arXiv Computer Vision

Discrete Annotation, Continuous Preference: Rethinking Supervision for Accurate and Generalizable Aesthetic Image Cropping

The paper introduces a new approach to aesthetic image cropping by modeling human preference as a continuous, multi-peaked field rather than relying on discrete, grid‑based annotations. It presents the Continuous Preference Field (CPF) that reconstructs a dense preference landscape from sparse labels, and uses this to train a VLM‑based cropping model (CPIC) that achieves state‑of‑the‑art accuracy and strong out‑of‑domain generalization. Additionally, the authors propose CPICD, a recalibrated benchmark that corrects grid‑bound artifacts in existing datasets, providing a more reliable evaluation framework.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

RankGround: Efficient High-Resolution GUI Grounding via Lightweight Reranker-Guided Crop Selection

RankGround is a two‑stage framework for GUI grounding that uses a single Vision‑Language Model call per query. It introduces GroundRanker, a lightweight multimodal reranker that selects the most promising crop from a dense candidate set, trained with a two‑stage curriculum on ranking supervision data derived from existing grounding datasets. Experiments show RankGround outperforms strong baselines, achieving 1.4× faster inference and a 5.5% average improvement in localization accuracy over the second‑best method across all backbones and screen scales.

By Liyang Fan, Xinping Bi, Yitai Li, Shuaimin Li, Hui Li, Min Yang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

VGA-BenchV2: An Expanded Unified Benchmark and Multi-Model Framework for Evaluating Video Aesthetics and Generation Quality

VGA‑BenchV2 is an expanded, human‑aligned benchmark and optimization framework that jointly evaluates video generation quality and aesthetic value. It builds on the original VGA‑Bench taxonomy, adding 52 sub‑dimensions and 1,016 curated prompts to generate over 60,000 videos from 12 mainstream models. The benchmark significantly enlarges human supervision with 36,000 task‑level annotations and introduces a hybrid evaluator (VAQA‑Net, VTag‑Net, VGQA‑Net) that aligns well with human judgments and can be used as a reward model for reinforcement‑learning fine‑tuning.

By Longteng Jiang, DanDan Zheng, Qianqian Qiao, Heng Huang, Huaye Wang, Yihang Bo, Bao Peng, Jingdong Chen, Jun Zhou, Xin Jin
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

G2D: Generative-to-Discriminative Collaborative Inference for Zero-Shot Image Classification

The paper introduces G2D, a training‑free framework that combines a discriminative model (CLIP) for broad candidate retrieval with a generative vision‑language model for fine‑grained, image‑grounded verification. By using CLIP’s top‑K shortlist and a structured prior from candidate names and probabilities, G2D focuses generative reasoning on uncertain samples, achieving an average accuracy of 68.85% across eight benchmarks—higher than both CLIP alone (59.35%) and the standalone generative model (63.11%). The approach also adapts to various generator configurations and extends to other models such as DCLIP, WaffleCLIP, and CuPL.

By Zehua Hao, Fang Liu, Qinliang Wang, Yaoyang Du, Xinyan Huang, Puhua Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

JEPAMatch: Geometric Representation Shaping for Semi-Supervised Learning

JEPAMatch introduces a new semi‑supervised learning framework that replaces traditional output‑thresholding with explicit geometric shaping of latent representations. By combining the FlexMatch loss with a latent‑space regularization inspired by LeJEPA, the method encourages isotropic Gaussian structure in the embedding space, mitigating class imbalance and noisy pseudo‑labels. Experiments on CIFAR‑100, STL‑10, and Tiny‑ImageNet show consistent performance gains and faster convergence compared to existing FixMatch‑based baselines.

By Ali Aghababaei-Harandi, Aude Sportisse, Massih-Reza Amini