Sign Language Translation (SLT) converts continuous sign videos into spoken language text, yet current models, whether gloss-based or gloss-free, struggle with long or discourse-level inputs. Recent architectures such as TwoStreamNetwork and CV-SLT have nearly saturated short-sentence accuracy, but their performance degrades on long sentences and multi-sentence paragraphs. In real scenarios such as news, interviews or daily conversations, signers naturally produce extended signing sequences with complex contextual dependencies. Moreover, identifying precise gloss boundaries remains a key obstacle, while gloss-based methods, though often superior, incur heavy annotation costs. The community therefore needs a solution that mitigates gloss dependency while preserving translation quality.We present BoostSLT, a context-aware framework enhancing semantic consistency over long sign sequences without gloss supervision. Instead of requiring explicit gloss segmentation, BoostSLT introduces an Energy-Aware Temporal Segmentation (EAT-Seg) module that dynamically partitions videos into semantically coherent fragments, followed by a Diffusion-based Semantic Reconstruction (DSR) module that stitches and refines fragment-level translations into globally fluent paragraphs. The framework is plug-and-play and model-agnostic, seamlessly integrating with existing gloss-based or gloss-free pipelines across languages. Experiments on PHOENIX-2014T, CSL-Daily, and Auslan-Daily show consistent BLEU and Rouge-L gains, confirming that diffusion-driven semantic reconstruction effectively bridges local accuracy and global coherence in long-form SLT.

Recently, iris recognition is regaining prominence in immersive applications such as extended reality as a means of seamless user identification. This application scenario introduces unique challenges compared to traditional iris recognition under controlled setups, as the ocular images are primarily captured off-axis and less constrained, causing perspective distortion, intra-subject variation, and quality degradation in iris textures. Datasets capturing these challenges remain limited. This paper fills this gap by presenting a large-scale iris dataset collected via head-mounted displays, termed ImmerIris. It contains 499,791 ocular images from 564 subjects, and is, to our knowledge, the largest public iris dataset to date and among the first dedicated to immersive applications. It is accompanied by a comprehensive set of evaluation protocols that benchmark recognition systems under various challenging conditions. This paper also draws attention to a shared obstacle of current recognition methods, the reliance on a pre-processing, normalization stage, which is fallible in off-axis and unconstrained setups. To this end, this paper further proposes a normalization-free paradigm that directly learns from minimally adjusted ocular images. Despite its simplicity, it outperforms normalization-based prior arts, indicating a promising direction for robust iris recognition.

We introduce OLATverse, a large-scale dataset comprising around 9M images of 765 real-world objects, captured from multiple viewpoints under a diverse set of precisely controlled lighting conditions. While recent advances in object-centric inverse rendering, novel view synthesis and relighting have shown promising results, most techniques still heavily rely on the synthetic datasets for training and small-scale real-world datasets for benchmarking, which limits their realism and generalization. To address this gap, OLATverse offers two key advantages over existing datasets: large-scale coverage of real objects and high-fidelity appearance under precisely controlled illuminations. Specifically, OLATverse contains 765 common and uncommon real-world objects, spanning a wide range of material categories. Each object is captured using 35 DSLR cameras and 331 individually controlled light sources, enabling the simulation of diverse illumination conditions. In addition, for each object, we provide well-calibrated camera parameters, accurate object masks, photometric surface normals, and diffuse albedo as auxiliary resources. We also construct an extensive evaluation set, establishing the first comprehensive real-world object-centric benchmark for inverse rendering and normal estimation. We believe that OLATverse represents a pivotal step toward integrating the next generation of inverse rendering and relighting methods with real-world data.

Music-driven 3D dance generation offers significant creative potential, yet practical applications demand versatile and multimodal control. As the highly dynamic and complex human motion covering various styles and genres, dance generation requires satisfying diverse conditions beyond just music (e.g., spatial trajectories, keyframe gestures, or style descriptions). However, the absence of a large-scale and richly annotated dataset severely hinders progress. In this paper, we build OpenDanceSet, an extensive human dance dataset comprising over 100 hours across 14 genres and 147 subjects. Each sample has rich annotations to facilitate robust cross-modal learning: 3D motion, paired music, 2D keypoints, trajectories, and expert-annotated text descriptions. Furthermore, we propose OpenDanceNet, a unified masked modeling framework for controllable dance generation, including a disentangled auto-encoder and a multimodal joint-prediction Transformer. OpenDanceNet supports generation conditioned on music and arbitrary combinations of text, keypoints, or trajectories. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our work achieves high-fidelity synthesis with strong diversity and realistic physical contacts, while also offering flexible control over spatial and stylistic conditions.

Face relighting aims to synthesize realistic portraits under novel illumination while preserving identity and geometry. However, progress remains constrained by the limited availability of large-scale, physically consistent illumination data. To address this, we introduce POLAR, a large-scale and physically calibrated One-Light-at-a-Time (OLAT) dataset containing over 200 subjects captured under 156 lighting directions, multiple views, and diverse expressions. Building upon POLAR, we develop a flow-based generative model POLARNet that predicts per-light OLAT responses from a single portrait, capturing fine-grained and direction-aware illumination effects while preserving facial identity. Unlike diffusion or background-conditioned methods that rely on statistical or contextual cues, our formulation models illumination as a continuous, physically interpretable transformation between lighting states, enabling scalable and controllable relighting. Together, POLAR and POLARNet form a unified illumination learning framework that links real data, generative synthesis, and physically grounded relighting, establishing a self-sustaining “chicken-and-egg’’ cycle for scalable and reproducible portrait illumination.

We present Relightable Holoported Characters (RHC), a novel person-specific method for free-view rendering and relighting of full-body and highly dynamic humans solely observed from sparse-view RGB videos at inference. In contrast to classical one-light-at-a-time (OLAT)-based human relighting, our transformer-based RelightNet predicts relit appearance within a single network pass, avoiding costly OLAT-basis capture and generation. For training such a model, we introduce a new capture strategy and dataset recorded in a multi-view lightstage, where we alternate frames lit by random environment maps with uniformly lit tracking frames, simultaneously enabling accurate motion tracking and diverse illumination as well as dynamics coverage. Inspired by the rendering equation, we derive physics-informed features that encode geometry, albedo, shading, and the virtual camera view from a coarse human mesh proxy and the input views. Our RelightNet then takes these features as input and cross-attends them with a novel lighting condition, and regresses the relit appearance in the form of texel-aligned 3D Gaussian splats attached to the coarse mesh proxy. Consequently, our RelightNet implicitly learns to efficiently compute the rendering equation for novel lighting conditions within a single feed-forward pass. Experiments demonstrate our method’s superior visual fidelity and lighting reproduction compared to state-of-the-art approaches.