ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Aug 24, 2026

cs.CV

Grounding Free-Form Instructions for Fashion Complementary Image Generation

Matteo Attimonelli, Claudio Pomo, Alessandro De Bellis and 3 more

Fashion complementary image generation (CIG) aims to create garments that stylistically match a seed item based on user intent, making it a natural multimodal grounding problem where models must interpret language in visual context. Existing CIG benchmarks rely on rigid template prompts (e.g., "a photo of a skirt"), failing to reflect natural user queries and obscuring model behavior across levels of linguistic specificity. We introduce fashion complementary image generation with free-form instructions, a multimodal language-grounding setting where a model generates a compatible garment from a seed image and a natural-language instruction. To this end, we enrich three CIG benchmarks with low-, medium-, and high-specificity instructions generated by a vision-language model and validated by human annotators. We instantiate the task with StyleFlow, a Rectified Flow Matching model that jointly conditions on the seed image and instruction within a single multimodal transformer. Across image quality metrics, catalog-alignment analysis, ablations, and human evaluation, StyleFlow consistently produces instruction-aligned and stylistically coherent garments while reducing architectural complexity and inference cost relative to auxiliary-module approaches.

#02Aug 24, 2026

cs.CL

What's the Catch? Evaluating Temporal Consistency in Vision-Language Models

Marek Hradil, Danae Sánchez Villegas

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on video and image-sequence benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether they capture temporal structure. To study this question, we formulate temporal grounding as an anomaly detection problem, providing a simple and controlled evaluation that directly tests sensitivity to temporal consistency. We introduce TimeCatch, where temporal anomalies are created by swapping consecutive frames and frame-level anomalies by replacing a frame with Gaussian noise. Models are evaluated on anomaly detection and localization tasks across four synthetic and real-world datasets, alongside a human study. Our evaluation reveals a substantial gap between frame-level and temporal anomaly detection. While VLMs consistently detect frame-level anomalies and often localize them accurately, they perform near chance on temporal anomaly detection and only modestly above chance on localization. Humans, in contrast, achieve near-ceiling performance on both tasks. Additional analyses across model scales, prompting strategies, sequence lengths, and visual similarity suggest that these failures cannot be explained solely by limitations in perception or model capacity. Together, these findings indicate that current VLMs can identify anomalies within individual frames but struggle to integrate information across frames to reason about temporal consistency. TimeCatch provides a controlled benchmark for evaluating temporal grounding in vision-language models.

#03Aug 24, 2026

cs.CV

Controllable blind deblurring with diffusion models

Imane Si Salah, Emile Cribelier, Thomas Veit and 2 more

Image acquisition with a camera involves several degradations due to the optical system, sensor, or low-level processing steps. We address blind deblurring in professional photography: we aim to invert unknown isotropic blur without knowledge of the degradation kernel.For such inverse problems,where some high-frequency information is lost, it is challenging to use generative models to produce details that are both photo-realistic and faithful to the input. We propose SuperSharpen, a diffusion-based blind deblurring method offering explicit control over restoration strength through a blur measure. We compare two conditioning strategies: a ControlNet-style adapter on a frozen backbone, and full finetuning of the diffusion prior. Our experiments show that finetuning achieves better fidelity with fewer hallucinated details. We validate our approach on synthetic and real-world blur, demonstrating improved perceptual quality and controllable restoration strength.

#04Aug 24, 2026

cs.CV

Spotter: Efficient Urban Visual Localization via Geo-Referenced Facade Landmarks in GPS-Degraded Environments

Antoni Valls, Jordi Sanchez-Riera

Accurate visual localization on robotic and wearable platforms remains challenging in dense urban environments. Existing methodologies typically rely on GPS for absolute positioning, yet GPS signals frequently degrade in urban canyons due to multipath propagation. Consequently, standard solutions like visual odometry suffer from unmitigated drift over time, while map-matching techniques struggle to acquire the reliable GPS priors they need, on top of being too computationally heavy for real-time edge execution. To address these limitations, we propose Spotter, a robuts and real-time visual localization framework that uses building facades as a reliable source of global geo-reference, while retaining the capability to integrate GPS signals when available. In an offline stage, Spotter processes Google Street View panoramas by semantically segmenting facades and pairing multi-view stereo depth with cartographic data to build a compact metric database. At runtime, query images are matched via a cascaded retrieval and geometric verification pipeline to recover fine-grained global camera localization. We benchmark Spotter on a newly collected dataset of pedestrian sequences acquired with wearable smart glasses across several districts of Barcelona. Experimental results show that Spotter outperforms odometry-based baselines and achieves localization accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art map-based methods while operating at significantly higher frame rates.

#05Aug 24, 2026

cs.CV

What Memory Composition Does Not Tell Us About Anomaly Detection

Joongwon Chae, Runming Wang, Peiwu Qin

Memory-based anomaly detectors store nominal training patches and score test patches against this memory. A patch selected for coverage therefore becomes a nor- mal reference without a separate check that geometric rarity makes it safe to trust. We probe this coupling with sparse training contamination. Under fixed representa- tions and memory budgets, we compare random, medoid, local, and global coverage selectors. We then use CLEANCON, an out-of-bag cross-image support gate that changes candidate-image eligibility while fixing the representation, absolute mem- ory size, builder, and inference rule. Global coverage strongly over-represents sparse contamination. CLEANCON reduces final-memory contamination to approx- imately zero and increases category-macro P-AP in all 12 matched comparisons. Yet along a retention sweep, the lowest-contamination memory does not attain the highest P-AP; performance continues to improve while contamination rises. Mem- ory contamination therefore does not order the resulting memories by P-AP