new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Apr 14

ACR: Attention Collaboration-based Regressor for Arbitrary Two-Hand Reconstruction

Reconstructing two hands from monocular RGB images is challenging due to frequent occlusion and mutual confusion. Existing methods mainly learn an entangled representation to encode two interacting hands, which are incredibly fragile to impaired interaction, such as truncated hands, separate hands, or external occlusion. This paper presents ACR (Attention Collaboration-based Regressor), which makes the first attempt to reconstruct hands in arbitrary scenarios. To achieve this, ACR explicitly mitigates interdependencies between hands and between parts by leveraging center and part-based attention for feature extraction. However, reducing interdependence helps release the input constraint while weakening the mutual reasoning about reconstructing the interacting hands. Thus, based on center attention, ACR also learns cross-hand prior that handle the interacting hands better. We evaluate our method on various types of hand reconstruction datasets. Our method significantly outperforms the best interacting-hand approaches on the InterHand2.6M dataset while yielding comparable performance with the state-of-the-art single-hand methods on the FreiHand dataset. More qualitative results on in-the-wild and hand-object interaction datasets and web images/videos further demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for arbitrary hand reconstruction. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhengdiYu/Arbitrary-Hands-3D-Reconstruction.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 10, 2023

Visual Speech-Aware Perceptual 3D Facial Expression Reconstruction from Videos

The recent state of the art on monocular 3D face reconstruction from image data has made some impressive advancements, thanks to the advent of Deep Learning. However, it has mostly focused on input coming from a single RGB image, overlooking the following important factors: a) Nowadays, the vast majority of facial image data of interest do not originate from single images but rather from videos, which contain rich dynamic information. b) Furthermore, these videos typically capture individuals in some form of verbal communication (public talks, teleconferences, audiovisual human-computer interactions, interviews, monologues/dialogues in movies, etc). When existing 3D face reconstruction methods are applied in such videos, the artifacts in the reconstruction of the shape and motion of the mouth area are often severe, since they do not match well with the speech audio. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we present the first method for visual speech-aware perceptual reconstruction of 3D mouth expressions. We do this by proposing a "lipread" loss, which guides the fitting process so that the elicited perception from the 3D reconstructed talking head resembles that of the original video footage. We demonstrate that, interestingly, the lipread loss is better suited for 3D reconstruction of mouth movements compared to traditional landmark losses, and even direct 3D supervision. Furthermore, the devised method does not rely on any text transcriptions or corresponding audio, rendering it ideal for training in unlabeled datasets. We verify the efficiency of our method through exhaustive objective evaluations on three large-scale datasets, as well as subjective evaluation with two web-based user studies.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 22, 2022 1

Recycling the Web: A Method to Enhance Pre-training Data Quality and Quantity for Language Models

Scaling laws predict that the performance of large language models improves with increasing model size and data size. In practice, pre-training has been relying on massive web crawls, using almost all data sources publicly available on the internet so far. However, this pool of natural data does not grow at the same rate as the compute supply. Furthermore, the availability of high-quality texts is even more limited: data filtering pipelines often remove up to 99% of the initial web scrapes to achieve state-of-the-art. To address the "data wall" of pre-training scaling, our work explores ways to transform and recycle data discarded in existing filtering processes. We propose REWIRE, REcycling the Web with guIded REwrite, a method to enrich low-quality documents so that they could become useful for training. This in turn allows us to increase the representation of synthetic data in the final pre-training set. Experiments at 1B, 3B and 7B scales of the DCLM benchmark show that mixing high-quality raw texts and our rewritten texts lead to 1.0, 1.3 and 2.5 percentage points improvement respectively across 22 diverse tasks, compared to training on only filtered web data. Training on the raw-synthetic data mix is also more effective than having access to 2x web data. Through further analysis, we demonstrate that about 82% of the mixed in texts come from transforming lower-quality documents that would otherwise be discarded. REWIRE also outperforms related approaches of generating synthetic data, including Wikipedia-style paraphrasing, question-answer synthesizing and knowledge extraction. These results suggest that recycling web texts holds the potential for being a simple and effective approach for scaling pre-training data.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 5, 2025

Newswire: A Large-Scale Structured Database of a Century of Historical News

In the U.S. historically, local newspapers drew their content largely from newswires like the Associated Press. Historians argue that newswires played a pivotal role in creating a national identity and shared understanding of the world, but there is no comprehensive archive of the content sent over newswires. We reconstruct such an archive by applying a customized deep learning pipeline to hundreds of terabytes of raw image scans from thousands of local newspapers. The resulting dataset contains 2.7 million unique public domain U.S. newswire articles, written between 1878 and 1977. Locations in these articles are georeferenced, topics are tagged using customized neural topic classification, named entities are recognized, and individuals are disambiguated to Wikipedia using a novel entity disambiguation model. To construct the Newswire dataset, we first recognize newspaper layouts and transcribe around 138 millions structured article texts from raw image scans. We then use a customized neural bi-encoder model to de-duplicate reproduced articles, in the presence of considerable abridgement and noise, quantifying how widely each article was reproduced. A text classifier is used to ensure that we only include newswire articles, which historically are in the public domain. The structured data that accompany the texts provide rich information about the who (disambiguated individuals), what (topics), and where (georeferencing) of the news that millions of Americans read over the course of a century. We also include Library of Congress metadata information about the newspapers that ran the articles on their front pages. The Newswire dataset is useful both for large language modeling - expanding training data beyond what is available from modern web texts - and for studying a diversity of questions in computational linguistics, social science, and the digital humanities.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024

VCR: Visual Caption Restoration

We introduce Visual Caption Restoration (VCR), a novel vision-language task that challenges models to accurately restore partially obscured texts using pixel-level hints within images. This task stems from the observation that text embedded in images is intrinsically different from common visual elements and natural language due to the need to align the modalities of vision, text, and text embedded in images. While numerous works have integrated text embedded in images into visual question-answering tasks, approaches to these tasks generally rely on optical character recognition or masked language modeling, thus reducing the task to mainly text-based processing. However, text-based processing becomes ineffective in VCR as accurate text restoration depends on the combined information from provided images, context, and subtle cues from the tiny exposed areas of masked texts. We develop a pipeline to generate synthetic images for the VCR task using image-caption pairs, with adjustable caption visibility to control the task difficulty. With this pipeline, we construct a dataset for VCR called VCR-Wiki using images with captions from Wikipedia, comprising 2.11M English and 346K Chinese entities in both easy and hard split variants. Our results reveal that current vision language models significantly lag behind human performance in the VCR task, and merely fine-tuning the models on our dataset does not lead to notable improvements. We release VCR-Wiki and the data construction code to facilitate future research.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024 1

HtmlRAG: HTML is Better Than Plain Text for Modeling Retrieved Knowledge in RAG Systems

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been shown to improve knowledge capabilities and alleviate the hallucination problem of LLMs. The Web is a major source of external knowledge used in RAG systems, and many commercial systems such as ChatGPT and Perplexity have used Web search engines as their major retrieval systems. Typically, such RAG systems retrieve search results, download HTML sources of the results, and then extract plain texts from the HTML sources. Plain text documents or chunks are fed into the LLMs to augment the generation. However, much of the structural and semantic information inherent in HTML, such as headings and table structures, is lost during this plain-text-based RAG process. To alleviate this problem, we propose HtmlRAG, which uses HTML instead of plain text as the format of retrieved knowledge in RAG. We believe HTML is better than plain text in modeling knowledge in external documents, and most LLMs possess robust capacities to understand HTML. However, utilizing HTML presents new challenges. HTML contains additional content such as tags, JavaScript, and CSS specifications, which bring extra input tokens and noise to the RAG system. To address this issue, we propose HTML cleaning, compression, and pruning strategies, to shorten the HTML while minimizing the loss of information. Specifically, we design a two-step block-tree-based pruning method that prunes useless HTML blocks and keeps only the relevant part of the HTML. Experiments on six QA datasets confirm the superiority of using HTML in RAG systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 5, 2024 23

Pruning Overparameterized Multi-Task Networks for Degraded Web Image Restoration

Image quality is a critical factor in delivering visually appealing content on web platforms. However, images often suffer from degradation due to lossy operations applied by online social networks (OSNs), negatively affecting user experience. Image restoration is the process of recovering a clean high-quality image from a given degraded input. Recently, multi-task (all-in-one) image restoration models have gained significant attention, due to their ability to simultaneously handle different types of image degradations. However, these models often come with an excessively high number of trainable parameters, making them computationally inefficient. In this paper, we propose a strategy for compressing multi-task image restoration models. We aim to discover highly sparse subnetworks within overparameterized deep models that can match or even surpass the performance of their dense counterparts. The proposed model, namely MIR-L, utilizes an iterative pruning strategy that removes low-magnitude weights across multiple rounds, while resetting the remaining weights to their original initialization. This iterative process is important for the multi-task image restoration model's optimization, effectively uncovering "winning tickets" that maintain or exceed state-of-the-art performance at high sparsity levels. Experimental evaluation on benchmark datasets for the deraining, dehazing, and denoising tasks shows that MIR-L retains only 10% of the trainable parameters while maintaining high image restoration performance. Our code, datasets and pre-trained models are made publicly available at https://github.com/Thomkat/MIR-L.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 16, 2025 2

Reviving Cultural Heritage: A Novel Approach for Comprehensive Historical Document Restoration

Historical documents represent an invaluable cultural heritage, yet have undergone significant degradation over time through tears, water erosion, and oxidation. Existing Historical Document Restoration (HDR) methods primarily focus on single modality or limited-size restoration, failing to meet practical needs. To fill this gap, we present a full-page HDR dataset (FPHDR) and a novel automated HDR solution (AutoHDR). Specifically, FPHDR comprises 1,633 real and 6,543 synthetic images with character-level and line-level locations, as well as character annotations in different damage grades. AutoHDR mimics historians' restoration workflows through a three-stage approach: OCR-assisted damage localization, vision-language context text prediction, and patch autoregressive appearance restoration. The modular architecture of AutoHDR enables seamless human-machine collaboration, allowing for flexible intervention and optimization at each restoration stage. Experiments demonstrate AutoHDR's remarkable performance in HDR. When processing severely damaged documents, our method improves OCR accuracy from 46.83\% to 84.05\%, with further enhancement to 94.25\% through human-machine collaboration. We believe this work represents a significant advancement in automated historical document restoration and contributes substantially to cultural heritage preservation. The model and dataset are available at https://github.com/SCUT-DLVCLab/AutoHDR.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 7, 2025 1

Predicting the Original Appearance of Damaged Historical Documents

Historical documents encompass a wealth of cultural treasures but suffer from severe damages including character missing, paper damage, and ink erosion over time. However, existing document processing methods primarily focus on binarization, enhancement, etc., neglecting the repair of these damages. To this end, we present a new task, termed Historical Document Repair (HDR), which aims to predict the original appearance of damaged historical documents. To fill the gap in this field, we propose a large-scale dataset HDR28K and a diffusion-based network DiffHDR for historical document repair. Specifically, HDR28K contains 28,552 damaged-repaired image pairs with character-level annotations and multi-style degradations. Moreover, DiffHDR augments the vanilla diffusion framework with semantic and spatial information and a meticulously designed character perceptual loss for contextual and visual coherence. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DiffHDR trained using HDR28K significantly surpasses existing approaches and exhibits remarkable performance in handling real damaged documents. Notably, DiffHDR can also be extended to document editing and text block generation, showcasing its high flexibility and generalization capacity. We believe this study could pioneer a new direction of document processing and contribute to the inheritance of invaluable cultures and civilizations. The dataset and code is available at https://github.com/yeungchenwa/HDR.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024 2

VisualWebInstruct: Scaling up Multimodal Instruction Data through Web Search

Vision-Language Models have made significant progress on many perception-focused tasks, however, their progress on reasoning-focused tasks seem to be limited due to the lack of high-quality and diverse training data. In this work, we aim to address the scarcity issue of reasoning-focused multimodal datasets. We propose VisualWebInstruct - a novel approach that leverages search engine to create a diverse, and high-quality dataset spanning multiple disciplines like math, physics, finance, chemistry, etc. Starting with meticulously selected 30,000 seed images, we employ Google Image search to identify websites containing similar images. We collect and process the HTMLs from over 700K unique URL sources. Through a pipeline of content extraction, filtering and synthesis, we build a dataset of approximately 900K question-answer pairs, with 40% being visual QA pairs and the rest as text QA pairs. Models fine-tuned on VisualWebInstruct demonstrate significant performance gains: (1) training from Llava-OV-mid shows 10-20% absolute point gains across benchmarks, (2) training from MAmmoTH-VL shows 5% absoluate gain. Our best model MAmmoTH-VL2 shows state-of-the-art performance within the 10B parameter class on MMMU-Pro-std (40.7%), MathVerse (42.6%), and DynaMath (55.7%). These remarkable results highlight the effectiveness of our dataset in enhancing VLMs' reasoning capabilities for complex multimodal tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 13, 2025 2

An Automatic Approach for Generating Rich, Linked Geo-Metadata from Historical Map Images

Historical maps contain detailed geographic information difficult to find elsewhere covering long-periods of time (e.g., 125 years for the historical topographic maps in the US). However, these maps typically exist as scanned images without searchable metadata. Existing approaches making historical maps searchable rely on tedious manual work (including crowd-sourcing) to generate the metadata (e.g., geolocations and keywords). Optical character recognition (OCR) software could alleviate the required manual work, but the recognition results are individual words instead of location phrases (e.g., "Black" and "Mountain" vs. "Black Mountain"). This paper presents an end-to-end approach to address the real-world problem of finding and indexing historical map images. This approach automatically processes historical map images to extract their text content and generates a set of metadata that is linked to large external geospatial knowledge bases. The linked metadata in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format support complex queries for finding and indexing historical maps, such as retrieving all historical maps covering mountain peaks higher than 1,000 meters in California. We have implemented the approach in a system called mapKurator. We have evaluated mapKurator using historical maps from several sources with various map styles, scales, and coverage. Our results show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. The code has been made publicly available as modules of the Kartta Labs project at https://github.com/kartta-labs/Project.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 2, 2021

Knowledge-Aware Artifact Image Synthesis with LLM-Enhanced Prompting and Multi-Source Supervision

Ancient artifacts are an important medium for cultural preservation and restoration. However, many physical copies of artifacts are either damaged or lost, leaving a blank space in archaeological and historical studies that calls for artifact image generation techniques. Despite the significant advancements in open-domain text-to-image synthesis, existing approaches fail to capture the important domain knowledge presented in the textual description, resulting in errors in recreated images such as incorrect shapes and patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-aware artifact image synthesis approach that brings lost historical objects accurately into their visual forms. We use a pretrained diffusion model as backbone and introduce three key techniques to enhance the text-to-image generation framework: 1) we construct prompts with explicit archaeological knowledge elicited from large language models (LLMs); 2) we incorporate additional textual guidance to correlated historical expertise in a contrastive manner; 3) we introduce further visual-semantic constraints on edge and perceptual features that enable our model to learn more intricate visual details of the artifacts. Compared to existing approaches, our proposed model produces higher-quality artifact images that align better with the implicit details and historical knowledge contained within written documents, thus achieving significant improvements across automatic metrics and in human evaluation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/danielwusg/artifact_diffusion.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 13, 2023

MTFusion: Reconstructing Any 3D Object from Single Image Using Multi-word Textual Inversion

Reconstructing 3D models from single-view images is a long-standing problem in computer vision. The latest advances for single-image 3D reconstruction extract a textual description from the input image and further utilize it to synthesize 3D models. However, existing methods focus on capturing a single key attribute of the image (e.g., object type, artistic style) and fail to consider the multi-perspective information required for accurate 3D reconstruction, such as object shape and material properties. Besides, the reliance on Neural Radiance Fields hinders their ability to reconstruct intricate surfaces and texture details. In this work, we propose MTFusion, which leverages both image data and textual descriptions for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction. Our approach consists of two stages. First, we adopt a novel multi-word textual inversion technique to extract a detailed text description capturing the image's characteristics. Then, we use this description and the image to generate a 3D model with FlexiCubes. Additionally, MTFusion enhances FlexiCubes by employing a special decoder network for Signed Distance Functions, leading to faster training and finer surface representation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our MTFusion surpasses existing image-to-3D methods on a wide range of synthetic and real-world images. Furthermore, the ablation study proves the effectiveness of our network designs.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 18, 2024

WebCloud: Recruiting web browsers for content distribution

We are at the beginning of a shift in how content is created and exchanged over the web. While content was previously created primarily by a small set of entities, today, individual users -- empowered by devices like digital cameras and services like online social networks -- are creating content that represents a significant fraction of Internet traffic. As a result, content today is increasingly generated and exchanged at the edge of the network. Unfortunately, the existing techniques and infrastructure that are still used to serve this content, such as centralized content distribution networks, are ill-suited for these new patterns of content exchange. In this paper, we take a first step towards addressing this situation by introducing WebCloud, a content distribution system for online social networking sites that works by re- purposing web browsers to help serve content. In other words, when a user browses content, WebCloud tries to fetch it from one of that user's friend's browsers, instead of from the social networking site. The result is a more direct exchange of content ; essentially, WebCloud leverages the spatial and temporal locality of interest between social network users. Because WebCloud is built using techniques already present in many web browsers, it can be applied today to many social networking sites. We demonstrate the practicality of WebCloud with microbenchmarks, simulations, and a prototype deployment.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 17, 2011

LASER: Layer-wise Scale Alignment for Training-Free Streaming 4D Reconstruction

Recent feed-forward reconstruction models like VGGT and π^3 achieve impressive reconstruction quality but cannot process streaming videos due to quadratic memory complexity, limiting their practical deployment. While existing streaming methods address this through learned memory mechanisms or causal attention, they require extensive retraining and may not fully leverage the strong geometric priors of state-of-the-art offline models. We propose LASER, a training-free framework that converts an offline reconstruction model into a streaming system by aligning predictions across consecutive temporal windows. We observe that simple similarity transformation (Sim(3)) alignment fails due to layer depth misalignment: monocular scale ambiguity causes relative depth scales of different scene layers to vary inconsistently between windows. To address this, we introduce layer-wise scale alignment, which segments depth predictions into discrete layers, computes per-layer scale factors, and propagates them across both adjacent windows and timestamps. Extensive experiments show that LASER achieves state-of-the-art performance on camera pose estimation and point map reconstruction %quality with offline models while operating at 14 FPS with 6 GB peak memory on a RTX A6000 GPU, enabling practical deployment for kilometer-scale streaming videos. Project website: https://neu-vi.github.io/LASER/{https://neu-vi.github.io/LASER/}

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 15, 2025

From Graphs to Hypergraphs: Hypergraph Projection and its Remediation

We study the implications of the modeling choice to use a graph, instead of a hypergraph, to represent real-world interconnected systems whose constituent relationships are of higher order by nature. Such a modeling choice typically involves an underlying projection process that maps the original hypergraph onto a graph, and is common in graph-based analysis. While hypergraph projection can potentially lead to loss of higher-order relations, there exists very limited studies on the consequences of doing so, as well as its remediation. This work fills this gap by doing two things: (1) we develop analysis based on graph and set theory, showing two ubiquitous patterns of hyperedges that are root to structural information loss in all hypergraph projections; we also quantify the combinatorial impossibility of recovering the lost higher-order structures if no extra help is provided; (2) we still seek to recover the lost higher-order structures in hypergraph projection, and in light of (1)'s findings we propose to relax the problem into a learning-based setting. Under this setting, we develop a learning-based hypergraph reconstruction method based on an important statistic of hyperedge distributions that we find. Our reconstruction method is evaluated on 8 real-world datasets under different settings, and exhibits consistently good performance. We also demonstrate benefits of the reconstructed hypergraphs via use cases of protein rankings and link predictions.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024

DOM-LM: Learning Generalizable Representations for HTML Documents

HTML documents are an important medium for disseminating information on the Web for human consumption. An HTML document presents information in multiple text formats including unstructured text, structured key-value pairs, and tables. Effective representation of these documents is essential for machine understanding to enable a wide range of applications, such as Question Answering, Web Search, and Personalization. Existing work has either represented these documents using visual features extracted by rendering them in a browser, which is typically computationally expensive, or has simply treated them as plain text documents, thereby failing to capture useful information presented in their HTML structure. We argue that the text and HTML structure together convey important semantics of the content and therefore warrant a special treatment for their representation learning. In this paper, we introduce a novel representation learning approach for web pages, dubbed DOM-LM, which addresses the limitations of existing approaches by encoding both text and DOM tree structure with a transformer-based encoder and learning generalizable representations for HTML documents via self-supervised pre-training. We evaluate DOM-LM on a variety of webpage understanding tasks, including Attribute Extraction, Open Information Extraction, and Question Answering. Our extensive experiments show that DOM-LM consistently outperforms all baselines designed for these tasks. In particular, DOM-LM demonstrates better generalization performance both in few-shot and zero-shot settings, making it attractive for making it suitable for real-world application settings with limited labeled data.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 25, 2022

TeCH: Text-guided Reconstruction of Lifelike Clothed Humans

Despite recent research advancements in reconstructing clothed humans from a single image, accurately restoring the "unseen regions" with high-level details remains an unsolved challenge that lacks attention. Existing methods often generate overly smooth back-side surfaces with a blurry texture. But how to effectively capture all visual attributes of an individual from a single image, which are sufficient to reconstruct unseen areas (e.g., the back view)? Motivated by the power of foundation models, TeCH reconstructs the 3D human by leveraging 1) descriptive text prompts (e.g., garments, colors, hairstyles) which are automatically generated via a garment parsing model and Visual Question Answering (VQA), 2) a personalized fine-tuned Text-to-Image diffusion model (T2I) which learns the "indescribable" appearance. To represent high-resolution 3D clothed humans at an affordable cost, we propose a hybrid 3D representation based on DMTet, which consists of an explicit body shape grid and an implicit distance field. Guided by the descriptive prompts + personalized T2I diffusion model, the geometry and texture of the 3D humans are optimized through multi-view Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and reconstruction losses based on the original observation. TeCH produces high-fidelity 3D clothed humans with consistent & delicate texture, and detailed full-body geometry. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that TeCH outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy and rendering quality. The code will be publicly available for research purposes at https://huangyangyi.github.io/tech

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 16, 2023 3

RESTORE: Graph Embedding Assessment Through Reconstruction

Following the success of Word2Vec embeddings, graph embeddings (GEs) have gained substantial traction. GEs are commonly generated and evaluated extrinsically on downstream applications, but intrinsic evaluations of the original graph properties in terms of topological structure and semantic information have been lacking. Understanding these will help identify the deficiency of the various families of GE methods when vectorizing graphs in terms of preserving the relevant knowledge or learning incorrect knowledge. To address this, we propose RESTORE, a framework for intrinsic GEs assessment through graph reconstruction. We show that reconstructing the original graph from the underlying GEs yields insights into the relative amount of information preserved in a given vector form. We first introduce the graph reconstruction task. We generate GEs from three GE families based on factorization methods, random walks, and deep learning (with representative algorithms from each family) on the CommonSense Knowledge Graph (CSKG). We analyze their effectiveness in preserving the (a) topological structure of node-level graph reconstruction with an increasing number of hops and (b) semantic information on various word semantic and analogy tests. Our evaluations show deep learning-based GE algorithm (SDNE) is overall better at preserving (a) with a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.54 and 0.35 for 2 and 3-hop reconstruction respectively, while the factorization-based algorithm (HOPE) is better at encapsulating (b) with an average Euclidean distance of 0.14, 0.17, and 0.11 for 1, 2, and 3-hop reconstruction respectively. The modest performance of these GEs leaves room for further research avenues on better graph representation learning.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 28, 2023

Backtracing: Retrieving the Cause of the Query

Many online content portals allow users to ask questions to supplement their understanding (e.g., of lectures). While information retrieval (IR) systems may provide answers for such user queries, they do not directly assist content creators -- such as lecturers who want to improve their content -- identify segments that _caused_ a user to ask those questions. We introduce the task of backtracing, in which systems retrieve the text segment that most likely caused a user query. We formalize three real-world domains for which backtracing is important in improving content delivery and communication: understanding the cause of (a) student confusion in the Lecture domain, (b) reader curiosity in the News Article domain, and (c) user emotion in the Conversation domain. We evaluate the zero-shot performance of popular information retrieval methods and language modeling methods, including bi-encoder, re-ranking and likelihood-based methods and ChatGPT. While traditional IR systems retrieve semantically relevant information (e.g., details on "projection matrices" for a query "does projecting multiple times still lead to the same point?"), they often miss the causally relevant context (e.g., the lecturer states "projecting twice gets me the same answer as one projection"). Our results show that there is room for improvement on backtracing and it requires new retrieval approaches. We hope our benchmark serves to improve future retrieval systems for backtracing, spawning systems that refine content generation and identify linguistic triggers influencing user queries. Our code and data are open-sourced: https://github.com/rosewang2008/backtracing.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 6, 2024 1

Latent Multimodal Reconstruction for Misinformation Detection

Multimodal misinformation, such as miscaptioned images, where captions misrepresent an image's origin, context, or meaning, poses a growing challenge in the digital age. To support fact-checkers, researchers have been focusing on creating datasets and developing methods for multimodal misinformation detection (MMD). Due to the scarcity of large-scale annotated MMD datasets, recent studies leverage synthetic training data via out-of-context image-caption pairs or named entity manipulations; altering names, dates, and locations. However, these approaches often produce simplistic misinformation that fails to reflect real-world complexity, limiting the robustness of detection models trained on them. Meanwhile, despite recent advancements, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain underutilized for generating diverse, realistic synthetic training data for MMD. To address this gap, we introduce "MisCaption This!", a training dataset comprising LVLM-generated miscaptioned images. Additionally, we introduce "Latent Multimodal Reconstruction" (LAMAR), a network trained to reconstruct the embeddings of truthful captions, providing a strong auxiliary signal to the detection process. To optimize LAMAR, we explore different training strategies (end-to-end training and large-scale pre-training) and integration approaches (direct, mask, gate, and attention). Extensive experiments show that models trained on "MisCaption This!" generalize better on real-world misinformation, while LAMAR sets new state-of-the-art on both NewsCLIPpings and VERITE benchmarks; highlighting the potential of LVLM-generated data and reconstruction-based approaches for advancing MMD. We release our code at: https://github.com/stevejpapad/miscaptioned-image-reconstruction

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 8, 2025

WebExplorer: Explore and Evolve for Training Long-Horizon Web Agents

The paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increasingly shifted toward agentic applications, where web browsing capabilities are fundamental for retrieving information from diverse online sources. However, existing open-source web agents either demonstrate limited information-seeking abilities on complex tasks or lack transparent implementations. In this work, we identify that the key challenge lies in the scarcity of challenging data for information seeking. To address this limitation, we introduce WebExplorer: a systematic data generation approach using model-based exploration and iterative, long-to-short query evolution. This method creates challenging query-answer pairs that require multi-step reasoning and complex web navigation. By leveraging our curated high-quality dataset, we successfully develop advanced web agent WebExplorer-8B through supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. Our model supports 128K context length and up to 100 tool calling turns, enabling long-horizon problem solving. Across diverse information-seeking benchmarks, WebExplorer-8B achieves the state-of-the-art performance at its scale. Notably, as an 8B-sized model, WebExplorer-8B is able to effectively search over an average of 16 turns after RL training, achieving higher accuracy than WebSailor-72B on BrowseComp-en/zh and attaining the best performance among models up to 100B parameters on WebWalkerQA and FRAMES. Beyond these information-seeking tasks, our model also achieves strong generalization on the HLE benchmark even though it is only trained on knowledge-intensive QA data. These results highlight our approach as a practical path toward long-horizon web agents.

  • 15 authors
·
Sep 8, 2025 3

Spatio-Temporal Garment Reconstruction Using Diffusion Mapping via Pattern Coordinates

Reconstructing 3D clothed humans from monocular images and videos is a fundamental problem with applications in virtual try-on, avatar creation, and mixed reality. Despite significant progress in human body recovery, accurately reconstructing garment geometry, particularly for loose-fitting clothing, remains an open challenge. We propose a unified framework for high-fidelity 3D garment reconstruction from both single images and video sequences. Our approach combines Implicit Sewing Patterns (ISP) with a generative diffusion model to learn expressive garment shape priors in 2D UV space. Leveraging these priors, we introduce a mapping model that establishes correspondences between image pixels, UV pattern coordinates, and 3D geometry, enabling accurate and detailed garment reconstruction from single images. We further extend this formulation to dynamic reconstruction by introducing a spatio-temporal diffusion scheme with test-time guidance to enforce long-range temporal consistency. We also develop analytic projection-based constraints that preserve image-aligned geometry in visible regions while enforcing coherent completion in occluded areas over time. Although trained exclusively on synthetically simulated cloth data, our method generalizes well to real-world imagery and consistently outperforms existing approaches on both tight- and loose-fitting garments. The reconstructed garments preserve fine geometric detail while exhibiting realistic dynamic motion, supporting downstream applications such as texture editing, garment retargeting, and animation.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 27

ReLi3D: Relightable Multi-view 3D Reconstruction with Disentangled Illumination

Reconstructing 3D assets from images has long required separate pipelines for geometry reconstruction, material estimation, and illumination recovery, each with distinct limitations and computational overhead. We present ReLi3D, the first unified end-to-end pipeline that simultaneously reconstructs complete 3D geometry, spatially-varying physically-based materials, and environment illumination from sparse multi-view images in under one second. Our key insight is that multi-view constraints can dramatically improve material and illumination disentanglement, a problem that remains fundamentally ill-posed for single-image methods. Key to our approach is the fusion of the multi-view input via a transformer cross-conditioning architecture, followed by a novel unified two-path prediction strategy. The first path predicts the object's structure and appearance, while the second path predicts the environment illumination from image background or object reflections. This, combined with a differentiable Monte Carlo multiple importance sampling renderer, creates an optimal illumination disentanglement training pipeline. In addition, with our mixed domain training protocol, which combines synthetic PBR datasets with real-world RGB captures, we establish generalizable results in geometry, material accuracy, and illumination quality. By unifying previously separate reconstruction tasks into a single feed-forward pass, we enable near-instantaneous generation of complete, relightable 3D assets. Project Page: https://reli3d.jdihlmann.com/

Do DALL-E and Flamingo Understand Each Other?

The field of multimodal research focusing on the comprehension and creation of both images and text has witnessed significant strides. This progress is exemplified by the emergence of sophisticated models dedicated to image captioning at scale, such as the notable Flamingo model and text-to-image generative models, with DALL-E serving as a prominent example. An interesting question worth exploring in this domain is whether Flamingo and DALL-E understand each other. To study this question, we propose a reconstruction task where Flamingo generates a description for a given image and DALL-E uses this description as input to synthesize a new image. We argue that these models understand each other if the generated image is similar to the given image. Specifically, we study the relationship between the quality of the image reconstruction and that of the text generation. We find that an optimal description of an image is one that gives rise to a generated image similar to the original one. The finding motivates us to propose a unified framework to finetune the text-to-image and image-to-text models. Concretely, the reconstruction part forms a regularization loss to guide the tuning of the models. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets with different image captioning and image generation models validate our findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed unified framework. As DALL-E and Flamingo are not publicly available, we use Stable Diffusion and BLIP in the remaining work. Project website: https://dalleflamingo.github.io.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 23, 2022

GSFixer: Improving 3D Gaussian Splatting with Reference-Guided Video Diffusion Priors

Reconstructing 3D scenes using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) from sparse views is an ill-posed problem due to insufficient information, often resulting in noticeable artifacts. While recent approaches have sought to leverage generative priors to complete information for under-constrained regions, they struggle to generate content that remains consistent with input observations. To address this challenge, we propose GSFixer, a novel framework designed to improve the quality of 3DGS representations reconstructed from sparse inputs. The core of our approach is the reference-guided video restoration model, built upon a DiT-based video diffusion model trained on paired artifact 3DGS renders and clean frames with additional reference-based conditions. Considering the input sparse views as references, our model integrates both 2D semantic features and 3D geometric features of reference views extracted from the visual geometry foundation model, enhancing the semantic coherence and 3D consistency when fixing artifact novel views. Furthermore, considering the lack of suitable benchmarks for 3DGS artifact restoration evaluation, we present DL3DV-Res which contains artifact frames rendered using low-quality 3DGS. Extensive experiments demonstrate our GSFixer outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in 3DGS artifact restoration and sparse-view 3D reconstruction. Project page: https://github.com/GVCLab/GSFixer.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 13, 2025 2

CMAMRNet: A Contextual Mask-Aware Network Enhancing Mural Restoration Through Comprehensive Mask Guidance

Murals, as invaluable cultural artifacts, face continuous deterioration from environmental factors and human activities. Digital restoration of murals faces unique challenges due to their complex degradation patterns and the critical need to preserve artistic authenticity. Existing learning-based methods struggle with maintaining consistent mask guidance throughout their networks, leading to insufficient focus on damaged regions and compromised restoration quality. We propose CMAMRNet, a Contextual Mask-Aware Mural Restoration Network that addresses these limitations through comprehensive mask guidance and multi-scale feature extraction. Our framework introduces two key components: (1) the Mask-Aware Up/Down-Sampler (MAUDS), which ensures consistent mask sensitivity across resolution scales through dedicated channel-wise feature selection and mask-guided feature fusion; and (2) the Co-Feature Aggregator (CFA), operating at both the highest and lowest resolutions to extract complementary features for capturing fine textures and global structures in degraded regions. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CMAMRNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods, effectively preserving both structural integrity and artistic details in restored murals. The code is available at~https://github.com/CXH-Research/CMAMRNet{https://github.com/CXH-Research/CMAMRNet}.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 9, 2025

AICC: Parse HTML Finer, Make Models Better -- A 7.3T AI-Ready Corpus Built by a Model-Based HTML Parser

While web data quality is crucial for large language models, most curation efforts focus on filtering and deduplication,treating HTML-to-text extraction as a fixed pre-processing step. Existing web corpora rely on heuristic-based extractors like Trafilatura, which struggle to preserve document structure and frequently corrupt structured elements such as formulas, codes, and tables. We hypothesize that improving extraction quality can be as impactful as aggressive filtering strategies for downstream performance. We introduce MinerU-HTML, a novel extraction pipeline that reformulates content extraction as a sequence labeling problem solved by a 0.6B-parameter language model. Unlike text-density heuristics, MinerU-HTML leverages semantic understanding and employs a two-stage formatting pipeline that explicitly categorizes semantic elements before converting to Markdown. Crucially, its model-based approach is inherently scalable, whereas heuristic methods offer limited improvement pathways. On MainWebBench, our benchmark of 7,887 annotated web pages, MinerU-HTML achieves 81.8\% ROUGE-N F1 compared to Trafilatura's 63.6\%, with exceptional structured element preservation (90.9\% for code blocks, 94.0\% for formulas). Using MinerU-HTML, we construct AICC (AI-ready Common Crawl), a 7.3-trillion token multilingual corpus from two Common Crawl snapshots. In controlled pretraining experiments where AICC and Trafilatura-extracted TfCC undergo identical filtering, models trained on AICC (62B tokens) achieve 50.8\% average accuracy across 13 benchmarks, outperforming TfCC by 1.08pp-providing direct evidence that extraction quality significantly impacts model capabilities. AICC also surpasses RefinedWeb and FineWeb on key benchmarks. We publicly release MainWebBench, MinerU-HTML, and AICC, demonstrating that HTML extraction is a critical, often underestimated component of web corpus construction.

opendatalab OpenDataLab
·
Nov 20, 2025 2

GTR: Improving Large 3D Reconstruction Models through Geometry and Texture Refinement

We propose a novel approach for 3D mesh reconstruction from multi-view images. Our method takes inspiration from large reconstruction models like LRM that use a transformer-based triplane generator and a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) model trained on multi-view images. However, in our method, we introduce several important modifications that allow us to significantly enhance 3D reconstruction quality. First of all, we examine the original LRM architecture and find several shortcomings. Subsequently, we introduce respective modifications to the LRM architecture, which lead to improved multi-view image representation and more computationally efficient training. Second, in order to improve geometry reconstruction and enable supervision at full image resolution, we extract meshes from the NeRF field in a differentiable manner and fine-tune the NeRF model through mesh rendering. These modifications allow us to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both 2D and 3D evaluation metrics, such as a PSNR of 28.67 on Google Scanned Objects (GSO) dataset. Despite these superior results, our feed-forward model still struggles to reconstruct complex textures, such as text and portraits on assets. To address this, we introduce a lightweight per-instance texture refinement procedure. This procedure fine-tunes the triplane representation and the NeRF color estimation model on the mesh surface using the input multi-view images in just 4 seconds. This refinement improves the PSNR to 29.79 and achieves faithful reconstruction of complex textures, such as text. Additionally, our approach enables various downstream applications, including text- or image-to-3D generation.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 9, 2024

WikiAutoGen: Towards Multi-Modal Wikipedia-Style Article Generation

Knowledge discovery and collection are intelligence-intensive tasks that traditionally require significant human effort to ensure high-quality outputs. Recent research has explored multi-agent frameworks for automating Wikipedia-style article generation by retrieving and synthesizing information from the internet. However, these methods primarily focus on text-only generation, overlooking the importance of multimodal content in enhancing informativeness and engagement. In this work, we introduce WikiAutoGen, a novel system for automated multimodal Wikipedia-style article generation. Unlike prior approaches, WikiAutoGen retrieves and integrates relevant images alongside text, enriching both the depth and visual appeal of generated content. To further improve factual accuracy and comprehensiveness, we propose a multi-perspective self-reflection mechanism, which critically assesses retrieved content from diverse viewpoints to enhance reliability, breadth, and coherence, etc. Additionally, we introduce WikiSeek, a benchmark comprising Wikipedia articles with topics paired with both textual and image-based representations, designed to evaluate multimodal knowledge generation on more challenging topics. Experimental results show that WikiAutoGen outperforms previous methods by 8%-29% on our WikiSeek benchmark, producing more accurate, coherent, and visually enriched Wikipedia-style articles. We show some of our generated examples in https://wikiautogen.github.io/ .

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 24, 2025 2

Puzzle Similarity: A Perceptually-guided No-Reference Metric for Artifact Detection in 3D Scene Reconstructions

Modern reconstruction techniques can effectively model complex 3D scenes from sparse 2D views. However, automatically assessing the quality of novel views and identifying artifacts is challenging due to the lack of ground truth images and the limitations of no-reference image metrics in predicting detailed artifact maps. The absence of such quality metrics hinders accurate predictions of the quality of generated views and limits the adoption of post-processing techniques, such as inpainting, to enhance reconstruction quality. In this work, we propose a new no-reference metric, Puzzle Similarity, which is designed to localize artifacts in novel views. Our approach utilizes image patch statistics from the input views to establish a scene-specific distribution that is later used to identify poorly reconstructed regions in the novel views. We test and evaluate our method in the context of 3D reconstruction; to this end, we collected a novel dataset of human quality assessment in unseen reconstructed views. Through this dataset, we demonstrate that our method can not only successfully localize artifacts in novel views, correlating with human assessment, but do so without direct references. Surprisingly, our metric outperforms both no-reference metrics and popular full-reference image metrics. We can leverage our new metric to enhance applications like automatic image restoration, guided acquisition, or 3D reconstruction from sparse inputs.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Survey

Estimating human pose and shape from monocular images is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Since the release of statistical body models, 3D human mesh recovery has been drawing broader attention. With the same goal of obtaining well-aligned and physically plausible mesh results, two paradigms have been developed to overcome challenges in the 2D-to-3D lifting process: i) an optimization-based paradigm, where different data terms and regularization terms are exploited as optimization objectives; and ii) a regression-based paradigm, where deep learning techniques are embraced to solve the problem in an end-to-end fashion. Meanwhile, continuous efforts are devoted to improving the quality of 3D mesh labels for a wide range of datasets. Though remarkable progress has been achieved in the past decade, the task is still challenging due to flexible body motions, diverse appearances, complex environments, and insufficient in-the-wild annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey to focus on the task of monocular 3D human mesh recovery. We start with the introduction of body models and then elaborate recovery frameworks and training objectives by providing in-depth analyses of their strengths and weaknesses. We also summarize datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmark results. Open issues and future directions are discussed in the end, hoping to motivate researchers and facilitate their research in this area. A regularly updated project page can be found at https://github.com/tinatiansjz/hmr-survey.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 3, 2022

WorldWarp: Propagating 3D Geometry with Asynchronous Video Diffusion

Generating long-range, geometrically consistent video presents a fundamental dilemma: while consistency demands strict adherence to 3D geometry in pixel space, state-of-the-art generative models operate most effectively in a camera-conditioned latent space. This disconnect causes current methods to struggle with occluded areas and complex camera trajectories. To bridge this gap, we propose WorldWarp, a framework that couples a 3D structural anchor with a 2D generative refiner. To establish geometric grounding, WorldWarp maintains an online 3D geometric cache built via Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). By explicitly warping historical content into novel views, this cache acts as a structural scaffold, ensuring each new frame respects prior geometry. However, static warping inevitably leaves holes and artifacts due to occlusions. We address this using a Spatio-Temporal Diffusion (ST-Diff) model designed for a "fill-and-revise" objective. Our key innovation is a spatio-temporal varying noise schedule: blank regions receive full noise to trigger generation, while warped regions receive partial noise to enable refinement. By dynamically updating the 3D cache at every step, WorldWarp maintains consistency across video chunks. Consequently, it achieves state-of-the-art fidelity by ensuring that 3D logic guides structure while diffusion logic perfects texture. Project page: https://hyokong.github.io/worldwarp-page/{https://hyokong.github.io/worldwarp-page/}.

Automatically Extracting Web API Specifications from HTML Documentation

Web API specifications are machine-readable descriptions of APIs. These specifications, in combination with related tooling, simplify and support the consumption of APIs. However, despite the increased distribution of web APIs, specifications are rare and their creation and maintenance heavily relies on manual efforts by third parties. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach and an associated tool called D2Spec for extracting specifications from web API documentation pages. Given a seed online documentation page on an API, D2Spec first crawls all documentation pages on the API, and then uses a set of machine learning techniques to extract the base URL, path templates, and HTTP methods, which collectively describe the endpoints of an API. We evaluated whether D2Spec can accurately extract endpoints from documentation on 120 web APIs. The results showed that D2Spec achieved a precision of 87.5% in identifying base URLs, a precision of 81.3% and a recall of 80.6% in generating path templates, and a precision of 84.4% and a recall of 76.2% in extracting HTTP methods. In addition, we found that D2Spec was useful when applied to APIs with pre-existing API specifications: D2Spec revealed many inconsistencies between web API documentation and their corresponding publicly available specifications. Thus, D2Spec can be used by web API providers to keep documentation and specifications in synchronization.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 26, 2018