Daily Papers

In controllable image synthesis, generating coherent and consistent images from multiple references with spatial layout awareness remains an open challenge. We present LAMIC, a Layout-Aware Multi-Image Composition framework that, for the first time, extends single-reference diffusion models to multi-reference scenarios in a training-free manner. Built upon the MMDiT model, LAMIC introduces two plug-and-play attention mechanisms: 1) Group Isolation Attention (GIA) to enhance entity disentanglement; and 2) Region-Modulated Attention (RMA) to enable layout-aware generation. To comprehensively evaluate model capabilities, we further introduce three metrics: 1) Inclusion Ratio (IN-R) and Fill Ratio (FI-R) for assessing layout control; and 2) Background Similarity (BG-S) for measuring background consistency. Extensive experiments show that LAMIC achieves state-of-the-art performance across most major metrics: it consistently outperforms existing multi-reference baselines in ID-S, BG-S, IN-R and AVG scores across all settings, and achieves the best DPG in complex composition tasks. These results demonstrate LAMIC's superior abilities in identity keeping, background preservation, layout control, and prompt-following, all achieved without any training or fine-tuning, showcasing strong zero-shot generalization ability. By inheriting the strengths of advanced single-reference models and enabling seamless extension to multi-image scenarios, LAMIC establishes a new training-free paradigm for controllable multi-image composition. As foundation models continue to evolve, LAMIC's performance is expected to scale accordingly. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/Suchenl/LAMIC.

Text-guided image editing with diffusion models has achieved remarkable quality but suffers from prohibitive latency, hindering real-world applications. We introduce FlashEdit, a novel framework designed to enable high-fidelity, real-time image editing. Its efficiency stems from three key innovations: (1) a One-Step Inversion-and-Editing (OSIE) pipeline that bypasses costly iterative processes; (2) a Background Shield (BG-Shield) technique that guarantees background preservation by selectively modifying features only within the edit region; and (3) a Sparsified Spatial Cross-Attention (SSCA) mechanism that ensures precise, localized edits by suppressing semantic leakage to the background. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlashEdit maintains superior background consistency and structural integrity, while performing edits in under 0.2 seconds, which is an over 150times speedup compared to prior multi-step methods. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/JunyiWuCode/FlashEdit.

The key to the success of few-shot segmentation (FSS) lies in how to effectively utilize support samples. Most solutions compress support foreground (FG) features into prototypes, but lose some spatial details. Instead, others use cross attention to fuse query features with uncompressed support FG. Query FG could be fused with support FG, however, query background (BG) cannot find matched BG features in support FG, yet inevitably integrates dissimilar features. Besides, as both query FG and BG are combined with support FG, they get entangled, thereby leading to ineffective segmentation. To cope with these issues, we design a self-calibrated cross attention (SCCA) block. For efficient patch-based attention, query and support features are firstly split into patches. Then, we design a patch alignment module to align each query patch with its most similar support patch for better cross attention. Specifically, SCCA takes a query patch as Q, and groups the patches from the same query image and the aligned patches from the support image as K&V. In this way, the query BG features are fused with matched BG features (from query patches), and thus the aforementioned issues will be mitigated. Moreover, when calculating SCCA, we design a scaled-cosine mechanism to better utilize the support features for similarity calculation. Extensive experiments conducted on PASCAL-5^i and COCO-20^i demonstrate the superiority of our model, e.g., the mIoU score under 5-shot setting on COCO-20^i is 5.6%+ better than previous state-of-the-arts. The code is available at https://github.com/Sam1224/SCCAN.

A significant weakness of most current deep Convolutional Neural Networks is the need to train them using vast amounts of manu- ally labelled data. In this work we propose a unsupervised framework to learn a deep convolutional neural network for single view depth predic- tion, without requiring a pre-training stage or annotated ground truth depths. We achieve this by training the network in a manner analogous to an autoencoder. At training time we consider a pair of images, source and target, with small, known camera motion between the two such as a stereo pair. We train the convolutional encoder for the task of predicting the depth map for the source image. To do so, we explicitly generate an inverse warp of the target image using the predicted depth and known inter-view displacement, to reconstruct the source image; the photomet- ric error in the reconstruction is the reconstruction loss for the encoder. The acquisition of this training data is considerably simpler than for equivalent systems, requiring no manual annotation, nor calibration of depth sensor to camera. We show that our network trained on less than half of the KITTI dataset (without any further augmentation) gives com- parable performance to that of the state of art supervised methods for single view depth estimation.

Visual program synthesis is a promising approach to exploit the reasoning abilities of large language models for compositional computer vision tasks. Previous work has used few-shot prompting with frozen LLMs to synthesize visual programs. Training an LLM to write better visual programs is an attractive prospect, but it is unclear how to accomplish this. No dataset of visual programs for training exists, and acquisition of a visual program dataset cannot be easily crowdsourced due to the need for expert annotators. To get around the lack of direct supervision, we explore improving the program synthesis abilities of an LLM using feedback from interactive experience. We propose a method where we exploit existing annotations for a vision-language task to improvise a coarse reward signal for that task, treat the LLM as a policy, and apply reinforced self-training to improve the visual program synthesis ability of the LLM for that task. We describe a series of experiments on object detection, compositional visual question answering, and image-text retrieval, and show that in each case, the self-trained LLM outperforms or performs on par with few-shot frozen LLMs that are an order of magnitude larger. Website: https://zaidkhan.me/ViReP

Contrastive Analysis VAE (CA-VAEs) is a family of Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) that aims at separating the common factors of variation between a background dataset (BG) (i.e., healthy subjects) and a target dataset (TG) (i.e., patients) from the ones that only exist in the target dataset. To do so, these methods separate the latent space into a set of salient features (i.e., proper to the target dataset) and a set of common features (i.e., exist in both datasets). Currently, all models fail to prevent the sharing of information between latent spaces effectively and to capture all salient factors of variation. To this end, we introduce two crucial regularization losses: a disentangling term between common and salient representations and a classification term between background and target samples in the salient space. We show a better performance than previous CA-VAEs methods on three medical applications and a natural images dataset (CelebA). Code and datasets are available on GitHub https://github.com/neurospin-projects/2023_rlouiset_sepvae.

Recent advancements in few-shot segmentation (FSS) have exploited pixel-by-pixel matching between query and support features, typically based on cross attention, which selectively activate query foreground (FG) features that correspond to the same-class support FG features. However, due to the large receptive fields in deep layers of the backbone, the extracted query and support FG features are inevitably mingled with background (BG) features, impeding the FG-FG matching in cross attention. Hence, the query FG features are fused with less support FG features, i.e., the support information is not well utilized. This paper presents a novel plug-in termed ambiguity elimination network (AENet), which can be plugged into any existing cross attention-based FSS methods. The main idea is to mine discriminative query FG regions to rectify the ambiguous FG features, increasing the proportion of FG information, so as to suppress the negative impacts of the doped BG features. In this way, the FG-FG matching is naturally enhanced. We plug AENet into three baselines CyCTR, SCCAN and HDMNet for evaluation, and their scores are improved by large margins, e.g., the 1-shot performance of SCCAN can be improved by 3.0%+ on both PASCAL-5^i and COCO-20^i. The code is available at https://github.com/Sam1224/AENet.

We present Mify-Coder, a 2.5B-parameter code model trained on 4.2T tokens using a compute-optimal strategy built on the Mify-2.5B foundation model. Mify-Coder achieves comparable accuracy and safety while significantly outperforming much larger baseline models on standard coding and function-calling benchmarks, demonstrating that compact models can match frontier-grade models in code generation and agent-driven workflows. Our training pipeline combines high-quality curated sources with synthetic data generated through agentically designed prompts, refined iteratively using enterprise-grade evaluation datasets. LLM-based quality filtering further enhances data density, enabling frugal yet effective training. Through disciplined exploration of CPT-SFT objectives, data mixtures, and sampling dynamics, we deliver frontier-grade code intelligence within a single continuous training trajectory. Empirical evidence shows that principled data and compute discipline allow smaller models to achieve competitive accuracy, efficiency, and safety compliance. Quantized variants of Mify-Coder enable deployment on standard desktop environments without requiring specialized hardware.

Language-based object detection is a promising direction towards building a natural interface to describe objects in images that goes far beyond plain category names. While recent methods show great progress in that direction, proper evaluation is lacking. With OmniLabel, we propose a novel task definition, dataset, and evaluation metric. The task subsumes standard- and open-vocabulary detection as well as referring expressions. With more than 28K unique object descriptions on over 25K images, OmniLabel provides a challenging benchmark with diverse and complex object descriptions in a naturally open-vocabulary setting. Moreover, a key differentiation to existing benchmarks is that our object descriptions can refer to one, multiple or even no object, hence, providing negative examples in free-form text. The proposed evaluation handles the large label space and judges performance via a modified average precision metric, which we validate by evaluating strong language-based baselines. OmniLabel indeed provides a challenging test bed for future research on language-based detection.

Although planning is a crucial component of the autonomous driving stack, researchers have yet to develop robust planning algorithms that are capable of safely handling the diverse range of possible driving scenarios. Learning-based planners suffer from overfitting and poor long-tail performance. On the other hand, rule-based planners generalize well, but might fail to handle scenarios that require complex driving maneuvers. To address these limitations, we investigate the possibility of leveraging the common-sense reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT4 and Llama2 to generate plans for self-driving vehicles. In particular, we develop a novel hybrid planner that leverages a conventional rule-based planner in conjunction with an LLM-based planner. Guided by commonsense reasoning abilities of LLMs, our approach navigates complex scenarios which existing planners struggle with, produces well-reasoned outputs while also remaining grounded through working alongside the rule-based approach. Through extensive evaluation on the nuPlan benchmark, we achieve state-of-the-art performance, outperforming all existing pure learning- and rule-based methods across most metrics. Our code will be available at https://llmassist.github.io.

Visual reasoning (VR), which is crucial in many fields for enabling human-like visual understanding, remains highly challenging. Recently, compositional visual reasoning approaches, which leverage the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) with integrated tools to solve problems, have shown promise as more effective strategies than end-to-end VR methods. However, these approaches face limitations, as frozen LLMs lack tool awareness in VR, leading to performance bottlenecks. While leveraging LLMs for reasoning is widely used in other domains, they are not directly applicable to VR due to limited training data, imperfect tools that introduce errors and reduce data collection efficiency in VR, and challenging in fine-tuning on noisy workflows. To address these challenges, we propose DWIM: i) Discrepancy-aware training Workflow generation, which assesses tool usage and extracts more viable workflows for training; and ii) Instruct-Masking fine-tuning, which guides the model to only clone effective actions, enabling the generation of more practical solutions. Our experiments demonstrate that DWIM achieves state-of-the-art performance across various VR tasks, exhibiting strong generalization on multiple widely-used datasets.

Background subtraction (BGS) aims to extract all moving objects in the video frames to obtain binary foreground segmentation masks. Deep learning has been widely used in this field. Compared with supervised-based BGS methods, unsupervised methods have better generalization. However, previous unsupervised deep learning BGS algorithms perform poorly in sophisticated scenarios such as shadows or night lights, and they cannot detect objects outside the pre-defined categories. In this work, we propose an unsupervised BGS algorithm based on zero-shot object detection called Zero-shot Background Subtraction (ZBS). The proposed method fully utilizes the advantages of zero-shot object detection to build the open-vocabulary instance-level background model. Based on it, the foreground can be effectively extracted by comparing the detection results of new frames with the background model. ZBS performs well for sophisticated scenarios, and it has rich and extensible categories. Furthermore, our method can easily generalize to other tasks, such as abandoned object detection in unseen environments. We experimentally show that ZBS surpasses state-of-the-art unsupervised BGS methods by 4.70% F-Measure on the CDnet 2014 dataset. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/ZBS.

In this work, we leverage CMB data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and LSS data from the imaging survey conducted by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to study the distribution of gas around galaxy groups at low redshift, z approx 0.3, via the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect. In particular, we perform velocity-weighted stacking on the photometric Bright Galaxy Sample (BGS) to isolate the monopole and quadrupole of the kSZ signal, orienting the stacked images along 2D filaments identified using the Hessian of the projected gravitational potential. We find a 7.2σ detection in the monopole of the signal (i.e., the gas density profile) and a 4σ detection in the quadrupole (m = 2), constituting the first measurement of the alignment between gas distribution and the cosmic web through the kSZ effect. As it is a linear probe of the local gas density, the kSZ has heightened sensitivity to the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM), which is believed to house the majority of the ``missing baryons.'' Mapping out the gas density at low redshifts, as enabled by our measurements, is crucial for weak lensing surveys, for which the impact of baryons on small scales is a major impediment. We compare the anisotropic signal against two hydrodynamical simulations, TNG300-1 and Illustris, which have very different baryonic feedback prescriptions. We find that the anisotropic signal measured in the data is comparable but slightly larger and more extended compared with the simulations. This suggests that there is excess accretion and feedback taking place through the filaments, hinting at the possible presence of spin-filament alignment of the BGS objects.