Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have markedly advanced the quality of image inpainting and local editing. However, the inherent latent compression often introduces pixel-level inconsistencies, such as chromatic shifts, texture mismatches, and visible seams along editing boundaries. Existing remedies, including backgroundconditioned latent decoding and pixel-space harmonization, usually fail to fully eliminate these artifacts in practice and do not generalize well across different latent representations or tasks. We introduce PixPerfect, a pixel-level refinement framework that delivers seamless, high-fidelity local edits across diverse LDM architectures and tasks. PixPerfect leverages (i) a differentiable discriminative pixel space that amplifies and suppresses subtle color and texture discrepancies, (ii) a comprehensive artifact simulation pipeline that exposes the refiner to realistic local editing artifacts during training, and (iii) a direct pixel-space refinement scheme that ensures broad applicability across diverse latent representations and tasks. Extensive experiments on inpainting, object removal, and insertion benchmarks demonstrate that PixPerfect substantially enhances perceptual fidelity and downstream editing performance, establishing a new standard for robust and high-fidelity localized image editing.

We introduce a model named DreamLight for universal image relighting in this work, which can seamlessly composite subjects into a new background while maintaining aesthetic uniformity in terms of lighting and color tone. The background can be specified by natural images (image-based relighting) or generated from unlimited text prompts (text-based relighting). Existing studies primarily focus on image-based relighting, while with scant exploration into text-based scenarios. Some works employ intricate disentanglement pipeline designs relying on environment maps to provide relevant information, which grapples with the expensive data cost required for intrinsic decomposition and light source. Other methods take this task as an image translation problem and perform pixel-level transformation with autoencoder architecture.

Medical image harmonization aims to reduce the differences in appearance caused by scanner hardware variations to allow for consistent and reliable comparisons across devices. Harmonization based on paired images from different devices has limited applicability in real-world clinical settings. On the other hand, unpaired harmonization typically does not guarantee anatomy consistency, which is problematic because anatomical information preservation is paramount. The Schrödinger bridge framework has achieved state-of-the-art style transfer performance with natural images by matching distributions of unpaired images, but this approach can also introduce anatomy changes when applied to medical images. We show that such changes occur because the Schrödinger bridge uses the square of the Euclidean distance between images as the transport cost in an entropy-regularized optimal transport problem.

We present the ilLumination-Aware conditional Image Repainting (LuminAIRe) task to address the unrealistic lighting effects in recent conditional image repainting (CIR) methods. The environment lighting and 3D geometry conditions are explicitly estimated from given background images and parsing masks using a parametric lighting representation and learning-based priors. These 3D conditions are then converted into illumination images through the proposed physically-based illumination rendering and illumination attention module. With the injection of illumination images, physically-correct lighting information is fed into the lighting-realistic generation process and repainted images with harmonized lighting effects in both foreground and background regions can be acquired, whose superiority over the results of state-of-the-art methods is confirmed through extensive experiments. For facilitating and validating the LuminAIRe task, a new dataset CAR-LUMINAIRE with lighting annotations and rich appearance variants is collected.

Advanced image editing is in high demand across a multitude of applications, e.g ., old photo

However,thesemethods ignore local variations, leading to inharmonious appearances.

Deep learning holds immense promise for transforming medical image analysis, yet its clinical generalization remains profoundly limited. A major barrier is data heterogeneity. This is particularly true in Magnetic Resonance Imaging, where scanner hardware differences, diverse acquisition protocols, and varying sequence parameters introduce substantial domain shifts that obscure underlying biological signals. Data harmonization methods aim to reduce these instrumental and acquisition variability, but existing approaches remain insufficient. When applied to imaging data, image-based harmonization approaches are often restricted by the need for target images, while existing text-guided methods rely on simplistic labels that fail to capture complex acquisition details or are typically restricted to datasets with limited variability, failing to capture the heterogeneity of real-world clinical environments. To address these limitations, we propose DIST-CLIP (Disentangled Style Transfer with CLIP Guidance), a unified framework for MRI harmonization that flexibly uses either target images or DICOM metadata for guidance. Our framework explicitly disentangles anatomical content from image contrast, with the contrast representations being extracted using pre-trained CLIP encoders. These contrast embeddings are then integrated into the anatomical content via a novel Adaptive Style Transfer module. We trained and evaluated DIST-CLIP on diverse real-world clinical datasets, and showed significant improvements in performance when compared against state-of-the-art methods in both style translation fidelity and anatomical preservation, offering a flexible solution for style transfer and standardizing MRI data. Our code and weights will be made publicly available upon publication.

Transformer architectures offer significant advantages regarding the generation of symbolic music; their capabilities for incorporating user preferences toward what they generate is being studied under many aspects. This paper studies the inclusion of predefined chord constraints in melodic harmonization, i.e., where a desired chord at a specific location is provided along with the melody as inputs and the autoregressive transformer model needs to incorporate the chord in the harmonization that it generates. The peculiarities of involving such constraints is discussed and an algorithm is proposed for tackling this task. This algorithm is called B* and it combines aspects of beam search and A* along with backtracking to force pretrained transformers to satisfy the chord constraints, at the correct onset position within the correct bar. The algorithm is brute-force and has exponential complexity in the worst case; however, this paper is a first attempt to highlight the difficulties of the problem and proposes an algorithm that offers many possibilities for improvements since it accommodates the involvement of heuristics.

Color harmonization adjusts the colors of an inserted object so that it perceptually matches the surrounding image, resulting in a seamless composite. The harmonization problem naturally arises in augmented reality (AR), yet harmonization algorithms are not currently integrated into AR pipelines because real-time solutions are scarce. In this work, we address color harmonization for AR by proposing a lightweight approach that supports on-device inference. For this, we leverage classical optimal transport theory by training a compact encoder to predict the Monge-Kantorovich transport map. We benchmark our MKL-Harmonizer algorithm against state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate that for real composite AR images our method achieves the best aggregated score. We release our dedicated AR dataset of composite images with pixel-accurate masks and data-gathering toolkit to support further data acquisition by researchers.

Objective: To develop and evaluate a scalable methodology for harmonizing inconsistent units in large-scale clinical datasets, addressing a key barrier to data interoperability. Materials and Methods: We designed a novel unit harmonization system combining BM25, sentence embeddings, Bayesian optimization, and a bidirectional transformer based binary classifier for retrieving and matching laboratory test entries. The system was evaluated using the Optum Clinformatics Datamart dataset (7.5 billion entries). We implemented a multi-stage pipeline: filtering, identification, harmonization proposal generation, automated re-ranking, and manual validation. Performance was assessed using Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and other standard information retrieval metrics. Results: Our hybrid retrieval approach combining BM25 and sentence embeddings (MRR: 0.8833) significantly outperformed both lexical-only (MRR: 0.7985) and embedding-only (MRR: 0.5277) approaches. The transformer-based reranker further improved performance (absolute MRR improvement: 0.10), bringing the final system MRR to 0.9833. The system achieved 83.39\% precision at rank 1 and 94.66\% recall at rank 5. Discussion: The hybrid architecture effectively leverages the complementary strengths of lexical and semantic approaches. The reranker addresses cases where initial retrieval components make errors due to complex semantic relationships in medical terminology. Conclusion: Our framework provides an efficient, scalable solution for unit harmonization in clinical datasets, reducing manual effort while improving accuracy. Once harmonized, data can be reused seamlessly in different analyses, ensuring consistency across healthcare systems and enabling more reliable multi-institutional studies and meta-analyses.