Daily Papers

Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a variety of computer vision tasks. However, the multimodal reasoning capability has not been fully explored in existing models. In this paper, we propose a Chain-of-Focus (CoF) method that allows VLMs to perform adaptive focusing and zooming in on key image regions based on obtained visual cues and the given questions, achieving efficient multimodal reasoning. To enable this CoF capability, we present a two-stage training pipeline, including supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In the SFT stage, we construct the MM-CoF dataset, comprising 3K samples derived from a visual agent designed to adaptively identify key regions to solve visual tasks with different image resolutions and questions. We use MM-CoF to fine-tune the Qwen2.5-VL model for cold start. In the RL stage, we leverage the outcome accuracies and formats as rewards to update the Qwen2.5-VL model, enabling further refining the search and reasoning strategy of models without human priors. Our model achieves significant improvements on multiple benchmarks. On the V* benchmark that requires strong visual reasoning capability, our model outperforms existing VLMs by 5% among 8 image resolutions ranging from 224 to 4K, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed CoF method and facilitating the more efficient deployment of VLMs in practical applications.

Transformers have shown superior performance on various vision tasks. Their large receptive field endows Transformer models with higher representation power than their CNN counterparts. Nevertheless, simply enlarging the receptive field also raises several concerns. On the one hand, using dense attention in ViT leads to excessive memory and computational cost, and features can be influenced by irrelevant parts that are beyond the region of interests. On the other hand, the handcrafted attention adopted in PVT or Swin Transformer is data agnostic and may limit the ability to model long-range relations. To solve this dilemma, we propose a novel deformable multi-head attention module, where the positions of key and value pairs in self-attention are adaptively allocated in a data-dependent way. This flexible scheme enables the proposed deformable attention to dynamically focus on relevant regions while maintains the representation power of global attention. On this basis, we present Deformable Attention Transformer (DAT), a general vision backbone efficient and effective for visual recognition. We further build an enhanced version DAT++. Extensive experiments show that our DAT++ achieves state-of-the-art results on various visual recognition benchmarks, with 85.9% ImageNet accuracy, 54.5 and 47.0 MS-COCO instance segmentation mAP, and 51.5 ADE20K semantic segmentation mIoU.

Recent advances in image-level self-supervised learning (SSL) have made significant progress, yet learning dense representations for patches remains challenging. Mainstream methods encounter an over-dispersion phenomenon that patches from the same instance/category scatter, harming downstream performance on dense tasks. This work reveals that image-level SSL avoids over-dispersion by involving implicit semantic concentration. Specifically, the non-strict spatial alignment ensures intra-instance consistency, while shared patterns, i.e., similar parts of within-class instances in the input space, ensure inter-image consistency. Unfortunately, these approaches are infeasible for dense SSL due to their spatial sensitivity and complicated scene-centric data. These observations motivate us to explore explicit semantic concentration for dense SSL. First, to break the strict spatial alignment, we propose to distill the patch correspondences. Facing noisy and imbalanced pseudo labels, we propose a noise-tolerant ranking loss. The core idea is extending the Average Precision (AP) loss to continuous targets, such that its decision-agnostic and adaptive focusing properties prevent the student model from being misled. Second, to discriminate the shared patterns from complicated scenes, we propose the object-aware filter to map the output space to an object-based space. Specifically, patches are represented by learnable prototypes of objects via cross-attention. Last but not least, empirical studies across various tasks soundly support the effectiveness of our method. Code is available in https://github.com/KID-7391/CoTAP.

Recent works have shown that the computational efficiency of video recognition can be significantly improved by reducing the spatial redundancy. As a representative work, the adaptive focus method (AdaFocus) has achieved a favorable trade-off between accuracy and inference speed by dynamically identifying and attending to the informative regions in each video frame. However, AdaFocus requires a complicated three-stage training pipeline (involving reinforcement learning), leading to slow convergence and is unfriendly to practitioners. This work reformulates the training of AdaFocus as a simple one-stage algorithm by introducing a differentiable interpolation-based patch selection operation, enabling efficient end-to-end optimization. We further present an improved training scheme to address the issues introduced by the one-stage formulation, including the lack of supervision, input diversity and training stability. Moreover, a conditional-exit technique is proposed to perform temporal adaptive computation on top of AdaFocus without additional training. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets (i.e., ActivityNet, FCVID, Mini-Kinetics, Something-Something V1&V2, and Jester) demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms the original AdaFocus and other competitive baselines, while being considerably more simple and efficient to train. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/AdaFocusV2.

Depth-of-field control is essential in photography, but getting the perfect focus often takes several tries or special equipment. Single-image refocusing is still difficult. It involves recovering sharp content and creating realistic bokeh. Current methods have significant drawbacks. They need all-in-focus inputs, depend on synthetic data from simulators, and have limited control over aperture. We introduce Generative Refocusing, a two-step process that uses DeblurNet to recover all-in-focus images from various inputs and BokehNet for creating controllable bokeh. Our main innovation is semi-supervised training. This method combines synthetic paired data with unpaired real bokeh images, using EXIF metadata to capture real optical characteristics beyond what simulators can provide. Our experiments show we achieve top performance in defocus deblurring, bokeh synthesis, and refocusing benchmarks. Additionally, our Generative Refocusing allows text-guided adjustments and custom aperture shapes.

We introduce Adaptive Filter Attention (AFA), a novel attention mechanism that incorporates a learnable dynamics model directly into the computation of attention weights. Rather than comparing queries and keys directly, we model the input sequence as discrete observations of a linear stochastic differential equation (SDE). By imposing a linear dynamics model with simultaneously diagonalizable state matrices and noise covariances, we can make use of a closed-form solution to the differential Lyapunov equation to efficiently propagate pairwise uncertainties through the dynamics. Attention naturally arises as the maximum likelihood solution for this linear SDE, with attention weights corresponding to robust residual-based reweightings of the propagated pairwise precisions. Imposing an additional constraint on the state matrix's eigenvalues leads to a simplified variant with the same computational and memory complexity as standard attention. In the limit of vanishing dynamics and process noise, and using a small-angle approximation, we recover ordinary dot-product attention.

Humans have the ability to adapt the type of information they use, the procedure they employ, and the amount of time they spend when solving problems. However, most standard neural networks have a fixed function type and computation budget regardless of the sample's nature or difficulty. Adaptivity is a powerful paradigm as it not only imbues practitioners with flexibility pertaining to the downstream usage of these models but can also serve as a powerful inductive bias for solving certain challenging classes of problems. In this work, we introduce a new approach called AdaTape, which allows for dynamic computation in neural networks through adaptive tape tokens. AdaTape utilizes an elastic input sequence by equipping an architecture with a dynamic read-and-write tape. Specifically, we adaptively generate input sequences using tape tokens obtained from a tape bank which can be either trainable or derived from input data. We examine the challenges and requirements to obtain dynamic sequence content and length, and propose the Adaptive Tape Reading (ATR) algorithm to achieve both goals. Through extensive experiments on image recognition tasks, we show that AdaTape can achieve better performance while maintaining the computational cost. To facilitate further research, we have released code at https://github.com/google-research/scenic.

Focus is a cornerstone of photography, yet autofocus systems often fail to capture the intended subject, and users frequently wish to adjust focus after capture. We introduce a novel method for realistic post-capture refocusing using video diffusion models. From a single defocused image, our approach generates a perceptually accurate focal stack, represented as a video sequence, enabling interactive refocusing and unlocking a range of downstream applications. We release a large-scale focal stack dataset acquired under diverse real-world smartphone conditions to support this work and future research. Our method consistently outperforms existing approaches in both perceptual quality and robustness across challenging scenarios, paving the way for more advanced focus-editing capabilities in everyday photography. Code and data are available at www.learn2refocus.github.io

Metalens is an emerging optical system with an irreplaceable merit in that it can be manufactured in ultra-thin and compact sizes, which shows great promise of various applications such as medical imaging and augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR). Despite its advantage in miniaturization, its practicality is constrained by severe aberrations and distortions, which significantly degrade the image quality. Several previous arts have attempted to address different types of aberrations, yet most of them are mainly designed for the traditional bulky lens and not convincing enough to remedy harsh aberrations of the metalens. While there have existed aberration correction methods specifically for metalens, they still fall short of restoration quality. In this work, we propose MetaFormer, an aberration correction framework for metalens-captured images, harnessing Vision Transformers (ViT) that has shown remarkable restoration performance in diverse image restoration tasks. Specifically, we devise a Multiple Adaptive Filters Guidance (MAFG), where multiple Wiener filters enrich the degraded input images with various noise-detail balances, enhancing output restoration quality. In addition, we introduce a Spatial and Transposed self-Attention Fusion (STAF) module, which aggregates features from spatial self-attention and transposed self-attention modules to further ameliorate aberration correction. We conduct extensive experiments, including correcting aberrated images and videos, and clean 3D reconstruction from the degraded images. The proposed method outperforms the previous arts by a significant margin. We further fabricate a metalens and verify the practicality of MetaFormer by restoring the images captured with the manufactured metalens in the wild. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://benhenryl.github.io/MetaFormer

MLLMs require high-resolution visual inputs for fine-grained tasks like document understanding and dense scene perception. However, current global resolution scaling paradigms indiscriminately flood the quadratic self-attention mechanism with visually redundant tokens, severely bottlenecking inference throughput while ignoring spatial sparsity and query intent. To overcome this, we propose Q-Zoom, a query-aware adaptive high-resolution perception framework that operates in an efficient coarse-to-fine manner. First, a lightweight Dynamic Gating Network safely bypasses high-resolution processing when coarse global features suffice. Second, for queries demanding fine-grained perception, a Self-Distilled Region Proposal Network (SD-RPN) precisely localizes the task-relevant Region-of-Interest (RoI) directly from intermediate feature spaces. To optimize these modules efficiently, the gating network uses a consistency-aware generation strategy to derive deterministic routing labels, while the SD-RPN employs a fully self-supervised distillation paradigm. A continuous spatio-temporal alignment scheme and targeted fine-tuning then seamlessly fuse the dense local RoI with the coarse global layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Zoom establishes a dominant Pareto frontier. Using Qwen2.5-VL-7B as a primary testbed, Q-Zoom accelerates inference by 2.52 times on Document & OCR benchmarks and 4.39 times in High-Resolution scenarios while matching the baseline's peak accuracy. Furthermore, when configured for maximum perceptual fidelity, Q-Zoom surpasses the baseline's peak performance by 1.1% and 8.1% on these respective benchmarks. These robust improvements transfer seamlessly to Qwen3-VL, LLaVA, and emerging RL-based thinking-with-image models. Project page is available at https://yuhengsss.github.io/Q-Zoom/.

KV cache has become a de facto technique for the inference of large language models (LLMs), where tensors of shape (layer number, head number, sequence length, feature dimension) are introduced to cache historical information for self-attention. As the size of the model and data grows, the KV cache can quickly become a bottleneck within the system in both storage and memory transfer. To address this, prior studies usually focus on the first three axes of the cache tensors for compression. This paper supplements them, focusing on the feature dimension axis, by utilizing low-rank projection matrices to transform the cache features into spaces with reduced dimensions. We begin by investigating the canonical orthogonal projection method for data compression through principal component analysis (PCA). We observe the issue with PCA projection where significant performance degradation is observed at low compression rates. To bridge the gap, we propose to directly tune the orthogonal projection matrices with a distillation objective using an elaborate Matryoshka training strategy. After training, we adaptively search for the optimal compression rates for various layers and heads given varying compression budgets. Compared to previous works, our method can easily embrace pre-trained LLMs and hold a smooth tradeoff between performance and compression rate. We empirically witness the high data efficiency of our training procedure and find that our method can sustain over 90% performance with an average KV cache compression rate of 60% (and up to 75% in certain extreme scenarios) for popular LLMs like LLaMA2-7B-base and Mistral-7B-v0.3-base.

In semi-supervised learning, unlabeled samples can be utilized through augmentation and consistency regularization. However, we observed certain samples, even undergoing strong augmentation, are still correctly classified with high confidence, resulting in a loss close to zero. It indicates that these samples have been already learned well and do not provide any additional optimization benefits to the model. We refer to these samples as ``naive samples". Unfortunately, existing SSL models overlook the characteristics of naive samples, and they just apply the same learning strategy to all samples. To further optimize the SSL model, we emphasize the importance of giving attention to naive samples and augmenting them in a more diverse manner. Sample adaptive augmentation (SAA) is proposed for this stated purpose and consists of two modules: 1) sample selection module; 2) sample augmentation module. Specifically, the sample selection module picks out {naive samples} based on historical training information at each epoch, then the naive samples will be augmented in a more diverse manner in the sample augmentation module. Thanks to the extreme ease of implementation of the above modules, SAA is advantageous for being simple and lightweight. We add SAA on top of FixMatch and FlexMatch respectively, and experiments demonstrate SAA can significantly improve the models. For example, SAA helped improve the accuracy of FixMatch from 92.50% to 94.76% and that of FlexMatch from 95.01% to 95.31% on CIFAR-10 with 40 labels.

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have been recently proposed to generate high-quality samples by estimating the gradient of the data density. The framework defines the prior noise as a standard Gaussian distribution, whereas the corresponding data distribution may be more complicated than the standard Gaussian distribution, which potentially introduces inefficiency in denoising the prior noise into the data sample because of the discrepancy between the data and the prior. In this paper, we propose PriorGrad to improve the efficiency of the conditional diffusion model for speech synthesis (for example, a vocoder using a mel-spectrogram as the condition) by applying an adaptive prior derived from the data statistics based on the conditional information. We formulate the training and sampling procedures of PriorGrad and demonstrate the advantages of an adaptive prior through a theoretical analysis. Focusing on the speech synthesis domain, we consider the recently proposed diffusion-based speech generative models based on both the spectral and time domains and show that PriorGrad achieves faster convergence and inference with superior performance, leading to an improved perceptual quality and robustness to a smaller network capacity, and thereby demonstrating the efficiency of a data-dependent adaptive prior.

Research on 3D Vision-Language Models (3D-VLMs) is gaining increasing attention, which is crucial for developing embodied AI within 3D scenes, such as visual navigation and embodied question answering. Due to the high density of visual features, especially in large 3D scenes, accurately locating task-relevant visual information is challenging. Existing works attempt to segment all objects and consider their features as scene representations. However, these task-agnostic object features include much redundant information and missing details for the task-relevant area. To tackle these problems, we propose LSceneLLM, an adaptive framework that automatically identifies task-relevant areas by leveraging LLM's visual preference for different tasks, followed by a plug-and-play scene magnifier module to capture fine-grained details in focused areas. Specifically, a dense token selector examines the attention map of LLM to identify visual preferences for the instruction input. It then magnifies fine-grained details of the focusing area. An adaptive self-attention module is leveraged to fuse the coarse-grained and selected fine-grained visual information. To comprehensively evaluate the large scene understanding ability of 3D-VLMs, we further introduce a cross-room understanding benchmark, XR-Scene, which contains a series of large scene understanding tasks including XR-QA, XR-EmbodiedPlanning, and XR-SceneCaption. Experiments show that our method surpasses existing methods on both large scene understanding and existing scene understanding benchmarks. Plunging our scene magnifier module into the existing 3D-VLMs also brings significant improvement.

Speech-based depression detection poses significant challenges for automated detection due to its unique manifestation across individuals and data scarcity. Addressing these challenges, we introduce DAAMAudioCNNLSTM and DAAMAudioTransformer, two parameter efficient and explainable models for audio feature extraction and depression detection. DAAMAudioCNNLSTM features a novel CNN-LSTM framework with multi-head Density Adaptive Attention Mechanism (DAAM), focusing dynamically on informative speech segments. DAAMAudioTransformer, leveraging a transformer encoder in place of the CNN-LSTM architecture, incorporates the same DAAM module for enhanced attention and interpretability. These approaches not only enhance detection robustness and interpretability but also achieve state-of-the-art performance: DAAMAudioCNNLSTM with an F1 macro score of 0.702 and DAAMAudioTransformer with an F1 macro score of 0.72 on the DAIC-WOZ dataset, without reliance on supplementary information such as vowel positions and speaker information during training/validation as in previous approaches. Both models' significant explainability and efficiency in leveraging speech signals for depression detection represent a leap towards more reliable, clinically useful diagnostic tools, promising advancements in speech and mental health care. To foster further research in this domain, we make our code publicly available.

Current digital human studies focusing on lip-syncing and body movement are no longer sufficient to meet the growing industrial demand, while human video generation techniques that support interacting with real-world environments (e.g., objects) have not been well investigated. Despite human hand synthesis already being an intricate problem, generating objects in contact with hands and their interactions presents an even more challenging task, especially when the objects exhibit obvious variations in size and shape. To tackle these issues, we present a novel video Reenactment framework focusing on Human-Object Interaction (HOI) via an adaptive Layout-instructed Diffusion model (Re-HOLD). Our key insight is to employ specialized layout representation for hands and objects, respectively. Such representations enable effective disentanglement of hand modeling and object adaptation to diverse motion sequences. To further improve the generation quality of HOI, we design an interactive textural enhancement module for both hands and objects by introducing two independent memory banks. We also propose a layout adjustment strategy for the cross-object reenactment scenario to adaptively adjust unreasonable layouts caused by diverse object sizes during inference. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods. Project page: https://fyycs.github.io/Re-HOLD.

Recent studies have determined that the learned token embeddings of large-scale neural language models are degenerated to be anisotropic with a narrow-cone shape. This phenomenon, called the representation degeneration problem, facilitates an increase in the overall similarity between token embeddings that negatively affect the performance of the models. Although the existing methods that address the degeneration problem based on observations of the phenomenon triggered by the problem improves the performance of the text generation, the training dynamics of token embeddings behind the degeneration problem are still not explored. In this study, we analyze the training dynamics of the token embeddings focusing on rare token embedding. We demonstrate that the specific part of the gradient for rare token embeddings is the key cause of the degeneration problem for all tokens during training stage. Based on the analysis, we propose a novel method called, adaptive gradient gating (AGG). AGG addresses the degeneration problem by gating the specific part of the gradient for rare token embeddings. Experimental results from language modeling, word similarity, and machine translation tasks quantitatively and qualitatively verify the effectiveness of AGG.

With the rise of powerful closed-sourced LLMs (ChatGPT, GPT-4), there are increasing interests in distilling the capabilies of close-sourced LLMs to smaller open-sourced LLMs. Previous distillation methods usually prompt ChatGPT to generate a set of instructions and answers, for the student model to learn. However, such standard distillation approach neglects the merits and conditions of the student model. Inspired by modern teaching principles, we design a personalised distillation process, in which the student attempts to solve a task first, then the teacher provides an adaptive refinement for the student to improve. Instead of feeding the student with teacher's prior, personalised distillation enables personalised learning for the student model, as it only learns on examples it makes mistakes upon and learns to improve its own solution. On code generation, personalised distillation consistently outperforms standard distillation with only one third of the data. With only 2.5-3K personalised examples that incur a data-collection cost of 4-6$, we boost CodeGen-mono-16B by 7% to achieve 36.4% pass@1 and StarCoder by 12.2% to achieve 45.8% pass@1 on HumanEval.

Multi-subject personalized image generation aims to synthesize customized images containing multiple specified subjects without requiring test-time optimization. However, achieving fine-grained independent control over multiple subjects remains challenging due to difficulties in preserving subject fidelity and preventing cross-subject attribute leakage. We present FocusDPO, a framework that adaptively identifies focus regions based on dynamic semantic correspondence and supervision image complexity. During training, our method progressively adjusts these focal areas across noise timesteps, implementing a weighted strategy that rewards information-rich patches while penalizing regions with low prediction confidence. The framework dynamically adjusts focus allocation during the DPO process according to the semantic complexity of reference images and establishes robust correspondence mappings between generated and reference subjects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially enhances the performance of existing pre-trained personalized generation models, achieving state-of-the-art results on both single-subject and multi-subject personalized image synthesis benchmarks. Our method effectively mitigates attribute leakage while preserving superior subject fidelity across diverse generation scenarios, advancing the frontier of controllable multi-subject image synthesis.

Anomaly detection in time series is essential for industrial monitoring and environmental sensing, yet distinguishing anomalies from complex patterns remains challenging. Existing methods like the Anomaly Transformer and DCdetector have progressed, but they face limitations such as sensitivity to short-term contexts and inefficiency in noisy, non-stationary environments. To overcome these issues, we introduce MAAT, an improved architecture that enhances association discrepancy modeling and reconstruction quality. MAAT features Sparse Attention, efficiently capturing long-range dependencies by focusing on relevant time steps, thereby reducing computational redundancy. Additionally, a Mamba-Selective State Space Model is incorporated into the reconstruction module, utilizing a skip connection and Gated Attention to improve anomaly localization and detection performance. Extensive experiments show that MAAT significantly outperforms previous methods, achieving better anomaly distinguishability and generalization across various time series applications, setting a new standard for unsupervised time series anomaly detection in real-world scenarios.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training. However, existing TTS methods for VLAs require additional training, verifiers, and multiple forward passes, making them impractical for deployment. Moreover, they intervene only at action decoding while keeping visual representations fixed-insufficient under perceptual ambiguity, where reconsidering how to perceive is as important as deciding what to do. To address these limitations, we propose SCALE, a simple inference strategy that jointly modulates visual perception and action based on 'self-uncertainty', inspired by uncertainty-driven exploration in Active Inference theory-requiring no additional training, no verifier, and only a single forward pass. SCALE broadens exploration in both perception and action under high uncertainty, while focusing on exploitation when confident-enabling adaptive execution across varying conditions. Experiments on simulated and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SCALE improves state-of-the-art VLAs and outperforms existing TTS methods while maintaining single-pass efficiency.

Human intelligence exhibits a remarkable capacity for rapid adaptation and effective problem-solving in novel and unfamiliar contexts. We argue that this profound adaptability is fundamentally linked to the efficient construction and refinement of internal representations of the environment, commonly referred to as world models, and we refer to this adaptation mechanism as world model induction. However, current understanding and evaluation of world models in artificial intelligence (AI) remains narrow, often focusing on static representations learned from training on massive corpora of data, instead of the efficiency and efficacy in learning these representations through interaction and exploration within a novel environment. In this Perspective, we provide a view of world model induction drawing on decades of research in cognitive science on how humans learn and adapt so efficiently; we then call for a new evaluation framework for assessing adaptive world models in AI. Concretely, we propose a new benchmarking paradigm based on suites of carefully designed games with genuine, deep and continually refreshing novelty in the underlying game structures -- we refer to this class of games as novel games. We detail key desiderata for constructing these games and propose appropriate metrics to explicitly challenge and evaluate the agent's ability for rapid world model induction. We hope that this new evaluation framework will inspire future evaluation efforts on world models in AI and provide a crucial step towards developing AI systems capable of human-like rapid adaptation and robust generalization -- a critical component of artificial general intelligence.

Automated log analysis is crucial to ensure high availability and reliability of complex systems. The advent of LLMs in NLP has ushered in a new era of language model-driven automated log analysis, garnering significant interest. Within this field, two primary paradigms based on language models for log analysis have become prominent. Small Language Models (SLMs) follow the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, focusing on the specific log analysis task through fine-tuning on supervised datasets. On the other hand, LLMs following the in-context learning paradigm, analyze logs by providing a few examples in prompt contexts without updating parameters. Despite their respective strengths, we notice that SLMs are more cost-effective but less powerful, whereas LLMs with large parameters are highly powerful but expensive and inefficient. To trade-off between the performance and inference costs of both models in automated log analysis, this paper introduces an adaptive log analysis framework known as AdaptiveLog, which effectively reduces the costs associated with LLM while ensuring superior results. This framework collaborates an LLM and a small language model, strategically allocating the LLM to tackle complex logs while delegating simpler logs to the SLM. Specifically, to efficiently query the LLM, we propose an adaptive selection strategy based on the uncertainty estimation of the SLM, where the LLM is invoked only when the SLM is uncertain. In addition, to enhance the reasoning ability of the LLM in log analysis tasks, we propose a novel prompt strategy by retrieving similar error-prone cases as the reference, enabling the model to leverage past error experiences and learn solutions from these cases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdaptiveLog achieves state-of-the-art results across different tasks, elevating the overall accuracy of log analysis while maintaining cost efficiency.

The rapid evolution of modern malware presents significant challenges to the development of effective defense mechanisms. Traditional cyber deception techniques often rely on static or manually configured parameters, limiting their adaptability to dynamic and sophisticated threats. This study leverages Generative AI (GenAI) models to automate the creation of adaptive cyber deception ploys, focusing on structured prompt engineering (PE) to enhance relevance, actionability, and deployability. We introduce a systematic framework (SPADE) to address inherent challenges large language models (LLMs) pose to adaptive deceptions, including generalized outputs, ambiguity, under-utilization of contextual information, and scalability constraints. Evaluations across diverse malware scenarios using metrics such as Recall, Exact Match (EM), BLEU Score, and expert quality assessments identified ChatGPT-4o as the top performer. Additionally, it achieved high engagement (93%) and accuracy (96%) with minimal refinements. Gemini and ChatGPT-4o Mini demonstrated competitive performance, with Llama3.2 showing promise despite requiring further optimization. These findings highlight the transformative potential of GenAI in automating scalable, adaptive deception strategies and underscore the critical role of structured PE in advancing real-world cybersecurity applications.

Despite their impressive performance on complex tasks, current language models (LMs) typically operate in a vacuum: Each input query is processed separately, without retaining insights from previous attempts. Here, we present Dynamic Cheatsheet (DC), a lightweight framework that endows a black-box LM with a persistent, evolving memory. Rather than repeatedly re-discovering or re-committing the same solutions and mistakes, DC enables models to store and reuse accumulated strategies, code snippets, and general problem-solving insights at inference time. This test-time learning enhances performance substantially across a range of tasks without needing explicit ground-truth labels or human feedback. Leveraging DC, Claude 3.5 Sonnet's accuracy more than doubled on AIME math exams once it began retaining algebraic insights across questions. Similarly, GPT-4o's success rate on Game of 24 increased from 10% to 99% after the model discovered and reused a Python-based solution. In tasks prone to arithmetic mistakes, such as balancing equations, DC enabled GPT-4o and Claude to reach near-perfect accuracy by recalling previously validated code, whereas their baselines stagnated around 50%. Beyond arithmetic challenges, DC yields notable accuracy gains on knowledge-demanding tasks. Claude achieved a 9% improvement in GPQA-Diamond and an 8% boost on MMLU-Pro problems. Crucially, DC's memory is self-curated, focusing on concise, transferable snippets rather than entire transcript. Unlike finetuning or static retrieval methods, DC adapts LMs' problem-solving skills on the fly, without modifying their underlying parameters. Overall, our findings present DC as a promising approach for augmenting LMs with persistent memory, bridging the divide between isolated inference events and the cumulative, experience-driven learning characteristic of human cognition.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in long-context understanding, yet they face significant challenges in high-quality long-form generation. Existing studies primarily suffer from two limitations: (1) A heavy reliance on scarce, high-quality long-form response data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or for pairwise preference reward in reinforcement learning (RL). (2) Focus on coarse-grained quality optimization dimensions, such as relevance, coherence, and helpfulness, overlooking the fine-grained specifics inherent to diverse long-form generation scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a framework using Adaptive Constraint-Enhanced reward for long-form generation Reinforcement Learning (ACE-RL). ACE-RL first automatically deconstructs each instruction into a set of fine-grained, adaptive constraint criteria by identifying its underlying intents and demands. Subsequently, we design a reward mechanism that quantifies the quality of long-form responses based on their satisfaction over corresponding constraints, converting subjective quality evaluation into constraint verification. Finally, we utilize reinforcement learning to guide models toward superior long-form generation capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that our ACE-RL framework significantly outperforms existing SFT and RL baselines by 20.70% and 7.32% on WritingBench, and our top-performing model even surpasses proprietary systems like GPT-4o by 7.10%, providing a more effective training paradigm for LLMs to generate high-quality content across diverse long-form generation scenarios.

Token-level reweighting is a simple yet effective mechanism for controlling supervised fine-tuning, but common indicators are largely one-dimensional: the ground-truth probability reflects downstream alignment, while token entropy reflects intrinsic uncertainty induced by the pre-training prior. Ignoring entropy can misidentify noisy or easily replaceable tokens as learning-critical, while ignoring probability fails to reflect target-specific alignment. RankTuner introduces a probability--entropy calibration signal, the Relative Rank Indicator, which compares the rank of the ground-truth token with its expected rank under the prediction distribution. The inverse indicator is used as a token-wise Relative Scale to reweight the fine-tuning objective, focusing updates on truly under-learned tokens without over-penalizing intrinsically uncertain positions. Experiments on multiple backbones show consistent improvements on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, transfer gains on out-of-distribution reasoning, and pre code generation performance over probability-only or entropy-only reweighting baselines.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success across various domains. However, their slow generation speed remains a critical challenge. Existing acceleration methods, while aiming to reduce steps, often compromise sample quality, controllability, or introduce training complexities. Therefore, we propose RayFlow, a novel diffusion framework that addresses these limitations. Unlike previous methods, RayFlow guides each sample along a unique path towards an instance-specific target distribution. This method minimizes sampling steps while preserving generation diversity and stability. Furthermore, we introduce Time Sampler, an importance sampling technique to enhance training efficiency by focusing on crucial timesteps. Extensive experiments demonstrate RayFlow's superiority in generating high-quality images with improved speed, control, and training efficiency compared to existing acceleration techniques.

Recent advancements in local Implicit Neural Representation (INR) demonstrate its exceptional capability in handling images at various resolutions. However, frequency discrepancies between high-resolution (HR) and ground-truth images, especially at larger scales, result in significant artifacts and blurring in HR images. This paper introduces Frequency Consistency for Implicit Neural Representation (FreqINR), an innovative Arbitrary-scale Super-resolution method aimed at enhancing detailed textures by ensuring spectral consistency throughout both training and inference. During training, we employ Adaptive Discrete Cosine Transform Frequency Loss (ADFL) to minimize the frequency gap between HR and ground-truth images, utilizing 2-Dimensional DCT bases and focusing dynamically on challenging frequencies. During inference, we extend the receptive field to preserve spectral coherence between low-resolution (LR) and ground-truth images, which is crucial for the model to generate high-frequency details from LR counterparts. Experimental results show that FreqINR, as a lightweight approach, achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing Arbitrary-scale Super-resolution methods and offers notable improvements in computational efficiency. The code for our method will be made publicly available.

Learning rate schedules used in practice bear little resemblance to those recommended by theory. We close much of this theory/practice gap, and as a consequence are able to derive new problem-adaptive learning rate schedules. Our key technical contribution is a refined analysis of learning rate schedules for a wide class of optimization algorithms (including SGD). In contrast to most prior works that study the convergence of the average iterate, we study the last iterate, which is what most people use in practice. When considering only worst-case analysis, our theory predicts that the best choice is the linear decay schedule: a popular choice in practice that sets the stepsize proportionally to 1 - t/T, where t is the current iteration and T is the total number of steps. To go beyond this worst-case analysis, we use the observed gradient norms to derive schedules refined for any particular task. These refined schedules exhibit learning rate warm-up and rapid learning rate annealing near the end of training. Ours is the first systematic approach to automatically yield both of these properties. We perform the most comprehensive evaluation of learning rate schedules to date, evaluating across 10 diverse deep learning problems, a series of LLMs, and a suite of logistic regression problems. We validate that overall, the linear-decay schedule matches or outperforms all commonly used default schedules including cosine annealing, and that our schedule refinement method gives further improvements.

Intense light sources often produce flares in captured images at night, which deteriorates the visual quality and negatively affects downstream applications. In order to train an effective flare removal network, a reliable dataset is essential. The mainstream flare removal datasets are semi-synthetic to reduce human labour, but these datasets do not cover typical scenarios involving multiple scattering flares. To tackle this issue, we synthesize a prior-guided dataset named Flare7K*, which contains multi-flare images where the brightness of flares adheres to the laws of illumination. Besides, flares tend to occupy localized regions of the image but existing networks perform flare removal on the entire image and sometimes modify clean areas incorrectly. Therefore, we propose a plug-and-play Adaptive Focus Module (AFM) that can adaptively mask the clean background areas and assist models in focusing on the regions severely affected by flares. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our data synthesis method can better simulate real-world scenes and several models equipped with AFM achieve state-of-the-art performance on the real-world test dataset.

We present DualFocus, a novel framework for integrating macro and micro perspectives within multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to enhance vision-language task performance. Current MLLMs typically singularly focus on inputs at a predefined resolution, resulting in deficiencies in detailed questions involving local regions. We introduced a DualFocus mechanism where the model concentrates on the image from a macro perspective, responses to the question, and identifies suitable sub-regions to zoom in for subsequent micro perspective analysis. Via the integration of answers from both macro and micro perspectives, the model is adept at addressing tasks that encompass global, detailed, and combined considerations. To endows the DualFocus mechanism in MLLMs, we curated a tailored dataset derived from the Visual Genome (VG) and adapted it to align with the training regimen of DualFocus. Through comparative studies across different model sizes and benchmarks, we demonstrate DualFocus's superiority in balancing detailed examination with holistic insight, significantly reducing hallucination instances in MLLMs and improving their performance in various vision-language tasks.

Domain shift remains a persistent challenge in deep-learning-based computer vision, often requiring extensive model modifications or large labeled datasets to address. Inspired by human visual perception, which adjusts input quality through corrective lenses rather than over-training the brain, we propose Lens, a novel camera sensor control method that enhances model performance by capturing high-quality images from the model's perspective rather than relying on traditional human-centric sensor control. Lens is lightweight and adapts sensor parameters to specific models and scenes in real-time. At its core, Lens utilizes VisiT, a training-free, model-specific quality indicator that evaluates individual unlabeled samples at test time using confidence scores without additional adaptation costs. To validate Lens, we introduce ImageNet-ES Diverse, a new benchmark dataset capturing natural perturbations from varying sensor and lighting conditions. Extensive experiments on both ImageNet-ES and our new ImageNet-ES Diverse show that Lens significantly improves model accuracy across various baseline schemes for sensor control and model modification while maintaining low latency in image captures. Lens effectively compensates for large model size differences and integrates synergistically with model improvement techniques. Our code and dataset are available at github.com/Edw2n/Lens.git.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning optimizes large, pre-trained foundation models by updating a subset of parameters; in this class, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is particularly effective. Inspired by an effort to investigate the different roles of LoRA matrices during fine-tuning, this paper characterizes and leverages unexpected asymmetry in the importance of low-rank adapter matrices. Specifically, when updating the parameter matrices of a neural network by adding a product BA, we observe that the B and A matrices have distinct functions: A extracts features from the input, while B uses these features to create the desired output. Based on this observation, we demonstrate that fine-tuning B is inherently more effective than fine-tuning A, and that a random untrained A should perform nearly as well as a fine-tuned one. Using an information-theoretic lens, we also bound the generalization of low-rank adapters, showing that the parameter savings of exclusively training B improves the bound. We support our conclusions with experiments on RoBERTa, BART-Large, LLaMA-2, and ViTs.

Humans can effortlessly locate desired objects in cluttered environments, relying on a cognitive mechanism known as visual search to efficiently filter out irrelevant information and focus on task-related regions. Inspired by this process, we propose Dyfo (Dynamic Focus), a training-free dynamic focusing visual search method that enhances fine-grained visual understanding in large multimodal models (LMMs). Unlike existing approaches which require additional modules or data collection, Dyfo leverages a bidirectional interaction between LMMs and visual experts, using a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to simulate human-like focus adjustments. This enables LMMs to focus on key visual regions while filtering out irrelevant content, without introducing additional training caused by vocabulary expansion or the integration of specialized localization modules. Experimental results demonstrate that Dyfo significantly improves fine-grained visual understanding and reduces hallucination issues in LMMs, achieving superior performance across both fixed and dynamic resolution models. The code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/DyFo_CVPR2025

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, but often fail to perceive fine-grained visual details, limiting their applicability in precision-demanding tasks. While methods that crop salient regions of an image offer a partial solution, we identify a critical limitation they introduce: "Contextual Blindness". This failure occurs due to structural disconnect between high-fidelity details (from the crop) and the broader global context (from the original image), even when all necessary visual information is present. We argue that this limitation stems not from a lack of information 'Quantity', but from a lack of 'Structural Diversity' in the model's input. To resolve this, we propose Visual Funnel, a training-free, two-step approach. Visual Funnel first performs Contextual Anchoring to identify the region of interest in a single forward pass. It then constructs an Entropy-Scaled Portfolio that preserves the hierarchical context - ranging from focal detail to broader surroundings - by dynamically determining crop sizes based on attention entropy and refining crop centers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Visual Funnel significantly outperforms naive single-crop and unstructured multi-crop baselines. Our results further validate that simply adding more unstructured crops provides limited or even detrimental benefits, confirming that the hierarchical structure of our portfolio is key to resolving Contextual Blindness.

In recent years, the state-of-the-art in deep learning has been dominated by very large models that have been pre-trained on vast amounts of data. The paradigm is very simple: Investing more computational resources (optimally) leads to better performance, and even predictably so; neural scaling laws have been derived that accurately forecast the performance of a network for a desired level of compute. This leads to the notion of a "compute-optimal" model, i.e. a model that allocates a given level of compute during training optimally to maximise performance. In this work, we extend the concept of optimality by allowing for an "adaptive" model, i.e. a model that can change its shape during the course of training. By allowing the shape to adapt, we can optimally traverse between the underlying scaling laws, leading to a significant reduction in the required compute to reach a given target performance. We focus on vision tasks and the family of Vision Transformers, where the patch size as well as the width naturally serve as adaptive shape parameters. We demonstrate that, guided by scaling laws, we can design compute-optimal adaptive models that beat their "static" counterparts.

Single image reflection removal is inherently ambiguous, as both the reflection and transmission components requiring separation may follow natural image statistics. Existing methods attempt to address the issue by using various types of low-level and physics-based cues as sources of reflection signals. However, these cues are not universally applicable, since they are only observable in specific capture scenarios. This leads to a significant performance drop when test images do not align with their assumptions. In this paper, we aim to explore a novel flexible interactive reflection removal approach that leverages various forms of sparse human guidance, such as points and bounding boxes, as auxiliary high-level prior to achieve robust reflection removal. However, incorporating the raw user guidance naively into the existing reflection removal network does not result in performance gains. To this end, we innovatively transform raw user input into a unified form -- reflection masks using an Interactive Segmentation Foundation Model. Such a design absorbs the quintessence of the foundational segmentation model and flexible human guidance, thereby mitigating the challenges of reflection separations. Furthermore, to fully utilize user guidance and reduce user annotation costs, we design a mask-guided reflection removal network, comprising our proposed self-adaptive prompt block. This block adaptively incorporates user guidance as anchors and refines transmission features via cross-attention mechanisms. Extensive results on real-world images validate that our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on various datasets with the help of flexible and sparse user guidance. Our code and dataset will be publicly available here https://github.com/ShawnChenn/FlexibleReflectionRemoval.

Wide-angle lenses are commonly used in perception tasks requiring a large field of view. Unfortunately, these lenses produce significant distortions making conventional models that ignore the distortion effects unable to adapt to wide-angle images. In this paper, we present a novel transformer-based model that automatically adapts to the distortion produced by wide-angle lenses. We leverage the physical characteristics of such lenses, which are analytically defined by the radial distortion profile (assumed to be known), to develop a distortion aware radial swin transformer (DarSwin). In contrast to conventional transformer-based architectures, DarSwin comprises a radial patch partitioning, a distortion-based sampling technique for creating token embeddings, and an angular position encoding for radial patch merging. We validate our method on classification tasks using synthetically distorted ImageNet data and show through extensive experiments that DarSwin can perform zero-shot adaptation to unseen distortions of different wide-angle lenses. Compared to other baselines, DarSwin achieves the best results (in terms of Top-1 accuracy) with significant gains when trained on bounded levels of distortions (very-low, low, medium, and high) and tested on all including out-of-distribution distortions. The code and models are publicly available at https://lvsn.github.io/darswin/

Recent advances in large-scale text-to-image models have revolutionized creative fields by generating visually captivating outputs from textual prompts; however, while traditional photography offers precise control over camera settings to shape visual aesthetics -- such as depth-of-field -- current diffusion models typically rely on prompt engineering to mimic such effects. This approach often results in crude approximations and inadvertently altering the scene content. In this work, we propose Bokeh Diffusion, a scene-consistent bokeh control framework that explicitly conditions a diffusion model on a physical defocus blur parameter. By grounding depth-of-field adjustments, our method preserves the underlying scene structure as the level of blur is varied. To overcome the scarcity of paired real-world images captured under different camera settings, we introduce a hybrid training pipeline that aligns in-the-wild images with synthetic blur augmentations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only achieves flexible, lens-like blur control but also supports applications such as real image editing via inversion.

Label efficiency has become an increasingly important objective in deep learning applications. Active learning aims to reduce the number of labeled examples needed to train deep networks, but the empirical performance of active learning algorithms can vary dramatically across datasets and applications. It is difficult to know in advance which active learning strategy will perform well or best in a given application. To address this, we propose the first adaptive algorithm selection strategy for deep active learning. For any unlabeled dataset, our (meta) algorithm TAILOR (Thompson ActIve Learning algORithm selection) iteratively and adaptively chooses among a set of candidate active learning algorithms. TAILOR uses novel reward functions aimed at gathering class-balanced examples. Extensive experiments in multi-class and multi-label applications demonstrate TAILOR's effectiveness in achieving accuracy comparable or better than that of the best of the candidate algorithms. Our implementation of TAILOR is open-sourced at https://github.com/jifanz/TAILOR.

Adaptive sparse coding methods learn a possibly overcomplete set of basis functions, such that natural image patches can be reconstructed by linearly combining a small subset of these bases. The applicability of these methods to visual object recognition tasks has been limited because of the prohibitive cost of the optimization algorithms required to compute the sparse representation. In this work we propose a simple and efficient algorithm to learn basis functions. After training, this model also provides a fast and smooth approximator to the optimal representation, achieving even better accuracy than exact sparse coding algorithms on visual object recognition tasks.

Deep learning-based speech enhancement methods have significantly improved speech quality and intelligibility. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proven to be essential components of many high-performance models. In this paper, we introduce adaptive convolution, an efficient and versatile convolutional module that enhances the model's capability to adaptively represent speech signals. Adaptive convolution performs frame-wise causal dynamic convolution, generating time-varying kernels for each frame by assembling multiple parallel candidate kernels. A lightweight attention mechanism is proposed for adaptive convolution, leveraging both current and historical information to assign adaptive weights to each candidate kernel. This enables the convolution operation to adapt to frame-level speech spectral features, leading to more efficient extraction and reconstruction. We integrate adaptive convolution into various CNN-based models, highlighting its generalizability. Experimental results demonstrate that adaptive convolution significantly improves the performance with negligible increases in computational complexity, especially for lightweight models. Moreover, we present an intuitive analysis revealing a strong correlation between kernel selection and signal characteristics. Furthermore, we propose the adaptive convolutional recurrent network (AdaptCRN), an ultra-lightweight model that incorporates adaptive convolution and an efficient encoder-decoder design, achieving superior performance compared to models with similar or even higher computational costs.

Transformer architectures are the backbone of the modern AI revolution. However, they are based on simply stacking the same blocks in dozens of layers and processing information sequentially from one block to another. In this paper, we propose to challenge this and introduce adaptive computations for LLM-like setups, which allow the final layer to attend to all of the intermediate layers as it deems fit through the attention mechanism, thereby introducing computational attention shortcuts. These shortcuts can thus make the architecture depth and context adaptive. We showcase four different datasets, namely acoustic tokens, natural language, and symbolic music, and we achieve superior performance for GPT-like architecture. We give evidence via attention maps that the models learn complex dependencies across layers that are adaptive in context and depth depending on the input tokens.

Matrix-based optimizers have attracted growing interest for improving LLM training efficiency, with significant progress centered on orthogonalization/whitening based methods. While yielding substantial performance gains, a fundamental question arises: can we develop new paradigms beyond orthogonalization, pushing the efficiency frontier further? We present Adaptively Rotated Optimization (ARO, a new matrix optimization framework that treats gradient rotation as a first class design principle. ARO accelerates LLM training by performing normed steepest descent in a rotated coordinate system, where the rotation is determined by a novel norm-informed policy. This perspective yields update rules that go beyond existing orthogonalization and whitening optimizers, improving sample efficiency in practice. To make comparisons reliable, we propose a rigorously controlled benchmarking protocol that reduces confounding and bias. Under this protocol, ARO consistently outperforms AdamW (by 1.3 sim1.35times) and orthogonalization methods (by 1.1sim1.15times) in LLM pretraining at up to 8B activated parameters, and up to 8times overtrain budget, without evidence of diminishing returns. Finally, we discuss how ARO can be reformulated as a symmetry-aware optimizer grounded in rotational symmetries of residual streams, motivating advanced designs that enable computationally efficient exploitation of cross-layer/cross module couplings.

TinyML is a novel area of machine learning that gained huge momentum in the last few years thanks to the ability to execute machine learning algorithms on tiny devices (such as Internet-of-Things or embedded systems). Interestingly, research in this area focused on the efficient execution of the inference phase of TinyML models on tiny devices, while very few solutions for on-device learning of TinyML models are available in the literature due to the relevant overhead introduced by the learning algorithms. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new type of adaptive TinyML solution that can be used in tasks, such as the presented Tiny Speaker Verification (TinySV), that require to be tackled with an on-device learning algorithm. Achieving this goal required (i) reducing the memory and computational demand of TinyML learning algorithms, and (ii) designing a TinyML learning algorithm operating with few and possibly unlabelled training data. The proposed TinySV solution relies on a two-layer hierarchical TinyML solution comprising Keyword Spotting and Adaptive Speaker Verification module. We evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed TinySV solution on a dataset collected expressly for the task and tested the proposed solution on a real-world IoT device (Infineon PSoC 62S2 Wi-Fi BT Pioneer Kit).

Cross-domain named entity recognition (NER) models are able to cope with the scarcity issue of NER samples in target domains. However, most of the existing NER benchmarks lack domain-specialized entity types or do not focus on a certain domain, leading to a less effective cross-domain evaluation. To address these obstacles, we introduce a cross-domain NER dataset (CrossNER), a fully-labeled collection of NER data spanning over five diverse domains with specialized entity categories for different domains. Additionally, we also provide a domain-related corpus since using it to continue pre-training language models (domain-adaptive pre-training) is effective for the domain adaptation. We then conduct comprehensive experiments to explore the effectiveness of leveraging different levels of the domain corpus and pre-training strategies to do domain-adaptive pre-training for the cross-domain task. Results show that focusing on the fractional corpus containing domain-specialized entities and utilizing a more challenging pre-training strategy in domain-adaptive pre-training are beneficial for the NER domain adaptation, and our proposed method can consistently outperform existing cross-domain NER baselines. Nevertheless, experiments also illustrate the challenge of this cross-domain NER task. We hope that our dataset and baselines will catalyze research in the NER domain adaptation area. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zliucr/CrossNER.

Advanced autoregressive (AR) video generation models have improved visual fidelity and interactivity, but the quadratic complexity of attention remains a primary bottleneck for efficient deployment. While existing sparse attention solutions have shown promise on bidirectional models, we identify that applying these solutions to AR models leads to considerable performance degradation for two reasons: isolated consideration of chunk generation and insufficient utilization of past informative context. Motivated by these observations, we propose Light Forcing, the first sparse attention solution tailored for AR video generation models. It incorporates a Chunk-Aware Growth mechanism to quantitatively estimate the contribution of each chunk, which determines their sparsity allocation. This progressive sparsity increase strategy enables the current chunk to inherit prior knowledge in earlier chunks during generation. Additionally, we introduce a Hierarchical Sparse Attention to capture informative historical and local context in a coarse-to-fine manner. Such two-level mask selection strategy (\ie, frame and block level) can adaptively handle diverse attention patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing sparse attention in quality (\eg, 84.5 on VBench) and efficiency (\eg, 1.2{sim}1.3times end-to-end speedup). Combined with FP8 quantization and LightVAE, Light Forcing further achieves a 2.3times speedup and 19.7\,FPS on an RTX~5090 GPU. Code will be released at https://github.com/chengtao-lv/LightForcing{https://github.com/chengtao-lv/LightForcing}.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and memorization capabilities via pretraining on massive textual corpora. However, this poses risk of privacy and copyright violations, highlighting the need for efficient machine unlearning methods that remove sensitive data without retraining from scratch. While Gradient Ascent (GA) is commonly used to unlearn by reducing the likelihood of generating unwanted content, it leads to unstable optimization and catastrophic forgetting of retrained knowledge. We find that combining GA with low-rank adaptation results in poor trade-offs between computational cost and generative performance. To address these challenges, we propose Low-rank Knowledge Unlearning (LoKU), a novel framework that enables robust and efficient unlearning for LLMs. First, we introduce Inverted Hinge Loss, which suppresses unwanted tokens while maintaining fluency by boosting the probability of the next most likely token. Second, we develop a data-adaptive initialization for LoRA adapters via low-rank approximation weighted with relative Fisher information, thereby focusing updates on parameters critical for removing targeted knowledge. Experiments on the Training Data Extraction Challenge dataset using GPT-Neo models as well as on the TOFU benchmark with Phi-1.5B and Llama2-7B models demonstrate that our approach effectively removes sensitive information while maintaining reasoning and generative capabilities with minimal impact. Our implementation can be found in https://github.com/csm9493/efficient-llm-unlearning.

Generating higher-resolution human-centric scenes with details and controls remains a challenge for existing text-to-image diffusion models. This challenge stems from limited training image size, text encoder capacity (limited tokens), and the inherent difficulty of generating complex scenes involving multiple humans. While current methods attempted to address training size limit only, they often yielded human-centric scenes with severe artifacts. We propose BeyondScene, a novel framework that overcomes prior limitations, generating exquisite higher-resolution (over 8K) human-centric scenes with exceptional text-image correspondence and naturalness using existing pretrained diffusion models. BeyondScene employs a staged and hierarchical approach to initially generate a detailed base image focusing on crucial elements in instance creation for multiple humans and detailed descriptions beyond token limit of diffusion model, and then to seamlessly convert the base image to a higher-resolution output, exceeding training image size and incorporating details aware of text and instances via our novel instance-aware hierarchical enlargement process that consists of our proposed high-frequency injected forward diffusion and adaptive joint diffusion. BeyondScene surpasses existing methods in terms of correspondence with detailed text descriptions and naturalness, paving the way for advanced applications in higher-resolution human-centric scene creation beyond the capacity of pretrained diffusion models without costly retraining. Project page: https://janeyeon.github.io/beyond-scene.

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding unintended consequences. Effective reward design aims to provide signals that accelerate the agent's convergence to optimal behavior. Crafting rewards that align with task objectives, foster desired behaviors, and prevent undesirable actions is inherently challenging. This thesis delves into the critical role of reward signals in RL, highlighting their impact on the agent's behavior and learning dynamics and addressing challenges such as delayed, ambiguous, or intricate rewards. In this thesis work, we tackle different aspects of reward shaping. First, we address the problem of designing informative and interpretable reward signals from a teacher's/expert's perspective (teacher-driven). Here, the expert, equipped with the optimal policy and the corresponding value function, designs reward signals that expedite the agent's convergence to optimal behavior. Second, we build on this teacher-driven approach by introducing a novel method for adaptive interpretable reward design. In this scenario, the expert tailors the rewards based on the learner's current policy, ensuring alignment and optimal progression. Third, we propose a meta-learning approach, enabling the agent to self-design its reward signals online without expert input (agent-driven). This self-driven method considers the agent's learning and exploration to establish a self-improving feedback loop.

Maintaining genetic diversity as a means to avoid premature convergence is critical in Genetic Programming. Several approaches have been proposed to achieve this, with some focusing on the mating phase from coupling dissimilar solutions to some form of self-adaptive selection mechanism. In nature, genetic diversity can be the consequence of many different factors, but when considering reproduction Sexual Selection can have an impact on promoting variety within a species. Specifically, Mate Choice often results in different selective pressures between sexes, which in turn may trigger evolutionary differences among them. Although some mechanisms of Sexual Selection have been applied to Genetic Programming in the past, the literature is scarce when it comes to mate choice. Recently, a way of modelling mating preferences by ideal mate representations was proposed, achieving good results when compared to a standard approach. These mating preferences evolve freely in a self-adaptive fashion, creating an evolutionary driving force of its own alongside fitness pressure. The inner mechanisms of this approach operate from personal choice, as each individual has its own representation of a perfect mate which affects the mate to be selected. In this paper, we compare this method against a random mate choice to assess whether there are advantages in evolving personal preferences. We conducted experiments using three symbolic regression problems and different mutation rates. The results show that self-adaptive mating preferences are able to create a more diverse set of solutions when compared to the traditional approach and a random mate approach (with statistically significant differences) and have a higher success rate in three of the six instances tested.

Text-guided image generation and editing using diffusion models have achieved remarkable advancements. Among these, tuning-free methods have gained attention for their ability to perform edits without extensive model adjustments, offering simplicity and efficiency. However, existing tuning-free approaches often struggle with balancing fidelity and editing precision. Reconstruction errors in DDIM Inversion are partly attributed to the cross-attention mechanism in U-Net, which introduces misalignments during the inversion and reconstruction process. To address this, we analyze reconstruction from a structural perspective and propose a novel approach that replaces traditional cross-attention with uniform attention maps, significantly enhancing image reconstruction fidelity. Our method effectively minimizes distortions caused by varying text conditions during noise prediction. To complement this improvement, we introduce an adaptive mask-guided editing technique that integrates seamlessly with our reconstruction approach, ensuring consistency and accuracy in editing tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach not only excels in achieving high-fidelity image reconstruction but also performs robustly in real image composition and editing scenarios. This study underscores the potential of uniform attention maps to enhance the fidelity and versatility of diffusion-based image processing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Mowenyii/Uniform-Attention-Maps.

Recent advances in learned image codecs have been extended from human perception toward machine perception. However, progressive image compression with fine granular scalability (FGS)-which enables decoding a single bitstream at multiple quality levels-remains unexplored for machine-oriented codecs. In this work, we propose a novel progressive learned image compression codec for machine perception, PICM-Net, based on trit-plane coding. By analyzing the difference between human- and machine-oriented rate-distortion priorities, we systematically examine the latent prioritization strategies in terms of machine-oriented codecs. To further enhance real-world adaptability, we design an adaptive decoding controller, which dynamically determines the necessary decoding level during inference time to maintain the desired confidence of downstream machine prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enables efficient and adaptive progressive transmission while maintaining high performance in the downstream classification task, establishing a new paradigm for machine-aware progressive image compression.

Variational quantum eigensolvers (VQEs) are among the most promising quantum algorithms for solving electronic structure problems in quantum chemistry, particularly during the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. In this study, we investigate the capabilities and limitations of VQE algorithms implemented on current quantum hardware for determining molecular ground-state energies, focusing on the adaptive derivative-assembled pseudo-Trotter ansatz VQE (ADAPT-VQE). To address the significant computational challenges posed by molecular Hamiltonians, we explore various strategies to simplify the Hamiltonian, optimize the ansatz, and improve classical parameter optimization through modifications of the COBYLA optimizer. These enhancements are integrated into a tailored quantum computing implementation designed to minimize the circuit depth and computational cost. Using benzene as a benchmark system, we demonstrate the application of these optimizations on an IBM quantum computer. Despite these improvements, our results highlight the limitations imposed by current quantum hardware, particularly the impact of quantum noise on state preparation and energy measurement. The noise levels in today's devices prevent meaningful evaluations of molecular Hamiltonians with sufficient accuracy to produce reliable quantum chemical insights. Finally, we extrapolate the requirements for future quantum hardware to enable practical and scalable quantum chemistry calculations using VQE algorithms. This work provides a roadmap for advancing quantum algorithms and hardware toward achieving quantum advantage in molecular modeling.

Stochastic optimization is one of the central problems in Machine Learning and Theoretical Computer Science. In the standard model, the algorithm is given a fixed distribution known in advance. In practice though, one may acquire at a cost extra information to make better decisions. In this paper, we study how to buy information for stochastic optimization and formulate this question as an online learning problem. Assuming the learner has an oracle for the original optimization problem, we design a 2-competitive deterministic algorithm and a e/(e-1)-competitive randomized algorithm for buying information. We show that this ratio is tight as the problem is equivalent to a robust generalization of the ski-rental problem, which we call super-martingale stopping. We also consider an adaptive setting where the learner can choose to buy information after taking some actions for the underlying optimization problem. We focus on the classic optimization problem, Min-Sum Set Cover, where the goal is to quickly find an action that covers a given request drawn from a known distribution. We provide an 8-competitive algorithm running in polynomial time that chooses actions and decides when to buy information about the underlying request.

The Multi-armed bandit offer the advantage to learn and exploit the already learnt knowledge at the same time. This capability allows this approach to be applied in different domains, going from clinical trials where the goal is investigating the effects of different experimental treatments while minimizing patient losses, to adaptive routing where the goal is to minimize the delays in a network. This article provides a review of the recent results on applying bandit to real-life scenario and summarize the state of the art for each of these fields. Different techniques has been proposed to solve this problem setting, like epsilon-greedy, Upper confident bound (UCB) and Thompson Sampling (TS). We are showing here how this algorithms were adapted to solve the different problems of exploration exploitation.

Tiny object detection plays a vital role in drone surveillance, remote sensing, and autonomous systems, enabling the identification of small targets across vast landscapes. However, existing methods suffer from inefficient feature leverage and high computational costs due to redundant feature processing and rigid query allocation. To address these challenges, we propose Dome-DETR, a novel framework with Density-Oriented Feature-Query Manipulation for Efficient Tiny Object Detection. To reduce feature redundancies, we introduce a lightweight Density-Focal Extractor (DeFE) to produce clustered compact foreground masks. Leveraging these masks, we incorporate Masked Window Attention Sparsification (MWAS) to focus computational resources on the most informative regions via sparse attention. Besides, we propose Progressive Adaptive Query Initialization (PAQI), which adaptively modulates query density across spatial areas for better query allocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dome-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance (+3.3 AP on AI-TOD-V2 and +2.5 AP on VisDrone) while maintaining low computational complexity and a compact model size. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Given the variety of the visual world there is not one true scale for recognition: objects may appear at drastically different sizes across the visual field. Rather than enumerate variations across filter channels or pyramid levels, dynamic models locally predict scale and adapt receptive fields accordingly. The degree of variation and diversity of inputs makes this a difficult task. Existing methods either learn a feedforward predictor, which is not itself totally immune to the scale variation it is meant to counter, or select scales by a fixed algorithm, which cannot learn from the given task and data. We extend dynamic scale inference from feedforward prediction to iterative optimization for further adaptivity. We propose a novel entropy minimization objective for inference and optimize over task and structure parameters to tune the model to each input. Optimization during inference improves semantic segmentation accuracy and generalizes better to extreme scale variations that cause feedforward dynamic inference to falter.

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of ICL does not necessarily scale well in many-shot (demonstration) settings. We theoretically and experimentally confirm that the reason lies in more demonstrations dispersing the model attention from the query, hindering its understanding of key content. Inspired by how humans learn from examples, we propose a training-free method FocusICL, which conducts triviality filtering to avoid attention being diverted by unimportant contents at token-level and operates hierarchical attention to further ensure sufficient attention towards current query at demonstration-level. We also design an efficient hyperparameter searching strategy for FocusICL based on model perplexity of demonstrations. Comprehensive experiments validate that FocusICL achieves an average performance improvement of 5.2% over vanilla ICL and scales well with many-shot demonstrations.

We present a novel adaptive optimization algorithm for large-scale machine learning problems. Equipped with a low-cost estimate of local curvature and Lipschitz smoothness, our method dynamically adapts the search direction and step-size. The search direction contains gradient information preconditioned by a well-scaled diagonal preconditioning matrix that captures the local curvature information. Our methodology does not require the tedious task of learning rate tuning, as the learning rate is updated automatically without adding an extra hyperparameter. We provide convergence guarantees on a comprehensive collection of optimization problems, including convex, strongly convex, and nonconvex problems, in both deterministic and stochastic regimes. We also conduct an extensive empirical evaluation on standard machine learning problems, justifying our algorithm's versatility and demonstrating its strong performance compared to other start-of-the-art first-order and second-order methods.

The Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) integrates computer vision and natural language processing techniques, offering substantial application potential. However, these models demand extensive resources during inference. Adaptive attention techniques can dynamically reduce computational redundancy and thus improve efficiency. Although current adaptive attention methods significantly reduce the memory requirements of Transformer-based language models, they are not tailored for LVLMs. We observe that LVLMs generate responses from both remote image tokens and local text tokens, and different modalities have different attention patterns. This observation inspires us to manage the attention for each modality separately. Specifically, for visual input, we store the cache of potentially useful information but only compute the most critical parts. For language input, we care more about local information. Based on our observation and analysis of vision-language attention patterns, we develop A-VL, a plug-and-play adaptive attention tailored for LVLM inference. Extensive evaluations on three vision-language tasks and five datasets show the effectiveness of our designs. Our approach A-VL outperforms existing adaptive attention methods in reducing memory usage and computational load without compromising performance.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has achieved superior performance in novel view synthesis and 3D scene representation, but its practical applications are hindered by slow convergence and reliance on dense training views. To this end, we present DWTNeRF, a unified framework based on Instant-NGP's fast-training hash encoding. It is coupled with regularization terms designed for few-shot NeRF, which operates on sparse training views. Our DWTNeRF additionally includes a novel Discrete Wavelet loss that allows explicit prioritization of low frequencies directly in the training objective, reducing few-shot NeRF's overfitting on high frequencies in earlier training stages. We also introduce a model-based approach, based on multi-head attention, that is compatible with INGP, which are sensitive to architectural changes. On the 3-shot LLFF benchmark, DWTNeRF outperforms Vanilla INGP by 15.07% in PSNR, 24.45% in SSIM and 36.30% in LPIPS. Our approach encourages a re-thinking of current few-shot approaches for fast-converging implicit representations like INGP or 3DGS.

This work addresses image restoration tasks through the lens of inverse problems using unpaired datasets. In contrast to traditional approaches -- which typically assume full knowledge of the forward model or access to paired degraded and ground-truth images -- the proposed method operates under minimal assumptions and relies only on small, unpaired datasets. This makes it particularly well-suited for real-world scenarios, where the forward model is often unknown or misspecified, and collecting paired data is costly or infeasible. The method leverages conditional flow matching to model the distribution of degraded observations, while simultaneously learning the forward model via a distribution-matching loss that arises naturally from the framework. Empirically, it outperforms both single-image blind and unsupervised approaches on deblurring and non-uniform point spread function (PSF) calibration tasks. It also matches state-of-the-art performance on blind super-resolution. We also showcase the effectiveness of our method with a proof of concept for lens calibration: a real-world application traditionally requiring time-consuming experiments and specialized equipment. In contrast, our approach achieves this with minimal data acquisition effort.

In few-shot recognition, a classifier that has been trained on one set of classes is required to rapidly adapt and generalize to a disjoint, novel set of classes. To that end, recent studies have shown the efficacy of fine-tuning with carefully crafted adaptation architectures. However this raises the question of: How can one design the optimal adaptation strategy? In this paper, we study this question through the lens of neural architecture search (NAS). Given a pre-trained neural network, our algorithm discovers the optimal arrangement of adapters, which layers to keep frozen and which to fine-tune. We demonstrate the generality of our NAS method by applying it to both residual networks and vision transformers and report state-of-the-art performance on Meta-Dataset and Meta-Album.

Lensless imaging offers a significant opportunity to develop ultra-compact cameras by removing the conventional bulky lens system. However, without a focusing element, the sensor's output is no longer a direct image but a complex multiplexed scene representation. Traditional methods have attempted to address this challenge by employing learnable inversions and refinement models, but these methods are primarily designed for 2D reconstruction and do not generalize well to 3D reconstruction. We introduce GANESH, a novel framework designed to enable simultaneous refinement and novel view synthesis from multi-view lensless images. Unlike existing methods that require scene-specific training, our approach supports on-the-fly inference without retraining on each scene. Moreover, our framework allows us to tune our model to specific scenes, enhancing the rendering and refinement quality. To facilitate research in this area, we also present the first multi-view lensless dataset, LenslessScenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms current approaches in reconstruction accuracy and refinement quality. Code and video results are available at https://rakesh-123-cryp.github.io/Rakesh.github.io/

Large language models (LLMs) encounter computational challenges during long-sequence inference, especially in the attention pre-filling phase, where the complexity grows quadratically with the prompt length. Previous efforts to mitigate these challenges have relied on fixed sparse attention patterns or identifying sparse attention patterns based on limited cases. However, these methods lacked the flexibility to efficiently adapt to varying input demands. In this paper, we introduce FlexPrefill, a Flexible sparse Pre-filling mechanism that dynamically adjusts sparse attention patterns and computational budget in real-time to meet the specific requirements of each input and attention head. The flexibility of our method is demonstrated through two key innovations: 1) Query-Aware Sparse Pattern Determination: By measuring Jensen-Shannon divergence, this component adaptively switches between query-specific diverse attention patterns and predefined attention patterns. 2) Cumulative-Attention Based Index Selection: This component dynamically selects query-key indexes to be computed based on different attention patterns, ensuring the sum of attention scores meets a predefined threshold. FlexPrefill adaptively optimizes the sparse pattern and sparse ratio of each attention head based on the prompt, enhancing efficiency in long-sequence inference tasks. Experimental results show significant improvements in both speed and accuracy over prior methods, providing a more flexible and efficient solution for LLM inference.

Single-frame infrared small target detection is considered to be a challenging task, due to the extreme imbalance between target and background, bounding box regression is extremely sensitive to infrared small targets, and small target information is easy to lose in the high-level semantic layer. In this paper, we propose an enhancing feature learning network (EFLNet) based on YOLOv7 framework to solve these problems. First, we notice that there is an extremely imbalance between the target and the background in the infrared image, which makes the model pay more attention to the background features, resulting in missed detection. To address this problem, we propose a new adaptive threshold focal loss function that adjusts the loss weight automatically, compelling the model to allocate greater attention to target features. Second, we introduce the normalized Gaussian Wasserstein distance to alleviate the difficulty of model convergence caused by the extreme sensitivity of the bounding box regression to infrared small targets. Finally, we incorporate a dynamic head mechanism into the network to enable adaptive learning of the relative importance of each semantic layer. Experimental results demonstrate our method can achieve better performance in the detection performance of infrared small targets compared to state-of-the-art deep-learning based methods.

Sharpness of minima is a promising quantity that can correlate with generalization in deep networks and, when optimized during training, can improve generalization. However, standard sharpness is not invariant under reparametrizations of neural networks, and, to fix this, reparametrization-invariant sharpness definitions have been proposed, most prominently adaptive sharpness (Kwon et al., 2021). But does it really capture generalization in modern practical settings? We comprehensively explore this question in a detailed study of various definitions of adaptive sharpness in settings ranging from training from scratch on ImageNet and CIFAR-10 to fine-tuning CLIP on ImageNet and BERT on MNLI. We focus mostly on transformers for which little is known in terms of sharpness despite their widespread usage. Overall, we observe that sharpness does not correlate well with generalization but rather with some training parameters like the learning rate that can be positively or negatively correlated with generalization depending on the setup. Interestingly, in multiple cases, we observe a consistent negative correlation of sharpness with out-of-distribution error implying that sharper minima can generalize better. Finally, we illustrate on a simple model that the right sharpness measure is highly data-dependent, and that we do not understand well this aspect for realistic data distributions. The code of our experiments is available at https://github.com/tml-epfl/sharpness-vs-generalization.

Metalenses offer significant potential for ultra-compact computational imaging but face challenges from complex optical degradation and computational restoration difficulties. Existing methods typically rely on precise optical calibration or massive paired datasets, which are non-trivial for real-world imaging systems. Furthermore, a lack of control over the inference process often results in undesirable hallucinated artifacts. We introduce Degradation-Modeled Multipath Diffusion for tunable metalens photography, leveraging powerful natural image priors from pretrained models instead of large datasets. Our framework uses positive, neutral, and negative-prompt paths to balance high-frequency detail generation, structural fidelity, and suppression of metalens-specific degradation, alongside pseudo data augmentation. A tunable decoder enables controlled trade-offs between fidelity and perceptual quality. Additionally, a spatially varying degradation-aware attention (SVDA) module adaptively models complex optical and sensor-induced degradation. Finally, we design and build a millimeter-scale MetaCamera for real-world validation. Extensive results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving high-fidelity and sharp image reconstruction. More materials: https://dmdiff.github.io/.

Local motion blur commonly occurs in real-world photography due to the mixing between moving objects and stationary backgrounds during exposure. Existing image deblurring methods predominantly focus on global deblurring, inadvertently affecting the sharpness of backgrounds in locally blurred images and wasting unnecessary computation on sharp pixels, especially for high-resolution images. This paper aims to adaptively and efficiently restore high-resolution locally blurred images. We propose a local motion deblurring vision Transformer (LMD-ViT) built on adaptive window pruning Transformer blocks (AdaWPT). To focus deblurring on local regions and reduce computation, AdaWPT prunes unnecessary windows, only allowing the active windows to be involved in the deblurring processes. The pruning operation relies on the blurriness confidence predicted by a confidence predictor that is trained end-to-end using a reconstruction loss with Gumbel-Softmax re-parameterization and a pruning loss guided by annotated blur masks. Our method removes local motion blur effectively without distorting sharp regions, demonstrated by its exceptional perceptual and quantitative improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our approach substantially reduces FLOPs by 66% and achieves more than a twofold increase in inference speed compared to Transformer-based deblurring methods. We will make our code and annotated blur masks publicly available.

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word relationships. However, with standard softmax attention, all attention heads are dense, assigning a non-zero weight to all context words. In this work, we introduce the adaptively sparse Transformer, wherein attention heads have flexible, context-dependent sparsity patterns. This sparsity is accomplished by replacing softmax with alpha-entmax: a differentiable generalization of softmax that allows low-scoring words to receive precisely zero weight. Moreover, we derive a method to automatically learn the alpha parameter -- which controls the shape and sparsity of alpha-entmax -- allowing attention heads to choose between focused or spread-out behavior. Our adaptively sparse Transformer improves interpretability and head diversity when compared to softmax Transformers on machine translation datasets. Findings of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of our approach include that heads in different layers learn different sparsity preferences and tend to be more diverse in their attention distributions than softmax Transformers. Furthermore, at no cost in accuracy, sparsity in attention heads helps to uncover different head specializations.

This work proposes a procedure for designing algorithms for specific adaptive data collection tasks like active learning and pure-exploration multi-armed bandits. Unlike the design of traditional adaptive algorithms that rely on concentration of measure and careful analysis to justify the correctness and sample complexity of the procedure, our adaptive algorithm is learned via adversarial training over equivalence classes of problems derived from information theoretic lower bounds. In particular, a single adaptive learning algorithm is learned that competes with the best adaptive algorithm learned for each equivalence class. Our procedure takes as input just the available queries, set of hypotheses, loss function, and total query budget. This is in contrast to existing meta-learning work that learns an adaptive algorithm relative to an explicit, user-defined subset or prior distribution over problems which can be challenging to define and be mismatched to the instance encountered at test time. This work is particularly focused on the regime when the total query budget is very small, such as a few dozen, which is much smaller than those budgets typically considered by theoretically derived algorithms. We perform synthetic experiments to justify the stability and effectiveness of the training procedure, and then evaluate the method on tasks derived from real data including a noisy 20 Questions game and a joke recommendation task.

Recent advances in text-conditioned video diffusion have greatly improved video quality. However, these methods offer limited or sometimes no control to users on camera aspects, including dynamic camera motion, zoom, distorted lens and focus shifts. These motion and optical aspects are crucial for adding controllability and cinematic elements to generation frameworks, ultimately resulting in visual content that draws focus, enhances mood, and guides emotions according to filmmakers' controls. In this paper, we aim to close the gap between controllable video generation and camera optics. To achieve this, we propose AKiRa (Augmentation Kit on Rays), a novel augmentation framework that builds and trains a camera adapter with a complex camera model over an existing video generation backbone. It enables fine-tuned control over camera motion as well as complex optical parameters (focal length, distortion, aperture) to achieve cinematic effects such as zoom, fisheye effect, and bokeh. Extensive experiments demonstrate AKiRa's effectiveness in combining and composing camera optics while outperforming all state-of-the-art methods. This work sets a new landmark in controlled and optically enhanced video generation, paving the way for future optical video generation methods.

Text-to-image customization, which takes given texts and images depicting given subjects as inputs, aims to synthesize new images that align with both text semantics and subject appearance. This task provides precise control over details that text alone cannot capture and is fundamental for various real-world applications, garnering significant interest from academia and industry. Existing works follow the pseudo-word paradigm, which involves representing given subjects as pseudo-words and combining them with given texts to collectively guide the generation. However, the inherent conflict and entanglement between the pseudo-words and texts result in a dual-optimum paradox, where subject similarity and text controllability cannot be optimal simultaneously. We propose a novel real-words paradigm termed RealCustom++ that instead represents subjects as non-conflict real words, thereby disentangling subject similarity from text controllability and allowing both to be optimized simultaneously. Specifically, RealCustom++ introduces a novel "train-inference" decoupled framework: (1) During training, RealCustom++ learns the alignment between vision conditions and all real words in the text, ensuring high subject-similarity generation in open domains. This is achieved by the cross-layer cross-scale projector to robustly and finely extract subject features, and a curriculum training recipe that adapts the generated subject to diverse poses and sizes. (2) During inference, leveraging the learned general alignment, an adaptive mask guidance is proposed to only customize the generation of the specific target real word, keeping other subject-irrelevant regions uncontaminated to ensure high text-controllability in real-time.

Adaptive gradient-based optimizers, particularly Adam, have left their mark in training large-scale deep learning models. The strength of such optimizers is that they exhibit fast convergence while being more robust to hyperparameter choice. However, they often generalize worse than non-adaptive methods. Recent studies have tied this performance gap to flat minima selection: adaptive methods tend to find solutions in sharper basins of the loss landscape, which in turn hurts generalization. To overcome this issue, we propose a new memory-augmented version of Adam that promotes exploration towards flatter minima by using a buffer of critical momentum terms during training. Intuitively, the use of the buffer makes the optimizer overshoot outside the basin of attraction if it is not wide enough. We empirically show that our method improves the performance of several variants of Adam on standard supervised language modelling and image classification tasks.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable success in visual understanding, yet they struggle with knowledge-intensive queries involving long-tail entities or evolving information due to static parametric knowledge. Recent search-augmented approaches attempt to address this limitation, but existing methods rely on indiscriminate whole-image retrieval that introduces substantial visual redundancy and noise, and lack deep iterative reflection, limiting their effectiveness on complex visual queries. To overcome these challenges, we propose Glance-or-Gaze (GoG), a fully autonomous framework that shifts from passive perception to active visual planning. GoG introduces a Selective Gaze mechanism that dynamically chooses whether to glance at global context or gaze into high-value regions, filtering irrelevant information before retrieval. We design a dual-stage training strategy: Reflective GoG Behavior Alignment via supervised fine-tuning instills the fundamental GoG paradigm, while Complexity-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning further enhances the model's capability to handle complex queries through iterative reasoning. Experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies confirm that both Selective Gaze and complexity-adaptive RL are essential for effective visual search. We will release our data and models for further exploration soon.

The choice of batch sizes in stochastic gradient optimizers is critical for model training. However, the practice of varying batch sizes throughout the training process is less explored compared to other hyperparameters. We investigate adaptive batch size strategies derived from adaptive sampling methods, traditionally applied only in stochastic gradient descent. Given the significant interplay between learning rates and batch sizes, and considering the prevalence of adaptive gradient methods in deep learning, we emphasize the need for adaptive batch size strategies in these contexts. We introduce AdAdaGrad and its scalar variant AdAdaGradNorm, which incrementally increase batch sizes during training, while model updates are performed using AdaGrad and AdaGradNorm. We prove that AdaGradNorm converges with high probability at a rate of O(1/K) for finding a first-order stationary point of smooth nonconvex functions within K iterations. AdaGrad also demonstrates similar convergence properties when integrated with a novel coordinate-wise variant of our adaptive batch size strategies. Our theoretical claims are supported by numerical experiments on various image classification tasks, highlighting the enhanced adaptability of progressive batching protocols in deep learning and the potential of such adaptive batch size strategies with adaptive gradient optimizers in large-scale model training.

In this paper, we present a self-calibrating framework that jointly optimizes camera parameters, lens distortion and 3D Gaussian representations, enabling accurate and efficient scene reconstruction. In particular, our technique enables high-quality scene reconstruction from Large field-of-view (FOV) imagery taken with wide-angle lenses, allowing the scene to be modeled from a smaller number of images. Our approach introduces a novel method for modeling complex lens distortions using a hybrid network that combines invertible residual networks with explicit grids. This design effectively regularizes the optimization process, achieving greater accuracy than conventional camera models. Additionally, we propose a cubemap-based resampling strategy to support large FOV images without sacrificing resolution or introducing distortion artifacts. Our method is compatible with the fast rasterization of Gaussian Splatting, adaptable to a wide variety of camera lens distortion, and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Optical design is the process of configuring optical elements to precisely manipulate light for high-fidelity imaging. It is inherently a highly non-convex optimization problem that relies heavily on human heuristic expertise and domain-specific knowledge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) possess extensive optical knowledge, their capabilities in leveraging the knowledge in designing lens system remain significantly constrained. This work represents the first attempt to employ LLMs in the field of optical design. We bridge the expertise gap by enabling users without formal optical training to successfully develop functional lens systems. Concretely, we curate a comprehensive dataset, named OptiDesignQA, which encompasses both classical lens systems sourced from standard optical textbooks and novel configurations generated by automated design algorithms for training and evaluation. Furthermore, we inject domain-specific optical expertise into the LLM through a hybrid objective of full-system synthesis and lens completion. To align the model with optical principles, we employ Group Relative Policy Optimization Done Right (DrGRPO) guided by Optical Lexicographic Reward for physics-driven policy alignment. This reward system incorporates structural format rewards, physical feasibility rewards, light-manipulation accuracy, and LLM-based heuristics. Finally, our model integrates with specialized optical optimization routines for end-to-end fine-tuning and precision refinement. We benchmark our proposed method against both traditional optimization-based automated design algorithms and LLM counterparts, and experimental results show the superiority of our method.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) aims to adapt pre-trained vision models to downstream tasks. Among PEFT paradigms, sparse tuning achieves remarkable performance by adjusting only the weights most relevant to downstream tasks, rather than densely tuning the entire weight matrix. Current methods follow a two-stage paradigm. First, it locates task-relevant weights by gradient information, which overlooks the parameter adjustments during fine-tuning and limits the performance. Second, it updates only the located weights by applying a sparse mask to the gradient of the weight matrix, which results in high memory usage due to the storage of all weight matrices in the optimizer. In this paper, we propose a one-stage method named SNELLA to overcome the above limitations. For memory usage, SNELLA selectively updates the weight matrix by adding it to another sparse matrix that is merged by two low-rank learnable matrices. We extend the low-rank decomposition by introducing nonlinear kernel functions, thereby increasing the rank of the resulting merged matrix to prevent the interdependency among weight updates, enabling better adaptation to downstream tasks. For locating task-relevant weights, we propose an adaptive bi-level sparsity allocation mechanism that encourages weights to compete across and inside layers based on their importance scores in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on classification, segmentation, and generation tasks using different pre-trained vision models. The results show that SNELLA achieves SOTA performance with low memory usage. Notably, SNELLA obtains 1.8% (91.9% v.s. 90.1%) higher Top-1 accuracy on the FGVC benchmark compared to SPT-LoRA. Compared to previous methods, SNELLA achieves a memory reduction of 31.1%-39.9% across models with parameter scales from 86M to 632M. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/ssfgunner/SNELL.

In the era of proliferation of large language and image generation models, the phenomenon of "model collapse" refers to the situation whereby as a model is trained recursively on data generated from previous generations of itself over time, its performance degrades until the model eventually becomes completely useless, i.e the model collapses. In this work, we study this phenomenon in the setting of high-dimensional regression and obtain analytic formulae which quantitatively outline this phenomenon in a broad range of regimes. In the special case of polynomial decaying spectral and source conditions, we obtain modified scaling laws which exhibit new crossover phenomena from fast to slow rates. We also propose a simple strategy based on adaptive regularization to mitigate model collapse. Our theoretical results are validated with experiments.

Visual understanding is inherently contextual -- what we focus on in an image depends on the task at hand. For instance, given an image of a person holding a bouquet of flowers, we may focus on either the person such as their clothing, or the type of flowers, depending on the context of interest. Yet, most existing image encoding paradigms represent an image as a fixed, generic feature vector, overlooking the potential needs of prioritizing varying visual information for different downstream use cases. In this work, we introduce FocalLens, a conditional visual encoding method that produces different representations for the same image based on the context of interest, expressed flexibly through natural language. We leverage vision instruction tuning data and contrastively finetune a pretrained vision encoder to take natural language instructions as additional inputs for producing conditional image representations. Extensive experiments validate that conditional image representation from FocalLens better pronounce the visual features of interest compared to generic features produced by standard vision encoders like CLIP. In addition, we show FocalLens further leads to performance improvements on a range of downstream tasks including image-image retrieval, image classification, and image-text retrieval, with an average gain of 5 and 10 points on the challenging SugarCrepe and MMVP-VLM benchmarks, respectively.

Visual instruction datasets from various distributors are released at different times and often contain a significant number of semantically redundant text-image pairs, depending on their task compositions (i.e., skills) or reference sources. This redundancy greatly limits the efficient deployment of lifelong adaptable multimodal large language models, hindering their ability to refine existing skills and acquire new competencies over time. To address this, we reframe the problem of Lifelong Instruction Tuning (LiIT) via data selection, where the model automatically selects beneficial samples to learn from earlier and new datasets based on the current state of acquired knowledge in the model. Based on empirical analyses that show that selecting the best data subset using a static importance measure is often ineffective for multi-task datasets with evolving distributions, we propose Adapt-infty, a new multi-way and adaptive data selection approach that dynamically balances sample efficiency and effectiveness during LiIT. We construct pseudo-skill clusters by grouping gradient-based sample vectors. Next, we select the best-performing data selector for each skill cluster from a pool of selector experts, including our newly proposed scoring function, Image Grounding score. This data selector samples a subset of the most important samples from each skill cluster for training. To prevent the continuous increase in the size of the dataset pool during LiIT, which would result in excessive computation, we further introduce a cluster-wise permanent data pruning strategy to remove the most semantically redundant samples from each cluster, keeping computational requirements manageable. Training with samples selected by Adapt-infty alleviates catastrophic forgetting, especially for rare tasks, and promotes forward transfer across the continuum using only a fraction of the original datasets.

Lensless cameras disregard the conventional design that imaging should mimic the human eye. This is done by replacing the lens with a thin mask, and moving image formation to the digital post-processing. State-of-the-art lensless imaging techniques use learned approaches that combine physical modeling and neural networks. However, these approaches make simplifying modeling assumptions for ease of calibration and computation. Moreover, the generalizability of learned approaches to lensless measurements of new masks has not been studied. To this end, we utilize a modular learned reconstruction in which a key component is a pre-processor prior to image recovery. We theoretically demonstrate the pre-processor's necessity for standard image recovery techniques (Wiener filtering and iterative algorithms), and through extensive experiments show its effectiveness for multiple lensless imaging approaches and across datasets of different mask types (amplitude and phase). We also perform the first generalization benchmark across mask types to evaluate how well reconstructions trained with one system generalize to others. Our modular reconstruction enables us to use pre-trained components and transfer learning on new systems to cut down weeks of tedious measurements and training. As part of our work, we open-source four datasets, and software for measuring datasets and for training our modular reconstruction.

Training state-of-the-art vision models has become prohibitively expensive for researchers and practitioners. For the sake of accessibility and resource reuse, it is important to focus on adapting these models to a variety of downstream scenarios. An interesting and practical paradigm is online test-time adaptation, according to which training data is inaccessible, no labelled data from the test distribution is available, and adaptation can only happen at test time and on a handful of samples. In this paper, we investigate how test-time adaptation methods fare for a number of pre-trained models on a variety of real-world scenarios, significantly extending the way they have been originally evaluated. We show that they perform well only in narrowly-defined experimental setups and sometimes fail catastrophically when their hyperparameters are not selected for the same scenario in which they are being tested. Motivated by the inherent uncertainty around the conditions that will ultimately be encountered at test time, we propose a particularly "conservative" approach, which addresses the problem with a Laplacian Adjusted Maximum-likelihood Estimation (LAME) objective. By adapting the model's output (not its parameters), and solving our objective with an efficient concave-convex procedure, our approach exhibits a much higher average accuracy across scenarios than existing methods, while being notably faster and have a much lower memory footprint. The code is available at https://github.com/fiveai/LAME.

Dynamic scene video deblurring aims to remove undesirable blurry artifacts captured during the exposure process. Although previous video deblurring methods have achieved impressive results, they suffer from significant performance drops due to the domain gap between training and testing videos, especially for those captured in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a domain adaptation scheme based on a blurring model to achieve test-time fine-tuning for deblurring models in unseen domains. Since blurred and sharp pairs are unavailable for fine-tuning during inference, our scheme can generate domain-adaptive training pairs to calibrate a deblurring model for the target domain. First, a Relative Sharpness Detection Module is proposed to identify relatively sharp regions from the blurry input images and regard them as pseudo-sharp images. Next, we utilize a blurring model to produce blurred images based on the pseudo-sharp images extracted during testing. To synthesize blurred images in compliance with the target data distribution, we propose a Domain-adaptive Blur Condition Generation Module to create domain-specific blur conditions for the blurring model. Finally, the generated pseudo-sharp and blurred pairs are used to fine-tune a deblurring model for better performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve state-of-the-art video deblurring methods, providing performance gains of up to 7.54dB on various real-world video deblurring datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jin-Ting-He/DADeblur.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) face significant challenges in few-shot scenarios, primarily due to overfitting and long training times for high-fidelity rendering. Existing methods, such as FreeNeRF and SparseNeRF, use frequency regularization or pre-trained priors but struggle with complex scheduling and bias. We introduce FrugalNeRF, a novel few-shot NeRF framework that leverages weight-sharing voxels across multiple scales to efficiently represent scene details. Our key contribution is a cross-scale geometric adaptation scheme that selects pseudo ground truth depth based on reprojection errors across scales. This guides training without relying on externally learned priors, enabling full utilization of the training data. It can also integrate pre-trained priors, enhancing quality without slowing convergence. Experiments on LLFF, DTU, and RealEstate-10K show that FrugalNeRF outperforms other few-shot NeRF methods while significantly reducing training time, making it a practical solution for efficient and accurate 3D scene reconstruction.

Blind all-in-one image restoration models aim to recover a high-quality image from an input degraded with unknown distortions. However, these models require all the possible degradation types to be defined during the training stage while showing limited generalization to unseen degradations, which limits their practical application in complex cases. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective adaptive blind all-in-one restoration (ABAIR) model, which can address multiple degradations, generalizes well to unseen degradations, and efficiently incorporate new degradations by training a small fraction of parameters. First, we train our baseline model on a large dataset of natural images with multiple synthetic degradations, augmented with a segmentation head to estimate per-pixel degradation types, resulting in a powerful backbone able to generalize to a wide range of degradations. Second, we adapt our baseline model to varying image restoration tasks using independent low-rank adapters. Third, we learn to adaptively combine adapters to versatile images via a flexible and lightweight degradation estimator. Our model is both powerful in handling specific distortions and flexible in adapting to complex tasks, it not only outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin on five- and three-task IR setups, but also shows improved generalization to unseen degradations and also composite distortions.

Deep convolutional neural networks trained end-to-end are the state-of-the-art methods to regress dense disparity maps from stereo pairs. These models, however, suffer from a notable decrease in accuracy when exposed to scenarios significantly different from the training set, e.g., real vs synthetic images, etc.). We argue that it is extremely unlikely to gather enough samples to achieve effective training/tuning in any target domain, thus making this setup impractical for many applications. Instead, we propose to perform unsupervised and continuous online adaptation of a deep stereo network, which allows for preserving its accuracy in any environment. However, this strategy is extremely computationally demanding and thus prevents real-time inference. We address this issue introducing a new lightweight, yet effective, deep stereo architecture, Modularly ADaptive Network (MADNet) and developing a Modular ADaptation (MAD) algorithm, which independently trains sub-portions of the network. By deploying MADNet together with MAD we introduce the first real-time self-adaptive deep stereo system enabling competitive performance on heterogeneous datasets.

Long-context understanding is crucial for many NLP applications, yet transformers struggle with efficiency due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Sparse attention methods alleviate this cost but often impose static, predefined masks, failing to capture heterogeneous attention patterns. This results in suboptimal token interactions, limiting adaptability and retrieval accuracy in long-sequence tasks. This work introduces a dynamic sparse attention mechanism that assigns adaptive masks at the attention-map level, preserving heterogeneous patterns across layers and heads. Unlike existing approaches, our method eliminates the need for fine-tuning and predefined mask structures while maintaining computational efficiency. By learning context-aware attention structures, it achieves high alignment with full-attention models, ensuring minimal performance degradation while reducing memory and compute overhead. This approach provides a scalable alternative to full attention, enabling the practical deployment of large-scale Large Language Models (LLMs) without sacrificing retrieval performance. DAM is available at: https://github.com/HanzhiZhang-Ulrica/DAM.

Mainstream Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods for adapting vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, typically rely on Shannon Entropy (SE) at test time to measure prediction uncertainty and inconsistency. However, since CLIP has a built-in bias from pretraining on highly imbalanced web-crawled data, SE inevitably results in producing biased estimates of uncertainty entropy. To address this issue, we notably find and demonstrate that Tsallis Entropy (TE), a generalized form of SE, is naturally suited for characterizing biased distributions by introducing a non-extensive parameter q, with the performance of SE serving as a lower bound for TE. Building upon this, we generalize TE into Adaptive Debiasing Tsallis Entropy (ADTE) for TTA, customizing a class-specific parameter q^l derived by normalizing the estimated label bias from continuously incoming test instances, for each category. This adaptive approach allows ADTE to accurately select high-confidence views and seamlessly integrate with a label adjustment strategy to enhance adaptation, without introducing distribution-specific hyperparameter tuning. Besides, our investigation reveals that both TE and ADTE can serve as direct, advanced alternatives to SE in TTA, without any other modifications. Experimental results show that ADTE outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ImageNet and its five variants, and achieves the highest average performance on 10 cross-domain benchmarks, regardless of the model architecture or text prompts used. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jinx630/ADTE.

We propose a method for adapting neural networks to distribution shifts at test-time. In contrast to training-time robustness mechanisms that attempt to anticipate and counter the shift, we create a closed-loop system and make use of a test-time feedback signal to adapt a network on the fly. We show that this loop can be effectively implemented using a learning-based function, which realizes an amortized optimizer for the network. This leads to an adaptation method, named Rapid Network Adaptation (RNA), that is notably more flexible and orders of magnitude faster than the baselines. Through a broad set of experiments using various adaptation signals and target tasks, we study the efficiency and flexibility of this method. We perform the evaluations using various datasets (Taskonomy, Replica, ScanNet, Hypersim, COCO, ImageNet), tasks (depth, optical flow, semantic segmentation, classification), and distribution shifts (Cross-datasets, 2D and 3D Common Corruptions) with promising results. We end with a discussion on general formulations for handling distribution shifts and our observations from comparing with similar approaches from other domains.

In class incremental learning, neural networks typically suffer from catastrophic forgetting. We show that an MLP featuring a sparse activation function and an adaptive learning rate optimizer can compete with established regularization techniques in the Split-MNIST task. We highlight the effectiveness of the Adaptive SwisH (ASH) activation function in this context and introduce a novel variant, Hard Adaptive SwisH (Hard ASH) to further enhance the learning retention.

Large language models (LLMs) now support extremely long context windows, but the quadratic complexity of vanilla attention results in significantly long Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency. Existing approaches to address this complexity require additional pretraining or finetuning, and often sacrifice model accuracy. In this paper, we first provide both theoretical and empirical foundations for near-lossless sparse attention. We find dynamically capturing head-specific sparse patterns at runtime with low overhead is crucial. To address this, we propose SampleAttention, an adaptive structured and near-lossless sparse attention. Leveraging observed significant sparse patterns, SampleAttention attends to a fixed percentage of adjacent tokens to capture local window patterns, and employs a two-stage query-guided key-value filtering approach, which adaptively select a minimum set of key-values with low overhead, to capture column stripe patterns. Comprehensive evaluations show that SampleAttention can seamlessly replace vanilla attention in off-the-shelf LLMs with nearly no accuracy loss, and reduces TTFT by up to 2.42times compared with FlashAttention.

There is an increasing number of pre-trained deep neural network models. However, it is still unclear how to effectively use these models for a new task. Transfer learning, which aims to transfer knowledge from source tasks to a target task, is an effective solution to this problem. Fine-tuning is a popular transfer learning technique for deep neural networks where a few rounds of training are applied to the parameters of a pre-trained model to adapt them to a new task. Despite its popularity, in this paper, we show that fine-tuning suffers from several drawbacks. We propose an adaptive fine-tuning approach, called AdaFilter, which selects only a part of the convolutional filters in the pre-trained model to optimize on a per-example basis. We use a recurrent gated network to selectively fine-tune convolutional filters based on the activations of the previous layer. We experiment with 7 public image classification datasets and the results show that AdaFilter can reduce the average classification error of the standard fine-tuning by 2.54%.

In the image acquisition process, various forms of degradation, including noise, haze, and rain, are frequently introduced. These degradations typically arise from the inherent limitations of cameras or unfavorable ambient conditions. To recover clean images from degraded versions, numerous specialized restoration methods have been developed, each targeting a specific type of degradation. Recently, all-in-one algorithms have garnered significant attention by addressing different types of degradations within a single model without requiring prior information of the input degradation type. However, these methods purely operate in the spatial domain and do not delve into the distinct frequency variations inherent to different degradation types. To address this gap, we propose an adaptive all-in-one image restoration network based on frequency mining and modulation. Our approach is motivated by the observation that different degradation types impact the image content on different frequency subbands, thereby requiring different treatments for each restoration task. Specifically, we first mine low- and high-frequency information from the input features, guided by the adaptively decoupled spectra of the degraded image. The extracted features are then modulated by a bidirectional operator to facilitate interactions between different frequency components. Finally, the modulated features are merged into the original input for a progressively guided restoration. With this approach, the model achieves adaptive reconstruction by accentuating the informative frequency subbands according to different input degradations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on different image restoration tasks, including denoising, dehazing, deraining, motion deblurring, and low-light image enhancement. Our code is available at https://github.com/c-yn/AdaIR.

Non-local attention module has been proven to be crucial for image restoration. Conventional non-local attention processes features of each layer separately, so it risks missing correlation between features among different layers. To address this problem, we aim to design attention modules that aggregate information from different layers. Instead of finding correlated key pixels within the same layer, each query pixel is encouraged to attend to key pixels at multiple previous layers of the network. In order to efficiently embed such attention design into neural network backbones, we propose a novel Adaptive Cross-Layer Attention (ACLA) module. Two adaptive designs are proposed for ACLA: (1) adaptively selecting the keys for non-local attention at each layer; (2) automatically searching for the insertion locations for ACLA modules. By these two adaptive designs, ACLA dynamically selects a flexible number of keys to be aggregated for non-local attention at previous layer while maintaining a compact neural network with compelling performance. Extensive experiments on image restoration tasks, including single image super-resolution, image denoising, image demosaicing, and image compression artifacts reduction, validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ACLA. The code of ACLA is available at https://github.com/SDL-ASU/ACLA.

Lensless imaging stands out as a promising alternative to conventional lens-based systems, particularly in scenarios demanding ultracompact form factors and cost-effective architectures. However, such systems are fundamentally governed by the Point Spread Function (PSF), which dictates how a point source contributes to the final captured signal. Traditional lensless techniques often require explicit calibrations and extensive pre-processing, relying on static or approximate PSF models. These rigid strategies can result in limited adaptability to real-world challenges, including noise, system imperfections, and dynamic scene variations, thus impeding high-fidelity reconstruction. In this paper, we propose LensNet, an end-to-end deep learning framework that integrates spatial-domain and frequency-domain representations in a unified pipeline. Central to our approach is a learnable Coded Mask Simulator (CMS) that enables dynamic, data-driven estimation of the PSF during training, effectively mitigating the shortcomings of fixed or sparsely calibrated kernels. By embedding a Wiener filtering component, LensNet refines global structure and restores fine-scale details, thus alleviating the dependency on multiple handcrafted pre-processing steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate LensNet's robust performance and superior reconstruction quality compared to state-of-the-art methods, particularly in preserving high-frequency details and attenuating noise. The proposed framework establishes a novel convergence between physics-based modeling and data-driven learning, paving the way for more accurate, flexible, and practical lensless imaging solutions for applications ranging from miniature sensors to medical diagnostics. The link of code is https://github.com/baijiesong/Lensnet.

High-resolution images enable neural networks to learn richer visual representations. However, this improved performance comes at the cost of growing computational complexity, hindering their usage in latency-sensitive applications. As not all pixels are equal, skipping computations for less-important regions offers a simple and effective measure to reduce the computation. This, however, is hard to be translated into actual speedup for CNNs since it breaks the regularity of the dense convolution workload. In this paper, we introduce SparseViT that revisits activation sparsity for recent window-based vision transformers (ViTs). As window attentions are naturally batched over blocks, actual speedup with window activation pruning becomes possible: i.e., ~50% latency reduction with 60% sparsity. Different layers should be assigned with different pruning ratios due to their diverse sensitivities and computational costs. We introduce sparsity-aware adaptation and apply the evolutionary search to efficiently find the optimal layerwise sparsity configuration within the vast search space. SparseViT achieves speedups of 1.5x, 1.4x, and 1.3x compared to its dense counterpart in monocular 3D object detection, 2D instance segmentation, and 2D semantic segmentation, respectively, with negligible to no loss of accuracy.

We propose ExtraNeRF, a novel method for extrapolating the range of views handled by a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). Our main idea is to leverage NeRFs to model scene-specific, fine-grained details, while capitalizing on diffusion models to extrapolate beyond our observed data. A key ingredient is to track visibility to determine what portions of the scene have not been observed, and focus on reconstructing those regions consistently with diffusion models. Our primary contributions include a visibility-aware diffusion-based inpainting module that is fine-tuned on the input imagery, yielding an initial NeRF with moderate quality (often blurry) inpainted regions, followed by a second diffusion model trained on the input imagery to consistently enhance, notably sharpen, the inpainted imagery from the first pass. We demonstrate high-quality results, extrapolating beyond a small number of (typically six or fewer) input views, effectively outpainting the NeRF as well as inpainting newly disoccluded regions inside the original viewing volume. We compare with related work both quantitatively and qualitatively and show significant gains over prior art.

Multimodal Large Language Models have advanced AI in applications like text-to-video generation and visual question answering. These models rely on visual encoders to convert non-text data into vectors, but current encoders either lack semantic alignment or overlook non-salient objects. We propose the Guiding Visual Encoder to Perceive Overlooked Information (GiVE) approach. GiVE enhances visual representation with an Attention-Guided Adapter (AG-Adapter) module and an Object-focused Visual Semantic Learning module. These incorporate three novel loss terms: Object-focused Image-Text Contrast (OITC) loss, Object-focused Image-Image Contrast (OIIC) loss, and Object-focused Image Discrimination (OID) loss, improving object consideration, retrieval accuracy, and comprehensiveness. Our contributions include dynamic visual focus adjustment, novel loss functions to enhance object retrieval, and the Multi-Object Instruction (MOInst) dataset. Experiments show our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.

We provide a probabilistic interpretation of attention and show that the standard dot-product attention in transformers is a special case of Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) inference. The proposed approach suggests the use of Expectation Maximization algorithms for online adaptation of key and value model parameters. This approach is useful for cases in which external agents, e.g., annotators, provide inference-time information about the correct values of some tokens, e.g, the semantic category of some pixels, and we need for this new information to propagate to other tokens in a principled manner. We illustrate the approach on an interactive semantic segmentation task in which annotators and models collaborate online to improve annotation efficiency. Using standard benchmarks, we observe that key adaptation boosts model performance (sim10% mIoU) in the low feedback regime and value propagation improves model responsiveness in the high feedback regime. A PyTorch layer implementation of our probabilistic attention model will be made publicly available here: https://github.com/apple/ml-probabilistic-attention.

An efficient attention implementation is essential for large models due to its quadratic time complexity. Fortunately, attention commonly exhibits sparsity, i.e., many values in the attention map are near zero, allowing for the omission of corresponding computations. Many studies have utilized the sparse pattern to accelerate attention. However, most existing works focus on optimizing attention within specific models by exploiting certain sparse patterns of the attention map. A universal sparse attention that guarantees both the speedup and end-to-end performance of diverse models remains elusive. In this paper, we propose SpargeAttn, a universal sparse and quantized attention for any model. Our method uses a two-stage online filter: in the first stage, we rapidly and accurately predict the attention map, enabling the skip of some matrix multiplications in attention. In the second stage, we design an online softmax-aware filter that incurs no extra overhead and further skips some matrix multiplications. Experiments show that our method significantly accelerates diverse models, including language, image, and video generation, without sacrificing end-to-end metrics. The codes are available at https://github.com/thu-ml/SpargeAttn.

We analyze transformers from the perspective of iterative inference, seeking to understand how model predictions are refined layer by layer. To do so, we train an affine probe for each block in a frozen pretrained model, making it possible to decode every hidden state into a distribution over the vocabulary. Our method, the tuned lens, is a refinement of the earlier "logit lens" technique, which yielded useful insights but is often brittle. We test our method on various autoregressive language models with up to 20B parameters, showing it to be more predictive, reliable and unbiased than the logit lens. With causal experiments, we show the tuned lens uses similar features to the model itself. We also find the trajectory of latent predictions can be used to detect malicious inputs with high accuracy. All code needed to reproduce our results can be found at https://github.com/AlignmentResearch/tuned-lens.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is an effective method for adapting pre-trained vision models to downstream tasks by tuning a small subset of parameters. Among PEFT methods, sparse tuning achieves superior performance by only adjusting the weights most relevant to downstream tasks, rather than densely tuning the whole weight matrix. However, this performance improvement has been accompanied by increases in memory usage, which stems from two factors, i.e., the storage of the whole weight matrix as learnable parameters in the optimizer and the additional storage of tunable weight indexes. In this paper, we propose a method named SNELL (Sparse tuning with kerNELized LoRA) for sparse tuning with low memory usage. To achieve low memory usage, SNELL decomposes the tunable matrix for sparsification into two learnable low-rank matrices, saving from the costly storage of the whole original matrix. A competition-based sparsification mechanism is further proposed to avoid the storage of tunable weight indexes. To maintain the effectiveness of sparse tuning with low-rank matrices, we extend the low-rank decomposition by applying nonlinear kernel functions to the whole-matrix merging. Consequently, we gain an increase in the rank of the merged matrix, enhancing the ability of SNELL in adapting the pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks show that SNELL achieves state-of-the-art performance with low memory usage, endowing PEFT with sparse tuning to large-scale models. Codes are available at https://github.com/ssfgunner/SNELL.

Dilated convolution, which expands the receptive field by inserting gaps between its consecutive elements, is widely employed in computer vision. In this study, we propose three strategies to improve individual phases of dilated convolution from the view of spectrum analysis. Departing from the conventional practice of fixing a global dilation rate as a hyperparameter, we introduce Frequency-Adaptive Dilated Convolution (FADC), which dynamically adjusts dilation rates spatially based on local frequency components. Subsequently, we design two plug-in modules to directly enhance effective bandwidth and receptive field size. The Adaptive Kernel (AdaKern) module decomposes convolution weights into low-frequency and high-frequency components, dynamically adjusting the ratio between these components on a per-channel basis. By increasing the high-frequency part of convolution weights, AdaKern captures more high-frequency components, thereby improving effective bandwidth. The Frequency Selection (FreqSelect) module optimally balances high- and low-frequency components in feature representations through spatially variant reweighting. It suppresses high frequencies in the background to encourage FADC to learn a larger dilation, thereby increasing the receptive field for an expanded scope. Extensive experiments on segmentation and object detection consistently validate the efficacy of our approach. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FADC.

In recent years, the increasing popularity of Hi-DPI screens has driven a rising demand for high-resolution images. However, the limited computational power of edge devices poses a challenge in deploying complex super-resolution neural networks, highlighting the need for efficient methods. While prior works have made significant progress, they have not fully exploited pixel-level information. Moreover, their reliance on fixed sampling patterns limits both accuracy and the ability to capture fine details in low-resolution images. To address these challenges, we introduce two plug-and-play modules designed to capture and leverage pixel information effectively in Look-Up Table (LUT) based super-resolution networks. Our method introduces Automatic Sampling (AutoSample), a flexible LUT sampling approach where sampling weights are automatically learned during training to adapt to pixel variations and expand the receptive field without added inference cost. We also incorporate Adaptive Residual Learning (AdaRL) to enhance inter-layer connections, enabling detailed information flow and improving the network's ability to reconstruct fine details. Our method achieves significant performance improvements on both MuLUT and SPF-LUT while maintaining similar storage sizes. Specifically, for MuLUT, we achieve a PSNR improvement of approximately +0.20 dB improvement on average across five datasets. For SPF-LUT, with more than a 50% reduction in storage space and about a 2/3 reduction in inference time, our method still maintains performance comparable to the original. The code is available at https://github.com/SuperKenVery/AutoLUT.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have achieved huge success in effectively capturing and representing 3D objects and scenes. However, to establish a ubiquitous presence in everyday media formats, such as images and videos, we need to fulfill three key objectives: 1. fast encoding and decoding time, 2. compact model sizes, and 3. high-quality renderings. Despite recent advancements, a comprehensive algorithm that adequately addresses all objectives has yet to be fully realized. In this work, we present CodecNeRF, a neural codec for NeRF representations, consisting of an encoder and decoder architecture that can generate a NeRF representation in a single forward pass. Furthermore, inspired by the recent parameter-efficient finetuning approaches, we propose a finetuning method to efficiently adapt the generated NeRF representations to a new test instance, leading to high-quality image renderings and compact code sizes. The proposed CodecNeRF, a newly suggested encoding-decoding-finetuning pipeline for NeRF, achieved unprecedented compression performance of more than 100x and remarkable reduction in encoding time while maintaining (or improving) the image quality on widely used 3D object datasets.

Long-context modeling is a pivotal capability for Large Language Models, yet the quadratic complexity of attention remains a critical bottleneck, particularly during the compute-intensive prefilling phase. While various sparse attention mechanisms have been explored, they typically suffer from either significant search latency or insufficient sparsity. In this paper, we propose FlashPrefill, a framework enabling ultra-fast prefilling via instantaneous pattern discovery and thresholding. FlashPrefill leverages a fast block-searching technique to simultaneously locate dynamic vertical, slash, and block-sparse attention patterns. Crucially, it introduces a dynamic thresholding mechanism that bypasses the prohibitive overhead of sorting or accumulating attention scores while effectively eliminating the long-tail distribution to enhance sparsity. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that FlashPrefill achieves a substantial leap in efficiency, delivering an unprecedented 27.78x speedup on 256K sequences. Notably, unlike existing methods that incur efficiency degradation on shorter contexts, FlashPrefill maintains a 1.71x speedup even at a 4K context length, demonstrating its robustness and practical utility across varying sequence scales.

Harnessing low-light enhancement and domain adaptation, nighttime UAV tracking has made substantial strides. However, over-reliance on image enhancement, limited high-quality nighttime data, and a lack of integration between daytime and nighttime trackers hinder the development of an end-to-end trainable framework. Additionally, current ViT-based trackers demand heavy computational resources due to their reliance on the self-attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel pure Mamba-based tracking framework (MambaNUT) that employs a state space model with linear complexity as its backbone, incorporating a single-stream architecture that integrates feature learning and template-search coupling within Vision Mamba. We introduce an adaptive curriculum learning (ACL) approach that dynamically adjusts sampling strategies and loss weights, thereby improving the model's ability of generalization. Our ACL is composed of two levels of curriculum schedulers: (1) sampling scheduler that transforms the data distribution from imbalanced to balanced, as well as from easier (daytime) to harder (nighttime) samples; (2) loss scheduler that dynamically assigns weights based on the size of the training set and IoU of individual instances. Exhaustive experiments on multiple nighttime UAV tracking benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MambaNUT achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring lower computational costs. The code will be available at https://github.com/wuyou3474/MambaNUT.

Recent Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate promising capabilities in unifying visual understanding and generative modeling, enabling both accurate content understanding and flexible editing. However, current approaches treat "what to see" and "how to edit" separately: they either perform isolated object segmentation or utilize segmentation masks merely as conditional prompts for local edit generation tasks, often relying on multiple disjointed models. To bridge these gaps, we introduce FOCUS, a unified LVLM that integrates segmentation-aware perception and controllable object-centric generation within an end-to-end framework. FOCUS employs a dual-branch visual encoder to simultaneously capture global semantic context and fine-grained spatial details. In addition, we leverage a MoVQGAN-based visual tokenizer to produce discrete visual tokens that enhance generation quality. To enable accurate and controllable image editing, we propose a progressive multi-stage training pipeline, where segmentation masks are jointly optimized and used as spatial condition prompts to guide the diffusion decoder. This strategy aligns visual encoding, segmentation, and generation modules, effectively bridging segmentation-aware perception with fine-grained visual synthesis. Extensive experiments across three core tasks, including multimodal understanding, referring segmentation accuracy, and controllable image generation, demonstrate that FOCUS achieves strong performance by jointly optimizing visual perception and generative capabilities.

In large language models, the demand for modeling long contexts is constantly increasing, but the quadratic complexity of the standard self-attention mechanism often becomes a bottleneck. Although existing sparse attention mechanisms have improved efficiency, they may still encounter issues such as static patterns or information loss. We introduce a trainable dynamic mask sparse attention mechanism, Dynamic Mask Attention, which effectively utilizes content-aware and position-aware sparsity. DMA achieves this through two key innovations: First, it dynamically generates content-aware sparse masks from value representations, enabling the model to identify and focus on critical information adaptively. Second, it implements position-aware sparse attention computation that effectively skips unnecessary calculation regions. This dual-sparsity design allows the model to significantly reduce the computational complexity of important information while retaining complete information, achieving an excellent balance between information fidelity and computational efficiency. We have verified the performance of DMA through comprehensive experiments. Comparative studies show that DMA outperforms multi-head attention, sliding window attention, multi-head latent attention, and native sparse attention in terms of perplexity under Chinchilla Scaling Law settings. Moreover, in challenging multi-query associative recall tasks, DMA also demonstrates superior performance and efficiency compared to these methods. Crucially, in the evaluation of a 1.7B parameter model, DMA significantly outperforms multi-head attention in both standard benchmark performance and the challenging needle-in-a-haystack task. These experimental results highlight its capability to balance model efficiency and long-context modeling ability effectively.

Recent sparse detectors with multiple, e.g. six, decoder layers achieve promising performance but much inference time due to complex heads. Previous works have explored using dense priors as initialization and built one-decoder-layer detectors. Although they gain remarkable acceleration, their performance still lags behind their six-decoder-layer counterparts by a large margin. In this work, we aim to bridge this performance gap while retaining fast speed. We find that the architecture discrepancy between dense and sparse detectors leads to feature conflict, hampering the performance of one-decoder-layer detectors. Thus we propose Adaptive Sparse Anchor Generator (ASAG) which predicts dynamic anchors on patches rather than grids in a sparse way so that it alleviates the feature conflict problem. For each image, ASAG dynamically selects which feature maps and which locations to predict, forming a fully adaptive way to generate image-specific anchors. Further, a simple and effective Query Weighting method eases the training instability from adaptiveness. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms dense-initialized ones and achieves a better speed-accuracy trade-off. The code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/ASAG.

Many-shot in-context learning has recently shown promise as an alternative to finetuning, with the major advantage that the same model can be served for multiple tasks. However, this shifts the computational burden from training-time to inference-time, making deployment of many-shot ICL challenging to justify in-practice. This cost is further increased if a custom demonstration set is retrieved for each inference example. We present Dynamic Block-Sparse Attention, a training-free framework for retrieval-based many-shot in-context learning. By combining carefully designed block-sparse attention and retrieval of cached groups of demonstrations, we achieve comparable per-example latency to finetuning while maintaining on average >95% of the best method's accuracy across strong ICL and finetuning baselines. We hope that this will further enable the deployment of many-shot ICL at scale.

Block-sparse attention is promising for accelerating long-context LLM pre-filling, yet identifying relevant blocks efficiently remains a bottleneck. Existing methods typically employ coarse-grained attention as a proxy for block importance estimation, but often resort to expensive token-level searching or scoring, resulting in significant selection overhead. In this work, we trace the inaccuracy of standard coarse-grained attention via mean pooling to a theoretical root cause: the interaction between mean pooling and Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE). We prove that mean pooling acts as a low-pass filter that induces destructive interference in high-frequency dimensions, effectively creating a "blind spot" for local positional information (e.g., slash patterns). To address this, we introduce Prism, a training-free spectral-aware approach that decomposes block selection into high-frequency and low-frequency branches. By applying energy-based temperature calibration, Prism restores the attenuated positional signals directly from pooled representations, enabling block importance estimation using purely block-level operations, thereby improving efficiency. Extensive evaluations confirm that Prism maintains accuracy parity with full attention while delivering up to 5.1times speedup.

Fine-tuning the entire set of parameters of a large pretrained model has become the mainstream approach for transfer learning. To increase its efficiency and prevent catastrophic forgetting and interference, techniques like adapters and sparse fine-tuning have been developed. Adapters are modular, as they can be combined to adapt a model towards different facets of knowledge (e.g., dedicated language and/or task adapters). Sparse fine-tuning is expressive, as it controls the behavior of all model components. In this work, we introduce a new fine-tuning method with both these desirable properties. In particular, we learn sparse, real-valued masks based on a simple variant of the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis. Task-specific masks are obtained from annotated data in a source language, and language-specific masks from masked language modeling in a target language. Both these masks can then be composed with the pretrained model. Unlike adapter-based fine-tuning, this method neither increases the number of parameters at inference time nor alters the original model architecture. Most importantly, it outperforms adapters in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by a large margin in a series of multilingual benchmarks, including Universal Dependencies, MasakhaNER, and AmericasNLI. Based on an in-depth analysis, we additionally find that sparsity is crucial to prevent both 1) interference between the fine-tunings to be composed and 2) overfitting. We release the code and models at https://github.com/cambridgeltl/composable-sft.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is the bread and butter of Large Language Model (LLM) finetuning. LoRA learns an additive low-rank perturbation, AB, of a pretrained matrix parameter W to align the model to a new task or dataset with W+AB. We identify three core limitations to LoRA for finetuning--a setting that employs limited amount of data and training steps. First, LoRA employs Dropout to prevent overfitting. We prove that Dropout is only suitable for long training episodes but fails to converge to a reliable regularizer for short training episodes. Second, LoRA's initialization of B at 0 creates a slow training dynamic between A and B. That dynamic is also exacerbated by Dropout that further slows the escape from 0 for B which is particularly harmful for short training episodes. Third, the scaling factor multiplying each LoRA additive perturbation creates ``short-sighted'' interactions between the LoRA modules of different layers. Motivated by principled analysis of those limitations, we find an elegant solution: a Dropout-free, scaling-free, LoRA with Adaptive Learning rate--coined ALLoRA. By scaling the per sample and per parameter gradients with a coefficient inversely proportional to parameters' ell_2 norm, ALLoRA alleviates those three limitations. As a by-product, ALLoRA removes two hyper-parameters from LoRA: the scaling factor and the dropout rate. Empirical results show that ALLoRA admits better accuracy than LoRA on various settings, including against recent LoRA variants such as Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA). Ablation studies show our solution is the optimal in a family of weight-dependent / output-dependent approaches on various LLMs including the latest Llama3.

With the rapid growth in the scale of pre-trained foundation models, parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques have gained significant attention, among which Adapter Tuning is the most widely used. Despite achieving efficiency, Adapter Tuning still underperforms full fine-tuning, and the performance improves at the cost of an increase in parameters. Recent efforts address this issue by pruning the original adapters, but it also introduces training instability and suboptimal performance on certain datasets. Motivated by this, we propose Mixture of Sparse Adapters, or MoSA, as a novel Adapter Tuning method to fully unleash the potential of each parameter in the adapter. We first split the standard adapter into multiple non-overlapping modules, then stochastically activate modules for sparse training, and finally merge them to form a complete adapter after tuning. In this way, MoSA can achieve significantly better performance than standard adapters without any additional computational or storage overhead. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical sparse strategy to better leverage limited training data. Extensive experiments on a series of 27 visual tasks demonstrate that MoSA consistently outperforms other Adapter Tuning methods as well as other baselines by a significant margin. Furthermore, in two challenging scenarios with low-resource and multi-task settings, MoSA achieves satisfactory results, further demonstrating the effectiveness of our design. Our code will be released.

The quadratic computation complexity of self-attention has been a persistent challenge when applying Transformer models to vision tasks. Linear attention, on the other hand, offers a much more efficient alternative with its linear complexity by approximating the Softmax operation through carefully designed mapping functions. However, current linear attention approaches either suffer from significant performance degradation or introduce additional computation overhead from the mapping functions. In this paper, we propose a novel Focused Linear Attention module to achieve both high efficiency and expressiveness. Specifically, we first analyze the factors contributing to the performance degradation of linear attention from two perspectives: the focus ability and feature diversity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a simple yet effective mapping function and an efficient rank restoration module to enhance the expressiveness of self-attention while maintaining low computation complexity. Extensive experiments show that our linear attention module is applicable to a variety of advanced vision Transformers, and achieves consistently improved performances on multiple benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/FLatten-Transformer.