The paper introduces ShadowCLR, an unsupervised framework for removing shadows from images without requiring paired shadow–shadow-free data or shadow masks. By leveraging consistency across multiple shadowed observations of the same scene, the method regularizes the model to recover scene-consistent appearance while suppressing shadow-specific variations. Experiments on several benchmarks show that ShadowCLR achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing unsupervised approaches.
By Anh-Kiet Duong, Petra Gomez-Kr\"amer, Jean-Michel Carozza
WildShadowRemover is a framework that adapts a pretrained video diffusion model for robust in-the-wild video shadow removal using LoRA fine-tuning. It augments the frozen VAE decoder with a detail injection module and introduces a shadow‑mask‑guided frequency‑decomposed modulation module to restore high‑frequency textures while suppressing shadow artifacts, with monocular depth priors providing geometry‑aware guidance. The authors also create WildShadow, a large‑scale paired video shadow removal dataset, and show that their method outperforms existing approaches in shadow removal quality, temporal consistency, and generalization across challenging real‑world scenarios.
By Jiamin Xu, Cong Wang, Zheng Dong, Chi Wang, Renshu Gu, Weiwei Xu, Gang Xu
The paper introduces AgenticShadow, a new dataset of 17,138 image‑mask‑target triplets created through an offline agentic workflow that combines physics‑motivated generation, failure detection, feedback‑driven retry, candidate selection, and deterministic correction. This approach addresses the long‑standing lack of diverse paired shadow‑free training data by leveraging existing shadow detection datasets and producing realistic shadow‑free targets. Models trained on AgenticShadow show significant improvements, reducing color distribution differences by 50.5% and cross‑domain LAB RMSE by 19.7‑37.5% compared to prior work.
By Shilin Hu, Jingyi Xu, Dimitris Samaras, Hieu Le
Existing supervised and unsupervised shadow removal methods often suffer from limited generalization due to the insufficient diversity of available training datasets, while zero-shot methods tend to produce artifacts and require time-consuming test-time optimization. To address these issues, we propose FreeShadow, a training-free shadow removal method built upon pretrained diffusion models, which exploits diffusion priors for shadow removal without any training or optimization.
arXiv:2606. 28094v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world object removal is challenging due to two key difficulties: the target object's non-local effects, such as shadows and reflections, which are difficult to model, and the fact that user-provided masks are often inaccurate or incomplete.
By Qinming Zhou, Chenxi Sun, Deyang Kong, Junhao He, Xiangheng Tang, Peike Yu, Haotian Wu, Leilei Cao, Linfeng Zhang
arXiv:2512.06174v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Generating realistic cast shadows for inserted foreground objects requires reasoning about scene geometry and illumination. However, most learning-...
By Shilin Hu, Jingyi Xu, Akshat Dave, Dimitris Samaras, Hieu Le
Recent advances in diffusion models have shown impressive performance in controllable image generation and dense prediction tasks. However, existing approaches typically treat diffusion-based controllable generation and dense prediction as separate tasks, overlooking the potential benefits of jointly modeling the heterogeneous distributions.
arXiv:2411.05005v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Beyond high-fidelity image synthesis, diffusion models have recently exhibited promising results in dense visual perception tasks. However, m...
By Shuhong Zheng, Zhipeng Bao, Ruoyu Zhao, Martial Hebert, Yu-Xiong Wang
arXiv:2607. 05319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study why diffusion autoencoders can achieve similar image quality while learning substantially different latent structures.
By Rajat Rasal, Avinash Kori, Tian Xia, Ben Glocker
arXiv:2604.19254v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Popular low-rank parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods represent adaptation as separate updates to selected backbone weights, without main...
By Xianming Li, Zongxi Li, Tsz-fung Andrew Lee, Jing Li, Haoran Xie, Qing Li
Unified image restoration (UIR) aims to recover high-quality (HQ) content from low-quality (LQ) images with different degradations using a single model. Most recent methods adapt large pretrained text-to-image (T2I) latent diffusion models for their strong capacity and generative priors.
DiffusionShadow introduces a diffusion-based shadow caching framework for neural volume rendering, compressing many pre‑computed shadow INRs into a single diffusion model conditioned on lighting direction. The method encodes shadow coefficient volumes as shadow INRs, trains the diffusion model to predict shadow INR weights at inference, and integrates directly with standard INR renderers without extra runtime sampling. Experiments demonstrate faster rendering than traditional approaches while avoiding the large storage overhead of independent INRs, producing shadows that closely match reference results.
By Kai-Chen Tung, Qi Wu, David Bauer, Mengjiao Han, Silvio Rizzi, Kwan-Liu Ma