Cencen Liu
Publications
What to Remove, What to Preserve: Dual-Ambiguity Rectification for All-in-One Image Restoration
All-in-one image restoration aims to handle diverse degradations within a unified framework. Existing methods commonly encode heterogeneous degradation conditions in a shared latent space, where degradation-related cues and scene content can remain entangled. We characterize the resulting challenge as dual ambiguity: semantic ambiguity in channel-wise modulation and spatial ambiguity in restoration responses, which can lead to content corruption and residual artifacts. To mitigate this issue, we propose DAR-Net, a Dual-Ambiguity Rectification Network for all-in-one image restoration. DAR-Net first introduces a Degradation Archetype Representation (DAR) module to construct a structured degradation state through simplex-constrained archetype mixture modeling. Based on this state, a Semantic Ambiguity Rectification (SeAR) module generates degradation-aware prompts to improve channel-wise conditioning in the decoder. A Spatial Ambiguity Rectification (SpAR) module further regularizes degradation-aware and complementary features toward orthogonal response subspaces, reducing spatial interference between removal and preservation cues. Extensive experiments on standard all-in-one restoration benchmarks show that DAR-Net achieves the best overall performance under both three-degradation and five-degradation settings, improving the average PSNR over the strongest competitor by 0.14 dB and 0.34 dB, respectively; it additionally shows superior performance on CDD-11 and WeatherBench.
CBV: Clean-label Backdoor Attacks on Vision Language Models via Diffusion Models
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering (VQA). However, as their applications become increasingly widespread, recent studies have revealed that VLMs are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks on VLMs primarily rely on data poisoning by adding visual triggers and modifying text labels, where the induced image-text mismatch makes poisoned samples easy to detect. To address this limitation, we propose the Clean-Label Backdoor Attack on VLMs via Diffusion Models (CBV), which leverages diffusion models to generate natural poisoned examples via score matching. Specifically, CBV modifies the score during the reverse generation process of the diffusion model to guide the generation of poisoned samples that contain triggered image features. To further enhance the effectiveness of the attack, we incorporate the textual information of the triggered images as multimodal guidance during generation. Moreover, to enhance stealthiness, we introduce a GradCAM-guided Mask (GM) that restricts modifications to only the most semantically important regions, rather than the entire image. We evaluate our method on MSCOCO and VQA v2 with four representative VLMs, achieving over 80% ASR while preserving normal functionality.
AlignVAR: Towards Globally Consistent Visual Autoregression for Image Super-Resolution
Visual autoregressive (VAR) models have recently emerged as a promising alternative for image generation, offering stable training, non-iterative inference, and high-fidelity synthesis through next-scale prediction. This encourages the exploration of VAR for image super-resolution (ISR), yet its application remains underexplored and faces two critical challenges: locality-biased attention, which fragments spatial structures, and residual-only supervision, which accumulates errors across scales, severely compromises global consistency of reconstructed images. To address these issues, we propose AlignVAR, a globally consistent visual autoregressive framework tailored for ISR, featuring two key components: (1) Spatial Consistency Autoregression (SCA), which applies an adaptive mask to reweight attention toward structurally correlated regions, thereby mitigating excessive locality and enhancing long-range dependencies; and (2) Hierarchical Consistency Constraint (HCC), which augments residual learning with full reconstruction supervision at each scale, exposing accumulated deviations early and stabilizing the coarse-to-fine refinement process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlignVAR consistently enhances structural coherence and perceptual fidelity over existing generative methods, while delivering over 10x faster inference with nearly 50% fewer parameters than leading diffusion-based approaches, establishing a new paradigm for efficient ISR.