Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in autonomous driving and embodied AI systems, where reliable perception is critical for safe semantic reasoning and decision-making. While recent VLMs demonstrate strong performance on multimodal benchmarks, their robustness to realistic perception degradation remains poorly understood. In this work, we systematically study semantic misalignment in VLMs under controlled degradation of upstream visual perception, using semantic segmentation on the Cityscapes dataset as a representative perception module. We introduce perception-realistic corruptions that induce only moderate drops in conventional segmentation metrics, yet observe severe failures in downstream VLM behavior, including hallucinated object mentions, omission of safety-critical entities, and inconsistent safety judgments. To quantify these effects, we propose a set of language-level misalignment metrics that capture hallucination, critical omission, and safety misinterpretation, and analyze their relationship with segmentation quality across multiple contrastive and generative VLMs. Our results reveal a clear disconnect between pixel-level robustness and multimodal semantic reliability, highlighting a critical limitation of current VLM-based systems and motivating the need for evaluation frameworks that explicitly account for perception uncertainty in safety-critical applications.
Look Clearly Before Answering: Mitigating Hallucinations in LVLMs via Saliency-Driven Perceptual Realignment
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Shanghai Road Transport Development Center（上海市道路运输发展中心）；Hunan Institute of Advanced Technology（湖南先进技术研究院）
P$^2$-DPO: Grounding Hallucination in Perceptual Processing via Calibration Direct Preference Optimization
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computational AI Models and Cognitive Intelligence, School of Computer Science & Engineering, South China University of Technology（广东省计算人工智能模型与认知智能重点实验室，计算机科学与工程学院，华南理工大学）；Pazhou Lab, Guangzhou, China（琶洲实验室，广州，中国）；Engineering Research Center of the Ministry of Education on Health Intelligent Perception and Paralleled Digital-Human, Guangzhou, China（教育部健康智能感知与并行数字人工程研究中心，广州，中国）
Degradation-Aware Prompt Learning with Cross-Modal Compensation for Adverse Weather Removal
School of Software Engineering, Dalian University（大连大学软件工程学院）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学数学科学学院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；University of California, San Francisco（加利福尼亚大学旧金山分校）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Lost in Visual Translation: A VLM-Assisted Perceptual-Semantic Coherence Framework for EEG-to-Image Reconstruction
Mahindra University（马欣德拉大学）；MU-VT Interdisciplinary Advanced Research Centre for Transformative Technologies, Mahindra University（马欣德拉大学MU-VT变革性技术跨学科高级研究中心）
Perceptual misalignment of texture representations in convolutional neural networks
Neuroscience area International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) Trieste Italy（国际先进研究学院（SISSA）神经科学部，特里埃斯特，意大利）；Department of Mathematics Informatics and Geosciences Università degli Studi di Trieste Trieste Italy（特里埃斯特大学数学、信息学和地球科学系，特里埃斯特，意大利）；Department of Data Engineering Area Science Park Trieste Italy（数据工程系，Area Science Park，特里埃斯特，意大利）
With the rapid growth of in-the-wild videos taken by non-specialists, blind video quality assessment (VQA) has become a challenging and demanding problem. Although lots of efforts have been made to solve this problem, it remains unclear how the human visual system (HVS) relates to the temporal quality of videos. Meanwhile, recent work has found that the frames of natural video transformed into the perceptual domain of the HVS tend to form a straight trajectory of the representations. With the obtained insight that distortion impairs the perceived video quality and results in a curved trajector…
Perceptual image restoration seeks for high-fidelity images that most likely degrade to given images. For better visual quality, previous work proposed to search for solutions within the natural image manifold, by exploiting the latent space of a generative model. However, the quality of generated images are only guaranteed when latent embedding lies close to the prior distribution. In this work, we propose to restrict the feasible region within the prior manifold. This is accomplished with a non-parametric metric for two distributions: the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). Moreover, we model th…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）
Existing deep learning-based full-reference IQA (FR-IQA) models usually predict the image quality in a deterministic way by explicitly comparing the features, gauging how severely distorted an image is by how far the corresponding feature lies from the space of the reference images. Herein, we look at this problem from a different viewpoint and propose to model the quality degradation in perceptual space from a statistical distribution perspective. As such, the quality is measured based upon the Wasserstein distance in the deep feature domain. More specifically, the 1DWasserstein distance at e…
Reinforcing Multimodal Reasoning Against Visual Degradation
Tencent Hunyuan（腾讯文言）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学 College Park 分校）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学 Chapel Hill 分校）
Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海光学精密机械研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Mechanobiology Institute, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学机械生物学研究所）；Seoul National University（首尔大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Fourier ptychographi cmicroscopy(FPM) is a newly developed computational imaging technique that can provide gigapixel images with both high resolution (HR) and wide field of view (FOV). However, the positional misalignment of the LED array induces a degradation of the reconstruction, especially in the regions away from the optical axis. In this paper, we propose a robust and fast method to correct the LED misalignment of FPM, termed as misalignment correction for FPM (mcFPM). Although different regions in the FOV have different sensitivity to the LED misalignment, the experimental results show…
Image dehazing without paired haze-free images is of immense importance, as acquiring paired images often entails significant cost. However, we observe that previous unpaired image dehazing approaches tend to suffer from performance degradation near depth borders, where depth tends to vary abruptly. Hence, we propose to anneal the depth border degradation in unpaired image dehazing with cyclic perceptual-depth supervision. Coupled with the dual-path feature re-using backbones of the generators and discriminators, our model achieves $\mathbf{20.36}$ Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) on NYU Dept…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
Perceptual video quality assessment (VQA) is an integral component of many streaming and video sharing platforms. Here we consider the problem of learning perceptually relevant video quality representations in a self-supervised manner. Distortion type identification and degradation level determination is employed as an auxiliary task to train a deep learning model containing a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that extracts spatial features, as well as a recurrent unit that captures temporal information. The model is trained using a contrastive loss and we therefore refer to this trainin…
Semantic Mismatch and Perceptual Degradation: A New Perspective on Image Editing Immunity
State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)（人工智能安全国家重点实验室，计算技术研究所，中国科学院）；University of China Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis, University of Oulu（信号分析中心，奥卢大学）；School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences（计算机科学学院，中国地质大学）
Center for Signal and Information Processing（信号与信息处理中心）；School of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电气与计算机工程学院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
This paper presents a full-reference image quality estimator based on color, structure, and visual system characteristics denoted as CSV. In contrast to the majority of existing methods, we quantify perceptual color degradations rather than absolute pixel-wise changes. We use the CIEDE2000 color difference formulation to quantify low-level color degradations and the Earth Mover's Distance between color name descriptors to measure significant color degradations. In addition to the perceptual color difference, CSV also contains structural and perceptual differences. Structural feature maps are o…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute（阿里巴巴-南洋理工大学新加坡联合研究院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Shandong Normal University（山东师范大学）；Beijing Jiao Tong University（北京交通大学）
Significant improvement has been made on just noticeable difference (JND) modelling due to the development of deep neural networks, especially for the recently developed unsupervised-JND generation models. However, they have a major drawback that the generated JND is assessed in the real-world signal domain instead of in the perceptual domain in the human brain. There is an obvious difference when JND is assessed in such two domains since the visual signal in the real world is encoded before it is delivered into the brain with the human visual system (HVS). Hence, we propose an HVS-inspired si…
Multiscale Sliced Wasserstein Distances as Perceptual Color Difference Measures
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学深圳研究院）；Shenzhen MSU-BIT University（深圳北理莫斯科大学）；Guangdong OPPO Mobile Telecommunications Corp., Ltd.（广东欧珀移动通信有限公司）；Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（江西财经大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））
AdaQual-Diff: Diffusion-Based Image Restoration via Adaptive Quality Prompting
Fuzhou University（福州大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Shandong Normal University（山东师范大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
PG-ControlNet: A Physics-Guided ControlNet for Generative Spatially Varying Image Deblurring
1 Computer Science Department, University of Rochester；2 Goergen Institute for Data Science \& AIS, University of Rochester；Computer Engineering Department, University of Rochester
Perceptual Quality-based Model Training under Annotator Label Uncertainty
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Center for Energy and Geo Processing (CeGP)（能源与地球处理中心）；School of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电气与计算机工程学院）
Qingdao University（青岛大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）；De Montfort University（德蒙福特大学）
With the wide applications of colored point cloud in many fields, point cloud perceptual quality assessment plays a vital role in the visual communication systems owing to the existence of quality degradations introduced in various stages. However, the existing point cloud quality assessments ignore the mechanism of human visual system (HVS) which has an important impact on the accuracy of the perceptual quality assessment. In this paper, a progressive knowledge transfer based on human visual perception mechanism for perceptual quality assessment of point clouds (PKT-PCQA) is proposed. The PKT…
RA-SOD: Reliability-Aware RGB-T Salient Object Detection under Modality Degradation
State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学机器人技术与系统国家重点实验室）；School of Computer Science, University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Signal degradation is ubiquitous and computational restoration of degraded signal has been investigated for many years. Recently, it is reported that the capability of signal restoration is fundamentally limited by the perception-distortion tradeoff, i.e. the distortion and the perceptual difference between the restored signal and the ideal `original' signal cannot be made both minimal simultaneously. Distortion corresponds to signal fidelity and perceptual difference corresponds to perceptual naturalness, both of which are important metrics in practice. Besides, there is another dimension wor…
DaLPSR: Leverage Degradation-Aligned Language Prompt for Real-World Image Super-Resolution
School of Computer and Information Engineering, Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学计算机与信息工程学院）；School of Digital Industry, Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学数字产业学院）；Institute of Advanced Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学先进技术研究院）；Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies Ltd.（华为技术有限公司诺亚方舟实验室）
