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Sep 23

PySIFT: GPU-Resident Deterministic SIFT for Deep Learning Vision Pipelines

A widespread assumption in local feature research holds that classical handcrafted descriptors are accuracy-limited relics best replaced by learned alternatives. We show this is wrong. Through an 8-configuration ablation spanning four benchmarks (HPatches, ROxford5K, IMC Phototourism, MegaDepth), we demonstrate that classical SIFT with DSP multi-scale pooling outperforms neural descriptor and orientation replacements (HardNet, OriNet) on every accuracy metric--while running 2--18times faster--and that learned matchers (LightGlue) complement rather than supersede classical features. The conclusion reframes a decade of work: not "replace SIFT" but "compose with SIFT," classical extraction paired with learned matching only where geometric context demands it. This finding was invisible because no prior GPU SIFT kept the complete pipeline in VRAM or offered modularity for controlled classical-vs-learned ablations. We present PySIFT, the first fully GPU-resident SIFT, implemented in CuPy/Numba CUDA kernels with DLPack zero-copy handoff to downstream DL frameworks--submillisecond O(1) metadata swap regardless of keypoint count. On a laptop-grade NVIDIA RTX 3050 (4 GB VRAM), PySIFT achieves: (i) higher Mean Matching Accuracy (MMA) than OpenCV SIFT on HPatches, (ii) 383 ms faster per pair on high-resolution MegaDepth, (iii) higher geometric accuracy on cross-dataset benchmarks (+5.6 pp AUC@10{}^circ on MegaDepth, more inliers on IMC Phototourism), and (iv) bitwise deterministic output--identical keypoints and descriptors across runs, with detection reproducing identically even across GPU architectures: a guarantee that learned extractors cannot match without significant performance sacrifice, and cannot achieve at all across GPU architectures due to cuDNN's architecture-dependent algorithm selection. PySIFT is open-source, requiring no C++ compilation.

  • 3 authors
·
May 17

UniLumos: Fast and Unified Image and Video Relighting with Physics-Plausible Feedback

Relighting is a crucial task with both practical demand and artistic value, and recent diffusion models have shown strong potential by enabling rich and controllable lighting effects. However, as they are typically optimized in semantic latent space, where proximity does not guarantee physical correctness in visual space, they often produce unrealistic results, such as overexposed highlights, misaligned shadows, and incorrect occlusions. We address this with UniLumos, a unified relighting framework for both images and videos that brings RGB-space geometry feedback into a flow matching backbone. By supervising the model with depth and normal maps extracted from its outputs, we explicitly align lighting effects with the scene structure, enhancing physical plausibility. Nevertheless, this feedback requires high-quality outputs for supervision in visual space, making standard multi-step denoising computationally expensive. To mitigate this, we employ path consistency learning, allowing supervision to remain effective even under few-step training regimes. To enable fine-grained relighting control and supervision, we design a structured six-dimensional annotation protocol capturing core illumination attributes. Building upon this, we propose LumosBench, a disentangled attribute-level benchmark that evaluates lighting controllability via large vision-language models, enabling automatic and interpretable assessment of relighting precision across individual dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniLumos achieves state-of-the-art relighting quality with significantly improved physical consistency, while delivering a 20x speedup for both image and video relighting. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/Lumos-Custom.

Alibaba-DAMO-Academy DAMO Academy
·
Nov 3, 2025 1

MapGlue: Multimodal Remote Sensing Image Matching

Multimodal remote sensing image (MRSI) matching is pivotal for cross-modal fusion, localization, and object detection, but it faces severe challenges due to geometric, radiometric, and viewpoint discrepancies across imaging modalities. Existing unimodal datasets lack scale and diversity, limiting deep learning solutions. This paper proposes MapGlue, a universal MRSI matching framework, and MapData, a large-scale multimodal dataset addressing these gaps. Our contributions are twofold. MapData, a globally diverse dataset spanning 233 sampling points, offers original images (7,000x5,000 to 20,000x15,000 pixels). After rigorous cleaning, it provides 121,781 aligned electronic map-visible image pairs (512x512 pixels) with hybrid manual-automated ground truth, addressing the scarcity of scalable multimodal benchmarks. MapGlue integrates semantic context with a dual graph-guided mechanism to extract cross-modal invariant features. This structure enables global-to-local interaction, enhancing descriptor robustness against modality-specific distortions. Extensive evaluations on MapData and five public datasets demonstrate MapGlue's superiority in matching accuracy under complex conditions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Notably, MapGlue generalizes effectively to unseen modalities without retraining, highlighting its adaptability. This work addresses longstanding challenges in MRSI matching by combining scalable dataset construction with a robust, semantics-driven framework. Furthermore, MapGlue shows strong generalization capabilities on other modality matching tasks for which it was not specifically trained. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/PeihaoWu/MapGlue.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

Light-A-Video: Training-free Video Relighting via Progressive Light Fusion

Recent advancements in image relighting models, driven by large-scale datasets and pre-trained diffusion models, have enabled the imposition of consistent lighting. However, video relighting still lags, primarily due to the excessive training costs and the scarcity of diverse, high-quality video relighting datasets. A simple application of image relighting models on a frame-by-frame basis leads to several issues: lighting source inconsistency and relighted appearance inconsistency, resulting in flickers in the generated videos. In this work, we propose Light-A-Video, a training-free approach to achieve temporally smooth video relighting. Adapted from image relighting models, Light-A-Video introduces two key techniques to enhance lighting consistency. First, we design a Consistent Light Attention (CLA) module, which enhances cross-frame interactions within the self-attention layers to stabilize the generation of the background lighting source. Second, leveraging the physical principle of light transport independence, we apply linear blending between the source video's appearance and the relighted appearance, using a Progressive Light Fusion (PLF) strategy to ensure smooth temporal transitions in illumination. Experiments show that Light-A-Video improves the temporal consistency of relighted video while maintaining the image quality, ensuring coherent lighting transitions across frames. Project page: https://bujiazi.github.io/light-a-video.github.io/.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 12, 2025 2

Light-PEFT: Lightening Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning via Early Pruning

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has emerged as the predominant technique for fine-tuning in the era of large language models. However, existing PEFT methods still have inadequate training efficiency. Firstly, the utilization of large-scale foundation models during the training process is excessively redundant for certain fine-tuning tasks. Secondly, as the model size increases, the growth in trainable parameters of empirically added PEFT modules becomes non-negligible and redundant, leading to inefficiency. To achieve task-specific efficient fine-tuning, we propose the Light-PEFT framework, which includes two methods: Masked Early Pruning of the Foundation Model and Multi-Granularity Early Pruning of PEFT. The Light-PEFT framework allows for the simultaneous estimation of redundant parameters in both the foundation model and PEFT modules during the early stage of training. These parameters can then be pruned for more efficient fine-tuning. We validate our approach on GLUE, SuperGLUE, QA tasks, and various models. With Light-PEFT, parameters of the foundation model can be pruned by up to over 40%, while still controlling trainable parameters to be only 25% of the original PEFT method. Compared to utilizing the PEFT method directly, Light-PEFT achieves training and inference speedup, reduces memory usage, and maintains comparable performance and the plug-and-play feature of PEFT.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

LightSTAR: Efficient Visual Document Retrieval via Lightweight Selection with Vision-Adaptive Refinement

Visual document retrieval requires rapidly locating relevant pages from large multi-modal corpora in response to user queries. While recent methods powered by Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show competitive accuracy, they suffer from prohibitive computational costs by applying intensive MLLM encoding to every single page. Meanwhile, we observe that user queries are typically keyword-anchored, containing semantically rich words that are expected to appear directly in the visible text of relevant pages, offering an efficient cue for quickly narrowing down candidate pages. Building on this insight, we propose LightSTAR, an efficient framework that decomposes visual document retrieval into: 1) LLM-free Visual Selection, which utilizes content-grounded query encoding to focus on informative words and employs LLM-free visual embeddings to produce a high-recall candidate set; and 2) Vision-adaptive Semantic Refinement, which further performs fine-grained semantic matching exclusively on these top candidates via adaptive region-wise feature fusion to effectively combine textual and layout cues, optimized through a hardness-aware contrastive objective. Experimental results demonstrate that LightSTAR achieves state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy while reducing end-to-end latency by several-fold, offering a highly practical solution to the accuracy-efficiency trade-off in visual document retrieval. Code is available at https://github.com/bokufa/LightSTAR.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 21

Toward Efficient Language Model Pretraining and Downstream Adaptation via Self-Evolution: A Case Study on SuperGLUE

This technical report briefly describes our JDExplore d-team's Vega v2 submission on the SuperGLUE leaderboard. SuperGLUE is more challenging than the widely used general language understanding evaluation (GLUE) benchmark, containing eight difficult language understanding tasks, including question answering, natural language inference, word sense disambiguation, coreference resolution, and reasoning. [Method] Instead of arbitrarily increasing the size of a pretrained language model (PLM), our aim is to 1) fully extract knowledge from the input pretraining data given a certain parameter budget, e.g., 6B, and 2) effectively transfer this knowledge to downstream tasks. To achieve goal 1), we propose self-evolution learning for PLMs to wisely predict the informative tokens that should be masked, and supervise the masked language modeling (MLM) process with rectified smooth labels. For goal 2), we leverage the prompt transfer technique to improve the low-resource tasks by transferring the knowledge from the foundation model and related downstream tasks to the target task. [Results] According to our submission record (Oct. 2022), with our optimized pretraining and fine-tuning strategies, our 6B Vega method achieved new state-of-the-art performance on 4/8 tasks, sitting atop the SuperGLUE leaderboard on Oct. 8, 2022, with an average score of 91.3.

  • 14 authors
·
Dec 4, 2022

Relightful Harmonization: Lighting-aware Portrait Background Replacement

Portrait harmonization aims to composite a subject into a new background, adjusting its lighting and color to ensure harmony with the background scene. Existing harmonization techniques often only focus on adjusting the global color and brightness of the foreground and ignore crucial illumination cues from the background such as apparent lighting direction, leading to unrealistic compositions. We introduce Relightful Harmonization, a lighting-aware diffusion model designed to seamlessly harmonize sophisticated lighting effect for the foreground portrait using any background image. Our approach unfolds in three stages. First, we introduce a lighting representation module that allows our diffusion model to encode lighting information from target image background. Second, we introduce an alignment network that aligns lighting features learned from image background with lighting features learned from panorama environment maps, which is a complete representation for scene illumination. Last, to further boost the photorealism of the proposed method, we introduce a novel data simulation pipeline that generates synthetic training pairs from a diverse range of natural images, which are used to refine the model. Our method outperforms existing benchmarks in visual fidelity and lighting coherence, showing superior generalization in real-world testing scenarios, highlighting its versatility and practicality.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 11, 2023

LightCrafter: PBR-Conditioned Video Diffusion Refinement for Controllable and Consistent Relighting

Video relighting requires balancing long-form temporal consistency with a physically grounded understanding of light transport, which depends on accurate estimation of intrinsic scene properties such as materials, geometry, and illumination. Existing methods follow two paradigms: (1) reconstruct a video's photometric properties via inverse rendering and relight them to a target illumination via forward rendering, using physically-based rendering (PBR) or a neural renderer; these suffer from noisy reconstructions and struggle with hard-to-model effects such as global illumination. (2) Frame the task as generative video-to-video translation conditioned on relighting targets (a target environment map or text); this limits relighting control and temporal stability, since diffusion models struggle to translate long-form videos, and is constrained by the availability of input/relit training pairs. We propose LightCrafter, a hybrid pipeline that reformulates video relighting as video translation of a proxy video: rather than translating the input video directly to the target, we translate a PBR rendering of the input under the target illumination to the final target. This bakes illumination targets into the PBR proxy, removing the need to teach the diffusion model illumination concepts like environment maps, and enables more intricate lighting control while naturally providing long-form temporal consistency. We show PBR renders alone already outperform some prior art but struggle with effects like global illumination; to capture these, we leverage photometric priors in video generation models by post-training CogVideoX on synthetic video pairs and real-world unpaired videos. We outperform prior state-of-the-art on existing real-world relighting benchmarks and contribute a synthetic benchmark for further analysis. We will release our dataset, benchmark, metrics, and code.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 14

Introducing TrGLUE and SentiTurca: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Turkish General Language Understanding and Sentiment Analysis

Evaluating the performance of various model architectures, such as transformers, large language models (LLMs), and other NLP systems, requires comprehensive benchmarks that measure performance across multiple dimensions. Among these, the evaluation of natural language understanding (NLU) is particularly critical as it serves as a fundamental criterion for assessing model capabilities. Thus, it is essential to establish benchmarks that enable thorough evaluation and analysis of NLU abilities from diverse perspectives. While the GLUE benchmark has set a standard for evaluating English NLU, similar benchmarks have been developed for other languages, such as CLUE for Chinese, FLUE for French, and JGLUE for Japanese. However, no comparable benchmark currently exists for the Turkish language. To address this gap, we introduce TrGLUE, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing a variety of NLU tasks for Turkish. In addition, we present SentiTurca, a specialized benchmark for sentiment analysis. To support researchers, we also provide fine-tuning and evaluation code for transformer-based models, facilitating the effective use of these benchmarks. TrGLUE comprises Turkish-native corpora curated to mirror the domains and task formulations of GLUE-style evaluations, with labels obtained through a semi-automated pipeline that combines strong LLM-based annotation, cross-model agreement checks, and subsequent human validation. This design prioritizes linguistic naturalness, minimizes direct translation artifacts, and yields a scalable, reproducible workflow. With TrGLUE, our goal is to establish a robust evaluation framework for Turkish NLU, empower researchers with valuable resources, and provide insights into generating high-quality semi-automated datasets.

turkish-nlp-suite Turkish NLP Suite
·
Dec 26, 2025 3

RIPE++: Reinforced Keypoint Learning from Positive Pairs Only

Sparse keypoint extraction and matching underpin core tasks in geometric computer vision, including structure-from-motion, visual SLAM, augmented reality, and medical image registration. Learning robust local feature representations, however, typically requires accurate camera poses or depth supervision, which are often unavailable in real-world settings. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising alternative, requiring only the information if two images show the same scene or not. However, existing RL formulations such as RIPE rely on coarse binary rewards and carefully constructed negative training pairs, limiting training stability and descriptor discriminability. In this paper, we revisit RL-based keypoint learning and propose a reward that fully exploits the geometric consistency signal, deriving both reward and penalty from a single positive pair without contrasting against negatives. This richer signal provides sufficient supervisory contrast to learn discriminative detectors and descriptors from positive image pairs alone, enabling representation learning under extremely limited supervision. Furthermore, we show that the same RL objective can be extended to the matching stage by adapting LightGlue, raising AUC@5 on MegaDepth1500 from 56.58 to 59.65 and enabling weakly-supervised training of the full sparse matching pipeline from image pairs with partial visual overlap. We validate our approach on established benchmarks, demonstrating competitive results compared to fully-supervised methods. We further show that the method can be even trained on low texture medical video sequences, where camera poses are usually unavailable and standard SfM pipelines often fail. Code and data are available at https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/RIPEpp .

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 19

LightReasoner: Can Small Language Models Teach Large Language Models Reasoning?

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, often through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, SFT is resource-intensive, relying on large curated datasets, rejection-sampled demonstrations, and uniform optimization across all tokens, even though only a fraction carry meaningful learning value. In this work, we explore a counterintuitive idea: can smaller language models (SLMs) teach larger language models (LLMs) by revealing high-value reasoning moments that reflect the latter's unique strength? We propose LightReasoner, a novel framework that leverages the behavioral divergence between a stronger expert model (LLM) and a weaker amateur model (SLM). LightReasoner operates in two stages: (1) a sampling stage that pinpoints critical reasoning moments and constructs supervision examples capturing the expert's advantage through expert-amateur contrast, and (2) a fine-tuning stage that aligns the expert model with these distilled examples, amplifying its reasoning strengths. Across seven mathematical benchmarks, LightReasoner improves accuracy by up to 28.1%, while reducing time consumption by 90%, sampled problems by 80%, and tuned token usage by 99%, all without relying on ground-truth labels. By turning weaker SLMs into effective teaching signals, LightReasoner offers a scalable and resource-efficient approach for advancing LLM reasoning. Code is available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/LightReasoner

Empowering Low-Light Image Enhancer through Customized Learnable Priors

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable progress in enhancing low-light images by improving their brightness and eliminating noise. However, most existing methods construct end-to-end mapping networks heuristically, neglecting the intrinsic prior of image enhancement task and lacking transparency and interpretability. Although some unfolding solutions have been proposed to relieve these issues, they rely on proximal operator networks that deliver ambiguous and implicit priors. In this work, we propose a paradigm for low-light image enhancement that explores the potential of customized learnable priors to improve the transparency of the deep unfolding paradigm. Motivated by the powerful feature representation capability of Masked Autoencoder (MAE), we customize MAE-based illumination and noise priors and redevelop them from two perspectives: 1) structure flow: we train the MAE from a normal-light image to its illumination properties and then embed it into the proximal operator design of the unfolding architecture; and m2) optimization flow: we train MAE from a normal-light image to its gradient representation and then employ it as a regularization term to constrain noise in the model output. These designs improve the interpretability and representation capability of the model.Extensive experiments on multiple low-light image enhancement datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed paradigm over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zheng980629/CUE.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 5, 2023

DeepLight: Reconstructing High-Resolution Observations of Nighttime Light With Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Data

Nighttime light (NTL) remote sensing observation serves as a unique proxy for quantitatively assessing progress toward meeting a series of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as poverty estimation, urban sustainable development, and carbon emission. However, existing NTL observations often suffer from pervasive degradation and inconsistency, limiting their utility for computing the indicators defined by the SDGs. In this study, we propose a novel approach to reconstruct high-resolution NTL images using multi-modal remote sensing data. To support this research endeavor, we introduce DeepLightMD, a comprehensive dataset comprising data from five heterogeneous sensors, offering fine spatial resolution and rich spectral information at a national scale. Additionally, we present DeepLightSR, a calibration-aware method for building bridges between spatially heterogeneous modality data in the multi-modality super-resolution. DeepLightSR integrates calibration-aware alignment, an auxiliary-to-main multi-modality fusion, and an auxiliary-embedded refinement to effectively address spatial heterogeneity, fuse diversely representative features, and enhance performance in 8times super-resolution (SR) tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of DeepLightSR over 8 competing methods, as evidenced by improvements in PSNR (2.01 dB sim 13.25 dB) and PIQE (0.49 sim 9.32). Our findings underscore the practical significance of our proposed dataset and model in reconstructing high-resolution NTL data, supporting efficiently and quantitatively assessing the SDG progress.

  • 7 authors
·
May 23, 2024

LLM-Optic: Unveiling the Capabilities of Large Language Models for Universal Visual Grounding

Visual grounding is an essential tool that links user-provided text queries with query-specific regions within an image. Despite advancements in visual grounding models, their ability to comprehend complex queries remains limited. To overcome this limitation, we introduce LLM-Optic, an innovative method that utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) as an optical lens to enhance existing visual grounding models in comprehending complex text queries involving intricate text structures, multiple objects, or object spatial relationships, situations that current models struggle with. LLM-Optic first employs an LLM as a Text Grounder to interpret complex text queries and accurately identify objects the user intends to locate. Then a pre-trained visual grounding model is used to generate candidate bounding boxes given the refined query by the Text Grounder. After that, LLM-Optic annotates the candidate bounding boxes with numerical marks to establish a connection between text and specific image regions, thereby linking two distinct modalities. Finally, it employs a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) as a Visual Grounder to select the marked candidate objects that best correspond to the original text query. Through LLM-Optic, we have achieved universal visual grounding, which allows for the detection of arbitrary objects specified by arbitrary human language input. Importantly, our method achieves this enhancement without requiring additional training or fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across various challenging benchmarks demonstrate that LLM-Optic achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot visual grounding capabilities. Project Page: https://haoyu-zhao.github.io/LLM-Optic.github.io/.

  • 3 authors
·
May 27, 2024

AnyRefill: A Unified, Data-Efficient Framework for Left-Prompt-Guided Vision Tasks

In this paper, we present a novel Left-Prompt-Guided (LPG) paradigm to address a diverse range of reference-based vision tasks. Inspired by the human creative process, we reformulate these tasks using a left-right stitching formulation to construct contextual input. Building upon this foundation, we propose AnyRefill, an extension of LeftRefill, that effectively adapts Text-to-Image (T2I) models to various vision tasks. AnyRefill leverages the inpainting priors of advanced T2I model based on the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, and incorporates flexible components to enhance its capabilities. By combining task-specific LoRAs with the stitching input, AnyRefill unlocks its potential across diverse tasks, including conditional generation, visual perception, and image editing, without requiring additional visual encoders. Meanwhile, AnyRefill exhibits remarkable data efficiency, requiring minimal task-specific fine-tuning while maintaining high generative performance. Through extensive ablation studies, we demonstrate that AnyRefill outperforms other image condition injection methods and achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art open-source methods. Notably, AnyRefill delivers results comparable to advanced commercial tools, such as IC-Light and SeedEdit, even in challenging scenarios. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies across versatile tasks validate the strong generation of the proposed simple yet effective LPG formulation, establishing AnyRefill as a unified, highly data-efficient solution for reference-based vision tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 16, 2025

Learning Latent Proxies for Controllable Single-Image Relighting

Single-image relighting is highly under-constrained: small illumination changes can produce large, nonlinear variations in shading, shadows, and specularities, while geometry and materials remain unobserved. Existing diffusion-based approaches either rely on intrinsic or G-buffer pipelines that require dense and fragile supervision, or operate purely in latent space without physical grounding, making fine-grained control of direction, intensity, and color unreliable. We observe that a full intrinsic decomposition is unnecessary and redundant for accurate relighting. Instead, sparse but physically meaningful cues, indicating where illumination should change and how materials should respond, are sufficient to guide a diffusion model. Based on this insight, we introduce LightCtrl that integrates physical priors at two levels: a few-shot latent proxy encoder that extracts compact material-geometry cues from limited PBR supervision, and a lighting-aware mask that identifies sensitive illumination regions and steers the denoiser toward shading relevant pixels. To compensate for scarce PBR data, we refine the proxy branch using a DPO-based objective that enforces physical consistency in the predicted cues. We also present ScaLight, a large-scale object-level dataset with systematically varied illumination and complete camera-light metadata, enabling physically consistent and controllable training. Across object and scene level benchmarks, our method achieves photometrically faithful relighting with accurate continuous control, surpassing prior diffusion and intrinsic-based baselines, including gains of up to +2.4 dB PSNR and 35% lower RMSE under controlled lighting shifts.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 16 2