLIPscore, and ImageReward, fine-tuned on SD 2.1 as the backbone.

Text-driven diffusion models have become increasingly popular for various image editing tasks, including inpainting, stylization, and object replacement. However, it still remains an open research problem to adopt this language-vision paradigm for more fine-level image processing tasks, such as denoising, super-resolution, deblurring, and compression artifact removal. In this paper, we develop TIP, a Text-driven Image Processing framework that leverages natural language as a user-friendly interface to control the image restoration process. We consider the capacity of text information in two dimensions. First, we use content-related prompts to enhance the semantic alignment, effectively alleviating identity ambiguity in the restoration outcomes. Second, our approach is the first framework that supports fine-level instruction through language-based quantitative specification of the restoration strength, without the need for explicit task-specific design. In addition, we introduce a novel fusion mechanism that augments the existing ControlNet architecture by learning to rescale the generative prior, thereby achieving better restoration fidelity. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superior restoration performance of TIP compared to the state of the arts, alongside offering the flexibility of text-based control over the restoration effects.

The adaptation of large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks with limited labeled data remains a significant challenge. While parameter-efficient prompt learning methods offer a promising path, they often suffer from catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge. Toward addressing this limitation, our work is grounded in the insight that governing the evolutionary path of prompts is essential for forgetting-free adaptation. To this end, we propose EvoPrompt, a novel framework designed to explicitly steer the prompt trajectory for stable, knowledge-preserving fine-tuning. Specifically, our approach employs a Modality-Shared Prompt Projector (MPP) to generate hierarchical prompts from a unified embedding space. Critically, an evolutionary training strategy decouples low-rank updates into directional and magnitude components, preserving early-learned semantic directions while only adapting their magnitude, thus enabling prompts to evolve without discarding foundational knowledge. This process is further stabilized by Feature Geometric Regularization (FGR), which enforces feature decorrelation to prevent representation collapse. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoPrompt achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot learning while robustly preserving the original zero-shot capabilities of pre-trained VLMs.

In professional video compositing workflows, artists must manually create environmental interactions-such as shadows, reflections, dust, and splashes-between foreground subjects and background layers. Existing video generative models struggle to preserve the input video while adding such effects, and current video inpainting methods either require costly per-frame masks or yield implausible results. We introduce augmented compositing, a new task that synthesizes realistic, semi-transparent environmental effects conditioned on text prompts and input video layers, while preserving the original scene. To address this task, we present Over++, a video effect generation framework that makes no assumptions about camera pose, scene stationarity, or depth supervision. We construct a paired effect dataset tailored for this task and introduce an unpaired augmentation strategy that preserves text-driven editability. Our method also supports optional mask control and keyframe guidance without requiring dense annotations. Despite training on limited data, Over++ produces diverse and realistic environmental effects and outperforms existing baselines in both effect generation and scene preservation.

Current Cross-Modality Generation Models (GMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in various generative tasks. Given the ubiquity and information richness of vision modality inputs in real-world scenarios, Cross-vision, encompassing Vision-Language Perception (VLP) and Image-to-Image (I2I), tasks have attracted significant attention. Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) and I2I GMs are employed to handle VLP and I2I tasks, respectively. Previous research indicates that printing typographic words into input images significantly induces LVLMs and I2I GMs to generate disruptive outputs semantically related to those words. Additionally, visual prompts, as a more sophisticated form of typography, are also revealed to pose security risks to various applications of VLP tasks when injected into images. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the performance impact induced by Typographic Visual Prompt Injection (TVPI) in various LVLMs and I2I GMs. To better observe performance modifications and characteristics of this threat, we also introduce the TVPI Dataset. Through extensive explorations, we deepen the understanding of the underlying causes of the TVPI threat in various GMs and offer valuable insights into its potential origins.