Hanzhou Liu, Chengkai Liu, Jiacong Xu, Peng Jiang, Mi Lu
Deep state-space models (SSMs), like recent Mamba architectures, are emerging as a promising alternative to CNN and Transformer networks. Existing Mamba-based restoration methods process visual data by leveraging a flatten-and-scan strategy that converts image patches into a 1D sequence before scanning. However, this scanning paradigm ignores local pixel dependencies and introduces spatial misalignment by positioning distant pixels incorrectly adjacent, which reduces local noise-awareness and degrades image sharpness in low-level vision tasks. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel slice-and-scan strategy that alternates scanning along intra- and inter-slices. We further design a new Vision State Space Module (VSSM) for image deblurring, and tackle the inefficiency challenges of the current Mamba-based vision module. Building upon this, we develop XYScanNet, an SSM architecture integrated with a lightweight feature fusion module for enhanced image deblurring. XYScanNet, maintains competitive distortion metrics and significantly improves perceptual performance. Experimental results show that XYScanNet enhances KID by $17\%$ compared to the nearest competitor.
Zhixian Li, Xingsong Ye, Yongkun Du, Yunyan Xiao, Yanglin Huang, Pinxuan Chen, Jiyu Zhuang, Cong Xu 等 9 位作者
In-image machine translation (IIMT) replaces text in an image with its translation while preserving the surrounding visual context. Existing task-specific models achieve convincing performance but require massive paired training images before and after translation. As advanced text-to-image (T2I) models have reached a practically usable level of multilingual text generation, we argue that this capability can be transferred to IIMT and present FlowTranslator. It is a training-free IIMT framework that first employs an OCR model and an LLM to generate the translation prompt, which is injected into the T2I-based diffusion model. To optimize the accurate and natural generation of translated text, we introduce two trajectory controls: Region Coupling Release (RCR) partially decorrelates target-branch noise inside the text region early in the trajectory, while Coupling Expansion (CE) amplifies the emerging edit displacement mid-trajectory. Under the EasyOCR read-back protocol, FlowTranslator achieves average PRIM BLEU and COMET scores of 20.6 and 57.2, respectively, substantially outperforming the strong training-based baseline UniTranslator. On the more challenging and realistic whole-image ScenePair photographs translated into Chinese, it reaches 40.1\% exact-match accuracy and surpasses existing editing systems, some of which only address the text-rendering stage rather than the complete IIMT task. These results establish flow-based editing as a strong, fully training-free baseline for IIMT.
Yijie Hu, Wei Li, Junjie Zhou, Zhiqi Jiang, Yi Jin, Licong Xu, Xinkai Sun, Kai Duan 等 9 位作者
Patent practice lies at the intersection of technical, legal, and linguistic work, making it challenging yet crucial to technological innovation. Recently, rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems have demonstrated the potential to complete realistic business workflows and even patent works. This raises a question: can current AI systems perform patent work reliably? Existing benchmarks cover a limited range of patent tasks and simplify evidence acquisition by providing reference materials or candidate documents. In this paper, we introduce PatentAgentBench, a benchmark comprising 510 instances across eight task suites: novelty search, freedom-to-operate (FTO) search, design FTO, invalidity search, claim charting, patent drafting, office-action response, and patent translation. Curated from real patent records and professional materials, the benchmark combines task-specific metrics with expert-reviewed annotations and rubrics. Retrieval tasks such novelty search, FTO, etc., require agents to search and compare patent collections without a supplied candidate pool. The drafting and OAR tasks assess the quality of agents' work given technical disclosure and office action notice. We evaluate seven LLMs across four agent harnesses on PatentAgentBench, finding that current systems still struggle to identify novelty, assess risk, and understand practitioner intent throughout patent workflows.