NTIRE 2026 The 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) Challenge: Professional Image Quality Assessment (Track 1)

In this paper, we present an overview of the NTIRE 2026 challenge on the 3rd Restore Any Image Model in the Wild, specifically focusing on Track 1: Professional Image Quality Assessment. Conventional Image Quality Assessment (IQA) typically relies on scalar scores. By compressing complex visual characteristics into a single number, these methods fundamentally struggle to distinguish subtle differences among uniformly high-quality images. Furthermore, they fail to articulate why one image is superior, lacking the reasoning capabilities required to provide guidance for vision tasks. To bridge this gap, recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising paradigm. Inspired by this potential, our challenge establishes a novel benchmark exploring the ability of MLLMs to mimic human expert cognition in evaluating high-quality image pairs. Participants were tasked with overcoming critical bottlenecks in professional scenarios, centering on two primary objectives: (1) Comparative Quality Selection: reliably identifying the visually superior image within a high-quality pair; and (2) Interpretative Reasoning: generating grounded, expert-level explanations that detail the rationale behind the selection. In total, the challenge attracted nearly 200 registrations and over 2,500 submissions. The top-performing methods significantly advanced the state of the art in professional IQA. The challenge dataset is available at https://github.com/narthchin/RAIM-PIQA, and the official homepage is accessible at https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12789/.

LoViF 2026 Challenge on Human-oriented Semantic Image Quality Assessment: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the LoViF 2026 Challenge on Human-oriented Semantic Image Quality Assessment. This challenge aims to raise a new direction, i.e., how to evaluate the loss of semantic information from the human perspective, intending to promote the development of some new directions, like semantic coding, processing, and semantic-oriented optimization, etc. Unlike existing datasets of quality assessment, we form a dataset of human-oriented semantic quality assessment, termed the SeIQA dataset. This dataset is divided into three parts for this competition: (i) training data: 510 pairs of degraded images and their corresponding ground truth references; (ii) validation data: 80 pairs of degraded images and their corresponding ground-truth references; (iii) testing data: 160 pairs of degraded images and their corresponding ground-truth references. The primary objective of this challenge is to establish a new and powerful benchmark for human-oriented semantic image quality assessment. There are a total of 58 teams registered in this competition, and 6 teams submitted valid solutions and fact sheets for the final testing phase. These submissions achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SeIQA dataset.

Decision-Centric Design for LLM Systems

LLM systems must make control decisions in addition to generating outputs: whether to answer, clarify, retrieve, call tools, repair, or escalate. In many current architectures, these decisions remain implicit within generation, entangling assessment and action in a single model call and making failures hard to inspect, constrain, or repair. We propose a decision-centric framework that separates decision-relevant signals from the policy that maps them to actions, turning control into an explicit and inspectable layer of the system. This separation supports attribution of failures to signal estimation, decision policy, or execution, and enables modular improvement of each component. It unifies familiar single-step settings such as routing and adaptive inference, and extends naturally to sequential settings in which actions alter the information available before acting. Across three controlled experiments, the framework reduces futile actions, improves task success, and reveals interpretable failure modes. More broadly, it offers a general architectural principle for building more reliable, controllable, and diagnosable LLM systems.

DP^2-VL: Private Photo Dataset Protection by Data Poisoning for Vision-Language Models

Recent advances in visual-language alignment have endowed vision-language models (VLMs) with fine-grained image understanding capabilities. However, this progress also introduces new privacy risks. This paper first proposes a novel privacy threat model named identity-affiliation learning: an attacker fine-tunes a VLM using only a few private photos of a target individual, thereby embedding associations between the target facial identity and their private property and social relationships into the model's internal representations. Once deployed via public APIs, this model enables unauthorized exposure of the target user's private information upon input of their photos. To benchmark VLMs' susceptibility to such identity-affiliation leakage, we introduce the first identity-affiliation dataset comprising seven typical scenarios appearing in private photos. Each scenario is instantiated with multiple identity-centered photo-description pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that mainstream VLMs like LLaVA, Qwen-VL, and MiniGPT-v2, can recognize facial identities and infer identity-affiliation relationships by fine-tuning on small-scale private photographic dataset, and even on synthetically generated datasets. To mitigate this privacy risk, we propose DP2-VL, the first Dataset Protection framework for private photos that leverages Data Poisoning. Though optimizing imperceptible perturbations by pushing the original representations toward an antithetical region, DP2-VL induces a dataset-level shift in the embedding space of VLMs'encoders. This shift separates protected images from clean inference images, causing fine-tuning on the protected set to overfit. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DP2-VL achieves strong generalization across models, robustness to diverse post-processing operations, and consistent effectiveness across varying protection ratios.

AMIF: Authorizable Medical Image Fusion Model with Built-in Authentication

Multimodal image fusion enables precise lesion localization and characterization for accurate diagnosis, thereby strengthening clinical decision-making and driving its growing prominence in medical imaging research. A powerful multimodal image fusion model relies on high-quality, clinically representative multimodal training data and a rigorously engineered model architecture. Therefore, the development of such professional radiomics models represents a collaborative achievement grounded in standardized acquisition, clinical-specific expertise, and algorithmic design proficiency, which necessitates protection of associated intellectual property rights. However, current multimodal image fusion models generate fused outputs without built-in mechanisms to safeguard intellectual property rights, inadvertently exposing proprietary model knowledge and sensitive training data through inference leakage. For example, malicious users can exploit fusion outputs and model distillation or other inference-based reverse engineering techniques to approximate the fusion performance of proprietary models. To address this issue, we propose AMIF, the first Authorizable Medical Image Fusion model with built-in authentication, which integrates authorization access control into the image fusion objective. For unauthorized usage, AMIF embeds explicit and visible copyright identifiers into fusion results. In contrast, high-quality fusion results are accessible upon successful key-based authentication.

MetaKube: An Experience-Aware LLM Framework for Kubernetes Failure Diagnosis

Existing LLM-based Kubernetes diagnostic systems cannot learn from operational experience, operating on static knowledge bases without improving from past resolutions. We present MetaKube, an experience-aware LLM framework through three synergistic innovations: (1) an Episodic Pattern Memory Network (EPMN) that abstracts diagnostic patterns from historical resolutions and provides confidence-calibrated retrieval for both rapid pattern matching and guided causal exploration, (2) a meta-cognitive controller that dynamically routes between intuitive and analytical pathways based on problem familiarity, optimizing the trade-off between speed and depth, and (3) KubeLLM, a locally-deployable 8B model enhanced through domain-specific post-training on our 7,000-sample Kubernetes Fault Resolution Dataset. Evaluation on 1,873 real-world scenarios demonstrates MetaKube transforms Qwen3-8B from 50.9 to 90.5 points, approaching GPT-4.1 performance while ensuring complete data privacy. EPMN contributes 15.3% improvement through experiential learning, with continuous learning experiments showing progressive gains as the system accumulates operational knowledge. The source code and related resources are available at https://github.com/MetaKube-LLM-for-Kubernetes-Diagnosis/MetaKube.

Stepwise: Neuro-Symbolic Proof Search for Automated Systems Verification

Formal verification via interactive theorem proving is increasingly used to ensure the correctness of critical systems, yet constructing large proof scripts remains highly manual and limits scalability. Advances in large language models (LLMs), especially in mathematical reasoning, make their integration into software verification increasingly promising. This paper introduces a neuro-symbolic proof generation framework designed to automate proof search for systems-level verification projects. The framework performs a best-first tree search over proof states, repeatedly querying an LLM for the next candidate proof step. On the neural side, we fine-tune LLMs using datasets of proof state-step pairs; on the symbolic side, we incorporate a range of ITP tools to repair rejected steps, filter and rank proof states, and automatically discharge subgoals when search progress stalls. This synergy enables data-efficient LLM adaptation and semantics-informed pruning of the search space. We implement the framework on a new Isabelle REPL that exposes fine-grained proof states and automation tools, and evaluate it on the FVEL seL4 benchmark and additional Isabelle developments. On seL4, the system proves up to 77.6\% of the theorems, substantially surpassing previous LLM-based approaches and standalone Sledgehammer, while solving significantly more multi-step proofs. Results across further benchmarks demonstrate strong generalization, indicating a viable path toward scalable automated software verification.

Generalized Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Occlusion Awareness

Generalized 3D hand-object pose estimation from a single RGB image remains challenging due to the large variations in object appearances and interaction patterns, especially under heavy occlusion. We propose GenHOI, a framework for generalized hand-object pose estimation with occlusion awareness. GenHOI integrates hierarchical semantic knowledge with hand priors to enhance model generalization under challenging occlusion conditions. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical semantic prompt that encodes object states, hand configurations, and interaction patterns via textual descriptions. This enables the model to learn abstract high-level representations of hand-object interactions for generalization to unseen objects and novel interactions while compensating for missing or ambiguous visual cues. To enable robust occlusion reasoning, we adopt a multi-modal masked modeling strategy over RGB images, predicted point clouds, and textual descriptions. Moreover, we leverage hand priors as stable spatial references to extract implicit interaction constraints. This allows reliable pose inference even under significant variations in object shapes and interaction patterns. Extensive experiments on the challenging DexYCB and HO3Dv2 benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in hand-object pose estimation.

SafeSci: Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models in Science Domains and Beyond

The success of large language models (LLMs) in scientific domains has heightened safety concerns, prompting numerous benchmarks to evaluate their scientific safety. Existing benchmarks often suffer from limited risk coverage and a reliance on subjective evaluation. To address these problems, we introduce SafeSci, a comprehensive framework for safety evaluation and enhancement in scientific contexts. SafeSci comprises SafeSciBench, a multi-disciplinary benchmark with 0.25M samples, and SafeSciTrain, a large-scale dataset containing 1.5M samples for safety enhancement. SafeSciBench distinguishes between safety knowledge and risk to cover extensive scopes and employs objective metrics such as deterministically answerable questions to mitigate evaluation bias. We evaluate 24 advanced LLMs, revealing critical vulnerabilities in current models. We also observe that LLMs exhibit varying degrees of excessive refusal behaviors on safety-related issues. For safety enhancement, we demonstrate that fine-tuning on SafeSciTrain significantly enhances the safety alignment of models. Finally, we argue that knowledge is a double-edged sword, and determining the safety of a scientific question should depend on specific context, rather than universally categorizing it as safe or unsafe. Our work provides both a diagnostic tool and a practical resource for building safer scientific AI systems.

LifeEval: A Multimodal Benchmark for Assistive AI in Egocentric Daily Life Tasks

The rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) marks a significant step toward artificial general intelligence, offering great potential for augmenting human capabilities. However, their ability to provide effective assistance in dynamic, real-world environments remains largely underexplored. Existing video benchmarks predominantly assess passive understanding through retrospective analysis or isolated perception tasks, failing to capture the interactive and adaptive nature of real-time user assistance. To bridge this gap, we introduce LifeEval, a multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate real-time, task-oriented human-AI collaboration in daily life from an egocentric perspective. LifeEval emphasizes three key aspects: task-oriented holistic evaluation, egocentric real-time perception from continuous first-person streams, and human-assistant collaborative interaction through natural dialogues. Constructed via a rigorous annotation pipeline, the benchmark comprises 4,075 high-quality question-answer pairs across 6 core capability dimensions. Extensive evaluations of 26 state-of-the-art MLLMs on LifeEval reveal substantial challenges in achieving timely, effective and adaptive interaction, highlighting essential directions for advancing human-centered interactive intelligence.