#01Nov 1, 2026
cs.CV
Systematic Evaluation of Robustness in Fine-tuned Models
Angela John, Hamayoon Behmanush
Our study systematically evaluates the robustness of fine-tuned pre-trained models across different datasets and attack types, aiming to provide insights for researchers in selecting pre-trained models for image classification tasks while prioritizing robustness against potential attacks. Our work explores the influence of fine-tuning pre-trained models with different datasets and attack types on their robustness and overview of the appropriate pre-trained model for image classification based on factors such as computation resources, memory usage, and accuracy on clean data. We fine-tune the models with weights. Evaluate the models on data before any attack and after different attack cases. The study utilizes publicly available image datasets such as MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and SVHN to assess the robustness of pre-trained models. The results indicate that the robustness of fine-tuned models varies across different data distributions and sample sizes, emphasizing the need for tailored selection based on specific task requirements. The findings also highlight the varying performance of ResNet50, DenseNet, and MobileNet in defending against attacks on different datasets. Overall, this research provides valuable insights into the robustness of fine-tuned pre-trained models and their suitability for real-world applications in image classification.
#02Nov 1, 2026
cs.CV
Biological Congruence: Evaluating Microscopy Generation Across Representations
Duway Nicolas Lesmes-Leon, Shumpei Takezaki, Fabian Schmeisser and 5 more
Generative models increasingly produce realistic microscopy images, yet conventional evaluation primarily characterizes visual fidelity and distributional coverage rather than the biological information represented by synthetic data. We introduce biological congruence as an evaluation principle describing whether biologically relevant information forms a coherent description across representations and remains consistent with its empirical biological context. To study this principle, we develop a text-conditioned diffusion framework that jointly generates microscopy images and instance masks, exposing the same generated biological state through conditioning, visual appearance, and instance structure. Across prompt--mask, prompt--image, image--mask, and population-level analyses, we find strongly feature-dependent behavior: density and confluency are consistently preserved, morphology exhibits recurrent disagreement, while nearest-neighbor distance reveals that strong image--mask agreement can coexist with weaker conditioning and population fidelity. Stress testing increasingly unsupported phenotype combinations further shows that target controllability can increase while untargeted phenotypes reorganize and the complete generated state moves toward configurations better supported by real data. These findings demonstrate that generative quality, controllability, cross-representation agreement, and population fidelity capture complementary properties, motivating biological congruence as a relational perspective for evaluating scientific generative models.
#03Nov 1, 2026
cs.CV
Z-Cache: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers via Self-Reflection
Zegang Cheng, Zhikai Wang, Jiacheng Liu and 8 more
Diffusion transformers have become the most powerful models for visual generation, but still suffer from massive computation costs. To solve this problem, feature caching has been proposed to cache the features of diffusion models in the previous computation steps and then reuse them in the following caching steps, which brings significant acceleration but also degradation in generation quality. To address this problem, this paper proposes Z-cache as a feature caching method that can maintain high-quality generation through self-reflection. Concretely, we observe that the error from feature caching tends to be sharply reduced after each full computation. Based on this observation, Z-Cache is designed to first predict the features in the future caching steps and then perform a full computation. After that, Z-Cache returns to the caching steps and re-predicts them based on the previous and the current computation steps, which brings correction in features. Experiments demonstrate that with Z-Cache, diffusion transformers achieve comparable generation quality to the original model but with faster inference speed, for instance, 6.22X acceleration on FLUX-dev for text-to-image generation. Our code is released on GitHub.
#04Nov 1, 2026
cs.CV
Vision-language classification of Torsades de Pointes risk from pseudo-coloured ECG images: do T-wave morphology and colour context help or hinder?
Dario Labrador Alonso, Alaa Alahmadi
Contextual prompting is widely presented as a cheap route to better performance from vision models, but the evidence comes largely from benchmarks in which an attribute named in a prompt is also present in the image, confounding the two channels. We investigate the significance of context for a semantically complex biomedical signal classification task using a domain-adapted vision-language model, BiomedCLIP. Building on our previous work that renders electrocardiogram (ECG) signals as colour-enhanced images to flag Torsades de Pointes risk using the QT-nomogram and pseudo-colouring technique, we cross four context strategies with four T-wave morphology label sets, evaluated zero-shot and with a class-balanced linear probe, under five-fold stratified cross-validation on 9,789 images. Zero-shot inference is unusable. Once trained, the colour-enhanced images outperform the colourless ones on every metric: balanced accuracy 0.903 versus 0.825, sensitivity 0.914 versus 0.827, specificity 0.892 versus 0.823, ROC-AUC 0.955 versus 0.888 and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) 0.437 versus 0.311. Crossing colour-in-image with colour-in-prompt separates the confounded channels: the image contributes +0.126 MCC (+0.078 balanced accuracy, +0.067 ROC-AUC) whether or not the prompt names colour, whereas naming it changes nothing under any metric. Context is two-sided: the best prompt set gains 0.008 MCC where colour is present and 0.016 where it is not, while the worst loses 0.017 and 0.013. For a signal rendered as an image, the leverage lies in how the signal is drawn rather than in how it is described - and where the endpoint is an interval measurement, prompts naming T-wave morphology describe the wrong quantity.
#05Nov 1, 2026
cs.CV
Synthetic Realities: Evaluating Human Ability to Distinguish AIGenerated Videos from Real Footage
Danyal Sarfraz, Raja Mubashar Karim, KwanMyung Kim
Recent advances in generative AI have enabled multiple pathways for high-fidelity video synthesis: text-to-video, image-to-video animation, and video outpainting. Empirical side-by-side evaluations of how untrained viewers perceive and distinguish these outputs from real footage remain scarce. In this study, we systematically compare human detection accuracy across these three AI generation techniques within three thematic contexts: historical footage, film and media content, and natural environments. We constructed a balanced stimulus set comprising equal amounts of real and AI-generated videos (18 each). The AI clips were evenly distributed across the three generation methods using Google's Veo 3, Lightricks LTX Video, and Wan VACE. All videos were produced and standardized within the ComfyUI framework to ensure consistent quality and duration. 87 participants judged every clip in a binary forced-choice task ("real" vs. "AI-generated"). Participants correctly identified videos 60% of the time on average. Image-to-video clips were recognized most accurately (79%), followed by real footage (64%), outpainting (49%), and text-to-video (43%). Accuracy also varied by theme: film and historical scenes yielded higher detection rates than environmental clips, which were frequently mistaken for AI. Logistic regression confirmed significant effects of both technique and theme as well as their interaction (p < 0.001), indicating that detection success depends jointly on how the content was generated and what it depicts. Findings reveal a consistent bias toward assuming synthetic origins and highlight that perceptual realism in AI video is shaped more by context than by model type, underscoring the importance of media-literacy approaches and context-aware evaluation tools for navigating increasingly synthetic visual media.