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Oct 27

Enhanced Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Models with Progressive Self-supervised Attention Learning

In aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), many neural models are equipped with an attention mechanism to quantify the contribution of each context word to sentiment prediction. However, such a mechanism suffers from one drawback: only a few frequent words with sentiment polarities are tended to be taken into consideration for final sentiment decision while abundant infrequent sentiment words are ignored by models. To deal with this issue, we propose a progressive self-supervised attention learning approach for attentional ABSA models. In this approach, we iteratively perform sentiment prediction on all training instances, and continually learn useful attention supervision information in the meantime. During training, at each iteration, context words with the highest impact on sentiment prediction, identified based on their attention weights or gradients, are extracted as words with active/misleading influence on the correct/incorrect prediction for each instance. Words extracted in this way are masked for subsequent iterations. To exploit these extracted words for refining ABSA models, we augment the conventional training objective with a regularization term that encourages ABSA models to not only take full advantage of the extracted active context words but also decrease the weights of those misleading words. We integrate the proposed approach into three state-of-the-art neural ABSA models. Experiment results and in-depth analyses show that our approach yields better attention results and significantly enhances the performance of all three models. We release the source code and trained models at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/PSSAttention.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 4, 2021

Hijacking Large Audio-Language Models via Context-Agnostic and Imperceptible Auditory Prompt Injection

Modern Large audio-language models (LALMs) power intelligent voice interactions by tightly integrating audio and text. This integration, however, expands the attack surface beyond text and introduces vulnerabilities in the continuous, high-dimensional audio channel. While prior work studied audio jailbreaks, the security risks of malicious audio injection and downstream behavior manipulation remain underexamined. In this work, we reveal a previously overlooked threat, auditory prompt injection, under realistic constraints of audio data-only access and strong perceptual stealth. To systematically analyze this threat, we propose AudioHijack, a general framework that generates context-agnostic and imperceptible adversarial audio to hijack LALMs. AudioHijack employs sampling-based gradient estimation for end-to-end optimization across diverse models, bypassing non-differentiable audio tokenization. Through attention supervision and multi-context training, it steers model attention toward adversarial audio and generalizes to unseen user contexts. We also design a convolutional blending method that modulates perturbations into natural reverberation, making them highly imperceptible to users. Extensive experiments on 13 state-of-the-art LALMs show consistent hijacking across 6 misbehavior categories, achieving average success rates of 79\%-96\% on unseen user contexts with high acoustic fidelity. Real-world studies demonstrate that commercial voice agents from Mistral AI and Microsoft Azure can be induced to execute unauthorized actions on behalf of users. These findings expose critical vulnerabilities in LALMs and highlight the urgent need for dedicated defense.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 15

3D-VITAL: Visibility-aware Identity Training from Artificial Liftings of 3D Reconstruction model for Cross-View Object Re-Identification

We address the Cross-View Object Re-Identification (ReID) task, aiming to match identities across drastically different viewpoints. We focus on Single-View Aerial-Ground ReID (SV AG-ReID), where models train on one viewpoint and must generalize to another at inference. To bridge this viewpoint gap, related work employs generative models to synthesize novel views from source images as additional training data. We leverage recent advances in large-scale single-view 3D mesh reconstruction to lift source images into textured meshes and to render them from new viewpoints. However, this pipeline produces unreliable data in two distinct ways. First, the reconstruction may fail and produce geometrically incorrect meshes, resulting in severe corruption in rendered novel views. Second, even when the geometry is correct, the rendered novel views contain hallucinated textures in regions not visible in the source image. The reconstructed mesh carries a per-pixel partition between regions visible from the source view and regions that the reconstruction model had to hallucinate, available as a deterministic byproduct of rendering. We introduce this per-pixel visibility map and exploit it in a two-stage design. Cross-View Consistency Filtering (CVCF) discards geometrically incorrect meshes by ensuring multi-view consistency between source and novel views over visible patches. Visibility-Aware Attention Supervision (VAAS) leverages the visibility map to guide the model's attention toward reliable regions of the rendered view during training. Combined, these two components enable our method, 3D-VITAL, to better leverage the synthetic signal from single-view 3D mesh reconstruction. 3D-VITAL sets a new state-of-the-art on three SV AG-ReID benchmarks. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/TurtleSmoke/3D-VITAL.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 11

SegEarth-R2: Towards Comprehensive Language-guided Segmentation for Remote Sensing Images

Effectively grounding complex language to pixels in remote sensing (RS) images is a critical challenge for applications like disaster response and environmental monitoring. Current models can parse simple, single-target commands but fail when presented with complex geospatial scenarios, e.g., segmenting objects at various granularities, executing multi-target instructions, and interpreting implicit user intent. To drive progress against these failures, we present LaSeRS, the first large-scale dataset built for comprehensive training and evaluation across four critical dimensions of language-guided segmentation: hierarchical granularity, target multiplicity, reasoning requirements, and linguistic variability. By capturing these dimensions, LaSeRS moves beyond simple commands, providing a benchmark for complex geospatial reasoning. This addresses a critical gap: existing datasets oversimplify, leading to sensitivity-prone real-world models. We also propose SegEarth-R2, an MLLM architecture designed for comprehensive language-guided segmentation in RS, which directly confronts these challenges. The model's effectiveness stems from two key improvements: (1) a spatial attention supervision mechanism specifically handles the localization of small objects and their components, and (2) a flexible and efficient segmentation query mechanism that handles both single-target and multi-target scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our SegEarth-R2 achieves outstanding performance on LaSeRS and other benchmarks, establishing a powerful baseline for the next generation of geospatial segmentation. All data and code will be released at https://github.com/earth-insights/SegEarth-R2.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 22, 2025

Hierarchy-Aware and Anatomy-Guided Learning for Lung Ultrasound Video Classification

Lung ultrasound (LUS) is a bedside tool for assessing pulmonary edema in patients at risk due to heart failure or impaired kidney function. However, automated LUS analysis remains challenging because of speckle noise, imaging artifacts, and operator-dependent acquisition variability. In this work, we present a deep learning framework for multi-class LUS video classification that explores two components: hierarchy-aware training, and anatomy-guided learning. Starting from a strong baseline, we introduce hierarchical training strategies and then introduce pleural line mask supervision to guide model attention toward anatomically relevant regions. We study four clinically relevant classes--healthy, B-lines, consolidations, and mixed B-lines with consolidations--using an open-access dataset of 1,886 videos from 219 patients, evaluated with patient-level five-fold cross-validation. Results show that hierarchy-aware training improves pathological separation relative to flat classification, while mask-guided attention supervision achieves the highest mean macro-F1 of 65.7\% and produces more localized attention patterns. Transfer experiments on the external COVID-BLUeS dataset further show competitive and parameter-efficient adaptation while preserving pleural-focused attention behavior. These findings suggest that combining clinically structured objectives with anatomy-guided supervision is a practical approach to robust, interpretable LUS video analysis. Code and model implementations are available at https://github.com/Alya-Almsouti/LUS-video-classification.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 19

FastComposer: Tuning-Free Multi-Subject Image Generation with Localized Attention

Diffusion models excel at text-to-image generation, especially in subject-driven generation for personalized images. However, existing methods are inefficient due to the subject-specific fine-tuning, which is computationally intensive and hampers efficient deployment. Moreover, existing methods struggle with multi-subject generation as they often blend features among subjects. We present FastComposer which enables efficient, personalized, multi-subject text-to-image generation without fine-tuning. FastComposer uses subject embeddings extracted by an image encoder to augment the generic text conditioning in diffusion models, enabling personalized image generation based on subject images and textual instructions with only forward passes. To address the identity blending problem in the multi-subject generation, FastComposer proposes cross-attention localization supervision during training, enforcing the attention of reference subjects localized to the correct regions in the target images. Naively conditioning on subject embeddings results in subject overfitting. FastComposer proposes delayed subject conditioning in the denoising step to maintain both identity and editability in subject-driven image generation. FastComposer generates images of multiple unseen individuals with different styles, actions, and contexts. It achieves 300times-2500times speedup compared to fine-tuning-based methods and requires zero extra storage for new subjects. FastComposer paves the way for efficient, personalized, and high-quality multi-subject image creation. Code, model, and dataset are available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/fastcomposer.

  • 5 authors
·
May 17, 2023 1

SelfPose3d: Self-Supervised Multi-Person Multi-View 3d Pose Estimation

We present a new self-supervised approach, SelfPose3d, for estimating 3d poses of multiple persons from multiple camera views. Unlike current state-of-the-art fully-supervised methods, our approach does not require any 2d or 3d ground-truth poses and uses only the multi-view input images from a calibrated camera setup and 2d pseudo poses generated from an off-the-shelf 2d human pose estimator. We propose two self-supervised learning objectives: self-supervised person localization in 3d space and self-supervised 3d pose estimation. We achieve self-supervised 3d person localization by training the model on synthetically generated 3d points, serving as 3d person root positions, and on the projected root-heatmaps in all the views. We then model the 3d poses of all the localized persons with a bottleneck representation, map them onto all views obtaining 2d joints, and render them using 2d Gaussian heatmaps in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Afterwards, we use the corresponding 2d joints and heatmaps from the pseudo 2d poses for learning. To alleviate the intrinsic inaccuracy of the pseudo labels, we propose an adaptive supervision attention mechanism to guide the self-supervision. Our experiments and analysis on three public benchmark datasets, including Panoptic, Shelf, and Campus, show the effectiveness of our approach, which is comparable to fully-supervised methods. Code: https://github.com/CAMMA-public/SelfPose3D. Video demo: https://youtu.be/GAqhmUIr2E8.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 2, 2024

ACTRESS: Active Retraining for Semi-supervised Visual Grounding

Semi-Supervised Visual Grounding (SSVG) is a new challenge for its sparse labeled data with the need for multimodel understanding. A previous study, RefTeacher, makes the first attempt to tackle this task by adopting the teacher-student framework to provide pseudo confidence supervision and attention-based supervision. However, this approach is incompatible with current state-of-the-art visual grounding models, which follow the Transformer-based pipeline. These pipelines directly regress results without region proposals or foreground binary classification, rendering them unsuitable for fitting in RefTeacher due to the absence of confidence scores. Furthermore, the geometric difference in teacher and student inputs, stemming from different data augmentations, induces natural misalignment in attention-based constraints. To establish a compatible SSVG framework, our paper proposes the ACTive REtraining approach for Semi-Supervised Visual Grounding, abbreviated as ACTRESS. Initially, the model is enhanced by incorporating an additional quantized detection head to expose its detection confidence. Building upon this, ACTRESS consists of an active sampling strategy and a selective retraining strategy. The active sampling strategy iteratively selects high-quality pseudo labels by evaluating three crucial aspects: Faithfulness, Robustness, and Confidence, optimizing the utilization of unlabeled data. The selective retraining strategy retrains the model with periodic re-initialization of specific parameters, facilitating the model's escape from local minima. Extensive experiments demonstrates our superior performance on widely-used benchmark datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024

SIFT-VTON: Geometric Correspondence Supervision on Cross-Attention for Virtual Try-On

Diffusion-based virtual try-on methods achieve photorealistic synthesis through cross-attention mechanisms that transfer garment features to target body regions. However, these approaches rely on implicit learning of spatial correspondences, struggling to preserve fine details such as text and illustrations. We propose a novel approach, which we call SIFT-VTON, that utilizes SIFT keypoint matching to provide explicit geometric guidance for diffusion-based virtual try-on. Our method applies domain-specific filtering to SIFT keypoint matches between garment and person images, then converts these correspondences into spatial probability distributions that supervise cross-attention layers during training. This explicit supervision guides the model to learn precise spatial alignment, concentrating attention on geometrically consistent garment regions. Experiments on the VITON-HD dataset demonstrate significant improvements on unpaired metrics while maintaining competitive paired reconstruction metrics. Qualitative comparisons show superior preservation of text clarity and pattern alignment. Attention visualizations confirm that our method produces sharply focused attention on relevant garment details. This work demonstrates that classical geometric correspondence methods can effectively enhance modern diffusion models for conditional synthesis tasks. The source code will be available at https://github.com/takesukeDS/SIFT-VTON.

  • 2 authors
·
May 1

TextPixs: Glyph-Conditioned Diffusion with Character-Aware Attention and OCR-Guided Supervision

The modern text-to-image diffusion models boom has opened a new era in digital content production as it has proven the previously unseen ability to produce photorealistic and stylistically diverse imagery based on the semantics of natural-language descriptions. However, the consistent disadvantage of these models is that they cannot generate readable, meaningful, and correctly spelled text in generated images, which significantly limits the use of practical purposes like advertising, learning, and creative design. This paper introduces a new framework, namely Glyph-Conditioned Diffusion with Character-Aware Attention (GCDA), using which a typical diffusion backbone is extended by three well-designed modules. To begin with, the model has a dual-stream text encoder that encodes both semantic contextual information and explicit glyph representations, resulting in a character-aware representation of the input text that is rich in nature. Second, an attention mechanism that is aware of the character is proposed with a new attention segregation loss that aims to limit the attention distribution of each character independently in order to avoid distortion artifacts. Lastly, GCDA has an OCR-in-the-loop fine-tuning phase, where a full text perceptual loss, directly optimises models to be legible and accurately spell. Large scale experiments to benchmark datasets, such as MARIO-10M and T2I-CompBench, reveal that GCDA sets a new state-of-the-art on all metrics, with better character based metrics on text rendering (Character Error Rate: 0.08 vs 0.21 for the previous best; Word Error Rate: 0.15 vs 0.25), human perception, and comparable image synthesis quality on high-fidelity (FID: 14.3).

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 8, 2025

AuraForge: Scaling Security Supervision for Training Coding Agents

Coding agents are now proficient enough to generate complex software applications from a single prompt. As their capabilities have grown, human oversight has increasingly shifted from line-by-line code review toward hands-off evaluation of outcomes. However, recent studies have shown that such a transition exposes a critical risk: functional correctness alone does not guarantee a secure implementation. Despite growing attention to code security, training safer coding agents remains challenging because reliable security supervision is difficult to obtain at scale from real-world repositories. We introduce AuraForge to synthesize and validate executable security tests for training secure coding agents. Our approach combines attack-oriented test synthesis, language-extensible task construction, and safeguards against reward hacking. Using AuraForge, we construct AuraGym, a multi-language and multi-CWE executable training gym: 679 executable feature-implementation tasks from 344 real-world repositories across Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript, covering 177 CWE categories. On the subset with human-written security tests, AuraForge produces about 3 times as many test cases on average and reduces the false-positive rate by 83.23%, allowing alternative secure implementations to receive correct supervision. Training Qwen3.5-4B with synthesized security tests gains larger improvements than human-written security tests (average 19.7 FuncPass and 6.2 SecPass vs. 14.9 FuncPass and 4.4 SecPass) on three languages. These results demonstrate that AuraForge provides more diverse and reliable security supervision to train secure coding agents.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 30

Mitigating Hallucination in Visual Language Models with Visual Supervision

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) suffer from hallucination a lot, generating responses that apparently contradict to the image content occasionally. The key problem lies in its weak ability to comprehend detailed content in a multi-modal context, which can be mainly attributed to two factors in training data and loss function. The vision instruction dataset primarily focuses on global description, and the auto-regressive loss function favors text modeling rather than image understanding. In this paper, we bring more detailed vision annotations and more discriminative vision models to facilitate the training of LVLMs, so that they can generate more precise responses without encounter hallucination. On one hand, we generate image-text pairs with detailed relationship annotations in panoptic scene graph dataset (PSG). These conversations pay more attention on detailed facts in the image, encouraging the model to answer questions based on multi-modal contexts. On the other hand, we integrate SAM and mask prediction loss as auxiliary supervision, forcing the LVLMs to have the capacity to identify context-related objects, so that they can generate more accurate responses, mitigating hallucination. Moreover, to provide a deeper evaluation on the hallucination in LVLMs, we propose a new benchmark, RAH-Bench. It divides vision hallucination into three different types that contradicts the image with wrong categories, attributes or relations, and introduces False Positive Rate as detailed sub-metric for each type. In this benchmark, our approach demonstrates an +8.4% enhancement compared to original LLaVA and achieves widespread performance improvements across other models.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 26, 2023

PointOBB: Learning Oriented Object Detection via Single Point Supervision

Single point-supervised object detection is gaining attention due to its cost-effectiveness. However, existing approaches focus on generating horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs) while ignoring oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) commonly used for objects in aerial images. This paper proposes PointOBB, the first single Point-based OBB generation method, for oriented object detection. PointOBB operates through the collaborative utilization of three distinctive views: an original view, a resized view, and a rotated/flipped (rot/flp) view. Upon the original view, we leverage the resized and rot/flp views to build a scale augmentation module and an angle acquisition module, respectively. In the former module, a Scale-Sensitive Consistency (SSC) loss is designed to enhance the deep network's ability to perceive the object scale. For accurate object angle predictions, the latter module incorporates self-supervised learning to predict angles, which is associated with a scale-guided Dense-to-Sparse (DS) matching strategy for aggregating dense angles corresponding to sparse objects. The resized and rot/flp views are switched using a progressive multi-view switching strategy during training to achieve coupled optimization of scale and angle. Experimental results on the DIOR-R and DOTA-v1.0 datasets demonstrate that PointOBB achieves promising performance, and significantly outperforms potential point-supervised baselines.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 23, 2023

MultiCrafter: High-Fidelity Multi-Subject Generation via Spatially Disentangled Attention and Identity-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Multi-subject image generation aims to synthesize user-provided subjects in a single image while preserving subject fidelity, ensuring prompt consistency, and aligning with human aesthetic preferences. However, existing methods, particularly those built on the In-Context-Learning paradigm, are limited by their reliance on simple reconstruction-based objectives, leading to both severe attribute leakage that compromises subject fidelity and failing to align with nuanced human preferences. To address this, we propose MultiCrafter, a framework that ensures high-fidelity, preference-aligned generation. First, we find that the root cause of attribute leakage is a significant entanglement of attention between different subjects during the generation process. Therefore, we introduce explicit positional supervision to explicitly separate attention regions for each subject, effectively mitigating attribute leakage. To enable the model to accurately plan the attention region of different subjects in diverse scenarios, we employ a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to enhance the model's capacity, allowing different experts to focus on different scenarios. Finally, we design a novel online reinforcement learning framework to align the model with human preferences, featuring a scoring mechanism to accurately assess multi-subject fidelity and a more stable training strategy tailored for the MoE architecture. Experiments validate that our framework significantly improves subject fidelity while aligning with human preferences better.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025 2

MVTrack4Gen: Multi-View Point Tracking as Geometric Supervision for 4D Video Generation

Synthesizing a novel-view video from a monocular reference video along a target camera trajectory requires both geometric consistency and motion fidelity with respect to the reference video. Existing methods based on explicit 3D representations are limited by the accuracy of off-the-shelf reconstruction modules, which often produce inaccurate geometry for dynamic objects in monocular videos. In contrast, camera-conditioning-only methods can achieve high visual quality but often struggle to preserve geometric and motion consistency. In this work, we introduce MVTrack4Gen (Multi-View point Tracking for Novel-View Generation), a motion-aware training framework that leverages multi-view point tracking as an additional geometric and motion supervision signal for camera-conditioning-only novel-view video diffusion models. Our key finding is that specific attention layers encode strong correspondence cues, where query features attend to key features at geometrically corresponding locations across views and over time, and the misalignment of these correspondences causes motion inconsistency. Based on this observation, we route these features into an auxiliary multi-view tracking head and jointly train the diffusion model with a point-tracking objective. By explicitly strengthening these motion-aware correspondences, MVTrack4Gen improves existing models to better follow the motion in the reference view and maintain cross-view geometric consistency. Across diverse benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art geometric consistency and competitive camera accuracy.

kaist-ai KAIST AI
·
Jun 23 1

From SRA to Self-Flow: Data Augmentation or Self-Supervision?

Representation alignment has become an effective way to accelerate diffusion transformer training and improve generation quality. Recent self-alignment methods, such as SRA and Self-Flow, further remove the dependency on external pretrained encoders by constructing alignment within the diffusion model itself. However, the mechanism behind the improvement from SRA to Self-Flow, dual-time scheduling, remains under-examined: Self-Flow attributes its gain to interactions between tokens at different noise levels, where cleaner tokens help infer noisier ones. In this work, we revisit this explanation and ask whether the gain instead comes from data augmentation along the noise dimension. To disentangle these factors, we introduce Attention Separation, which preserves the same dual-timestep input as Self-Flow while blocking attention between tokens assigned to different noise levels. Surprisingly, removing such interaction does not degrade performance and can even improve it, suggesting that the improvement from SRA to Self-Flow mainly comes from data augmentation. Furthermore,We show that Attention Separation itself provides an augmentation effect by splitting a single image into multiple effective training parts to expand the training data. Based on these observations, we combine self-representation alignment with dual-timestep and attention-separation augmentation, and demonstrate the effectiveness of this design on ImageNet.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 1 2

SIEVE: Selective attention-value Suppression for Vision-Language Models Unlearning

The ability of vision-language models (VLMs) to associate visual identities with biographical information creates a need for selective unlearning of personally identifiable information (PII) while preserving permitted knowledge about the same individual. This setting is challenging because both sensitive and retained information can share the same visual inputs and intermediate representations. We introduce SIEVE, a simple and effective framework for selective VLM unlearning. SIEVE directly regularizes attention-value representations while also controlling model outputs. SIEVE suppresses attention values for forget examples toward a constant zero, while preserving retain-example representations by matching them to a frozen reference model. These objectives are combined with sequence-level forget and retain supervision, enabling targeted forgetting without largely affecting retained knowledge. Extensive experiments show that SIEVE achieves state-of-the-art performance on unlearning with multiple model-modality settings, while maintaining competitive retained utility. Ablation studies further show that value suppression and negative cross-entropy contribute complementary forgetting signals, while reference-based value matching substantially reduces utility degradation. These results demonstrate that attention values provide an effective intervention point for selective multimodal unlearning when sensitive and retained knowledge are closely related.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 30

Revisiting End-to-End Learning with Slide-level Supervision in Computational Pathology

Pre-trained encoders for offline feature extraction followed by multiple instance learning (MIL) aggregators have become the dominant paradigm in computational pathology (CPath), benefiting cancer diagnosis and prognosis. However, performance limitations arise from the absence of encoder fine-tuning for downstream tasks and disjoint optimization with MIL. While slide-level supervised end-to-end (E2E) learning is an intuitive solution to this issue, it faces challenges such as high computational demands and suboptimal results. These limitations motivate us to revisit E2E learning. We argue that prior work neglects inherent E2E optimization challenges, leading to performance disparities compared to traditional two-stage methods. In this paper, we pioneer the elucidation of optimization challenge caused by sparse-attention MIL and propose a novel MIL called ABMILX. It mitigates this problem through global correlation-based attention refinement and multi-head mechanisms. With the efficient multi-scale random patch sampling strategy, an E2E trained ResNet with ABMILX surpasses SOTA foundation models under the two-stage paradigm across multiple challenging benchmarks, while remaining computationally efficient (<10 RTX3090 hours). We show the potential of E2E learning in CPath and calls for greater research focus in this area. The code is https://github.com/DearCaat/E2E-WSI-ABMILX.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 2, 2025 1

Attention Editing: A Versatile Framework for Cross-Architecture Attention Conversion

Key-Value (KV) cache memory and bandwidth increasingly dominate large language model inference cost in long-context and long-generation regimes. Architectures such as multi-head latent attention (MLA) and hybrid sliding-window attention (SWA) can alleviate this bound, but integrating them into existing models remains difficult. Prior methods impose fine-grained structural requirements on both source and target attention modules, which cannot meet the feasible requirement in practical deployment. We present Attention Editing, a practical framework for converting already-trained large language models (LLMs) with new attention architectures without re-pretraining from scratch. Attention editing replaces the original attention with a learnable target module and trains it using progressive distillation, consisting of (1) layer-wise teacher-forced optimization with intermediate activation supervision to prevent cold-start error accumulation, and (2) model-level distillation on next-token distributions, optionally regularized by weak feature matching. We instantiate the framework on two different target--MLA and GateSWA, a gated hybrid SWA design, and apply it to Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-30B-A3B. The resulting models maintain competitive performance while delivering substantial efficiency improvements, demonstrating that large-scale attention conversion is both feasible and robust. Notably, experiments are conducted on an Ascend 910B clusters, offering a practical training case study on domestic hardware.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 6

CATO: Charted Attention for Neural PDE Operators

Neural operators have emerged as powerful data-driven solvers for PDEs, offering substantial acceleration over classical numerical methods. However, existing transformer-based operators still face critical challenges when modeling PDEs on complex geometries: directly processing over massive mesh points is computationally expensive, while operating in raw discretization coordinates may obscure the intrinsic geometry where physical interactions are more naturally expressed. To address these limitations, we introduce the Charted Axial Transformer Operator (CATO), a geometry-adaptive and derivative-aware neural operator for PDEs on general geometries. Instead of applying attention directly in the physical coordinate system, CATO learns a continuous latent chart that maps mesh coordinates into a learned chart space, where chart-conditioned axial attention efficiently captures long-range dependencies with reduced computational cost. In addition, CATO introduces a derivative-aware physics loss for steady-state PDEs that jointly supervises solution values, mesh-consistent gradients, and an auxiliary flux-like field, improving physical fidelity and reducing oversmoothing. We further provide a theoretical approximation result showing that, under a favorable chart, charted axial attention can represent low-rank axial solution operators with controlled error, and that small chart perturbations induce bounded approximation degradation. CATO achieves the best performance across all evaluated datasets, yielding an average improvement of approximately 26.76\% over the strongest competing baselines while reducing the number of parameters by 81.98\%. These results highlight the effectiveness of learning geometry-adaptive charts and derivative-aware physical supervision for accurate and efficient PDE operator learning.

  • 4 authors
·
May 8

Training Vision-Language-Action Models with Dense Embodied Chain-of-Thought Supervision

Cross-embodiment transfer in vision-language-action (VLA) models remains challenging because low-level state and action spaces differ fundamentally across robot platforms. We observe that the high-level cognitive process underlying manipulation, including scene perception, object identification, task planning, and sub-task decomposition, is largely shared across embodiments. Based on this observation, we present ZR-0, a 2.6 billion parameter end-to-end VLA model that uses dense Embodied Chain-of-Thought (ECoT) supervision to align cross-embodiment representations within the vision-language model (VLM). ZR-0 adopts a dual-stream architecture: a pre-trained VLM (System 2) generates structured ECoT reasoning during training, while a Diffusion Transformer-based action expert (System 1) produces continuous action chunks via flow matching. The two components are coupled through cross-attention, with an attention mask that restricts the action expert to input prompt features only, enabling ECoT generation to be entirely skipped at inference without any performance loss. ZR-0 is pre-trained on ProcCorpus-60M, a large-scale dataset comprising approximately 60 million frames (approximately 1,000 hours) from over 400K trajectories, with dense ECoT annotations covering 96.8% of all frames. We evaluate ZR-0 on three simulation benchmarks spanning single-arm (LIBERO), bimanual (RoboTwin 2.0), and humanoid (RoboCasa GR-1 Tabletop) embodiments, as well as real-world experiments on the xArm platform, demonstrating strong performance across all settings. Code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/ZR-0.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 30

DeepTriNet: A Tri-Level Attention Based DeepLabv3+ Architecture for Semantic Segmentation of Satellite Images

The segmentation of satellite images is crucial in remote sensing applications. Existing methods face challenges in recognizing small-scale objects in satellite images for semantic segmentation primarily due to ignoring the low-level characteristics of the underlying network and due to containing distinct amounts of information by different feature maps. Thus, in this research, a tri-level attention-based DeepLabv3+ architecture (DeepTriNet) is proposed for the semantic segmentation of satellite images. The proposed hybrid method combines squeeze-and-excitation networks (SENets) and tri-level attention units (TAUs) with the vanilla DeepLabv3+ architecture, where the TAUs are used to bridge the semantic feature gap among encoders output and the SENets used to put more weight on relevant features. The proposed DeepTriNet finds which features are the more relevant and more generalized way by its self-supervision rather we annotate them. The study showed that the proposed DeepTriNet performs better than many conventional techniques with an accuracy of 98% and 77%, IoU 80% and 58%, precision 88% and 68%, and recall of 79% and 55% on the 4-class Land-Cover.ai dataset and the 15-class GID-2 dataset respectively. The proposed method will greatly contribute to natural resource management and change detection in rural and urban regions through efficient and semantic satellite image segmentation

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 5, 2023

MADS: Multi-Attribute Document Supervision for Zero-Shot Image Classification

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to train a model on seen classes and recognize unseen classes by knowledge transfer through shared auxiliary information. Recent studies reveal that documents from encyclopedias provide helpful auxiliary information. However, existing methods align noisy documents, entangled in visual and non-visual descriptions, with image regions, yet solely depend on implicit learning. These models fail to filter non-visual noise reliably and incorrectly align non-visual words to image regions, which is harmful to knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a novel multi-attribute document supervision framework to remove noises at both document collection and model learning stages. With the help of large language models, we introduce a novel prompt algorithm that automatically removes non-visual descriptions and enriches less-described documents in multiple attribute views. Our proposed model, MADS, extracts multi-view transferable knowledge with information decoupling and semantic interactions for semantic alignment at local and global levels. Besides, we introduce a model-agnostic focus loss to explicitly enhance attention to visually discriminative information during training, also improving existing methods without additional parameters. With comparable computation costs, MADS consistently outperforms the SOTA by 7.2% and 8.2% on average in three benchmarks for document-based ZSL and GZSL settings, respectively. Moreover, we qualitatively offer interpretable predictions from multiple attribute views.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 9, 2025

OSLoPrompt: Bridging Low-Supervision Challenges and Open-Set Domain Generalization in CLIP

We introduce Low-Shot Open-Set Domain Generalization (LSOSDG), a novel paradigm unifying low-shot learning with open-set domain generalization (ODG). While prompt-based methods using models like CLIP have advanced DG, they falter in low-data regimes (e.g., 1-shot) and lack precision in detecting open-set samples with fine-grained semantics related to training classes. To address these challenges, we propose OSLOPROMPT, an advanced prompt-learning framework for CLIP with two core innovations. First, to manage limited supervision across source domains and improve DG, we introduce a domain-agnostic prompt-learning mechanism that integrates adaptable domain-specific cues and visually guided semantic attributes through a novel cross-attention module, besides being supported by learnable domain- and class-generic visual prompts to enhance cross-modal adaptability. Second, to improve outlier rejection during inference, we classify unfamiliar samples as "unknown" and train specialized prompts with systematically synthesized pseudo-open samples that maintain fine-grained relationships to known classes, generated through a targeted query strategy with off-the-shelf foundation models. This strategy enhances feature learning, enabling our model to detect open samples with varied granularity more effectively. Extensive evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that OSLOPROMPT establishes a new state-of-the-art in LSOSDG, significantly outperforming existing methods.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

OmniScene: Attention-Augmented Multimodal 4D Scene Understanding for Autonomous Driving

Human vision is capable of transforming two-dimensional observations into an egocentric three-dimensional scene understanding, which underpins the ability to translate complex scenes and exhibit adaptive behaviors. This capability, however, remains lacking in current autonomous driving systems, where mainstream approaches primarily rely on depth-based 3D reconstruction rather than true scene understanding. To address this limitation, we propose a novel human-like framework called OmniScene. First, we introduce the OmniScene Vision-Language Model (OmniVLM), a vision-language framework that integrates multi-view and temporal perception for holistic 4D scene understanding. Then, harnessing a teacher-student OmniVLM architecture and knowledge distillation, we embed textual representations into 3D instance features for semantic supervision, enriching feature learning, and explicitly capturing human-like attentional semantics. These feature representations are further aligned with human driving behaviors, forming a more human-like perception-understanding-action architecture. In addition, we propose a Hierarchical Fusion Strategy (HFS) to address imbalances in modality contributions during multimodal integration. Our approach adaptively calibrates the relative significance of geometric and semantic features at multiple abstraction levels, enabling the synergistic use of complementary cues from visual and textual modalities. This learnable dynamic fusion enables a more nuanced and effective exploitation of heterogeneous information. We evaluate OmniScene comprehensively on the nuScenes dataset, benchmarking it against over ten state-of-the-art models across various tasks. Our approach consistently achieves superior results, establishing new benchmarks in perception, prediction, planning, and visual question answering.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 24, 2025

Dual-Thresholded Heatmap-Guided Proposal Clustering and Negative Certainty Supervision with Enhanced Base Network for Weakly Supervised Object Detection

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) has attracted significant attention in recent years, as it does not require box-level annotations. State-of-the-art methods generally adopt a multi-module network, which employs WSDDN as the multiple instance detection network module and uses multiple instance refinement modules to refine performance. However, these approaches suffer from three key limitations. First, existing methods tend to generate pseudo GT boxes that either focus only on discriminative parts, failing to capture the whole object, or cover the entire object but fail to distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. Second, the foundational WSDDN architecture lacks a crucial background class representation for each proposal and exhibits a large semantic gap between its branches. Third, prior methods discard ignored proposals during optimization, leading to slow convergence. To address these challenges, we propose the Dual-thresholded heAtmap-guided proposal clustering and Negative Certainty supervision with Enhanced base network (DANCE) method for WSOD. Specifically, we first devise a heatmap-guided proposal selector (HGPS) algorithm, which utilizes dual thresholds on heatmaps to pre-select proposals, enabling pseudo GT boxes to both capture the full object extent and distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. We then construct a weakly supervised basic detection network (WSBDN), which augments each proposal with a background class representation and uses heatmaps for pre-supervision to bridge the semantic gap between matrices. At last, we introduce a negative certainty supervision (NCS) loss on ignored proposals to accelerate convergence. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/gyl2565309278/DANCE.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 6

Modeling Long-Term Memory and Temporal Attention Shifts for Video Salient Object Ranking with a New Benchmark

Salient Object Ranking (SOR) aims to estimate the relative saliency order among multiple salient objects. While SOR has been extensively studied in static images, Video Salient Object Ranking (VSOR) remains largely underexplored due to the lack of effective temporal saliency modeling. In particular, existing VSOR methods rely on short input frame clips, which limits their ability to capture long-term saliency evolution and identify dynamic attention shifts. To address these challenges, we propose LoTAS, a long-term memory framework for VSOR that jointly models historical saliency states and temporal attention transitions. To model historical saliency, we propose a Temporal Context Decoder (TCD) and a Rank-aware Saliency State Encoder (RSSE). The TCD retrieves historical saliency states from memory queries to provide references to previously salient instances and long-range temporal context, while the RSSE encodes current predictions into rank-aware state embeddings and updates the memory for future frames, allowing reliable ranking cues to accumulate across long video sequences. To capture temporal attention transitions, we introduce explicit inter-frame rank-transition supervision and jointly learn a binary transition predictor as an auxiliary task alongside ordinal ranking. In addition, to address the limited video types and scene diversity in the existing VSOR dataset, we propose a challenging dataset that covers diverse video types and scenes with 124 videos and 16,610 frames. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art VSOR methods. We will make the code and our proposed dataset available.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 3

iSEE: Object Permanence Through Self-Supervision

Object permanence, keeping track of an object's identity and position while it is occluded, is central to video representations that track, predict and plan. Trackers that achieve it learn from boxes, track identities and visibility labels. On the other hand, self-supervised object-centric methods discover objects without labels: through slot attention, it represents a video as slots that bind to objects and follow them across frames. However, these slots are lost under occlusion, making the desired permanence impossible. Reasoning permanence is a hard problem because it requires to detect when an object becomes occluded, re-identify when object reappears, and keep the object's hidden position continuous, using reapperance as the only learning cue. To address this, we propose iSEE, a novel framework that offers all three aforementioned requirements, without any labels whatsoever. We built iSEE using the following three proposed components: (i) Object evidence modelling: a slot's attention, compared with its own past, reveals when its object is hidden. (ii) Appearance-position separation: two slot streams let the appearance be held for re-identification while the position keeps changing. (iii) Permanence from reappearance: a walker follows the hidden object's position, trained only on where the object reappears. On LA-CATER static, iSEE returns a reappearing object to its own slot after 86% of occlusions, against 32% for SlotContrast, and localises it while hidden within 4.1 mAP of the label-trained SoTA RAM. The two streams also allow downstream planning, with the position stream as the action of a world model. Project page: https://insait-institute.github.io/iSEE/

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 30

On-Policy Attention Linearization

Hybrid transformer architectures that replace most softmax attention layers with linear attention offer transformer-level quality at a fraction of the memory cost. Rather than pretraining such models, a growing body of work distills them from already trained full-attention transformers. However, these distilled models often collapse on long-context retrieval and reasoning tasks, particularly when operating in thinking mode, where the efficiency gains of hybrid architectures matter most. Since linear attention layers must compress context into a fixed-size state, their errors compound over long sequences. As off-policy distillation never teaches the student model to recover from this drift, tasks that necessitate longer sequence lengths become especially challenging. We introduce On-Policy Attention Linearization (OPAL) in which the hybrid attention student samples its own long-context trajectories and receives dense supervision from the frozen full-attention teacher. Applying OPAL to Qwen3-4B and MiMo-7B-RL-0530, we recover 87--94% of full-attention performance on commonsense reasoning, 100% on needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) retrieval, and 83--93% on mathematical reasoning with only 3B training tokens. We achieve these results without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Compared with the strongest prior linearization method, which recovers 68% of its teacher's retrieval performance and 21.6% absolute average mathematical reasoning accuracy, OPAL fully recovers retrieval and achieves 67.6--72.2% on math reasoning.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 24

Mask & Match: Learning to Recognize Handwritten Math with Self-Supervised Attention

Recognizing handwritten mathematical expressions (HMER) is a challenging task due to the inherent two-dimensional structure, varying symbol scales, and complex spatial relationships among symbols. In this paper, we present a self-supervised learning (SSL) framework for HMER that eliminates the need for expensive labeled data. Our approach begins by pretraining an image encoder using a combination of global and local contrastive loss, enabling the model to learn both holistic and fine-grained representations. A key contribution of this work is a novel self-supervised attention network, which is trained using a progressive spatial masking strategy. This attention mechanism is designed to learn semantically meaningful focus regions, such as operators, exponents, and nested mathematical notation, without requiring any supervision. The progressive masking curriculum encourages the network to become increasingly robust to missing or occluded visual information, ultimately improving structural understanding. Our complete pipeline consists of (1) self-supervised pretraining of the encoder, (2) self-supervised attention learning, and (3) supervised fine-tuning with a transformer decoder to generate LATEX sequences. Extensive experiments on CROHME benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing SSL and fully supervised baselines, validating the effectiveness of our progressive attention mechanism in enhancing HMER performance. Our codebase can be found here.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 8, 2025

Dual-State Slot Attention: Decoupling Appearance and Identity for Video Object-Centric Learning

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into persistent, object-level representations without supervision. However, existing slot-based methods struggle to maintain stable object identity in challenging settings such as rapid motion and partial occlusion. First, they typically encode both the per-frame appearance of an object and its identity across frames in a single slot vector, creating an objective conflict that leads to slot swapping: reconstruction requires sensitivity to transient visual changes, whereas temporal consistency requires invariance to them. Second, the token renormalization used in Slot Attention can amplify weakly attending slots, allowing them to absorb tokens from other objects and destabilize slot-to-object correspondence. We propose Dual-State Slot Attention (DSSA), a fully self-supervised framework that addresses these limitations by separating appearance from identity and by reducing spurious updates from weakly matching slots. DSSA decomposes each slot into a local state for per-frame appearance and an identity state for temporally stable object information, thereby aligning reconstruction and temporal consistency with separate representations. The identity state is updated through a learned recurrent transition that acts as a temporal filter on the local state, while competition-modulated aggregation (CMA) down-weights updates from weakly matching slots and prevents them from absorbing tokens from other objects. Experiments on MOVi-C, MOVi-D, and YouTube-VIS demonstrate that DSSA consistently improves segmentation quality and temporal consistency over prior methods, while also yielding stronger downstream object recognition and video dynamics prediction. Code and models will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 9

Learning to Generate Grounded Visual Captions without Localization Supervision

When automatically generating a sentence description for an image or video, it often remains unclear how well the generated caption is grounded, that is whether the model uses the correct image regions to output particular words, or if the model is hallucinating based on priors in the dataset and/or the language model. The most common way of relating image regions with words in caption models is through an attention mechanism over the regions that are used as input to predict the next word. The model must therefore learn to predict the attentional weights without knowing the word it should localize. This is difficult to train without grounding supervision since recurrent models can propagate past information and there is no explicit signal to force the captioning model to properly ground the individual decoded words. In this work, we help the model to achieve this via a novel cyclical training regimen that forces the model to localize each word in the image after the sentence decoder generates it, and then reconstruct the sentence from the localized image region(s) to match the ground-truth. Our proposed framework only requires learning one extra fully-connected layer (the localizer), a layer that can be removed at test time. We show that our model significantly improves grounding accuracy without relying on grounding supervision or introducing extra computation during inference, for both image and video captioning tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/chihyaoma/cyclical-visual-captioning .

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 1, 2019

Revisiting the Integration of Convolution and Attention for Vision Backbone

Convolutions (Convs) and multi-head self-attentions (MHSAs) are typically considered alternatives to each other for building vision backbones. Although some works try to integrate both, they apply the two operators simultaneously at the finest pixel granularity. With Convs responsible for per-pixel feature extraction already, the question is whether we still need to include the heavy MHSAs at such a fine-grained level. In fact, this is the root cause of the scalability issue w.r.t. the input resolution for vision transformers. To address this important problem, we propose in this work to use MSHAs and Convs in parallel at different granularity levels instead. Specifically, in each layer, we use two different ways to represent an image: a fine-grained regular grid and a coarse-grained set of semantic slots. We apply different operations to these two representations: Convs to the grid for local features, and MHSAs to the slots for global features. A pair of fully differentiable soft clustering and dispatching modules is introduced to bridge the grid and set representations, thus enabling local-global fusion. Through extensive experiments on various vision tasks, we empirically verify the potential of the proposed integration scheme, named GLMix: by offloading the burden of fine-grained features to light-weight Convs, it is sufficient to use MHSAs in a few (e.g., 64) semantic slots to match the performance of recent state-of-the-art backbones, while being more efficient. Our visualization results also demonstrate that the soft clustering module produces a meaningful semantic grouping effect with only IN1k classification supervision, which may induce better interpretability and inspire new weakly-supervised semantic segmentation approaches. Code will be available at https://github.com/rayleizhu/GLMix.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 21, 2024

Breaking the Low-Rank Dilemma of Linear Attention

The Softmax attention mechanism in Transformer models is notoriously computationally expensive, particularly due to its quadratic complexity, posing significant challenges in vision applications. In contrast, linear attention provides a far more efficient solution by reducing the complexity to linear levels. However, compared to Softmax attention, linear attention often experiences significant performance degradation. Our experiments indicate that this performance drop is due to the low-rank nature of linear attention's feature map, which hinders its ability to adequately model complex spatial information. In this paper, to break the low-rank dilemma of linear attention, we conduct rank analysis from two perspectives: the KV buffer and the output features. Consequently, we introduce Rank-Augmented Linear Attention (RALA), which rivals the performance of Softmax attention while maintaining linear complexity and high efficiency. Based on RALA, we construct the Rank-Augmented Vision Linear Transformer (RAVLT). Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAVLT achieves excellent performance across various vision tasks. Specifically, without using any additional labels, data, or supervision during training, RAVLT achieves an 84.4% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k with only 26M parameters and 4.6G FLOPs. This result significantly surpasses previous linear attention mechanisms, fully illustrating the potential of RALA. Code will be available at https://github.com/qhfan/RALA.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 12, 2024

AttentionInfluence: Adopting Attention Head Influence for Weak-to-Strong Pretraining Data Selection

Recently, there has been growing interest in collecting reasoning-intensive pretraining data to improve LLMs' complex reasoning ability. Prior approaches typically rely on supervised classifiers to identify such data, which requires labeling by humans or LLMs, often introducing domain-specific biases. Due to the attention heads being crucial to in-context reasoning, we propose AttentionInfluence, a simple yet effective, training-free method without supervision signal. Our approach enables a small pretrained language model to act as a strong data selector through a simple attention head masking operation. Specifically, we identify retrieval heads and compute the loss difference when masking these heads. We apply AttentionInfluence to a 1.3B-parameter dense model to conduct data selection on the SmolLM corpus of 241B tokens, and mix the SmolLM corpus with the selected subset comprising 73B tokens to pretrain a 7B-parameter dense model using 1T training tokens and WSD learning rate scheduling. Our experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements, ranging from 1.4pp to 3.5pp, across several knowledge-intensive and reasoning-heavy benchmarks (i.e., MMLU, MMLU-Pro, AGIEval-en, GSM8K, and HumanEval). This demonstrates an effective weak-to-strong scaling property, with small models improving the final performance of larger models-offering a promising and scalable path for reasoning-centric data selection.

  • 4 authors
·
May 12, 2025 2

Alaya-EVOKE: From Linear-Scaling Supervision to Endless World

Interactive world models must support persistent memory, responsive interaction, and long-horizon generation, yet these requirements place conflicting demands on the model. Maintaining history in the denoiser context or key-value cache incurs growing cost, forcing a trade-off between session length and retained memory, while low-latency interaction relies on few-step generation whose capabilities are bounded by its teacher. Evoke addresses both limitations by externalizing persistent world state and redesigning the teacher for long-horizon interactive generation. Scene geometry is maintained in an external, camera-indexed world state bank, from which only view-relevant information is retrieved, keeping the denoiser context bounded as the session grows. Rather than treating the teacher as a fixed generator, we design it for long-horizon supervision: its sparse attention combines chunk-wise grouping, retrieval of selected distant frames, and a linear-attention global state, yielding linear growth in memory and compute while enabling supervision over long horizons. Such supervision exposes content drift that stays locally plausible within short windows, while per-chunk conditioning enables prompt changes and event control throughout the sequence. A 30-second distribution-matching objective, applied under self-forced rollouts, transfers both capabilities to a three-step student that uses no classifier-free guidance, improving resistance to long-term drift while preserving responsive conditioning. With bounded context and recurrent external memory, Evoke supports open-ended, continuously evolving generation; on a single H200 at 384times 640, each 1.5,s chunk is generated in 2.11,s. As a three-step world model, Evoke achieves state-of-the-art performance on WBench while remaining competitive on VBench-Long and VBench-2.0.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 12 3

CRAFT: Constrained Reward via Attention Fine-Tuning for Subject Personalization without Composed Targets

Subject-driven image personalization---generating new images that preserve the identity of one or several reference subjects in novel scenes---is a foundational capability for modern visual content creation. It is currently dominated by generalized methods that fine-tune a pretrained multimodal diffusion transformer (MMDiT) on hundreds of thousands to millions of paired (reference, composed-target) examples, where each composed target is a synthesized image of the subject in a novel scene. Producing such targets demands a costly multi-stage curation pipeline---LLM-based prompt generation, T2I-based composed-target synthesis, reference-subject extraction, VLM-based quality filtering, and correspondence labeling---and tightly couples each method to a particular target synthesizer and curation choice. We introduce CRAFT (Constrained Reward via Attention Fine-Tuning), a single-step ReFL framework that fine-tunes a pre-trained reference-aware MMDiT via LoRA adapters using a compact reference-only data construction---10K reference images and subject masks, with no composed-target supervision. CRAFT realizes a Where to look principle: attention-level rewards align noise- and phrase-token attention with the correct reference subject, and the resulting per-subject attention masks gate a pixel-level identity reward to keep image-space supervision consistent with the learned attention routing. Applied to FLUX.2-klein-9B, CRAFT achieves state-of-the-art performance on XVerseBench while using no composed-target supervision---only 10K reference-only samples, whereas prior generalized methods require 150K to over 2M composed-target pairs. The same recipe transfers to other reference-aware backbones, consistently improving performance. Project page: https://jihun999.github.io/projects/CRAFT/.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 13

OpenVAM: Open-World Visual Attention Modeling with VLMs

Predicting human gaze is a core capability for applications ranging from web/UI design analysis to robotics and human-computer interaction. Yet, most visual attention modeling methods output only a dense saliency map, which is often insufficient for action: practitioners need to connect attention peaks to discrete elements in the scene (what) and understand the drivers of those peaks in context (why), while remaining robust to domain shift across natural images, commercial content, and UI/web layouts. We, therefore, introduce OpenVAM (Open-world Visual Attention Modeling with VLMs), a unified framework that jointly addresses universality and explainability across heterogeneous domains (natural scenes, commercial imagery, and UI/web layouts) and supervision modalities. OpenVAM adopts a decoupled-but-aligned design: a dedicated dense visual pathway provides stable, spatially precise localization, while an instruction-following vision--language semantic head generates grounded what/why explanations conditioned on the same image and data-type prompts. A three-stage training strategy preserves strong localization priors while progressively introducing language grounding and improving explanation alignment via parameter-efficient adaptation without perturbing the saliency branch. We further propose a scalable pipeline to generate multi-domain saliency-reason annotations for training and systematic evaluation. Experiments across diverse datasets show that OpenVAM improves robustness under domain shift while producing image-grounded explanations that make saliency predictions more interpretable.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 24

Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision

Pre-trained representations are becoming crucial for many NLP and perception tasks. While representation learning in NLP has transitioned to training on raw text without human annotations, visual and vision-language representations still rely heavily on curated training datasets that are expensive or require expert knowledge. For vision applications, representations are mostly learned using datasets with explicit class labels such as ImageNet or OpenImages. For vision-language, popular datasets like Conceptual Captions, MSCOCO, or CLIP all involve a non-trivial data collection (and cleaning) process. This costly curation process limits the size of datasets and hence hinders the scaling of trained models. In this paper, we leverage a noisy dataset of over one billion image alt-text pairs, obtained without expensive filtering or post-processing steps in the Conceptual Captions dataset. A simple dual-encoder architecture learns to align visual and language representations of the image and text pairs using a contrastive loss. We show that the scale of our corpus can make up for its noise and leads to state-of-the-art representations even with such a simple learning scheme. Our visual representation achieves strong performance when transferred to classification tasks such as ImageNet and VTAB. The aligned visual and language representations enables zero-shot image classification and also set new state-of-the-art results on Flickr30K and MSCOCO image-text retrieval benchmarks, even when compared with more sophisticated cross-attention models. The representations also enable cross-modality search with complex text and text + image queries.

  • 10 authors
·
Feb 11, 2021 1

Meningioma segmentation in T1-weighted MRI leveraging global context and attention mechanisms

Meningiomas are the most common type of primary brain tumor, accounting for approximately 30% of all brain tumors. A substantial number of these tumors are never surgically removed but rather monitored over time. Automatic and precise meningioma segmentation is therefore beneficial to enable reliable growth estimation and patient-specific treatment planning. In this study, we propose the inclusion of attention mechanisms over a U-Net architecture: (i) Attention-gated U-Net (AGUNet) and (ii) Dual Attention U-Net (DAUNet), using a 3D MRI volume as input. Attention has the potential to leverage the global context and identify features' relationships across the entire volume. To limit spatial resolution degradation and loss of detail inherent to encoder-decoder architectures, we studied the impact of multi-scale input and deep supervision components. The proposed architectures are trainable end-to-end and each concept can be seamlessly disabled for ablation studies. The validation studies were performed using a 5-fold cross validation over 600 T1-weighted MRI volumes from St. Olavs University Hospital, Trondheim, Norway. For the best performing architecture, an average Dice score of 81.6% was reached for an F1-score of 95.6%. With an almost perfect precision of 98%, meningiomas smaller than 3ml were occasionally missed hence reaching an overall recall of 93%. Leveraging global context from a 3D MRI volume provided the best performances, even if the native volume resolution could not be processed directly. Overall, near-perfect detection was achieved for meningiomas larger than 3ml which is relevant for clinical use. In the future, the use of multi-scale designs and refinement networks should be further investigated to improve the performance. A larger number of cases with meningiomas below 3ml might also be needed to improve the performance for the smallest tumors.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 19, 2021

Learning to Segment from Scribbles using Multi-scale Adversarial Attention Gates

Large, fine-grained image segmentation datasets, annotated at pixel-level, are difficult to obtain, particularly in medical imaging, where annotations also require expert knowledge. Weakly-supervised learning can train models by relying on weaker forms of annotation, such as scribbles. Here, we learn to segment using scribble annotations in an adversarial game. With unpaired segmentation masks, we train a multi-scale GAN to generate realistic segmentation masks at multiple resolutions, while we use scribbles to learn their correct position in the image. Central to the model's success is a novel attention gating mechanism, which we condition with adversarial signals to act as a shape prior, resulting in better object localization at multiple scales. Subject to adversarial conditioning, the segmentor learns attention maps that are semantic, suppress the noisy activations outside the objects, and reduce the vanishing gradient problem in the deeper layers of the segmentor. We evaluated our model on several medical (ACDC, LVSC, CHAOS) and non-medical (PPSS) datasets, and we report performance levels matching those achieved by models trained with fully annotated segmentation masks. We also demonstrate extensions in a variety of settings: semi-supervised learning; combining multiple scribble sources (a crowdsourcing scenario) and multi-task learning (combining scribble and mask supervision). We release expert-made scribble annotations for the ACDC dataset, and the code used for the experiments, at https://vios-s.github.io/multiscale-adversarial-attention-gates

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 2, 2020

S0 Tuning: Zero-Overhead Adaptation of Hybrid Recurrent-Attention Models

Using roughly 48 execution-verified HumanEval training solutions, tuning a single initial state matrix per recurrent layer, with zero inference overhead, outperforms LoRA by +10.8 pp (p < 0.001) on HumanEval. The method, which we call S0 tuning, optimizes one state matrix per recurrent layer while freezing all model weights. On Qwen3.5-4B (GatedDeltaNet hybrid), S0 tuning improves greedy pass@1 by +23.6 +/- 1.7 pp (10 seeds). On FalconH1-7B (Mamba-2 hybrid), S0 reaches 71.8% +/- 1.3 and LoRA reaches 71.4% +/- 2.4 (3 seeds), statistically indistinguishable at this sample size while requiring no weight merging. Cross-domain transfer is significant on MATH-500 (+4.8 pp, p = 0.00002, 8 seeds) and GSM8K (+2.8 pp, p = 0.0003, 10 seeds); a text-to-SQL benchmark (Spider) shows no transfer, consistent with the trajectory-steering mechanism. A prefix-tuning control on a pure Transformer (Qwen2.5-3B) degrades performance by -13.9 pp under all nine configurations tested. On Qwen3.5, a per-step state-offset variant reaches +27.1 pp, above both S0 and LoRA but with per-step inference cost. Taken together, the results show that recurrent state initialization is a strong zero-inference-overhead PEFT surface for hybrid language models when verified supervision is scarce. The tuned state is a ~48 MB file; task switching requires no weight merging or model reload. Code and library: https://github.com/jackyoung27/s0-tuning.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 2 3

Zonkey: A Hierarchical Diffusion Language Model with Differentiable Tokenization and Probabilistic Attention

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet they remain constrained by fixed, non-differentiable tokenizers like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which hinder end-to-end optimization and adaptability to noisy or domain-specific data. We introduce Zonkey, a hierarchical diffusion model that addresses these limitations through a fully trainable pipeline from raw characters to document-level representations. At its core is a differentiable tokenizer (Segment Splitter) that learns probabilistic beginning-of-sequence (BOS) decisions, enabling adaptive splits that emerge as linguistically meaningful (e.g., word boundaries at spaces, sentence starts at periods) without explicit supervision. This differentiability is enabled by our novel Probabilistic Attention mechanism, which incorporates position-specific existence probabilities to simulate soft masking over theoretically infinite sequences while preserving gradients. Sequences decay probabilistically rather than relying on end-of-sequence tokens, supporting variable-length outputs. Hierarchical levels compress sequences into higher abstractions (e.g., character n-grams to word-like vectors, then sentence-like), with reconstruction via our Denoising Diffusion Mixed Model (DDMM) for stable and efficient denoising in latent space. A Stitcher ensures overlap invariance across segments. Trained end-to-end on Wikipedia, Zonkey generates coherent, variable-length text from noise, demonstrating emergent hierarchies and promising qualitative alignment to data distributions compared to entropy-based learnable tokenizers. Our approach advances toward fully gradient-based LLMs, with potential for better domain adaptation and scalable generation. We release the source code for training and reproducing our experiments.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 29

PosA-VLA: Enhancing Action Generation via Pose-Conditioned Anchor Attention

The Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable performance on embodied tasks and shown promising potential for real-world applications. However, current VLAs still struggle to produce consistent and precise target-oriented actions, as they often generate redundant or unstable motions along trajectories, limiting their applicability in time-sensitive scenarios.In this work, we attribute these redundant actions to the spatially uniform perception field of existing VLAs, which causes them to be distracted by target-irrelevant objects, especially in complex environments.To address this issue, we propose an efficient PosA-VLA framework that anchors visual attention via pose-conditioned supervision, consistently guiding the model's perception toward task-relevant regions. The pose-conditioned anchor attention mechanism enables the model to better align instruction semantics with actionable visual cues, thereby improving action generation precision and efficiency. Moreover, our framework adopts a lightweight architecture and requires no auxiliary perception modules (e.g., segmentation or grounding networks), ensuring efficient inference. Extensive experiments verify that our method executes embodied tasks with precise and time-efficient behavior across diverse robotic manipulation benchmarks and shows robust generalization in a variety of challenging environments.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025

RT-DETRv3: Real-time End-to-End Object Detection with Hierarchical Dense Positive Supervision

RT-DETR is the first real-time end-to-end transformer-based object detector. Its efficiency comes from the framework design and the Hungarian matching. However, compared to dense supervision detectors like the YOLO series, the Hungarian matching provides much sparser supervision, leading to insufficient model training and difficult to achieve optimal results. To address these issues, we proposed a hierarchical dense positive supervision method based on RT-DETR, named RT-DETRv3. Firstly, we introduce a CNN-based auxiliary branch that provides dense supervision that collaborates with the original decoder to enhance the encoder feature representation. Secondly, to address insufficient decoder training, we propose a novel learning strategy involving self-attention perturbation. This strategy diversifies label assignment for positive samples across multiple query groups, thereby enriching positive supervisions. Additionally, we introduce a shared-weight decoder branch for dense positive supervision to ensure more high-quality queries matching each ground truth. Notably, all aforementioned modules are training-only. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on COCO val2017. RT-DETRv3 significantly outperforms existing real-time detectors, including the RT-DETR series and the YOLO series. For example, RT-DETRv3-R18 achieves 48.1% AP (+1.6%/+1.4%) compared to RT-DETR-R18/RT-DETRv2-R18, while maintaining the same latency. Furthermore, RT-DETRv3-R101 can attain an impressive 54.6% AP outperforming YOLOv10-X. The code will be released at https://github.com/clxia12/RT-DETRv3.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 18, 2024

Panoptic SegFormer: Delving Deeper into Panoptic Segmentation with Transformers

Panoptic segmentation involves a combination of joint semantic segmentation and instance segmentation, where image contents are divided into two types: things and stuff. We present Panoptic SegFormer, a general framework for panoptic segmentation with transformers. It contains three innovative components: an efficient deeply-supervised mask decoder, a query decoupling strategy, and an improved post-processing method. We also use Deformable DETR to efficiently process multi-scale features, which is a fast and efficient version of DETR. Specifically, we supervise the attention modules in the mask decoder in a layer-wise manner. This deep supervision strategy lets the attention modules quickly focus on meaningful semantic regions. It improves performance and reduces the number of required training epochs by half compared to Deformable DETR. Our query decoupling strategy decouples the responsibilities of the query set and avoids mutual interference between things and stuff. In addition, our post-processing strategy improves performance without additional costs by jointly considering classification and segmentation qualities to resolve conflicting mask overlaps. Our approach increases the accuracy 6.2\% PQ over the baseline DETR model. Panoptic SegFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on COCO test-dev with 56.2\% PQ. It also shows stronger zero-shot robustness over existing methods. The code is released at https://github.com/zhiqi-li/Panoptic-SegFormer.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 8, 2021

Listening Forward: Next Patch Embedding Prediction Enables Scalable Audio Learners

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has driven substantial progress in audio representation learning, though existing methods have increasingly relied on elaborate pre-training recipes to reach competitive performance. A markedly different pre-training philosophy underpins the most influential progress in language modeling and, more recently, in visual representation learning: rather than train encoders as static feature extractors, models are trained to predict the next element, a discrete token or a continuous embedding, from the preceding context. Autoregressive prediction thereby provides a unified pre-training interface that transfers across modalities, compelling the model to learn the underlying data distribution. We ask whether such a simple causal paradigm can yield strong audio learners, given that audio's temporal structure makes autoregressive prediction of patch embeddings a natural fit. We introduce NAPE (Next-Audio-Patch-Embedding prediction), a self-supervised framework in which a causal Transformer predicts each next patch embedding of a log-mel spectrogram from the previous ones, using causal masking and stop-gradient as its sole training signal. The design is intentionally minimalist, avoiding reconstruction decoders, acoustic tokenizers, student-teacher setups, and auxiliary regularization losses. Across six audio and speech benchmarks, NAPE achieves state-of-the-art fine-tuning performance on several tasks, scales consistently across encoder sizes, and yields strong linear-probing results. NAPE also produces structured attention patterns without explicit supervision.

DreamWAM: Beyond RGB Future Prediction for World Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) learn action-relevant representations by predicting how the observed world will evolve. Most existing WAMs define this future in RGB space, where task-relevant state transitions are entangled with nuisance variations in texture, illumination, background, and viewpoint. We argue that WAMs should explicitly predict action-relevant future state rather than relying on RGB prediction alone. We introduce DreamWAM, which reformulates future prediction as structured world modeling beyond RGB, representing future states through complementary views of appearance, motion, geometry, and semantics. During training, DreamWAM combines joint latent denoising of RGB and motion with lightweight gated residual branches for geometry and semantics. Shared attention between VideoDiT and ActionDiT allows the action branch to learn from these future-state predictions, while all beyond-RGB supervision branches are disabled at inference and deployment remains RGB-only. Across both no-rollout and joint video-action inference, DreamWAM consistently improves the matched RGB-only baselines on LIBERO, from 97.30\% to 98.40\% and from 98.00\% to 98.90\%, respectively. The gains become larger under unseen LIBERO-Plus perturbations, from 51.36\% to 63.44\% and from 69.16\% to 75.47\%. The same robustness extends to real-world manipulation, where DreamWAM attains an average success rate of 74.4\% across unseen changes in lighting, background, and object layout, compared with 55.6\% for Fast-WAM-Joint. These results show that robust world-action learning depends not only on predicting the future, but on representing it in a form that matters for action. The code and models are publicly released at https://github.com/hustvl/DreamWAM.

  • 9 authors
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Aug 4

Looped Diffusion Transformer

Improving text-to-image models has traditionally relied on increasing model size or the number of denoising steps. In this work, we explore an alternative way to scale computation by repeatedly running shared Transformer blocks within each denoising step, effectively increasing computational depth while keeping the parameter count fixed. This looped computation enables iterative refinement of internal representations without explicit reasoning tokens. However, naive looping fails to consistently improve image quality. We trace this problem to weak supervision across intermediate loops and unregulated attention updates that progressively erode local information. To overcome these challenges, we propose Looped Diffusion Transformer (Looped-DiT), which combines deep supervision across intermediate loops with self-modulating attention to stabilize looped feature updates. Under matched-parameter and matched-compute settings, Looped-DiT consistently outperforms non-looped baselines. Notably, a 260M-parameter looped model can surpass a model 6.5x larger across multiple text-to-image benchmarks while requiring 4.9x lower inference compute. Beyond this performance gain, we find that looped computation can offer a more effective form of iterative computation for diffusion models, with increasing loop depth yielding larger gains than adding more denoising steps under a fixed inference budget. Furthermore, deeper loops can progressively correct mistakes made in earlier loops, exhibiting behaviors suggestive of latent reasoning. Together, these results show that looped computation offers a promising way to scale visual generation models.

  • 10 authors
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Sep 29

Memorizon: Training World Models Beyond Their Context Window

Streaming world models should render a place consistently across repeated visits. Directly supervising such revisits requires training samples that capture both visits, often spanning minutes. Yet dense attention over the full span incurs quadratic costs, making long-span supervision expensive. Memorizon breaks this coupling: long spans are needed for supervision, but not for attention, since the two visits can share a forward pass without including every intervening frame. A training sample covers a span of any length but is scored only on its last k chunks. Instead of tokenizing the history before them, each scored chunk retrieves its own top-K latents by camera co-visibility, and the union of these requests forms a shared bank. The bank is bounded by kK, so the sequence stays bounded however long the span; at the shortest span the recipe is exactly conventional training. Adding the bank raises the cost of a step once; beyond that, a longer span costs little, and going from 100 to 400 s adds 12% to the step time. Against a sliding-window baseline, retrieval raises revisit consistency on every split, and a span long enough to reach the first visit of each return adds a further 24% to 30%, at some cost in image quality; beyond that span, more length no longer helps. Filling the bank from another episode lowers revisit correlation by 83%, so the model uses what it retrieves. Project page: https://tingtingliao.github.io/memorizon

MBZUAI-IFM MBZUAI-IFM
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Sep 29 2

Retrieve, Integrate, and Synthesize: Spatial-Semantic Grounded Latent Visual Reasoning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made remarkable progress on vision-language reasoning, yet most methods still compress visual evidence into discrete textual thoughts, creating an information bottleneck for fine-grained perception. Recent latent visual reasoning methods attempt to reason in continuous hidden states, but we find that they suffer from insufficient manifold compatibility: latent trajectories drift away from pretrained reasoning circuits, collapse into instance-agnostic patterns, and are often bypassed during answer generation. To address these issues, we propose RIS (Retrieve, Integrate, and Synthesize), a spatial-semantic grounded framework that develops latent reasoning as a compatible extension of pretrained MLLM computation. We first construct a step-wise grounded reasoning dataset with bounding boxes and region-specific semantic descriptions. Built on this supervision, RIS anchors latent tokens to both spatial and semantic evidence, enforces their causal role through a progressive attention bottleneck, and introduces short language transition tokens to bridge synthesized latent states back to vocabulary-aligned decoding. Experiments on V*, HRBench4K, HRBench8K, MMVP, and BLINK show consistent improvements over closed/open-source and latent reasoning baselines. Further analyses demonstrate that RIS learns diverse, interpretable, and progressively integrated latent trajectories, offering a practical path toward faithful internal visual reasoning in MLLMs.

  • 8 authors
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May 7

PanoWorld: Towards Spatial Supersensing in 360$^\circ$ Panorama World

Multimodal large laboratory models (MLLMs) still struggle with spatial understanding under the dominant perspective-image paradigm, which inherits the narrow field of view of human-like perception. For navigation, robotic search, and 3D scene understanding, 360-degree panoramic sensing offers a form of supersensing by capturing the entire surrounding environment at once. However, existing MLLM pipelines typically decompose panoramas into multiple perspective views, leaving the spherical structure of equirectangular projection (ERP) largely implicit. In this paper, we study pano-native understanding, which requires an MLLM to reason over an ERP panorama as a continuous, observer-centered space. To this end, we first define the key abilities for pano-native understanding, including semantic anchoring, spherical localization, reference-frame transformation, and depth-aware 3D spatial reasoning. We then build a large-scale metadata construction pipeline that converts mixed-source ERP panoramas into geometry-aware, language-grounded, and depth-aware supervision, and instantiate these signals as capability-aligned instruction tuning data. On the model side, we introduce PanoWorld with Spherical Spatial Cross-Attention, which injects spherical geometry into the visual stream. We further construct PanoSpace-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating ERP-native spatial reasoning. Experiments show that PanoWorld substantially outperforms both proprietary and open-source baselines on PanoSpace-Bench, H* Bench, and R2R-CE Val-Unseen benchmarks. These results demonstrate that robust panoramic reasoning requires dedicated pano-native supervision and geometry-aware model adaptation. All source code and proposed data will be publicly released.

CARL: Camera-Agnostic Representation Learning for Spectral Image Analysis

Spectral imaging offers promising applications across diverse domains, including medicine and urban scene understanding, and is already established as a critical modality in remote sensing. However, variability in channel dimensionality and captured wavelengths among spectral cameras impede the development of AI-driven methodologies, leading to camera-specific models with limited generalizability and inadequate cross-camera applicability. To address this bottleneck, we introduce CARL, a model for Camera-Agnostic Representation Learning across RGB, multispectral, and hyperspectral imaging modalities. To enable the conversion of a spectral image with any channel dimensionality to a camera-agnostic representation, we introduce a novel spectral encoder, featuring a self-attention-cross-attention mechanism, to distill salient spectral information into learned spectral representations. Spatio-spectral pre-training is achieved with a novel feature-based self-supervision strategy tailored to CARL. Large-scale experiments across the domains of medical imaging, autonomous driving, and satellite imaging demonstrate our model's unique robustness to spectral heterogeneity, outperforming on datasets with simulated and real-world cross-camera spectral variations. The scalability and versatility of the proposed approach position our model as a backbone for future spectral foundation models. Code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/IMSY-DKFZ/CARL.

  • 8 authors
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Apr 27, 2025

Seeing Like Radiologists: Context- and Gaze-Guided Vision-Language Pretraining for Chest X-rays

Despite recent advances in medical vision-language pretraining, existing models still struggle to capture the diagnostic workflow: radiographs are typically treated as context-agnostic images, while radiologists' gaze -- a crucial cue for visual reasoning -- remains largely underexplored by existing methods. These limitations hinder the modeling of disease-specific patterns and weaken cross-modal alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce CoGaze, a Context- and Gaze-guided vision-language pretraining framework for chest X-rays. We first propose a context-infused vision encoder that models how radiologists integrate clinical context -- including patient history, symptoms, and diagnostic intent -- to guide diagnostic reasoning. We then present a multi-level supervision paradigm that (1) enforces intra- and inter-modal semantic alignment through hybrid-positive contrastive learning, (2) injects diagnostic priors via disease-aware cross-modal representation learning, and (3) leverages radiologists' gaze as probabilistic priors to guide attention toward diagnostically salient regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoGaze consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse tasks, achieving up to +2.0% CheXbertF1 and +1.2% BLEU2 for free-text and structured report generation, +23.2% AUROC for zero-shot classification, and +12.2% Precision@1 for image-text retrieval. Code is available at https://github.com/mk-runner/CoGaze.

  • 8 authors
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Mar 26

TuringViT: Making SOTA Vision Transformers Accessible to All

Modern VLMs and VLA systems commonly adopt off-the-shelf ViTs such as SigLIP2 as visual encoders, but diverse downstream requirements in latency, temporal modeling, and VLM integration often call for customized SOTA-level ViTs. Training such encoders remains beyond the reach of much of the community, as it requires massive image-text data, while standard softmax attention makes high-resolution or dynamic-resolution pretraining prohibitively costly and often forces low-resolution pretraining followed by post-hoc adaptation. TuringViT addresses these challenges with three key designs: Turing Linear Attention (TLA) for efficient sequence modeling, VISTA-Curation to construct supervision-rich image-video training data, and native dynamic-resolution pretraining that supports flexible inputs from the start and transfers seamlessly to downstream VLMs. As a result, TuringViT outperforms leading open-source ViT baselines with only 10% of the data, achieves stronger downstream VLM performance, and delivers substantially better latency scaling on high-resolution inputs. Our scaling-law analysis further shows that TuringViT continues to improve predictably with curated data scale, far from saturation. Its fast adaptation, hardware-friendly design, and efficient deployment have made it a unified visual foundation across XPeng's AI systems. More broadly, TuringViT provides a reproducible pipeline that dramatically lowers the cost for the community to train, customize, and deploy SOTA-level ViTs, moving toward making such Vision Transformers accessible to all.

  • 22 authors
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Jun 22

A Closer Look at the Explainability of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training

Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) is a powerful vision-language model that has shown great benefits for various tasks. However, we have identified some issues with its explainability, which undermine its credibility and limit the capacity for related tasks. Specifically, we find that CLIP tends to focus on background regions rather than foregrounds, with noisy activations at irrelevant positions on the visualization results. These phenomena conflict with conventional explainability methods based on the class attention map (CAM), where the raw model can highlight the local foreground regions using global supervision without alignment. To address these problems, we take a closer look at its architecture and features. Based on thorough analyses, we find the raw self-attentions link to inconsistent semantic regions, resulting in the opposite visualization. Besides, the noisy activations are owing to redundant features among categories. Building on these insights, we propose the CLIP Surgery for reliable CAM, a method that allows surgery-like modifications to the inference architecture and features, without further fine-tuning as classical CAM methods. This approach significantly improves the explainability of CLIP, surpassing existing methods by large margins. Besides, it enables multimodal visualization and extends the capacity of raw CLIP on open-vocabulary tasks without extra alignment. The code is available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/CLIP_Surgery.

  • 5 authors
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Sep 15, 2024

Extending a Large View Synthesis Model for Multi-view Panoptic Segmentation

Large view synthesis models synthesize novel views through cross-view attention without explicit 3D representations, and recent studies have shown that they learn accurate spatial correspondence from RGB supervision alone. We observe that this correspondence generalizes beyond appearance. When non-photorealistic signals such as binary encoded panoptic labels are passed through the model, they are propagated to novel views with consistent spatial structure. These results indicate that the correspondence learned for RGB view synthesis can also propagate view-independent per-pixel labels. From this observation, we present the first work to extend large view synthesis models beyond appearance rendering to 3D scene understanding. We propose a panoptic segmentation pipeline that reuses a frozen view synthesis model to propagate panoptic labels from input views to novel views, without 3D reconstruction or any segmentation-specific training of the view synthesis model. Given panoptic labels on the input views, we encode them into binary channel representations and pass them through the same model to render target-view segmentation. On ScanNet, our method achieves segmentation quality on par with Gaussian based approaches requiring explicit 3D reconstruction, while outperforming them in novel view synthesis by more than 7 dB. The label propagation also transfers across datasets, surpassing these approaches on Replica without any fine-tuning.

  • 6 authors
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Jul 21

FOCUS: Forcing In-Context Object Localization through Visual Support Constraints and Policy Optimization

In-context localization (ICL) seeks to localize a target object specified by a small set of support examples in a query image, operating on the fly without training or parameter updates. Despite rapid advances in vision-language models (VLMs), achieving category-agnostic and visually grounded ICL remains an open problem, even though it is essential for applications such as image editing, personalized visual search, and retrieval. Existing methods are fragile and rely on explicit category supervision, which not only limits applicability in realistic settings with unnamed or instance-specific objects but also introduces category bias that steers predictions toward semantic priors rather than visual evidence. We introduce a two-stage training framework that explicitly optimizes in-context attention between support bounding boxes and query images without category supervision. We further refine localization via reinforcement learning using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to directly minimize localization error. This formulation enforces visual correspondence over semantic priors, yielding robust instance-level localization. Empirically, a 7B-parameter model trained with our objectives outperforms models up to 72B parameters, demonstrating that context-aware localization objectives can surpass scaling alone. Comprehensive ablations validate the contribution of each component.

  • 2 authors
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May 28

MagicMakeup: A Region-Controllable Diffusion Transformer for High-Fidelity Makeup-Transfer

Makeup-transfer applies the reference makeup to the source face while preserving the source identity. Despite advances in full-face editing by diffusion-based methods, strong regional controllability, makeup fidelity, and identity preservation remain challenging. The reasons are (i) pixel-to-attention misalignment that causes spillover into non-target areas and weakens regional control; (ii) unclear transfer/preservation concept separation under two-image conditioning, leading to coupling between makeup attributes and identity; and (iii) the lack of a high-resolution dataset that is identity-consistent and region-labeled for fine-grained supervision. In this paper, we propose MagicMakeup, a diffusion transformer-based framework for region-controllable and high-fidelity makeup transfer, built on spatial constraints and concept disentanglement. To enable precise region-specific editing while preserving identity, we propose Token-Aligned Region Gating, which aligns pixel masks with attention and applies region-specific logit gating. To clarify the concepts of transfer and preservation, we further introduce Cross-Modal Perception Guidance, which aligns text and image features to enhance cross-modal concept perception. We also design a pipeline for the generation of 1024 x 1024 data pairs through region-specific makeup removal and establish a unified benchmark in synthetic and real settings. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that MagicMakeup improves regional controllability, makeup fidelity, and identity preservation, with strong robustness across styles, races, and poses.

  • 8 authors
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Jul 22

PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images

We present PyMAF-X, a regression-based approach to recovering parametric full-body models from monocular images. This task is very challenging since minor parametric deviation may lead to noticeable misalignment between the estimated mesh and the input image. Moreover, when integrating part-specific estimations into the full-body model, existing solutions tend to either degrade the alignment or produce unnatural wrist poses. To address these issues, we propose a Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback (PyMAF) loop in our regression network for well-aligned human mesh recovery and extend it as PyMAF-X for the recovery of expressive full-body models. The core idea of PyMAF is to leverage a feature pyramid and rectify the predicted parameters explicitly based on the mesh-image alignment status. Specifically, given the currently predicted parameters, mesh-aligned evidence will be extracted from finer-resolution features accordingly and fed back for parameter rectification. To enhance the alignment perception, an auxiliary dense supervision is employed to provide mesh-image correspondence guidance while spatial alignment attention is introduced to enable the awareness of the global contexts for our network. When extending PyMAF for full-body mesh recovery, an adaptive integration strategy is proposed in PyMAF-X to produce natural wrist poses while maintaining the well-aligned performance of the part-specific estimations. The efficacy of our approach is validated on several benchmark datasets for body, hand, face, and full-body mesh recovery, where PyMAF and PyMAF-X effectively improve the mesh-image alignment and achieve new state-of-the-art results. The project page with code and video results can be found at https://www.liuyebin.com/pymaf-x.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 13, 2022

Leveraging Swin Transformer for Local-to-Global Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

In recent years, weakly supervised semantic segmentation using image-level labels as supervision has received significant attention in the field of computer vision. Most existing methods have addressed the challenges arising from the lack of spatial information in these labels by focusing on facilitating supervised learning through the generation of pseudo-labels from class activation maps (CAMs). Due to the localized pattern detection of CNNs, CAMs often emphasize only the most discriminative parts of an object, making it challenging to accurately distinguish foreground objects from each other and the background. Recent studies have shown that Vision Transformer (ViT) features, due to their global view, are more effective in capturing the scene layout than CNNs. However, the use of hierarchical ViTs has not been extensively explored in this field. This work explores the use of Swin Transformer by proposing "SWTformer" to enhance the accuracy of the initial seed CAMs by bringing local and global views together. SWTformer-V1 generates class probabilities and CAMs using only the patch tokens as features. SWTformer-V2 incorporates a multi-scale feature fusion mechanism to extract additional information and utilizes a background-aware mechanism to generate more accurate localization maps with improved cross-object discrimination. Based on experiments on the PascalVOC 2012 dataset, SWTformer-V1 achieves a 0.98% mAP higher localization accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art models. It also yields comparable performance by 0.82% mIoU on average higher than other methods in generating initial localization maps, depending only on the classification network. SWTformer-V2 further improves the accuracy of the generated seed CAMs by 5.32% mIoU, further proving the effectiveness of the local-to-global view provided by the Swin transformer. Code available at: https://github.com/RozhanAhmadi/SWTformer

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 10, 2024

VidLanKD: Improving Language Understanding via Video-Distilled Knowledge Transfer

Since visual perception can give rich information beyond text descriptions for world understanding, there has been increasing interest in leveraging visual grounding for language learning. Recently, vokenization (Tan and Bansal, 2020) has attracted attention by using the predictions of a text-to-image retrieval model as labels for language model supervision. Despite its success, the method suffers from approximation error of using finite image labels and the lack of vocabulary diversity of a small image-text dataset. To overcome these limitations, we present VidLanKD, a video-language knowledge distillation method for improving language understanding. We train a multi-modal teacher model on a video-text dataset, and then transfer its knowledge to a student language model with a text dataset. To avoid approximation error, we propose to use different knowledge distillation objectives. In addition, the use of a large-scale video-text dataset helps learn diverse and richer vocabularies. In our experiments, VidLanKD achieves consistent improvements over text-only language models and vokenization models, on several downstream language understanding tasks including GLUE, SQuAD, and SWAG. We also demonstrate the improved world knowledge, physical reasoning, and temporal reasoning capabilities of our model by evaluating on the GLUE-diagnostics, PIQA, and TRACIE datasets. Lastly, we present comprehensive ablation studies as well as visualizations of the learned text-to-video grounding results of our teacher and student language models. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/zinengtang/VidLanKD

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 6, 2021

Colors See Colors Ignore: Clothes Changing ReID with Color Disentanglement

Clothes-Changing Re-Identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals across different locations and times, irrespective of clothing. Existing methods often rely on additional models or annotations to learn robust, clothing-invariant features, making them resource-intensive. In contrast, we explore the use of color - specifically foreground and background colors - as a lightweight, annotation-free proxy for mitigating appearance bias in ReID models. We propose Colors See, Colors Ignore (CSCI), an RGB-only method that leverages color information directly from raw images or video frames. CSCI efficiently captures color-related appearance bias ('Color See') while disentangling it from identity-relevant ReID features ('Color Ignore'). To achieve this, we introduce S2A self-attention, a novel self-attention to prevent information leak between color and identity cues within the feature space. Our analysis shows a strong correspondence between learned color embeddings and clothing attributes, validating color as an effective proxy when explicit clothing labels are unavailable. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CSCI on both image and video ReID with extensive experiments on four CC-ReID datasets. We improve the baseline by Top-1 2.9% on LTCC and 5.0% on PRCC for image-based ReID, and 1.0% on CCVID and 2.5% on MeVID for video-based ReID without relying on additional supervision. Our results highlight the potential of color as a cost-effective solution for addressing appearance bias in CC-ReID. Github: https://github.com/ppriyank/ICCV-CSCI-Person-ReID.