Generalization over Memorization: Generalization-Aware Diffusion Adaptation for Single-Image Multi-View Synthesis

We present the winning solution to the ACM Multimedia 2026 Grand Challenge on Single-Image Guided Multi-Angle Image Synthesis. It ranks first among 293 registered teams; 56 teams obtained at least one scored submission on the public Phase-A leaderboard. With only 40 training scenes, the challenge requires 26 target views from one RGB model and one forward pass per view; it prohibits explicit geometry, external rendering, chained generation, candidate selection, and post-processing. We identify a critical model-selection failure: shared training and validation scenes make memorization appear as transferable view control. We therefore introduce GoM. Short for Generalization over Memorization, the framework combines scene-disjoint validation, exposure-matched selection, and targeted diffusion adaptation. Its synthesis model adapts a 4B rectified-flow DiT using rank-32 LoRA, optimizer restarts, late-checkpoint averaging, and VAE decoder tuning. More than 300 offline experiments and 24 online submissions show that validation design and training-trajectory control can matter as much as architecture scale in small-data generative modeling.

Level, Sharpness, and Corpus: Why Zero-Shot OOD Detector Rankings Do Not Transfer

Selecting a zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detector for a new deployment is typically based on benchmark rankings, implicitly assuming that the highest-ranked detector will transfer across domains. We show that this assumption does not hold. Through a controlled portability audit across seventeen in-distribution datasets, three vision-language models, and seven representative zero-shot OOD detectors, we find that detector rankings reverse across deployments, every detector exceeds $80\%$ FPR95 on at least one domain, and the preferred detector depends on both the in-distribution data and the underlying VLM. We trace these reversals to complementary evidence channels in vision-language logits. Corpus-free detectors rely on different combinations of absolute match level and relative or spatial sharpness, while WordNet-based methods additionally depend on external semantic coverage. A simple proposition shows that level and sharpness cannot generally be recovered from one another, explaining why no single detector transfers reliably across deployments. Motivated by this diagnosis, we introduce the Complementary Evidence Guard (CEG), a detector-agnostic wrapper that preserves complementary evidence through a non-compensatory fusion of the base detector, level, and sharpness using only empirical in-distribution percentiles. Controls replacing these channels with entropy, logit variance, or random noise do not reproduce the gains. Without OOD samples, auxiliary corpora, or learned fusion, CEG reduces detector sensitivity and improves GL-MCM from $38.1$ to $28.8$ and MCM from $42.6$ to $30.5$ family-balanced FPR95.

Beyond aggregate scores: Deployment-aware and non-compensatory benchmarking of vision-based eye-state recognition models for driver monitoring

Model selection for safety-relevant visual recognition is often based on clean aggregate performance, although robustness, transfer, embedded latency, and explanation faithfulness may produce different preferences. This study presents a Human-Centered Benchmarking Framework (HCBF) that separates multidimensional evidence from non-compensatory operational eligibility. Six compact convolutional and transformer-oriented eye-state recognition models were evaluated using a subject-disjoint MRL Eye protocol, deterministic image corruptions, zero-shot transfer and participant-safe target-domain training with out-of-fold evaluation on RT-BENE, TensorRT FP32 inference on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano, and black-box RISE faithfulness. Clean MRL Macro-F1 ranged from 0.9566 to 0.9794, whereas zero-shot RT-BENE Macro-F1 ranged from 0.2066 to 0.7771. Matched target-domain effects varied from -0.0406 to 0.4807 and redistributed the two directional errors differently across architectures. Only MobileNetV3-Large and ShuffleNetV2 met the 33.333-ms binocular-pair latency deadline, while neither passed the predefined safety-related screen. The remaining four models failed both requirements, yielding an empty eligible set. Normalized deletion AUC ranged from 0.5826 to 0.9113, while normalized insertion coverage varied from 17.6% to 88.6%. Model ordering changed across clean prediction, corruption robustness, transfer, deployment, faithfulness, and historical score sensitivity. These findings show that relative ranking, multidimensional preference, and operational eligibility are distinct decisions. Deployment-aware benchmarking should preserve directional failures and uncertainty and should allow no model to be selected when mandatory requirements are unmet.