Daily Papers

Ultrafast electron microscopy (UEM) has found widespread applications in physics, chemistry, and materials science, enabling real-space imaging of dynamics on ultrafast timescales. Recent advances have pushed the temporal resolution of UEM into the attosecond regime, enabling the attomicroscopy technique to directly visualize electron motion. In this work, we extend the capabilities of this powerful imaging tool to investigate ultrafast electron dynamics in a biological system by imaging and controlling light induced electronic and chemical changes in the conductive network of multicellular cable bacteria. Using electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), we first observed a laser induced increase in {\pi}-electron density, accompanied by spectral peak broadening and a blueshift features indicative of enhanced conductivity and structural modification. We also traced the effect of ultrafast laser pumping on bulk plasmon electron oscillations by monitoring changes in the plasmon like resonance peak. Additionally, we visualized laser induced chemical structural changes in cable bacteria in real space. The imaging results revealed carbon enrichment alongside a depletion of nitrogen and oxygen, highlighting the controllability of chemical dynamics. Moreover, time resolved EELS measurements further revealed a picosecond scale decay and recovery of both {\pi}-electron and plasmonic features, attributed to electron phonon coupling. In addition to shedding light on the mechanism of electron motion in cable bacteria, these findings demonstrate ultrafast modulation and switching of conductivity, underscoring their potential as bio-optoelectronic components operating on ultrafast timescales.

Optical resonances in nanostructures enable strong enhancement of nonlinear processes at the nanoscale, such as second-harmonic generation (SHG), with high-Q modes providing intensified light--matter interactions and sharp spectral selectivity for applications in filtering, sensing, and nonlinear spectroscopy. Thanks to the recent advances in thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) technology, these key features can be now translated to lithium niobate for realizing novel nanoscale nonlinear optical platforms. Here, we demonstrate a large-area metasurface, realized by scalable nanoimprint lithography, comprising a slanted titanium dioxide (TiO_2) nanograting on etchless TFLN for efficient narrowband SHG. This is enabled by the optimal coupling of quasi-bound state in the continuum (q-BIC) modes with a narrowband pulsed laser pump. The demonstrated normalized SHG efficiency is 0.15%,cm^2/GW, which is among the largest reported for LN metasurfaces. The low pump peak intensity (3.64~kW/cm^2) employed, which enables SHG even by continuous-wave pumping, allows envisioning integrated and portable photonic applications. SHG wavelength tuning from 870 to 920~nm with stable output power as well as polarization control is also achieved by off-normal pump illumination. This versatile platform opens new opportunities for sensing, THz generation and detection, and ultrafast electro-optic modulation of nonlinear optical signals.

Pulsed visible lasers either by Q-switching or mode locking have been attracting intense attentions both in solid-state laser and fiber laser. Here, we report on the simultaneous manipulation of reconfigurable sub-pulse sequences and customizable high-order vortex beams in an actively Q-switched visible laser. On the one hand, pulse sequences with up to 4 sub-pulses could be generated and fully controlled by means of an acoustic-optic modulator driven by an arbitrary waveform generator. Both pulse number and pulse intensity can be manipulated through the programmable step-signal, which is also theoretically simulated through the rate equations. On the other hand, assisted by the off-axis pumping technique and the astigmatic mode conversion, the laser cavity could emit high-quality vortex beams carrying Laguerre-Gaussian modes up to 30th order. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most flexible active manipulations not only on the intensity distribution of the transverse modes but also on the temporal distribution of the pulse sequences in a visible laser. The versatile manipulating techniques in this work could be immediately implemented into all other solid-state lasers to obtain sub-pulse vortex beams, which may provide enhanced functionality and flexibility for a large range of laser systems.

High spatial frequency information, including fine details like textures, significantly contributes to the accuracy of semantic segmentation. However, according to the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem, high-frequency components are vulnerable to aliasing or distortion when propagating through downsampling layers such as strided-convolution. Here, we propose a novel Spatial Frequency Modulation (SFM) that modulates high-frequency features to a lower frequency before downsampling and then demodulates them back during upsampling. Specifically, we implement modulation through adaptive resampling (ARS) and design a lightweight add-on that can densely sample the high-frequency areas to scale up the signal, thereby lowering its frequency in accordance with the Frequency Scaling Property. We also propose Multi-Scale Adaptive Upsampling (MSAU) to demodulate the modulated feature and recover high-frequency information through non-uniform upsampling This module further improves segmentation by explicitly exploiting information interaction between densely and sparsely resampled areas at multiple scales. Both modules can seamlessly integrate with various architectures, extending from convolutional neural networks to transformers. Feature visualization and analysis confirm that our method effectively alleviates aliasing while successfully retaining details after demodulation. Finally, we validate the broad applicability and effectiveness of SFM by extending it to image classification, adversarial robustness, instance segmentation, and panoptic segmentation tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/SFM.

Diffusion models are proficient at generating high-quality images. They are however effective only when operating at the resolution used during training. Inference at a scaled resolution leads to repetitive patterns and structural distortions. Retraining at higher resolutions quickly becomes prohibitive. Thus, methods enabling pre-existing diffusion models to operate at flexible test-time resolutions are highly desirable. Previous works suffer from frequent artifacts and often introduce large latency overheads. We propose two simple modules that combine to solve these issues. We introduce a Frequency Modulation (FM) module that leverages the Fourier domain to improve the global structure consistency, and an Attention Modulation (AM) module which improves the consistency of local texture patterns, a problem largely ignored in prior works. Our method, coined Fam diffusion, can seamlessly integrate into any latent diffusion model and requires no additional training. Extensive qualitative results highlight the effectiveness of our method in addressing structural and local artifacts, while quantitative results show state-of-the-art performance. Also, our method avoids redundant inference tricks for improved consistency such as patch-based or progressive generation, leading to negligible latency overheads.

In this work, we present efficient modulation, a novel design for efficient vision networks. We revisit the modulation mechanism, which operates input through convolutional context modeling and feature projection layers, and fuses features via element-wise multiplication and an MLP block. We demonstrate that the modulation mechanism is particularly well suited for efficient networks and further tailor the modulation design by proposing the efficient modulation (EfficientMod) block, which is considered the essential building block for our networks. Benefiting from the prominent representational ability of modulation mechanism and the proposed efficient design, our network can accomplish better trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency and set new state-of-the-art performance in the zoo of efficient networks. When integrating EfficientMod with the vanilla self-attention block, we obtain the hybrid architecture which further improves the performance without loss of efficiency. We carry out comprehensive experiments to verify EfficientMod's performance. With fewer parameters, our EfficientMod-s performs 0.6 top-1 accuracy better than EfficientFormerV2-s2 and is 25% faster on GPU, and 2.9 better than MobileViTv2-1.0 at the same GPU latency. Additionally, our method presents a notable improvement in downstream tasks, outperforming EfficientFormerV2-s by 3.6 mIoU on the ADE20K benchmark. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/ma-xu/EfficientMod.

Neural fields, mapping low-dimensional input coordinates to corresponding signals, have shown promising results in representing various signals. Numerous methodologies have been proposed, and techniques employing MLPs and grid representations have achieved substantial success. MLPs allow compact and high expressibility, yet often suffer from spectral bias and slow convergence speed. On the other hand, methods using grids are free from spectral bias and achieve fast training speed, however, at the expense of high spatial complexity. In this work, we propose a novel way for exploiting both MLPs and grid representations in neural fields. Unlike the prevalent methods that combine them sequentially (extract features from the grids first and feed them to the MLP), we inject spectral bias-free grid representations into the intermediate features in the MLP. More specifically, we suggest a Coordinate-Aware Modulation (CAM), which modulates the intermediate features using scale and shift parameters extracted from the grid representations. This can maintain the strengths of MLPs while mitigating any remaining potential biases, facilitating the rapid learning of high-frequency components. In addition, we empirically found that the feature normalizations, which have not been successful in neural filed literature, proved to be effective when applied in conjunction with the proposed CAM. Experimental results demonstrate that CAM enhances the performance of neural representation and improves learning stability across a range of signals. Especially in the novel view synthesis task, we achieved state-of-the-art performance with the least number of parameters and fast training speed for dynamic scenes and the best performance under 1MB memory for static scenes. CAM also outperforms the best-performing video compression methods using neural fields by a large margin.

We propose focal modulation networks (FocalNets in short), where self-attention (SA) is completely replaced by a focal modulation mechanism for modeling token interactions in vision. Focal modulation comprises three components: (i) hierarchical contextualization, implemented using a stack of depth-wise convolutional layers, to encode visual contexts from short to long ranges, (ii) gated aggregation to selectively gather contexts for each query token based on its content, and (iii) element-wise modulation or affine transformation to inject the aggregated context into the query. Extensive experiments show FocalNets outperform the state-of-the-art SA counterparts (e.g., Swin and Focal Transformers) with similar computational costs on the tasks of image classification, object detection, and segmentation. Specifically, FocalNets with tiny and base size achieve 82.3% and 83.9% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K. After pretrained on ImageNet-22K in 224 resolution, it attains 86.5% and 87.3% top-1 accuracy when finetuned with resolution 224 and 384, respectively. When transferred to downstream tasks, FocalNets exhibit clear superiority. For object detection with Mask R-CNN, FocalNet base trained with 1\times outperforms the Swin counterpart by 2.1 points and already surpasses Swin trained with 3\times schedule (49.0 v.s. 48.5). For semantic segmentation with UPerNet, FocalNet base at single-scale outperforms Swin by 2.4, and beats Swin at multi-scale (50.5 v.s. 49.7). Using large FocalNet and Mask2former, we achieve 58.5 mIoU for ADE20K semantic segmentation, and 57.9 PQ for COCO Panoptic Segmentation. Using huge FocalNet and DINO, we achieved 64.3 and 64.4 mAP on COCO minival and test-dev, respectively, establishing new SoTA on top of much larger attention-based models like Swinv2-G and BEIT-3. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/microsoft/FocalNet.

Convolutions operate only locally, thus failing to model global interactions. Self-attention is, however, able to learn representations that capture long-range dependencies in sequences. We propose a network architecture for audio super-resolution that combines convolution and self-attention. Attention-based Feature-Wise Linear Modulation (AFiLM) uses self-attention mechanism instead of recurrent neural networks to modulate the activations of the convolutional model. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms existing approaches on standard benchmarks. Moreover, it allows for more parallelization resulting in significantly faster training.

Although numerous solutions have been proposed for image super-resolution, they are usually incompatible with low-power devices with many computational and memory constraints. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a simple yet effective deep network to solve image super-resolution efficiently. In detail, we develop a spatially-adaptive feature modulation (SAFM) mechanism upon a vision transformer (ViT)-like block. Within it, we first apply the SAFM block over input features to dynamically select representative feature representations. As the SAFM block processes the input features from a long-range perspective, we further introduce a convolutional channel mixer (CCM) to simultaneously extract local contextual information and perform channel mixing. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method is 3times smaller than state-of-the-art efficient SR methods, e.g., IMDN, in terms of the network parameters and requires less computational cost while achieving comparable performance. The code is available at https://github.com/sunny2109/SAFMN.

How to explore useful features from images as prompts to guide the deep image restoration models is an effective way to solve image restoration. In contrast to mining spatial relations within images as prompt, which leads to characteristics of different frequencies being neglected and further remaining subtle or undetectable artifacts in the restored image, we develop a Frequency Prompting image restoration method, dubbed FPro, which can effectively provide prompt components from a frequency perspective to guild the restoration model address these differences. Specifically, we first decompose input features into separate frequency parts via dynamically learned filters, where we introduce a gating mechanism for suppressing the less informative elements within the kernels. To propagate useful frequency information as prompt, we then propose a dual prompt block, consisting of a low-frequency prompt modulator (LPM) and a high-frequency prompt modulator (HPM), to handle signals from different bands respectively. Each modulator contains a generation process to incorporate prompting components into the extracted frequency maps, and a modulation part that modifies the prompt feature with the guidance of the decoder features. Experimental results on commonly used benchmarks have demonstrated the favorable performance of our pipeline against SOTA methods on 5 image restoration tasks, including deraining, deraindrop, demoiréing, deblurring, and dehazing. The source code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/joshyZhou/FPro.

Recent advancements in state-space models (SSMs) have showcased effective performance in modeling long-range dependencies with subquadratic complexity. However, pure SSM-based models still face challenges related to stability and achieving optimal performance on computer vision tasks. Our paper addresses the challenges of scaling SSM-based models for computer vision, particularly the instability and inefficiency of large model sizes. To address this, we introduce a Modulated Group Mamba layer which divides the input channels into four groups and applies our proposed SSM-based efficient Visual Single Selective Scanning (VSSS) block independently to each group, with each VSSS block scanning in one of the four spatial directions. The Modulated Group Mamba layer also wraps the four VSSS blocks into a channel modulation operator to improve cross-channel communication. Furthermore, we introduce a distillation-based training objective to stabilize the training of large models, leading to consistent performance gains. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the merits of the proposed contributions, leading to superior performance over existing methods for image classification on ImageNet-1K, object detection, instance segmentation on MS-COCO, and semantic segmentation on ADE20K. Our tiny variant with 23M parameters achieves state-of-the-art performance with a classification top-1 accuracy of 83.3% on ImageNet-1K, while being 26% efficient in terms of parameters, compared to the best existing Mamba design of same model size. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/Amshaker/GroupMamba.

In the image acquisition process, various forms of degradation, including noise, haze, and rain, are frequently introduced. These degradations typically arise from the inherent limitations of cameras or unfavorable ambient conditions. To recover clean images from degraded versions, numerous specialized restoration methods have been developed, each targeting a specific type of degradation. Recently, all-in-one algorithms have garnered significant attention by addressing different types of degradations within a single model without requiring prior information of the input degradation type. However, these methods purely operate in the spatial domain and do not delve into the distinct frequency variations inherent to different degradation types. To address this gap, we propose an adaptive all-in-one image restoration network based on frequency mining and modulation. Our approach is motivated by the observation that different degradation types impact the image content on different frequency subbands, thereby requiring different treatments for each restoration task. Specifically, we first mine low- and high-frequency information from the input features, guided by the adaptively decoupled spectra of the degraded image. The extracted features are then modulated by a bidirectional operator to facilitate interactions between different frequency components. Finally, the modulated features are merged into the original input for a progressively guided restoration. With this approach, the model achieves adaptive reconstruction by accentuating the informative frequency subbands according to different input degradations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on different image restoration tasks, including denoising, dehazing, deraining, motion deblurring, and low-light image enhancement. Our code is available at https://github.com/c-yn/AdaIR.

Real-image super-resolution (Real-ISR) seeks to recover HR images from LR inputs with mixed, unknown degradations. While diffusion models surpass GANs in perceptual quality, they under-reconstruct high-frequency (HF) details due to a low-frequency (LF) bias and a depth-wise "low-first, high-later" hierarchy. We introduce FRAMER, a plug-and-play training scheme that exploits diffusion priors without changing the backbone or inference. At each denoising step, the final-layer feature map teaches all intermediate layers. Teacher and student feature maps are decomposed into LF/HF bands via FFT masks to align supervision with the model's internal frequency hierarchy. For LF, an Intra Contrastive Loss (IntraCL) stabilizes globally shared structure. For HF, an Inter Contrastive Loss (InterCL) sharpens instance-specific details using random-layer and in-batch negatives. Two adaptive modulators, Frequency-based Adaptive Weight (FAW) and Frequency-based Alignment Modulation (FAM), reweight per-layer LF/HF signals and gate distillation by current similarity. Across U-Net and DiT backbones (e.g., Stable Diffusion 2, 3), FRAMER consistently improves PSNR/SSIM and perceptual metrics (LPIPS, NIQE, MANIQA, MUSIQ). Ablations validate the final-layer teacher and random-layer negatives.

This paper presents a new vision Transformer, Scale-Aware Modulation Transformer (SMT), that can handle various downstream tasks efficiently by combining the convolutional network and vision Transformer. The proposed Scale-Aware Modulation (SAM) in the SMT includes two primary novel designs. Firstly, we introduce the Multi-Head Mixed Convolution (MHMC) module, which can capture multi-scale features and expand the receptive field. Secondly, we propose the Scale-Aware Aggregation (SAA) module, which is lightweight but effective, enabling information fusion across different heads. By leveraging these two modules, convolutional modulation is further enhanced. Furthermore, in contrast to prior works that utilized modulations throughout all stages to build an attention-free network, we propose an Evolutionary Hybrid Network (EHN), which can effectively simulate the shift from capturing local to global dependencies as the network becomes deeper, resulting in superior performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMT significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across a wide range of visual tasks. Specifically, SMT with 11.5M / 2.4GFLOPs and 32M / 7.7GFLOPs can achieve 82.2% and 84.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, respectively. After pretrained on ImageNet-22K in 224^2 resolution, it attains 87.1% and 88.1% top-1 accuracy when finetuned with resolution 224^2 and 384^2, respectively. For object detection with Mask R-CNN, the SMT base trained with 1x and 3x schedule outperforms the Swin Transformer counterpart by 4.2 and 1.3 mAP on COCO, respectively. For semantic segmentation with UPerNet, the SMT base test at single- and multi-scale surpasses Swin by 2.0 and 1.1 mIoU respectively on the ADE20K.

Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) image restoration is trapped in a scalability crisis: existing models, bound to pixel-wise operations, demand unsustainable computation. While state space models (SSMs) like Mamba promise linear complexity, their pixel-serial scanning remains a fundamental bottleneck for the millions of pixels in UHD content. We ask: must we process every pixel to understand the image? This paper introduces C^2SSM, a visual state space model that breaks this taboo by shifting from pixel-serial to cluster-serial scanning. Our core discovery is that the rich feature distribution of a UHD image can be distilled into a sparse set of semantic centroids via a neural-parameterized mixture model. C^2SSM leverages this to reformulate global modeling into a novel dual-path process: it scans and reasons over a handful of cluster centers, then diffuses the global context back to all pixels through a principled similarity distribution, all while a lightweight modulator preserves fine details. This cluster-centric paradigm achieves a decisive leap in efficiency, slashing computational costs while establishing new state-of-the-art results across five UHD restoration tasks. More than a solution, C^2SSM charts a new course for efficient large-scale vision: scan clusters, not pixels.

While the field of multi-modal learning keeps growing fast, the deficiency of the standard joint training paradigm has become clear through recent studies. They attribute the sub-optimal performance of the jointly trained model to the modality competition phenomenon. Existing works attempt to improve the jointly trained model by modulating the training process. Despite their effectiveness, those methods can only apply to late fusion models. More importantly, the mechanism of the modality competition remains unexplored. In this paper, we first propose an adaptive gradient modulation method that can boost the performance of multi-modal models with various fusion strategies. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses all existing modulation methods. Furthermore, to have a quantitative understanding of the modality competition and the mechanism behind the effectiveness of our modulation method, we introduce a novel metric to measure the competition strength. This metric is built on the mono-modal concept, a function that is designed to represent the competition-less state of a modality. Through systematic investigation, our results confirm the intuition that the modulation encourages the model to rely on the more informative modality. In addition, we find that the jointly trained model typically has a preferred modality on which the competition is weaker than other modalities. However, this preferred modality need not dominate others. Our code will be available at https://github.com/lihong2303/AGM_ICCV2023.

While Dynamic Convolution (DY-Conv) has shown promising performance by enabling adaptive weight selection through multiple parallel weights combined with an attention mechanism, the frequency response of these weights tends to exhibit high similarity, resulting in high parameter costs but limited adaptability. In this work, we introduce Frequency Dynamic Convolution (FDConv), a novel approach that mitigates these limitations by learning a fixed parameter budget in the Fourier domain. FDConv divides this budget into frequency-based groups with disjoint Fourier indices, enabling the construction of frequency-diverse weights without increasing the parameter cost. To further enhance adaptability, we propose Kernel Spatial Modulation (KSM) and Frequency Band Modulation (FBM). KSM dynamically adjusts the frequency response of each filter at the spatial level, while FBM decomposes weights into distinct frequency bands in the frequency domain and modulates them dynamically based on local content. Extensive experiments on object detection, segmentation, and classification validate the effectiveness of FDConv. We demonstrate that when applied to ResNet-50, FDConv achieves superior performance with a modest increase of +3.6M parameters, outperforming previous methods that require substantial increases in parameter budgets (e.g., CondConv +90M, KW +76.5M). Moreover, FDConv seamlessly integrates into a variety of architectures, including ConvNeXt, Swin-Transformer, offering a flexible and efficient solution for modern vision tasks. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FDConv.

We report an optical method of generating arbitrary polarization states by manipulating the thicknesses of a pair of uniaxial birefringent plates, the optical axes of which are set at a crossing angle of {\pi}/4. The method has the remarkable feature of being able to generate a distribution of arbitrary polarization states in a group of highly discrete spectra without spatially separating the individual spectral components. The target polarization-state distribution is obtained as an optimal solution through an exploration. Within a realistic exploration range, a sufficient number of near-optimal solutions are found. This property is also reproduced well by a concise model based on a distribution of exploration points on a Poincar\'e sphere, showing that the number of near-optimal solutions behaves according to a power law with respect to the number of spectral components of concern. As a typical example of an application, by applying this method to a set of phase-locked highly discrete spectra, we numerically demonstrate the continuous generation of a vector-like optical electric field waveform, the helicity of which is alternated within a single optical cycle in the time domain.

Multimodal learning has developed very fast in recent years. However, during the multimodal training process, the model tends to rely on only one modality based on which it could learn faster, thus leading to inadequate use of other modalities. Existing methods to balance the training process always have some limitations on the loss functions, optimizers and the number of modalities and only consider modulating the magnitude of the gradients while ignoring the directions of the gradients. To solve these problems, in this paper, we present a novel method to balance multimodal learning with Classifier-Guided Gradient Modulation (CGGM), considering both the magnitude and directions of the gradients. We conduct extensive experiments on four multimodal datasets: UPMC-Food 101, CMU-MOSI, IEMOCAP and BraTS 2021, covering classification, regression and segmentation tasks. The results show that CGGM outperforms all the baselines and other state-of-the-art methods consistently, demonstrating its effectiveness and versatility. Our code is available at https://github.com/zrguo/CGGM.

The structure-function relationship is at the heart of biology and major protein deformations are correlated to specific functions. In the case of heme proteins, doming is associated with the respiratory function in hemoglobin and myoglobin, while ruffling has been correlated with electron transfer processes, such as in the case of Cytochrome c (Cyt c). The latter has indeed evolved to become an important electron transfer protein in humans. In its ferrous form, it undergoes ligand release and doming upon photoexcitation, but its ferric form does not release the distal ligand, while the return to the ground state has been attributed to thermal relaxation. Here, by combining femtosecond Fe K-edge X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) studies and femtosecond Fe Kalpha and Kbeta X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES), we demonstrate that the photocycle of ferric Cyt c is entirely due to a cascade among excited spin states of the Iron ion, causing the ferric heme to undergo doming, which we identify for the first time. We also argue that this pattern is common to all ferric haems, raising the question of the biological relevance of doming in such proteins.

Learned image compression (LIC) has gained traction as an effective solution for image storage and transmission in recent years. However, existing LIC methods are redundant in latent representation due to limitations in capturing anisotropic frequency components and preserving directional details. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel frequency-aware transformer (FAT) block that for the first time achieves multiscale directional ananlysis for LIC. The FAT block comprises frequency-decomposition window attention (FDWA) modules to capture multiscale and directional frequency components of natural images. Additionally, we introduce frequency-modulation feed-forward network (FMFFN) to adaptively modulate different frequency components, improving rate-distortion performance. Furthermore, we present a transformer-based channel-wise autoregressive (T-CA) model that effectively exploits channel dependencies. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance compared to existing LIC methods, and evidently outperforms latest standardized codec VTM-12.1 by 14.5%, 15.1%, 13.0% in BD-rate on the Kodak, Tecnick, and CLIC datasets.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on instruction-following tasks by integrating pretrained visual encoders with large language models (LLMs). However, existing approaches often struggle to ground fine-grained visual concepts in complex scenes. In this paper, we propose MoDA (Modulation Adapter), a lightweight yet effective module designed to refine pre-aligned visual features through instruction-guided modulation. Our approach follows the standard LLaVA training protocol, consisting of a two-stage process: (1) aligning image features to the LLMs input space via a frozen vision encoder and adapter layers, and (2) refining those features using the MoDA adapter during the instructional tuning stage. MoDA employs a Transformer-based cross-attention mechanism to generate a modulation mask over the aligned visual tokens, thereby emphasizing semantically relevant embedding dimensions based on the language instruction. The modulated features are then passed to the LLM for autoregressive language generation. Our experimental evaluation shows that MoDA improves visual grounding and generates more contextually appropriate responses, demonstrating its effectiveness as a general-purpose enhancement for image-based MLLMs.

Real-time object detection has achieved substantial progress through meticulously designed architectures and optimization strategies. However, the pursuit of high-speed inference via lightweight network designs often leads to degraded feature representation, which hinders further performance improvements and practical on-device deployment. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective and highly adaptable distillation framework that harnesses the rapidly evolving capabilities of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to enhance lightweight object detectors. Given the significant architectural and learning objective disparities between VFMs and resource-constrained detectors, achieving stable and task-aligned semantic transfer is challenging. To address this, on one hand, we introduce a Deep Semantic Injector (DSI) module that facilitates the integration of high-level representations from VFMs into the deep layers of the detector. On the other hand, we devise a Gradient-guided Adaptive Modulation (GAM) strategy, which dynamically adjusts the intensity of semantic transfer based on gradient norm ratios. Without increasing deployment and inference overhead, our approach painlessly delivers striking and consistent performance gains across diverse DETR-based models, underscoring its practical utility for real-time detection. Our new model family, RT-DETRv4, achieves state-of-the-art results on COCO, attaining AP scores of 49.7/53.5/55.4/57.0 at corresponding speeds of 273/169/124/78 FPS.

Earlier, in the CINT program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we focused ultrafast mode-locked lasers on the tip-sample junction of a scanning tunneling microscope to generate currents at hundreds of harmonics of the laser pulse repetition frequency. Each harmonic has a signal-to-noise ratio of 20 dB with a 10-dB linewidth of only 3 Hz. Now we model closed quantum nanocircuits with rectangular, triangular, or delta-function barrier, shunted by a beryllium filament for quasi-coherent electron transport over mean-free paths as great as 68 nm. The time-independent Schrödinger equation is solved with the boundary conditions that the wavefunction and its derivative are continuous at both connections. These four boundary conditions are used to form a four-by-four complex matrix equation with only zeros in the right-hand column vector which is required to have a non-trivial solution with each of the closed nanocircuits. Each model has four parameters: (1) the barrier length, (2) the height and shape of the barrier, (3) the length of the pre-barrier, and (4) the electron energy. Any three of these may be specified and then the fourth is varied to bring the determinant to zero to find the solutions on lines or surfaces in the space defined by the four parameters. First, we use a simplistic model having a rectangular barrier. The second model has a triangular barrier as a first approximation to field emission, and we are considering applying this approach for a self-contained nanoscale extension of our earlier effort to generate the harmonics at Los Alamos. The third model has a delta-function barrier, and the fourth model is an extension of the first one where the width of the rectangular barrier is varied inversely with its height.

We present a novel method for measuring the rate of periodic phenomena (e.g., rotation, flicker, and vibration), by an event camera, a device asynchronously reporting brightness changes at independently operating pixels with high temporal resolution. The approach assumes that for a periodic phenomenon, a highly similar set of events is generated within a spatio-temporal window at a time difference corresponding to its period. The sets of similar events are detected by a correlation in the spatio-temporal event stream space. The proposed method, EEPPR, is evaluated on a dataset of 12 sequences of periodic phenomena, i.e. flashing light and vibration, and periodic motion, e.g., rotation, ranging from 3.2 Hz to 2 kHz (equivalent to 192 - 120 000 RPM). EEPPR significantly outperforms published methods on this dataset, achieving a mean relative error of 0.1%, setting new state-of-the-art. The dataset and codes are publicly available on GitHub.

Indirect Time of Flight LiDARs can indirectly calculate the scene's depth from the phase shift angle between transmitted and received laser signals with amplitudes modulated at a predefined frequency. Unfortunately, this method generates ambiguity in calculated depth when the phase shift angle value exceeds 2pi. Current state-of-the-art methods use raw samples generated using two distinct modulation frequencies to overcome this ambiguity problem. However, this comes at the cost of increasing laser components' stress and raising their temperature, which reduces their lifetime and increases power consumption. In our work, we study two different methods to recover the entire depth range of the LiDAR using fewer raw data sample shots from a single modulation frequency with the support of sensor's gray scale output to reduce the laser components' stress and power consumption.

Intracellular lasers are emerging as powerful biosensors for multiplexed tracking and precision sensing of cells and their microenvironment. This sensing capacity is enabled by quantifying their narrow-linewidth emission spectra, which is presently challenging to do at high speeds. In this work, we demonstrate rapid snapshot hyperspectral imaging of intracellular lasers. Using integral field mapping with a microlens array and a diffraction grating, we obtain images of the spatial and spectral intensity distribution from a single camera acquisition. We demonstrate widefield hyperspectral imaging over a 3times3 mm^2 field of view and volumetric imaging over 250times250times800 mum^3 volumes with a spatial resolution of 5 mum and a spectral resolution of less than 0.8 nm. We evaluate the performance and outline the challenges and strengths of snapshot methods in the context of characterising the emission from intracellular lasers. This method offers new opportunities for a diverse range of applications, including high-throughput and long-term biosensing with intracellular lasers.

We present an open-source Python implementation of an idealized high-order pseudo-spectral solver for the one-dimensional nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (NLSE). The solver combines Fourier spectral spatial discretization with an adaptive eighth-order Dormand-Prince time integration scheme to achieve machine-precision conservation of mass and near-perfect preservation of momentum and energy for smooth solutions. The implementation accurately reproduces fundamental NLSE phenomena including soliton collisions with analytically predicted phase shifts, Akhmediev breather dynamics, and the development of modulation instability from noisy initial conditions. Four canonical test cases validate the numerical scheme: single soliton propagation, two-soliton elastic collision, breather evolution, and noise-seeded modulation instability. The solver employs a 2/3 dealiasing rule with exponential filtering to prevent aliasing errors from the cubic nonlinearity. Statistical analysis using Shannon, R\'enyi, and Tsallis entropies quantifies the spatio-temporal complexity of solutions, while phase space representations reveal the underlying coherence structure. The implementation prioritizes code transparency and educational accessibility over computational performance, providing a valuable pedagogical tool for exploring nonlinear wave dynamics. Complete source code, documentation, and example configurations are freely available, enabling reproducible computational experiments across diverse physical contexts where the NLSE governs wave evolution, including nonlinear optics, Bose-Einstein condensates, and ocean surface waves.

Femtosecond thermal lens spectroscopy (FTLS) is a powerful analytical tool, yet its application to complex, multi-component mixtures like fragrance accords remains limited. Here, we introduce and validate a unified metric, the Femtosecond Thermal Lens Integrated Magnitude (FTL-IM), to characterize such mixtures. The FTL-IM, derived from the integrated signal area, provides a direct, model-free measure of the total thermo-optical response, including critical convective effects. Applying the FTL-IM to complex six-component accords, we demonstrate its utility in predicting a mixture's thermal response from its composition through linear additivity with respect to component mole fractions. Our method quantifies the accords' behavior, revealing both the baseline contributions of components and the dominant, non-linear effects of highly-active species like Methyl Anthranilate. This consistency is validated across single-beam Z-scan, dual-beam Z-scan, and time-resolved FTLS measurements. The metric also demonstrates the necessity of single-beam measurements for interpreting dual-beam data. This work establishes a rapid, quantitative method for fragrance analysis, offering advantages for quality control by directly linking a mixture's bulk thermo-optical properties to its composition.

An electro-optic modulator offers the function of modulating the propagation of light in a material with electric field and enables seamless connection between electronics-based computing and photonics-based communication. The search for materials with large electro-optic coefficients and low optical loss is critical to increase the efficiency and minimize the size of electro-optic devices. We present a semi-empirical method to compute the electro-optic coefficients of ferroelectric materials by combining first-principles density-functional theory calculations with Landau-Devonshire phenomenological modeling. We apply the method to study the electro-optic constants, also called Pockels coefficients, of three paradigmatic ferroelectric oxides: BaTiO3, LiNbO3, and LiTaO3. We present their temperature-, frequency- and strain-dependent electro-optic tensors calculated using our method. The predicted electro-optic constants agree with the experimental results, where available, and provide benchmarks for experimental verification.

Point-spread-function (PSF) engineering is a powerful computational imaging techniques wherein a custom phase mask is integrated into an optical system to encode additional information into captured images. Used in combination with deep learning, such systems now offer state-of-the-art performance at monocular depth estimation, extended depth-of-field imaging, lensless imaging, and other tasks. Inspired by recent advances in spatial light modulator (SLM) technology, this paper answers a natural question: Can one encode additional information and achieve superior performance by changing a phase mask dynamically over time? We first prove that the set of PSFs described by static phase masks is non-convex and that, as a result, time-averaged PSFs generated by dynamic phase masks are fundamentally more expressive. We then demonstrate, in simulation, that time-averaged dynamic (TiDy) phase masks can offer substantially improved monocular depth estimation and extended depth-of-field imaging performance.

Accurate RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) crowd counting is crucial for public safety in challenging conditions. While recent Transformer-based methods excel at capturing global context, their inherent lack of spatial inductive bias causes attention to spread to irrelevant background regions, compromising crowd localization precision. Furthermore, effectively bridging the gap between these distinct modalities remains a major hurdle. To tackle this, we propose the Dual Modulation Framework, comprising two modules: Spatially Modulated Attention (SMA), which improves crowd localization by using a learnable Spatial Decay Mask to penalize attention between distant tokens and prevent focus from spreading to the background; and Adaptive Fusion Modulation (AFM), which implements a dynamic gating mechanism to prioritize the most reliable modality for adaptive cross-modal fusion. Extensive experiments on RGB-T crowd counting datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to previous works. Code available at https://github.com/Cht2924/RGBT-Crowd-Counting.

We introduce a general-purpose conditioning method for neural networks called FiLM: Feature-wise Linear Modulation. FiLM layers influence neural network computation via a simple, feature-wise affine transformation based on conditioning information. We show that FiLM layers are highly effective for visual reasoning - answering image-related questions which require a multi-step, high-level process - a task which has proven difficult for standard deep learning methods that do not explicitly model reasoning. Specifically, we show on visual reasoning tasks that FiLM layers 1) halve state-of-the-art error for the CLEVR benchmark, 2) modulate features in a coherent manner, 3) are robust to ablations and architectural modifications, and 4) generalize well to challenging, new data from few examples or even zero-shot.

Flicker artifacts, arising from unstable illumination and row-wise exposure inconsistencies, pose a significant challenge in short-exposure photography, severely degrading image quality. Unlike typical artifacts, e.g., noise and low-light, flicker is a structured degradation with specific spatial-temporal patterns, which are not accounted for in current generic restoration frameworks, leading to suboptimal flicker suppression and ghosting artifacts. In this work, we reveal that flicker artifacts exhibit two intrinsic characteristics, periodicity and directionality, and propose Flickerformer, a transformer-based architecture that effectively removes flicker without introducing ghosting. Specifically, Flickerformer comprises three key components: a phase-based fusion module (PFM), an autocorrelation feed-forward network (AFFN), and a wavelet-based directional attention module (WDAM). Based on the periodicity, PFM performs inter-frame phase correlation to adaptively aggregate burst features, while AFFN exploits intra-frame structural regularities through autocorrelation, jointly enhancing the network's ability to perceive spatially recurring patterns. Moreover, motivated by the directionality of flicker artifacts, WDAM leverages high-frequency variations in the wavelet domain to guide the restoration of low-frequency dark regions, yielding precise localization of flicker artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Flickerformer outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. The source code is available at https://github.com/qulishen/Flickerformer.

Real-world video restoration is plagued by complex degradations from motion coupled with dynamically varying exposure - a key challenge largely overlooked by prior works and a common artifact of auto-exposure or low-light capture. We present FMA-Net++, a framework for joint video super-resolution and deblurring that explicitly models this coupled effect of motion and dynamically varying exposure. FMA-Net++ adopts a sequence-level architecture built from Hierarchical Refinement with Bidirectional Propagation blocks, enabling parallel, long-range temporal modeling. Within each block, an Exposure Time-aware Modulation layer conditions features on per-frame exposure, which in turn drives an exposure-aware Flow-Guided Dynamic Filtering module to infer motion- and exposure-aware degradation kernels. FMA-Net++ decouples degradation learning from restoration: the former predicts exposure- and motion-aware priors to guide the latter, improving both accuracy and efficiency. To evaluate under realistic capture conditions, we introduce REDS-ME (multi-exposure) and REDS-RE (random-exposure) benchmarks. Trained solely on synthetic data, FMA-Net++ achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and temporal consistency on our new benchmarks and GoPro, outperforming recent methods in both restoration quality and inference speed, and generalizes well to challenging real-world videos.

Binary classical information is routinely encoded in the two metastable states of a dynamical system. Since these states may exhibit macroscopic lifetimes, the encoded information inherits a strong protection against bit-flips. A recent qubit - the cat-qubit - is encoded in the manifold of metastable states of a quantum dynamical system, thereby acquiring bit-flip protection. An outstanding challenge is to gain quantum control over such a system without breaking its protection. If this challenge is met, significant shortcuts in hardware overhead are forecast for quantum computing. In this experiment, we implement a cat-qubit with bit-flip times exceeding ten seconds. This is a four order of magnitude improvement over previous cat-qubit implementations, and six orders of magnitude enhancement over the single photon lifetime that compose this dynamical qubit. This was achieved by introducing a quantum tomography protocol that does not break bit-flip protection. We prepare and image quantum superposition states, and measure phase-flip times above 490 nanoseconds. Most importantly, we control the phase of these superpositions while maintaining the bit-flip time above ten seconds. This work demonstrates quantum operations that preserve macroscopic bit-flip times, a necessary step to scale these dynamical qubits into fully protected hardware-efficient architectures.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks. However, the authenticity of the responses generated by MLLMs is often compromised by object hallucinations. We identify that a key cause of these hallucinations is the model's over-susceptibility to specific image frequency features in detecting objects. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Frequency Perturbations (MFP), a simple, cost-effective, and pluggable method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference, thereby mitigating hallucinations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures. Furthermore, as a training-time method, MFP can be combined with inference-time methods to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the CHAIR benchmark.

We introduce a platform to achieve ultra-strong coupling (USC) between light and matter using widely available materials. USC is a light-matter interaction regime characterized by coupling strengths exceeding 10% of the ground state energy. It gives rise to novel physical phenomena, such as efficient single-photon coupling and quantum gates, with applications in quantum sensing, nonlinear optics, and low-threshold lasing. Although early demonstrations in plasmonic systems have been realized, achieving USC in dielectric platforms, which offer lower losses and high Q-factors, remains challenging due to typically low mode overlap between the photonic field and the material resonance. Here we leverage dielectric dual gradient metasurfaces supporting quasi-bound states in the continuum to spatially encode both the spectral and coupling parameter space and demonstrate USC to an epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) mode in an ultra-thin SiO2 layer. The strong out-of-plane electric fields in our tapered bar structure overlap exceptionally well with those of the ENZ mode, resulting in a normalized coupling strength of 0.101 and a mode splitting equivalent to 20% of the ENZ mode energy; a four- to five-fold increase compared to previous approaches. The strong field confinement of our approach opens new possibilities for compact and scalable polaritonic devices, such as tunable frequency converters and low-energy optical modulators.

Attosecond pulses provide unique opportunities for studies of time-resolved electron dynamics. However, focusing these pulses, typically ranging from the vacuum ultraviolet to the soft-X-ray region, remains challenging. Conventional refractive lenses are not suitable owing to the large dispersion and the strong absorption, while reflective optics, despite avoiding these issues, still lead to high losses. Here we propose a tunable plasma lens capable of focusing attosecond pulses, and experimentally demonstrate focusing of these pulses at extreme-ultraviolet photon energies around 20 eV and 80 eV. A key advantage is its compatibility with nonlinear frequency conversion processes like high-harmonic generation. The different focusing properties of the fundamental light and the generated harmonic frequencies allow for efficient separation of these components. Consequently, the transmission of high-harmonic generation beamlines can be increased to more than 80%, making this approach highly suitable for photon-demanding applications.

Standing as one of the most significant barriers to reaching quantum advantage, state-preparation fidelities on noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors suffer from quantum-gate errors, which accumulate over time. A potential remedy is pulse-based state preparation. We numerically investigate the minimal evolution times (METs) attainable by optimizing (microwave and exchange) pulses on silicon hardware. We investigate two state preparation tasks. First, we consider the preparation of molecular ground states and find the METs for H_2, HeH^+, and LiH to be 2.4 ns, 4.4 ns, and 27.2 ns, respectively. Second, we consider transitions between arbitrary states and find the METs for transitions between arbitrary four-qubit states to be below 50 ns. For comparison, connecting arbitrary two-qubit states via one- and two-qubit gates on the same silicon processor requires approximately 200 ns. This comparison indicates that pulse-based state preparation is likely to utilize the coherence times of silicon hardware more efficiently than gate-based state preparation. Finally, we quantify the effect of silicon device parameters on the MET. We show that increasing the maximal exchange amplitude from 10 MHz to 1 GHz accelerates the METs, e.g., for H_2 from 84.3 ns to 2.4 ns. This demonstrates the importance of fast exchange. We also show that increasing the maximal amplitude of the microwave drive from 884 kHz to 56.6 MHz shortens state transitions, e.g., for two-qubit states from 1000 ns to 25 ns. Our results bound both the state-preparation times for general quantum algorithms and the execution times of variational quantum algorithms with silicon spin qubits.

Blind face video restoration aims to restore high-fidelity details from videos subjected to complex and unknown degradations. This task poses a significant challenge of managing temporal heterogeneity while at the same time maintaining stable face attributes. In this paper, we introduce a Discrete Prior-based Temporal-Coherent content prediction transformer to address the challenge, and our model is referred to as DP-TempCoh. Specifically, we incorporate a spatial-temporal-aware content prediction module to synthesize high-quality content from discrete visual priors, conditioned on degraded video tokens. To further enhance the temporal coherence of the predicted content, a motion statistics modulation module is designed to adjust the content, based on discrete motion priors in terms of cross-frame mean and variance. As a result, the statistics of the predicted content can match with that of real videos over time. By performing extensive experiments, we verify the effectiveness of the design elements and demonstrate the superior performance of our DP-TempCoh in both synthetically and naturally degraded video restoration.

The performance of single image super-resolution depends heavily on how to generate and complement high-frequency details to low-resolution images. Recently, diffusion-based models exhibit great potential in generating high-quality images for super-resolution tasks. However, existing models encounter difficulties in directly predicting high-frequency information of wide bandwidth by solely utilizing the high-resolution ground truth as the target for all sampling timesteps. To tackle this problem and achieve higher-quality super-resolution, we propose a novel Frequency Domain-guided multiscale Diffusion model (FDDiff), which decomposes the high-frequency information complementing process into finer-grained steps. In particular, a wavelet packet-based frequency complement chain is developed to provide multiscale intermediate targets with increasing bandwidth for reverse diffusion process. Then FDDiff guides reverse diffusion process to progressively complement the missing high-frequency details over timesteps. Moreover, we design a multiscale frequency refinement network to predict the required high-frequency components at multiple scales within one unified network. Comprehensive evaluations on popular benchmarks are conducted, and demonstrate that FDDiff outperforms prior generative methods with higher-fidelity super-resolution results.

With applications ranging from metabolomics to histopathology, quantitative phase microscopy (QPM) is a powerful label-free imaging modality. Despite significant advances in fast multiplexed imaging sensors and deep-learning-based inverse solvers, the throughput of QPM is currently limited by the speed of electronic hardware. Complementarily, to improve throughput further, here we propose to acquire images in a compressed form such that more information can be transferred beyond the existing electronic hardware bottleneck. To this end, we present a learnable optical compression-decompression framework that learns content-specific features. The proposed differentiable quantitative phase microscopy (partial mu) first uses learnable optical feature extractors as image compressors. The intensity representation produced by these networks is then captured by the imaging sensor. Finally, a reconstruction network running on electronic hardware decompresses the QPM images. In numerical experiments, the proposed system achieves compression of times 64 while maintaining the SSIM of sim 0.90 and PSNR of sim 30 dB on cells. The results demonstrated by our experiments open up a new pathway for achieving end-to-end optimized (i.e., optics and electronic) compact QPM systems that may provide unprecedented throughput improvements.

High Power Laser's (HPL) optimal performance is essential for the success of a wide variety of experimental tasks related to light-matter interactions. Traditionally, HPL parameters are optimised in an automated fashion relying on black-box numerical methods. However, these can be demanding in terms of computational resources and usually disregard transient and complex dynamics. Model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers a promising alternative framework for optimising HPL performance since it allows to tune the control parameters as a function of system states subject to nonlinear temporal dynamics without requiring an explicit dynamics model of those. Furthermore, DRL aims to find an optimal control policy rather than a static parameter configuration, particularly suitable for dynamic processes involving sequential decision-making. This is particularly relevant as laser systems are typically characterised by dynamic rather than static traits. Hence the need for a strategy to choose the control applied based on the current context instead of one single optimal control configuration. This paper investigates the potential of DRL in improving the efficiency and safety of HPL control systems. We apply this technique to optimise the temporal profile of laser pulses in the L1 pump laser hosted at the ELI Beamlines facility. We show how to adapt DRL to the setting of spectral phase control by solely tuning dispersion coefficients of the spectral phase and reaching pulses similar to transform limited with full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of ca1.6 ps.

Statistical whitening transformations play a fundamental role in many computational systems, and may also play an important role in biological sensory systems. Existing neural circuit models of adaptive whitening operate by modifying synaptic interactions; however, such modifications would seem both too slow and insufficiently reversible. Motivated by the extensive neuroscience literature on gain modulation, we propose an alternative model that adaptively whitens its responses by modulating the gains of individual neurons. Starting from a novel whitening objective, we derive an online algorithm that whitens its outputs by adjusting the marginal variances of an overcomplete set of projections. We map the algorithm onto a recurrent neural network with fixed synaptic weights and gain-modulating interneurons. We demonstrate numerically that sign-constraining the gains improves robustness of the network to ill-conditioned inputs, and a generalization of the circuit achieves a form of local whitening in convolutional populations, such as those found throughout the visual or auditory systems.

We demonstrate a compact, cost-effective snapshot spectral imaging system named Aperture Diffraction Imaging Spectrometer (ADIS), which consists only of an imaging lens with an ultra-thin orthogonal aperture mask and a mosaic filter sensor, requiring no additional physical footprint compared to common RGB cameras. Then we introduce a new optical design that each point in the object space is multiplexed to discrete encoding locations on the mosaic filter sensor by diffraction-based spatial-spectral projection engineering generated from the orthogonal mask. The orthogonal projection is uniformly accepted to obtain a weakly calibration-dependent data form to enhance modulation robustness. Meanwhile, the Cascade Shift-Shuffle Spectral Transformer (CSST) with strong perception of the diffraction degeneration is designed to solve a sparsity-constrained inverse problem, realizing the volume reconstruction from 2D measurements with Large amount of aliasing. Our system is evaluated by elaborating the imaging optical theory and reconstruction algorithm with demonstrating the experimental imaging under a single exposure. Ultimately, we achieve the sub-super-pixel spatial resolution and high spectral resolution imaging. The code will be available at: https://github.com/Krito-ex/CSST.

Spatially variant dynamic convolution provides a principled approach of integrating spatial adaptivity into deep neural networks. However, mainstream designs in medical segmentation commonly generate dynamic kernels through average pooling, which implicitly collapses high-frequency spatial details into a coarse, spatially-compressed representation, leading to over-smoothed predictions that degrade the fidelity of fine-grained clinical structures. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Structure-Guided Dynamic Convolution (SGDC) mechanism, which leverages an explicitly supervised structure-extraction branch to guide the generation of dynamic kernels and gating signals for structure-aware feature modulation. Specifically, the high-fidelity boundary information from this auxiliary branch is fused with semantic features to enable spatially-precise feature modulation. By replacing context aggregation with pixel-wise structural guidance, the proposed design effectively prevents the information loss introduced by average pooling. Experimental results show that SGDC achieves state-of-the-art performance on ISIC 2016, PH2, ISIC 2018, and CoNIC datasets, delivering superior boundary fidelity by reducing the Hausdorff Distance (HD95) by 2.05, and providing consistent IoU gains of 0.99\%-1.49\% over pooling-based baselines. Moreover, the mechanism exhibits strong potential for extension to other fine-grained, structure-sensitive vision tasks, such as small-object detection, offering a principled solution for preserving structural integrity in medical image analysis. To facilitate reproducibility and encourage further research, the implementation code for both our SGE and SGDC modules has been is publicly released at https://github.com/solstice0621/SGDC.