aiqbench analysis
This paper addresses the persistent brittleness of shadow removal models by introducing AgenticShadow, a dataset constructed via an offline agentic workflow that synthesizes missing paired supervision from existing detection data. By integrating physics-motivated generation with feedback-driven retry mechanisms, the approach significantly improves cross-domain generalization and color fidelity compared to traditional methods relying on static benchmarks. The work highlights how agentic workflows can overcome long-standing data scarcity challenges in computer vision without requiring new physical capture campaigns.
After a Decade: Bringing Shadow Removal into the Real World with Agentic Training Data
arXiv:2609.38607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Shadow removal looks nearly solved on established benchmarks, yet remains brittle in the real world. Models have advanced; the paired training data they rely on have barely changed in nearly a decade. The reason is simple: obtaining a shadow-free target requires removing the occluder while keeping the scene, camera, and illumination otherwise unchanged, making diverse paired data difficult to capture. Meanwhile, large shadow detection datasets already contain diverse real-world images and masks, but no shadow-free targets. To turn this abundant but incomplete data into paired supervision, we propose an offline agentic workflow combining physics-motivated generation, failure detection, feedback-driven retry, candidate selection, and deterministic correction. Using this workflow, we construct AgenticShadow, a dataset of 17,138 image-mask-target triplets spanning general scenes, faces, and remote sensing. Our construction workflow reduces Color Distribution Difference by 50.5% over previous shadow removal work, while training existing shadow removal models on AgenticShadow reduces cross-domain LAB RMSE by 19.7-37.5%.
Abstract:Shadow removal looks nearly solved on established benchmarks, yet remains brittle in the real world. Models have advanced; the paired training data they rely on have barely changed in nearly a decade. The reason is simple: obtaining a shadow-free target requires removing the occluder while keeping the scene, camera, and illumination otherwise unchanged, making diverse paired data difficult to capture. Meanwhile, large shadow detection datasets already contain diverse real-world images and masks, but no shadow-free targets. To turn this abundant but incomplete data into paired supervision, we propose an offline agentic workflow combining physics-motivated generation, failure detection, feedback-driven retry, candidate selection, and deterministic correction. Using this workflow, we construct AgenticShadow, a dataset of 17,138 image-mask-target triplets spanning general scenes, faces, and remote sensing. Our construction workflow reduces Color Distribution Difference by 50.5% over previous shadow removal work, while training existing shadow removal models on AgenticShadow reduces cross-domain LAB RMSE by 19.7-37.5%.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2609.38607 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2609.38607v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.38607 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 251 words
