Image Style Transfer aims to replicate the style of a reference image based on the content from a text description or another image. With the significant advancements in image generation through diffusion models, recent studies have attempted to either fine-tuning embeddings to learn the single style or utilizing the pre-trained CLIP image encoder to extract style representations. However, style-tuning requires substantial computational resources and the pre-trained CLIP image encoder is trained for semantic understanding rather than for style representation. To address these challenges, we introduce a style-aware encoder and a well-organized style dataset called StyleGallery to learn a good style representation that is crucial and sufficient for generalized style transfer without test-time tuning. With dedicated design for style learning, this style-aware encoder is trained to extract expressive style representation from multi-level patches with decoupling training strategy, and StyleGallery enables the generalization ability. Moreover, we employ a content extraction and content-fusion encoder to enhance image-driven style transfer. We highlight that, our approach, named StyleShot, is simple yet effective in mimicking various desired styles, i.e., 3D, flat, abstract or even fine-grained styles, without test-time tuning. Rigorous experiments validate that, StyleShot achieves superior performance across a wide range of styles compared to existing state-of-the-art text- and image-driven methods.

Dataset distillation improves neural network training efficiency by compressing large real datasets into compact synthetic datasets. Existing methods typically optimize matching objectives, such as aligning gradients, features, and trajectories between the synthetic and original datasets to ensure the distilled data retains essential properties for model training. However, many of these approaches rely on predefined distillation pools to streamline the process or treat all real data points equally, overlooking the dynamic nature of the synthetic dataset's training requirements during optimization. To address these limitations, we propose Active Dataset Distillation via Dual-Space Informative Matching (ACDD), an active learning-based algorithm that dynamically selects the most informative real data subset to align with the synthetic dataset's evolving needs. By adaptively refining the distillation pool, ACDD enhances training efficiency and generalization while ensuring the synthetic dataset effectively captures the original data's key characteristics. ACDD operates through two interconnected loops: the dual-space active loop (DAL) and the distillation loop. DAL plays a key role by dynamically selecting samples that balance diversity and uncertainty, adding them to the target distillation pool to meet the evolving informational needs of the current distillation loop. As a result, ACDD enables the synthetic dataset to achieve superior performance compared to SOTA methods across multiple benchmarks, including SVHN, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet subset. Moreover, ACDD reduces the required real dataset to just 20%-40% of the original, demonstrating its efficiency and effectiveness in data distillation.

Unsupervised person re-identification (ReID) aims to learn identity-discriminative representations without manual annotations, which is challenging due to noisy pseudo labels, background clutter, and large appearance variations. Recent studies have shown that exploiting fine-grained local cues is crucial for improving robustness in unsupervised ReID. In this context, random masking has emerged as a simple and annotation-free way to encourage the model to focus on informative regions. However, existing masking-based unsupervised ReID methods still suffer from two limitations: (1) Underused masked views: masked views are treated as degraded auxiliaries rather than exploited as fine-grained supervisory signals; (2) Weak cross-view alignment: feature alignment is restricted to mini-batch pairs, lacking explicit global alignment between masked and unmasked views across clusters. To address these issues, we propose the Mask-guided Asymmetric Contrastive and Semantic Alignment (ACSA) framework. Specifically, we introduce an Asymmetric Contrastive Learning (ACL) module with a dual-memory mechanism to separately encode masked and unmasked features, allowing masked views to serve as informative and discriminative supervision. In parallel, a Semantic Alignment Learning (SAL) module conducts multi-granularity distribution alignment by aligning both cluster-level prototypes and randomly sampled instance-level features, thereby preserving semantic consistency and intra-cluster diversity. Furthermore, to provide more reliable semantic anchors for SAL under noisy pseudo labels, we introduce a Progressive Refinement Module (PRM), which refines prototypes and features via exponential moving averaging for more stable semantic alignment. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our method, even outperforming certain supervised counterparts. Code is available at https://github.com/Trangle12/ACSA.

Unsupervised person re-identification (USL-ReID) typically relies on clustering to generate pseudo-labels, but significant cross-view appearance variations often cause images of the same identity to be split into different clusters. Training on such noisy pseudo-labels severely degrades the learned representations. Therefore, learning robust view-invariant features is paramount. Data augmentation provides a direct way to enhance invariance, yet its trade-offs in USL-ReID remain under-explored: weak augmentations usually preserve identity semantics but lack diversity, whereas strong augmentations provide richer appearance diversity at the cost of partially corrupting identity-consistent semantic cues. To address this challenge, we propose Invariant Representation learning with Progressive Prototype Refinement (IRPP), a unified framework that learns invariant and discriminative features from noisy pseudo-labels. IRPP consists of three synergistic components. First, an Augmented Dual-Contrastive Learning (ADCL) module performs dataset-level prototype-guided invariant learning by contrasting weakly and strongly augmented views against cluster-derived prototypes. Second, an Alignment and Uniformity Learning (AUL) module regularizes the mini-batch-level weak-strong feature geometry, leading to more stable feature distributions under data augmentation. Third, a Progressive Prototype Refinement (PPR) mechanism progressively optimizes cluster centroids into cleaner prototypes, thereby mitigating the influence of noisy pseudo-labels and further strengthening invariant representation learning. This closed-loop design enables prototype-guided contrastive learning, weak-strong regularization, and prototype refinement to mutually reinforce each other. Extensive experiments on standard USL-ReID benchmarks demonstrate that IRPP achieves state-of-the-art performance with a simple and efficient training pipeline. Code is available at https://github.com/Trangle12/IRPP.

Dataset distillation (DD) condenses key information from large-scale datasets into smaller synthetic datasets, reducing storage and computational costs for training networks. However, most recent research has primarily focused on image classification tasks, with limited exploration in detection and segmentation. Two key challenges remain: (i) Task Optimization Heterogeneity, where existing methods focus on class-level information but fail to address the diverse needs of detection and segmentation, and (ii) Inflexible Image Generation, where current generation methods rely on global updates for single-class targets and lack localized optimization for specific object regions. To address these challenges, we propose UniDD, a universal dataset distillation framework built on a task-driven diffusion model for diverse DD tasks, as shown in Fig. 1. Our approach operates in two stages: Universal Task Knowledge Mining, which captures task-relevant information through task-specific proxy model training, and Universal Task-Driven Diffusion, where these proxies guide the diffusion process to generate task-specific synthetic images. Extensive experiments across ImageNet-1K, Pascal VOC, and MS COCO demonstrate that UniDD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. In particular, on ImageNet-1K with IPC-10, UniDD surpasses previous diffusion-based methods by 6.1%, while also reducing deployment costs.

Dataset condensation (DC) is an emerging technique capable of creating compact synthetic datasets from large originals while maintaining considerable performance. It is crucial for accelerating network training and reducing data storage requirements. However, current research on DC mainly focuses on image classification, with less exploration of object detection. This is primarily due to two challenges: (i) the multitasking nature of object detection complicates the condensation process, and (ii) Object detection datasets are characterized by large-scale and high-resolution data, which are difficult for existing DC methods to handle. As a remedy, we propose DCOD, the first dataset condensation framework for object detection. It operates in two stages: Fetch and Forge, initially storing key localization and classification information into model parameters, and then reconstructing synthetic images via model inversion. For the complex of multiple objects in an image, we propose Foreground Background Decoupling to centrally update the foreground of multiple instances and Incremental PatchExpand to further enhance the diversity of foregrounds. Extensive experiments on various detection datasets demonstrate the superiority of DCOD. Even at an extremely low compression rate of 1\%, we achieve 46.4\% and 24.7\% $\text{AP}_{50}$ on the VOC and COCO, respectively, significantly reducing detector training duration.

We have developed and evaluated a set of speaker normalization procedures derived by bilinear transform (BLT) to compensate for variations in vocal tract lengths of different classes of speakers. The warping factors are estimated using the average third formants and their bandwidth, leaving out the exhaustive search. The MFCC of the testing data are transformed by the warped Mel filterbanks to match the models of the training data. The effectiveness of this set of speaker normalization procedures is examined in an experimental study performed using an isolated digit database of man, woman and children comparing to other standard speaker normalization method. The results of experiments demonstrate their capacity to achieve recognition accuracy increase of 19.5% and 16.5% at the best.