Infrared video has been of great interest in visual tasks under challenging environments, but often suffers from severe atmospheric turbulence and compression degradation. Existing video super-resolution (VSR) methods either neglect the inherent modality gap between infrared and visible images or fail to restore turbulence-induced distortions. Directly cascading turbulence mitigation (TM) algorithms with VSR methods leads to error propagation and accumulation due to the decoupled modeling of degradation between turbulence and resolution. We introduce HATIR, a Heat-Aware Diffusion for Turbulent InfraRed Video Super-Resolution, which injects heat-aware deformation priors into the diffusion sampling path to jointly model the inverse process of turbulent degradation and structural detail loss. Specifically, HATIR constructs a Phasor-Guided Flow Estimator, rooted in the physical principle that thermally active regions exhibit consistent phasor responses over time, enabling reliable turbulence-aware flow to guide the reverse diffusion process. To ensure the fidelity of structural recovery under nonuniform distortions, a Turbulence-Aware Decoder is proposed to selectively suppress unstable temporal cues and enhance edge-aware feature aggregation via turbulence gating and structure-aware attention. We built FLIR-IVSR, the first dataset for turbulent infrared VSR, comprising paired LR-HR sequences from a FLIR T1050sc camera (1024 X 768) spanning 640 diverse scenes with varying camera and object motion conditions. This encourages future research in infrared VSR.

Infrared and Visible Image Fusion (IVIF) under unregistered conditions has been of great interest in various visual tasks under challenging environments. While existing approaches often demonstrate promising results on specific benchmarks, they tend to exhibit performance drops in unseen scenarios and incur high computational overhead when retrained on new datasets. To address these challenges, we propose TRACE, a Training-free Reinforcement-based Alignment method for Cross-modality Enhancement, which incorporates Evaluator, a rewarding network, into an evaluation-driven Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, enabling efficient and plug-and-play refinement of any existing registration approach. Specifically, TRACE constructs the Evaluator network to assess the alignment quality of the given registration model, generating confidence scores and adjustment masks via spatial and channel attention. Leveraging these cues as RL rewards, TRACE iteratively refines the registration network to mitigate misalignments until the accumulated improvement is satisfied. Due to its training-free and plug-and-play nature, TRACE notably enhances fusion results across diverse and unseen scenarios. TRACE achieves impressive improvements in different methods across diverse datasets with minimal computational cost. The project page is available at https://github.com/pubyLu/TRACE.