Daily Papers

We investigate the scaling properties of implicit deductive reasoning over Horn clauses in depth-bounded Transformers. By systematically decorrelating provability from spurious features and enforcing algorithmic alignment, we find that in sufficiently deep models with a bidirectional prefix mask, implicit reasoning approaches explicit CoT performance across graph topologies and problem widths, though CoT remains necessary for depth extrapolation.

We focus on addressing the dense backward propagation issue for training efficiency of N:M fine-grained sparsity that preserves at most N out of M consecutive weights and achieves practical speedups supported by the N:M sparse tensor core. Therefore, we present a novel method of Bi-directional Masks (Bi-Mask) with its two central innovations in: 1) Separate sparse masks in the two directions of forward and backward propagation to obtain training acceleration. It disentangles the forward and backward weight sparsity and overcomes the very dense gradient computation. 2) An efficient weight row permutation method to maintain performance. It picks up the permutation candidate with the most eligible N:M weight blocks in the backward to minimize the gradient gap between traditional uni-directional masks and our bi-directional masks. Compared with existing uni-directional scenario that applies a transposable mask and enables backward acceleration, our Bi-Mask is experimentally demonstrated to be more superior in performance. Also, our Bi-Mask performs on par with or even better than methods that fail to achieve backward acceleration. Project of this paper is available at https://github.com/zyxxmu/Bi-Mask.

Autoregressive models excel in modeling sequential dependencies by enforcing causal constraints, yet they struggle to capture complex bidirectional patterns due to their unidirectional nature. In contrast, mask-based models leverage bidirectional context, enabling richer dependency modeling. However, they often assume token independence during prediction, which undermines the modeling of sequential dependencies. Additionally, the corruption of sequences through masking or absorption can introduce unnatural distortions, complicating the learning process. To address these issues, we propose Bidirectional Autoregressive Diffusion (BAD), a novel approach that unifies the strengths of autoregressive and mask-based generative models. BAD utilizes a permutation-based corruption technique that preserves the natural sequence structure while enforcing causal dependencies through randomized ordering, enabling the effective capture of both sequential and bidirectional relationships. Comprehensive experiments show that BAD outperforms autoregressive and mask-based models in text-to-motion generation, suggesting a novel pre-training strategy for sequence modeling. The codebase for BAD is available on https://github.com/RohollahHS/BAD.

Bidirectional transformers are the foundation of many sequence modeling tasks across natural, biological, and chemical language domains, but they are permutation-invariant without explicit positional embeddings. In contrast, unidirectional attention inherently encodes positional information through its triangular mask, enabling models to operate without positional embeddings altogether. Here, we introduce Dual Triangle Attention, a novel bidirectional attention mechanism that separates the query-key subspace of each attention head into two complementary triangular masks: one that attends to past-and-self positions and one that attends to future-and-self positions. This design provides bidirectional context while maintaining the causal mask's implicit positional inductive bias in both directions. Using PyTorch's flex_attention, Dual Triangle Attention is implemented as a single compiled kernel call with no additional parameters beyond standard multi-head attention. We evaluated Dual Triangle Attention across three settings: (1) a synthetic argmax position probe, (2) masked language modeling (MLM) on natural language, and (3) MLM on protein sequences. In the argmax task, both Dual Triangle Attention and causal attention learn positional information without explicit positional embeddings, whereas standard bidirectional attention cannot. In the MLM experiments, Dual Triangle Attention with Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) achieved the best context extension performance and strong performance across the board. These findings suggest that Dual Triangle Attention is a viable attention mechanism for bidirectional transformers, with or without positional embeddings.

The Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) task is a critical branch in the field of OCR. Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating bidirectional context information significantly improves the performance of HMER models. However, existing methods fail to effectively utilize bidirectional context information during the inference stage. Furthermore, current bidirectional training methods are primarily designed for string decoders and cannot adequately generalize to tree decoders, which offer superior generalization capabilities and structural analysis capacity. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose the Mirror-Flipped Symbol Layout Tree (MF-SLT) and Bidirectional Asynchronous Training (BAT) structure. Our method extends the bidirectional training strategy to the tree decoder, allowing for more effective training by leveraging bidirectional information. Additionally, we analyze the impact of the visual and linguistic perception of the HMER model separately and introduce the Shared Language Modeling (SLM) mechanism. Through the SLM, we enhance the model's robustness and generalization when dealing with visual ambiguity, particularly in scenarios with abundant training data. Our approach has been validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating its ability to achieve new state-of-the-art results on the CROHME 2014, 2016, and 2019 datasets, as well as the HME100K dataset. The code used in our experiments will be publicly available.

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs, offering faster inference and greater interactivity via parallel decoding and bidirectional modeling. However, despite strong performance in code generation and text infilling, we identify a fundamental safety concern: existing alignment mechanisms fail to safeguard dLLMs against context-aware, masked-input adversarial prompts, exposing novel vulnerabilities. To this end, we present DIJA, the first systematic study and jailbreak attack framework that exploits unique safety weaknesses of dLLMs. Specifically, our proposed DIJA constructs adversarial interleaved mask-text prompts that exploit the text generation mechanisms of dLLMs, i.e., bidirectional modeling and parallel decoding. Bidirectional modeling drives the model to produce contextually consistent outputs for masked spans, even when harmful, while parallel decoding limits model dynamic filtering and rejection sampling of unsafe content. This causes standard alignment mechanisms to fail, enabling harmful completions in alignment-tuned dLLMs, even when harmful behaviors or unsafe instructions are directly exposed in the prompt. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that DIJA significantly outperforms existing jailbreak methods, exposing a previously overlooked threat surface in dLLM architectures. Notably, our method achieves up to 100% keyword-based ASR on Dream-Instruct, surpassing the strongest prior baseline, ReNeLLM, by up to 78.5% in evaluator-based ASR on JailbreakBench and by 37.7 points in StrongREJECT score, while requiring no rewriting or hiding of harmful content in the jailbreak prompt. Our findings underscore the urgent need for rethinking safety alignment in this emerging class of language models. Code is available at https://github.com/ZichenWen1/DIJA.

Beyond parallel generation and global context modeling, current masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) suffer from a fundamental limitation: they require a predefined, fixed generation length, which lacks flexibility and forces an inevitable trade-off between output quality and computational efficiency. To address this, we study the denoising dynamics and find that the implicit density (ρ) of end-of-sequence (EOS) tokens serves as a reliable signal of generation sufficiency. In particular, the evolving implicit EOS density during denoising reveals whether the current masked space is excessive or insufficient, thereby guiding the adjustment direction for generation length. Building on this insight, we propose $ρ-texttt{EOS}, a training-free, single-stage strategy that enables bidirectional variable-length generation for masked dLLMs. Unlike prior two-stage approaches--which require separate length adjustment and iterative mask insertion phases while supporting only unidirectional expansion--ρ-texttt{EOS} achieves bidirectional length adjustment within a unified denoising process by continuously estimating the implicit EOS density: excessively high density triggers MASK token contraction, while insufficient density induces expansion. Extensive experiments on mathematics and code benchmarks demonstrate that ρ-texttt{EOS}$ achieves comparable performance while substantially improving inference efficiency and token utilization.

We show how bidirectional transformers trained for masked token prediction can be applied to neural image compression to achieve state-of-the-art results. Such models were previously used for image generation by progressivly sampling groups of masked tokens according to uncertainty-adaptive schedules. Unlike these works, we demonstrate that predefined, deterministic schedules perform as well or better for image compression. This insight allows us to use masked attention during training in addition to masked inputs, and activation caching during inference, to significantly speed up our models (~4 higher inference speed) at a small increase in bitrate.

Online video understanding is essential for applications like public surveillance and AI glasses. However, applying Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to this domain is challenging due to the large number of video frames, resulting in high GPU memory usage and computational latency. To address these challenges, we propose token pruning as a means to reduce context length while retaining critical information. Specifically, we introduce a novel redundancy metric, Maximum Similarity to Spatially Adjacent Video Tokens (MSSAVT), which accounts for both token similarity and spatial position. To mitigate the bidirectional dependency between pruning and redundancy, we further design a masked pruning strategy that ensures only mutually unadjacent tokens are pruned. We also integrate an existing temporal redundancy-based pruning method to eliminate temporal redundancy of the video modality. Experimental results on multiple online and offline video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly improves the accuracy (i.e., by 4\% at most) while incurring a negligible pruning latency (i.e., less than 1ms). Our full implementation will be made publicly available.

Generative transformers have experienced rapid popularity growth in the computer vision community in synthesizing high-fidelity and high-resolution images. The best generative transformer models so far, however, still treat an image naively as a sequence of tokens, and decode an image sequentially following the raster scan ordering (i.e. line-by-line). We find this strategy neither optimal nor efficient. This paper proposes a novel image synthesis paradigm using a bidirectional transformer decoder, which we term MaskGIT. During training, MaskGIT learns to predict randomly masked tokens by attending to tokens in all directions. At inference time, the model begins with generating all tokens of an image simultaneously, and then refines the image iteratively conditioned on the previous generation. Our experiments demonstrate that MaskGIT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art transformer model on the ImageNet dataset, and accelerates autoregressive decoding by up to 64x. Besides, we illustrate that MaskGIT can be easily extended to various image editing tasks, such as inpainting, extrapolation, and image manipulation.

Image outpainting is a very intriguing problem as the outside of a given image can be continuously filled by considering as the context of the image. This task has two main challenges. The first is to maintain the spatial consistency in contents of generated regions and the original input. The second is to generate a high-quality large image with a small amount of adjacent information. Conventional image outpainting methods generate inconsistent, blurry, and repeated pixels. To alleviate the difficulty of an outpainting problem, we propose a novel image outpainting method using bidirectional boundary region rearrangement. We rearrange the image to benefit from the image inpainting task by reflecting more directional information. The bidirectional boundary region rearrangement enables the generation of the missing region using bidirectional information similar to that of the image inpainting task, thereby generating the higher quality than the conventional methods using unidirectional information. Moreover, we use the edge map generator that considers images as original input with structural information and hallucinates the edges of unknown regions to generate the image. Our proposed method is compared with other state-of-the-art outpainting and inpainting methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. We further compared and evaluated them using BRISQUE, one of the No-Reference image quality assessment (IQA) metrics, to evaluate the naturalness of the output. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other methods and generates new images with 360{\deg}panoramic characteristics.

The remarkable performance of large multimodal models (LMMs) has attracted significant interest from the image segmentation community. To align with the next-token-prediction paradigm, current LMM-driven segmentation methods either use object boundary points to represent masks or introduce special segmentation tokens, whose hidden states are decoded by a segmentation model requiring the original image as input. However, these approaches often suffer from inadequate mask representation and complex architectures, limiting the potential of LMMs. In this work, we propose the Hierarchical Mask Tokenizer (HiMTok), which represents segmentation masks with up to 32 tokens and eliminates the need for the original image during mask de-tokenization. HiMTok allows for compact and coarse-to-fine mask representations, aligning well with the LLM next-token-prediction paradigm and facilitating the direct acquisition of segmentation capabilities. We develop a 3-stage training recipe for progressive learning of segmentation and visual capabilities, featuring a hierarchical mask loss for effective coarse-to-fine learning. Additionally, we enable bidirectional information flow, allowing conversion between bounding boxes and mask tokens to fully leverage multi-task training potential. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various segmentation tasks,while also enhancing visual grounding and maintaining overall visual understanding.

The main advantages of diffusion language models over autoregressive (AR) models lie in their ability to support parallel generation and bidirectional attention, enabling a more controllable generation process. In recent years, open-source mask diffusion language models have emerged, most of which are based on a variant known as absorbing diffusion. However, this paper demonstrates why mask diffusion faces inherent difficulties in achieving parallel generation and bidirectional attention. We also propose the most effective training and inference strategies for mask diffusion.

Recent Vision Transformer Compression (VTC) works mainly follow a two-stage scheme, where the importance score of each model unit is first evaluated or preset in each submodule, followed by the sparsity score evaluation according to the target sparsity constraint. Such a separate evaluation process induces the gap between importance and sparsity score distributions, thus causing high search costs for VTC. In this work, for the first time, we investigate how to integrate the evaluations of importance and sparsity scores into a single stage, searching the optimal subnets in an efficient manner. Specifically, we present OFB, a cost-efficient approach that simultaneously evaluates both importance and sparsity scores, termed Once for Both (OFB), for VTC. First, a bi-mask scheme is developed by entangling the importance score and the differentiable sparsity score to jointly determine the pruning potential (prunability) of each unit. Such a bi-mask search strategy is further used together with a proposed adaptive one-hot loss to realize the progressive-and-efficient search for the most important subnet. Finally, Progressive Masked Image Modeling (PMIM) is proposed to regularize the feature space to be more representative during the search process, which may be degraded by the dimension reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OFB can achieve superior compression performance over state-of-the-art searching-based and pruning-based methods under various Vision Transformer architectures, meanwhile promoting search efficiency significantly, e.g., costing one GPU search day for the compression of DeiT-S on ImageNet-1K.

Video outpainting aims to adequately complete missing areas at the edges of video frames. Compared to image outpainting, it presents an additional challenge as the model should maintain the temporal consistency of the filled area. In this paper, we introduce a masked 3D diffusion model for video outpainting. We use the technique of mask modeling to train the 3D diffusion model. This allows us to use multiple guide frames to connect the results of multiple video clip inferences, thus ensuring temporal consistency and reducing jitter between adjacent frames. Meanwhile, we extract the global frames of the video as prompts and guide the model to obtain information other than the current video clip using cross-attention. We also introduce a hybrid coarse-to-fine inference pipeline to alleviate the artifact accumulation problem. The existing coarse-to-fine pipeline only uses the infilling strategy, which brings degradation because the time interval of the sparse frames is too large. Our pipeline benefits from bidirectional learning of the mask modeling and thus can employ a hybrid strategy of infilling and interpolation when generating sparse frames. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in video outpainting tasks. More results are provided at our https://fanfanda.github.io/M3DDM/.

Masked generative models (MGMs) have emerged as a powerful framework for image synthesis, combining parallel decoding with strong bidirectional context modeling. However, generating high-quality samples typically requires many iterative decoding steps, resulting in high inference costs. A straightforward way to speed up generation is by decoding more tokens in each step, thereby reducing the total number of steps. However, when many tokens are decoded simultaneously, the model can only estimate the univariate marginal distributions independently, failing to capture the dependency among them. As a result, reducing the number of steps significantly compromises generation fidelity. In this work, we introduce ReCAP (Reused Context-Aware Prediction), a plug-and-play module that accelerates inference in MGMs by constructing low-cost steps via reusing feature embeddings from previously decoded context tokens. ReCAP interleaves standard full evaluations with lightweight steps that cache and reuse context features, substantially reducing computation while preserving the benefits of fine-grained, iterative generation. We demonstrate its effectiveness on top of three representative MGMs (MaskGIT, MAGE, and MAR), including both discrete and continuous token spaces and covering diverse architectural designs. In particular, on ImageNet256 class-conditional generation, ReCAP achieves up to 2.4x faster inference than the base model with minimal performance drop, and consistently delivers better efficiency-fidelity trade-offs under various generation settings.

Pre-trained language models based on masked language modeling (MLM) objective excel in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. While fine-tuned MLM-based encoders consistently outperform causal language modeling decoders of comparable size, a recent trend of scaling decoder models to multiple billion parameters resulted in large language models (LLMs), making them competitive with MLM-based encoders. Although scale amplifies their prowess in NLU tasks, LLMs fall short of SOTA results in information extraction (IE) tasks, many framed as sequence labeling (SL). However, whether this is an intrinsic limitation of LLMs or whether their SL performance can be improved remains unclear. To address this, we explore strategies to enhance the SL performance of "open" LLMs (Llama2 and Mistral) on IE tasks. We investigate bidirectional information flow within groups of decoder blocks, applying layer-wise removal or enforcement of the causal mask (CM) during LLM fine-tuning. This approach yields performance gains competitive with SOTA SL models, matching or outperforming the results of CM removal from all blocks. Our findings hold for diverse SL tasks, proving that "open" LLMs with layer-dependent CM removal outperform strong MLM-based encoders and instruction-tuned LLMs. However, we observe no effect from CM removal on a small scale when maintaining an equivalent model size, pre-training steps, and pre-training and fine-tuning data.

Masked diffusion language models (dLMs) generate text through bidirectional denoising, yet this capability remains locked for infilling prompts. This limitation is an artifact of the current supervised finetuning (SFT) convention of applying response-only masking. To unlock this capability, we extend full-sequence masking during SFT, where both prompts and responses are masked jointly. Once unlocked, the model infills masked portions of a prompt template conditioned on few-shot examples. We show that such model-infilled prompts match or surpass manually designed templates, transfer effectively across models, and are complementary to existing prompt optimization methods. Our results suggest that training practices, not architectural limitations, are the primary bottleneck preventing masked diffusion language models from infilling effective prompts

Decoder-only large language models are increasingly used as behavioral encoders for user representation learning, yet the impact of attention masking on the quality of user embeddings remains underexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of causal, hybrid, and bidirectional attention masks within a unified contrastive learning framework trained on large-scale real-world Alipay data that integrates long-horizon heterogeneous user behaviors. To improve training dynamics when transitioning from causal to bidirectional attention, we propose Gradient-Guided Soft Masking, a gradient-based pre-warmup applied before a linear scheduler that gradually opens future attention during optimization. Evaluated on 9 industrial user cognition benchmarks covering prediction, preference, and marketing sensitivity tasks, our approach consistently yields more stable training and higher-quality bidirectional representations compared with causal, hybrid, and scheduler-only baselines, while remaining compatible with decoder pretraining. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of masking design and training transition in adapting decoder-only LLMs for effective user representation learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/JhCircle/Deepfind-GGSM.

Autoregressive (AR) generation is the standard decoding paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs), but its token-by-token nature limits parallelism at inference time. Diffusion Language Models (DLLMs) offer parallel decoding by recovering multiple masked tokens per step; however, in practice they often fail to translate this parallelism into deployment speed gains over optimized AR engines (e.g., vLLM). A key reason is that many DLLMs rely on bidirectional attention, which breaks standard prefix KV caching and forces repeated contextualization, undermining efficiency. We propose WeDLM, a diffusion decoding framework built entirely on standard causal attention to make parallel generation prefix-cache friendly. The core idea is to let each masked position condition on all currently observed tokens while keeping a strict causal mask, achieved by Topological Reordering that moves observed tokens to the physical prefix while preserving their logical positions. Building on this property, we introduce a streaming decoding procedure that continuously commits confident tokens into a growing left-to-right prefix and maintains a fixed parallel workload, avoiding the stop-and-wait behavior common in block diffusion methods. Experiments show that WeDLM preserves the quality of strong AR backbones while delivering substantial speedups, approaching 3x on challenging reasoning benchmarks and up to 10x in low-entropy generation regimes; critically, our comparisons are against AR baselines served by vLLM under matched deployment settings, demonstrating that diffusion-style decoding can outperform an optimized AR engine in practice.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is increasingly regarded as a foundational capability for modern vision-language models (VLMs), enabling them not only to read text in images but also to support downstream reasoning in real-world visual question answering (VQA). However, practical applications further require reliable text anchors, i.e., accurately grounding queried text to its corresponding spatial region. To systematically evaluate this capability, we introduce TextAnchor-Bench (TABench), a benchmark for fine-grained text-region grounding, which reveals that both general-purpose and OCR-specific VLMs still struggle to establish accurate and stable text anchors. To address this limitation, we propose Q-Mask, a precise OCR framework built upon a causal query-driven mask decoder (CQMD). Inspired by chain-of-thought reasoning, Q-Mask performs causal visual decoding that sequentially generates query-conditioned visual masks before producing the final OCR output. This visual CoT paradigm disentangles where the text is from what the text is, enforcing grounded evidence acquisition prior to recognition and enabling explicit text anchor construction during inference. To train CQMD, we construct TextAnchor-26M, a large-scale dataset of image-text pairs annotated with fine-grained masks corresponding to specific textual elements, encouraging stable text-region correspondences and injecting strong spatial priors into VLM training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Mask substantially improves text anchoring and understanding across diverse visual scenes.

We tackle the challenge of open-vocabulary segmentation, where we need to identify objects from a wide range of categories in different environments, using text prompts as our input. To overcome this challenge, existing methods often use multi-modal models like CLIP, which combine image and text features in a shared embedding space to bridge the gap between limited and extensive vocabulary recognition, resulting in a two-stage approach: In the first stage, a mask generator takes an input image to generate mask proposals, and the in the second stage the target mask is picked based on the query. However, the expected target mask may not exist in the generated mask proposals, which leads to an unexpected output mask. In our work, we propose a novel approach named Prompt-guided Mask Proposal (PMP) where the mask generator takes the input text prompts and generates masks guided by these prompts. Compared with mask proposals generated without input prompts, masks generated by PMP are better aligned with the input prompts. To realize PMP, we designed a cross-attention mechanism between text tokens and query tokens which is capable of generating prompt-guided mask proposals after each decoding. We combined our PMP with several existing works employing a query-based segmentation backbone and the experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, showcasing significant improvements over the current two-stage models (1% ~ 3% absolute performance gain in terms of mIOU). The steady improvement in performance across these benchmarks indicates the effective generalization of our proposed lightweight prompt-aware method.

AutoRegressive (AR) models have made notable progress in image generation, with Masked AutoRegressive (MAR) models gaining attention for their efficient parallel decoding. However, MAR models have traditionally underperformed when compared to standard AR models. This study refines the MAR architecture to improve image generation quality. We begin by evaluating various image tokenizers to identify the most effective one. Subsequently, we introduce an improved Bidirectional LLaMA architecture by replacing causal attention with bidirectional attention and incorporating 2D RoPE, which together form our advanced model, MaskGIL. Scaled from 111M to 1.4B parameters, MaskGIL achieves a FID score of 3.71, matching state-of-the-art AR models in the ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, while requiring only 8 inference steps compared to the 256 steps of AR models. Furthermore, we develop a text-driven MaskGIL model with 775M parameters for generating images from text at various resolutions. Beyond image generation, MaskGIL extends to accelerate AR-based generation and enable real-time speech-to-image conversion. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/synbol/MaskGIL.

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can solve a wide range of tasks requiring visual reasoning. In real-world scenarios, desirable properties for VLMs include fast inference and controllable generation (e.g., constraining outputs to adhere to a desired format). However, existing autoregressive (AR) VLMs like LLaVA struggle in these aspects. Discrete diffusion models (DMs) offer a promising alternative, enabling parallel decoding for faster inference and bidirectional context for controllable generation through text-infilling. While effective in language-only settings, DMs' potential for multimodal tasks is underexplored. We introduce LaViDa, a family of VLMs built on DMs. We build LaViDa by equipping DMs with a vision encoder and jointly fine-tune the combined parts for multimodal instruction following. To address challenges encountered, LaViDa incorporates novel techniques such as complementary masking for effective training, prefix KV cache for efficient inference, and timestep shifting for high-quality sampling. Experiments show that LaViDa achieves competitive or superior performance to AR VLMs on multi-modal benchmarks such as MMMU, while offering unique advantages of DMs, including flexible speed-quality tradeoff, controllability, and bidirectional reasoning. On COCO captioning, LaViDa surpasses Open-LLaVa-Next-8B by +4.1 CIDEr with 1.92x speedup. On bidirectional tasks, it achieves +59% improvement on Constrained Poem Completion. These results demonstrate LaViDa as a strong alternative to AR VLMs. Code and models will be released in the camera-ready version.

Image generation models have encountered challenges related to scalability and quadratic complexity, primarily due to the reliance on Transformer-based backbones. In this study, we introduce MaskMamba, a novel hybrid model that combines Mamba and Transformer architectures, utilizing Masked Image Modeling for non-autoregressive image synthesis. We meticulously redesign the bidirectional Mamba architecture by implementing two key modifications: (1) replacing causal convolutions with standard convolutions to better capture global context, and (2) utilizing concatenation instead of multiplication, which significantly boosts performance while accelerating inference speed. Additionally, we explore various hybrid schemes of MaskMamba, including both serial and grouped parallel arrangements. Furthermore, we incorporate an in-context condition that allows our model to perform both class-to-image and text-to-image generation tasks. Our MaskMamba outperforms Mamba-based and Transformer-based models in generation quality. Notably, it achieves a remarkable 54.44% improvement in inference speed at a resolution of 2048times 2048 over Transformer.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at generation but dominant autoregressive (AR) decoding is inherently sequential, creating a throughput bottleneck. Diffusion Language Models (DLMs)--especially block-wise variants--enable parallel generation and intra-block bidirectional reasoning, yet training large DLMs from scratch is costly and wastes the knowledge in mature AR checkpoints. Prior "adaptation" attempts either modify logits or randomly grow attention masks to full-sequence diffusion, or simply transplant AR weights into a block-diffusion recipe, leaving a fundamental mismatch between AR causality and block-wise bidirectionality unaddressed. We reframe adaptation as a intra-paradigm path from AR to Block-Diffusion by viewing AR as Block-Diffusion with blocksize=1. Concretely, we design the pathway of adaptation as follows: we use a context-causal attention mask (causal in context, bidirectional only within the active block), an efficient parallel adaptation procedure, an auxiliary AR loss to maximize data utilization and retain pretrained knowledge, and gradual increment of the generation block size. The recipe integrates cleanly with masked block-diffusion and maintains train-inference consistency. Built on these components, NBDiff-7B (Base and Instruct) could inherit the long-context modeling and reasoning capabilities, and achieve state-of-the-art performance among the 7B-class DLMs, delivering strong gains on general-knowledge, math, and code benchmarks over strong baselines. These results demonstrate that principled AR-to-block-diffusion adaptation is an effective and compute-efficient alternative to training DLMs from scratch. Codes: https://github.com/YuchuanTian/NBDiff.

Transforming causal generative language models into bidirectional encoders offers a powerful alternative to BERT-style architectures. However, current approaches remain limited: they lack consensus on optimal training objectives, suffer from catastrophic forgetting at scale, and fail to flexibly integrate the vast ecosystem of specialized generative models. In this work, through systematic ablations on the Gemma3 and Qwen3 families, we identify the key factors driving successful adaptation, highlighting the critical role of an often-omitted prior masking phase. To scale this process without original pre-training data, we introduce a dual strategy combining linear weight merging with a lightweight multi-domain data mixture that mitigates catastrophic forgetting. Finally, we augment our encoders by merging them with specialized causal models, seamlessly transferring modality- and domain-specific capabilities. This open-source recipe, designed for any causal decoder LLM, yields BidirLM, a family of five encoders that outperform alternatives on text, vision, and audio representation benchmarks.

While explicit positional encodings such as RoPE are a primary source of positional information in Transformer decoders, the causal mask also provides positional information. In this work, we prove that the causal mask can induce position-dependent patterns in attention scores, even without parameters or causal dependency in the input. Our theoretical analysis indicates that the induced attention pattern tends to favor nearby query-key pairs, mirroring the behavior of common positional encodings. Empirical analysis confirms that trained models exhibit the same behavior, with learned parameters further amplifying these patterns. Notably, we found that the interaction of causal mask and RoPE distorts RoPE's relative attention score patterns into non-relative ones. We consistently observed this effect in modern large language models, suggesting the importance of considering the causal mask as a source of positional information alongside explicit positional encodings.

Masked Image Generation Models (MIGMs) have achieved great success, yet their efficiency is hampered by the multiple steps of bi-directional attention. In fact, there exists notable redundancy in their computation: when sampling discrete tokens, the rich semantics contained in the continuous features are lost. Some existing works attempt to cache the features to approximate future features. However, they exhibit considerable approximation error under aggressive acceleration rates. We attribute this to their limited expressivity and the failure to account for sampling information. To fill this gap, we propose to learn a lightweight model that incorporates both previous features and sampled tokens, and regresses the average velocity field of feature evolution. The model has moderate complexity that suffices to capture the subtle dynamics while keeping lightweight compared to the original base model. We apply our method, MIGM-Shortcut, to two representative MIGM architectures and tasks. In particular, on the state-of-the-art Lumina-DiMOO, it achieves over 4x acceleration of text-to-image generation while maintaining quality, significantly pushing the Pareto frontier of masked image generation. The code and model weights are available at https://github.com/Kaiwen-Zhu/MIGM-Shortcut.

Diffusion language models (dLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm that enables parallel, non-autoregressive generation, but their learning efficiency lags behind that of autoregressive (AR) language models when trained from scratch. To this end, we study AR-to-dLM conversion to transform pretrained AR models into efficient dLMs that excel in speed while preserving AR models' task accuracy. We achieve this by identifying limitations in the attention patterns and objectives of existing AR-to-dLM methods and then proposing principles and methodologies for more effective AR-to-dLM conversion. Specifically, we first systematically compare different attention patterns and find that maintaining pretrained AR weight distributions is critical for effective AR-to-dLM conversion. As such, we introduce a continuous pretraining scheme with a block-wise attention pattern, which remains causal across blocks while enabling bidirectional modeling within each block. We find that this approach can better preserve pretrained AR models' weight distributions than fully bidirectional modeling, in addition to its known benefit of enabling KV caching, and leads to a win-win in accuracy and efficiency. Second, to mitigate the training-test gap in mask token distributions (uniform vs. highly left-to-right), we propose a position-dependent token masking strategy that assigns higher masking probabilities to later tokens during training to better mimic test-time behavior. Leveraging this framework, we conduct extensive studies of dLMs' attention patterns, training dynamics, and other design choices, providing actionable insights into scalable AR-to-dLM conversion. These studies lead to the Efficient-DLM family, which outperforms state-of-the-art AR models and dLMs, e.g., our Efficient-DLM 8B achieves +5.4%/+2.7% higher accuracy with 4.5x/2.7x higher throughput compared to Dream 7B and Qwen3 4B, respectively.

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.

We present MaskMark, a simple, efficient and flexible framework for image watermarking. MaskMark has two variants: MaskMark-D, which supports global watermark embedding, watermark localization, and local watermark extraction for applications such as tamper detection, and MaskMark-ED, which focuses on local watermark embedding and extraction with enhanced robustness in small regions, enabling localized image protection. Built upon the classical Encoder- Distortion-Decoder training paradigm, MaskMark-D introduces a simple masking mechanism during the decoding stage to support both global and local watermark extraction. A mask is applied to the watermarked image before extraction, allowing the decoder to focus on selected regions and learn local extraction. A localization module is also integrated into the decoder to identify watermark regions during inference, reducing interference from irrelevant content and improving accuracy. MaskMark-ED extends this design by incorporating the mask into the encoding stage as well, guiding the encoder to embed the watermark in designated local regions for enhanced robustness. Comprehensive experiments show that MaskMark achieves state-of-the-art performance in global watermark extraction, local watermark extraction, watermark localization, and multi-watermark embedding. It outperforms all existing baselines, including the recent leading model WAM for local watermarking, while preserving high visual quality of the watermarked images. MaskMark is also flexible, by adjusting the distortion layer, it can adapt to different robustness requirements with just a few steps of fine-tuning. Moreover, our approach is efficient and easy to optimize, requiring only 20 hours on a single A6000 GPU with just 1/15 the computational cost of WAM.

Recent alignment studies commonly remove introductory boilerplate phrases from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets. This work challenges that assumption. We hypothesize that safety- and reasoning-oriented prefix sentences serve as lightweight alignment signals that can guide model decoding toward safer and more coherent responses. To examine this, we fine-tune three R1 series models across three core model capabilities: reasoning (mathematics, coding), safety, and factuality, systematically varying prefix inclusion from 0% to 100%. Results show that prefix-conditioned SFT improves both safety and reasoning performance, yielding up to +6% higher Safe@1 accuracy on adversarial benchmarks (WildJailbreak, StrongReject) and +7% improvement on GSM8K reasoning. However, factuality and coding tasks show marginal or negative effects, indicating that prefix-induced narrowing of the search space benefits structured reasoning. Token-level loss analysis further reveals that prefix tokens such as "revised" and "logically" incur higher gradient magnitudes, acting as alignment anchors that stabilize reasoning trajectories. Our findings suggest that prefix conditioning offers a scalable and interpretable mechanism for improving reasoning safety, serving as an implicit form of alignment that complements traditional reward-based methods.

Network pruning is an effective approach to reduce network complexity with acceptable performance compromise. Existing studies achieve the sparsity of neural networks via time-consuming weight training or complex searching on networks with expanded width, which greatly limits the applications of network pruning. In this paper, we show that high-performing and sparse sub-networks without the involvement of weight training, termed "lottery jackpots", exist in pre-trained models with unexpanded width. Furthermore, we improve the efficiency for searching lottery jackpots from two perspectives. Firstly, we observe that the sparse masks derived from many existing pruning criteria have a high overlap with the searched mask of our lottery jackpot, among which, the magnitude-based pruning results in the most similar mask with ours. Consequently, our searched lottery jackpot removes 90% weights in ResNet-50, while it easily obtains more than 70% top-1 accuracy using only 5 searching epochs on ImageNet. In compliance with this insight, we initialize our sparse mask using the magnitude-based pruning, resulting in at least 3x cost reduction on the lottery jackpot searching while achieving comparable or even better performance. Secondly, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the searching process for lottery jackpots. Our theoretical result suggests that the decrease in training loss during weight searching can be disturbed by the dependency between weights in modern networks. To mitigate this, we propose a novel short restriction method to restrict change of masks that may have potential negative impacts on the training loss. Our code is available at https://github.com/zyxxmu/lottery-jackpots.

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs), leveraging a denoising objective that, in principle, should enable more uniform context utilisation. In this work, we examine the context comprehension abilities of MDLMs and uncover two key limitations. First, despite their more global training objective and bidirectional attention mechanism, similarly to ARLMS, MDLMs exhibit a strong locality bias: performance is highly sensitive to the position of relevant information within the input, favouring local over distant context. Second, we show that appending a large number of mask tokens--required for generation--can significantly degrade context comprehension. Through systematic ablations, we find that these masks act as distractors, reducing the model's ability to process relevant information. To address this, we introduce a mask-agnostic loss function that encourages predictions to remain invariant to the number of appended masks. Fine-tuning with this objective substantially mitigates the distracting effect of masks, improving robustness of MDLMs. Overall, our findings reveal critical limitations of the current MDLM training paradigm and provide actionable insights for building diffusion-based language models with stronger context comprehension.

The lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) has increased attention to pruning neural networks at initialization. We study this problem in the linear setting. We show that finding a sparse mask at initialization is equivalent to the sketching problem introduced for efficient matrix multiplication. This gives us tools to analyze the LTH problem and gain insights into it. Specifically, using the mask found at initialization, we bound the approximation error of the pruned linear model at the end of training. We theoretically justify previous empirical evidence that the search for sparse networks may be data independent. By using the sketching perspective, we suggest a generic improvement to existing algorithms for pruning at initialization, which we show to be beneficial in the data-independent case.

Prompt tuning and adapter tuning have shown great potential in transferring pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to various downstream tasks. In this work, we design a new type of tuning method, termed as regularized mask tuning, which masks the network parameters through a learnable selection. Inspired by neural pathways, we argue that the knowledge required by a downstream task already exists in the pre-trained weights but just gets concealed in the upstream pre-training stage. To bring the useful knowledge back into light, we first identify a set of parameters that are important to a given downstream task, then attach a binary mask to each parameter, and finally optimize these masks on the downstream data with the parameters frozen. When updating the mask, we introduce a novel gradient dropout strategy to regularize the parameter selection, in order to prevent the model from forgetting old knowledge and overfitting the downstream data. Experimental results on 11 datasets demonstrate the consistent superiority of our method over previous alternatives. It is noteworthy that we manage to deliver 18.73% performance improvement compared to the zero-shot CLIP via masking an average of only 2.56% parameters. Furthermore, our method is synergistic with most existing parameter-efficient tuning methods and can boost the performance on top of them. Project page can be found here (https://wuw2019.github.io/R-AMT/).

Since sparse neural networks usually contain many zero weights, these unnecessary network connections can potentially be eliminated without degrading network performance. Therefore, well-designed sparse neural networks have the potential to significantly reduce FLOPs and computational resources. In this work, we propose a new automatic pruning method - Sparse Connectivity Learning (SCL). Specifically, a weight is re-parameterized as an element-wise multiplication of a trainable weight variable and a binary mask. Thus, network connectivity is fully described by the binary mask, which is modulated by a unit step function. We theoretically prove the fundamental principle of using a straight-through estimator (STE) for network pruning. This principle is that the proxy gradients of STE should be positive, ensuring that mask variables converge at their minima. After finding Leaky ReLU, Softplus, and Identity STEs can satisfy this principle, we propose to adopt Identity STE in SCL for discrete mask relaxation. We find that mask gradients of different features are very unbalanced, hence, we propose to normalize mask gradients of each feature to optimize mask variable training. In order to automatically train sparse masks, we include the total number of network connections as a regularization term in our objective function. As SCL does not require pruning criteria or hyper-parameters defined by designers for network layers, the network is explored in a larger hypothesis space to achieve optimized sparse connectivity for the best performance. SCL overcomes the limitations of existing automatic pruning methods. Experimental results demonstrate that SCL can automatically learn and select important network connections for various baseline network structures. Deep learning models trained by SCL outperform the SOTA human-designed and automatic pruning methods in sparsity, accuracy, and FLOPs reduction.

Instruction following is crucial in contemporary LLM. However, when extended to multimodal setting, it often suffers from misalignment between specific textual instruction and targeted local region of an image. To achieve more accurate and nuanced multimodal instruction following, we introduce Instruction-guided Visual Masking (IVM), a new versatile visual grounding model that is compatible with diverse multimodal models, such as LMM and robot model. By constructing visual masks for instruction-irrelevant regions, IVM-enhanced multimodal models can effectively focus on task-relevant image regions to better align with complex instructions. Specifically, we design a visual masking data generation pipeline and create an IVM-Mix-1M dataset with 1 million image-instruction pairs. We further introduce a new learning technique, Discriminator Weighted Supervised Learning (DWSL) for preferential IVM training that prioritizes high-quality data samples. Experimental results on generic multimodal tasks such as VQA and embodied robotic control demonstrate the versatility of IVM, which as a plug-and-play tool, significantly boosts the performance of diverse multimodal models, yielding new state-of-the-art results across challenging multimodal benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/2toinf/IVM.

Recently, masked video modeling has been widely explored and significantly improved the model's understanding ability of visual regions at a local level. However, existing methods usually adopt random masking and follow the same reconstruction paradigm to complete the masked regions, which do not leverage the correlations between cross-modal content. In this paper, we present Mask for Semantics Completion (MASCOT) based on semantic-based masked modeling. Specifically, after applying attention-based video masking to generate high-informed and low-informed masks, we propose Informed Semantics Completion to recover masked semantics information. The recovery mechanism is achieved by aligning the masked content with the unmasked visual regions and corresponding textual context, which makes the model capture more text-related details at a patch level. Additionally, we shift the emphasis of reconstruction from irrelevant backgrounds to discriminative parts to ignore regions with low-informed masks. Furthermore, we design dual-mask co-learning to incorporate video cues under different masks and learn more aligned video representation. Our MASCOT performs state-of-the-art performance on four major text-video retrieval benchmarks, including MSR-VTT, LSMDC, ActivityNet, and DiDeMo. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.

Recent open-vocabulary segmentation methods adopt mask generators to predict segmentation masks and leverage pre-trained vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, to classify these masks via mask pooling. Although these approaches show promising results, it is counterintuitive that accurate masks often fail to yield accurate classification results through pooling CLIP image embeddings within the mask regions. In this paper, we reveal the performance limitations of mask pooling and introduce Mask-Adapter, a simple yet effective method to address these challenges in open-vocabulary segmentation. Compared to directly using proposal masks, our proposed Mask-Adapter extracts semantic activation maps from proposal masks, providing richer contextual information and ensuring alignment between masks and CLIP. Additionally, we propose a mask consistency loss that encourages proposal masks with similar IoUs to obtain similar CLIP embeddings to enhance models' robustness to varying predicted masks. Mask-Adapter integrates seamlessly into open-vocabulary segmentation methods based on mask pooling in a plug-and-play manner, delivering more accurate classification results. Extensive experiments across several zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate significant performance gains for the proposed Mask-Adapter on several well-established methods. Notably, Mask-Adapter also extends effectively to SAM and achieves impressive results on several open-vocabulary segmentation datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/MaskAdapter.

The exponential growth in numbers of parameters of neural networks over the past years has been accompanied by an increase in performance across several fields. However, due to their sheer size, the networks not only became difficult to interpret but also problematic to train and use in real-world applications, since hardware requirements increased accordingly. Tackling both issues, we present a novel approach that either drops a neural network's initial weights or inverts their respective sign. Put simply, a network is trained by weight selection and inversion without changing their absolute values. Our contribution extends previous work on masking by additionally sign-inverting the initial weights and follows the findings of the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis. Through this extension and adaptations of initialization methods, we achieve a pruning rate of up to 99%, while still matching or exceeding the performance of various baseline and previous models. Our approach has two main advantages. First, and most notable, signed Supermask models drastically simplify a model's structure, while still performing well on given tasks. Second, by reducing the neural network to its very foundation, we gain insights into which weights matter for performance. The code is available on GitHub.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are distinguished by their massive parameter counts, which typically result in significant redundancy. This work introduces MaskLLM, a learnable pruning method that establishes Semi-structured (or ``N:M'') Sparsity in LLMs, aimed at reducing computational overhead during inference. Instead of developing a new importance criterion, MaskLLM explicitly models N:M patterns as a learnable distribution through Gumbel Softmax sampling. This approach facilitates end-to-end training on large-scale datasets and offers two notable advantages: 1) High-quality Masks - our method effectively scales to large datasets and learns accurate masks; 2) Transferability - the probabilistic modeling of mask distribution enables the transfer learning of sparsity across domains or tasks. We assessed MaskLLM using 2:4 sparsity on various LLMs, including LLaMA-2, Nemotron-4, and GPT-3, with sizes ranging from 843M to 15B parameters, and our empirical results show substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods. For instance, leading approaches achieve a perplexity (PPL) of 10 or greater on Wikitext compared to the dense model's 5.12 PPL, but MaskLLM achieves a significantly lower 6.72 PPL solely by learning the masks with frozen weights. Furthermore, MaskLLM's learnable nature allows customized masks for lossless application of 2:4 sparsity to downstream tasks or domains. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/MaskLLM.

Integrating segmentation into Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) presents a core trilemma: simultaneously preserving dialogue ability, achieving high segmentation performance, and ensuring fast inference. Prevailing paradigms are forced into a compromise. Embedding prediction methods introduce a conflicting pixel-level objective that degrades the MLLM's general dialogue abilities. The alternative, next-token prediction, reframes segmentation as an autoregressive task, which preserves dialogue but forces a trade-off between poor segmentation performance with sparse outputs or prohibitive inference speeds with rich ones. We resolve this trilemma with all-mask prediction, a novel paradigm that decouples autoregressive dialogue generation from non-autoregressive mask prediction. We present STAMP: Simultaneous Textual All-Mask Prediction, an MLLM that embodies this paradigm. After generating a textual response, STAMP predicts an entire segmentation mask in a single forward pass by treating it as a parallel "fill-in-the-blank" task over image patches. This design maintains the MLLM's dialogue ability by avoiding conflicting objectives, enables high segmentation performance by leveraging rich, bidirectional spatial context for all mask tokens, and achieves exceptional speed. Extensive experiments show that STAMP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple segmentation benchmarks, providing a solution that excels in dialogue, segmentation, and speed without compromise.

Masked AutoEncoders (MAE) have emerged as a robust self-supervised framework, offering remarkable performance across a wide range of downstream tasks. To increase the difficulty of the pretext task and learn richer visual representations, existing works have focused on replacing standard random masking with more sophisticated strategies, such as adversarial-guided and teacher-guided masking. However, these strategies depend on the input data thus commonly increasing the model complexity and requiring additional calculations to generate the mask patterns. This raises the question: Can we enhance MAE performance beyond random masking without relying on input data or incurring additional computational costs? In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective data-independent method, termed ColorMAE, which generates different binary mask patterns by filtering random noise. Drawing inspiration from color noise in image processing, we explore four types of filters to yield mask patterns with different spatial and semantic priors. ColorMAE requires no additional learnable parameters or computational overhead in the network, yet it significantly enhances the learned representations. We provide a comprehensive empirical evaluation, demonstrating our strategy's superiority in downstream tasks compared to random masking. Notably, we report an improvement of 2.72 in mIoU in semantic segmentation tasks relative to baseline MAE implementations.

Recent advancements in generative models have revolutionized image generation and editing, making these tasks accessible to non-experts. This paper focuses on local image editing, particularly the task of adding new content to a loosely specified area. Existing methods often require a precise mask or a detailed description of the location, which can be cumbersome and prone to errors. We propose Click2Mask, a novel approach that simplifies the local editing process by requiring only a single point of reference (in addition to the content description). A mask is dynamically grown around this point during a Blended Latent Diffusion (BLD) process, guided by a masked CLIP-based semantic loss. Click2Mask surpasses the limitations of segmentation-based and fine-tuning dependent methods, offering a more user-friendly and contextually accurate solution. Our experiments demonstrate that Click2Mask not only minimizes user effort but also delivers competitive or superior local image manipulation results compared to SoTA methods, according to both human judgement and automatic metrics. Key contributions include the simplification of user input, the ability to freely add objects unconstrained by existing segments, and the integration potential of our dynamic mask approach within other editing methods.

Text-based person re-identification (TBPReID) aims to retrieve person images represented by a given textual query. In this task, how to effectively align images and texts globally and locally is a crucial challenge. Recent works have obtained high performances by solving Masked Language Modeling (MLM) to align image/text parts. However, they only performed uni-directional (i.e., from image to text) local-matching, leaving room for improvement by introducing opposite-directional (i.e., from text to image) local-matching. In this work, we introduce Bidirectional Local-Matching (BiLMa) framework that jointly optimize MLM and Masked Image Modeling (MIM) in TBPReID model training. With this framework, our model is trained so as the labels of randomly masked both image and text tokens are predicted by unmasked tokens. In addition, to narrow the semantic gap between image and text in MIM, we propose Semantic MIM (SemMIM), in which the labels of masked image tokens are automatically given by a state-of-the-art human parser. Experimental results demonstrate that our BiLMa framework with SemMIM achieves state-of-the-art Rank@1 and mAP scores on three benchmarks.

Linguistic knowledge is of great benefit to scene text recognition. However, how to effectively model linguistic rules in end-to-end deep networks remains a research challenge. In this paper, we argue that the limited capacity of language models comes from: 1) implicitly language modeling; 2) unidirectional feature representation; and 3) language model with noise input. Correspondingly, we propose an autonomous, bidirectional and iterative ABINet for scene text recognition. Firstly, the autonomous suggests to block gradient flow between vision and language models to enforce explicitly language modeling. Secondly, a novel bidirectional cloze network (BCN) as the language model is proposed based on bidirectional feature representation. Thirdly, we propose an execution manner of iterative correction for language model which can effectively alleviate the impact of noise input. Additionally, based on the ensemble of iterative predictions, we propose a self-training method which can learn from unlabeled images effectively. Extensive experiments indicate that ABINet has superiority on low-quality images and achieves state-of-the-art results on several mainstream benchmarks. Besides, the ABINet trained with ensemble self-training shows promising improvement in realizing human-level recognition. Code is available at https://github.com/FangShancheng/ABINet.

Recent large-scale text-driven synthesis models have attracted much attention thanks to their remarkable capabilities of generating highly diverse images that follow given text prompts. Such text-based synthesis methods are particularly appealing to humans who are used to verbally describe their intent. Therefore, it is only natural to extend the text-driven image synthesis to text-driven image editing. Editing is challenging for these generative models, since an innate property of an editing technique is to preserve most of the original image, while in the text-based models, even a small modification of the text prompt often leads to a completely different outcome. State-of-the-art methods mitigate this by requiring the users to provide a spatial mask to localize the edit, hence, ignoring the original structure and content within the masked region. In this paper, we pursue an intuitive prompt-to-prompt editing framework, where the edits are controlled by text only. To this end, we analyze a text-conditioned model in depth and observe that the cross-attention layers are the key to controlling the relation between the spatial layout of the image to each word in the prompt. With this observation, we present several applications which monitor the image synthesis by editing the textual prompt only. This includes localized editing by replacing a word, global editing by adding a specification, and even delicately controlling the extent to which a word is reflected in the image. We present our results over diverse images and prompts, demonstrating high-quality synthesis and fidelity to the edited prompts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in natural language processing tasks, yet their massive size makes serving them inefficient and costly. Semi-structured pruning has emerged as an effective method for model acceleration, but existing approaches are suboptimal because they focus on local, layer-wise optimizations using heuristic rules, failing to leverage global feedback. We present ProxSparse, a learning-based framework for mask selection enabled by regularized optimization. ProxSparse transforms the rigid, non-differentiable mask selection process into a smoother optimization procedure, allowing gradual mask exploration with flexibility. ProxSparse does not involve additional weight updates once the mask is determined. Our extensive evaluations on 7 widely used models show that ProxSparse consistently outperforms previously proposed semi-structured mask selection methods with significant improvement, demonstrating the effectiveness of our learned approach towards semi-structured pruning.

Unified diffusion editors often rely on a fixed, shared backbone for diverse tasks, suffering from task interference and poor adaptation to heterogeneous demands (e.g., local vs global, semantic vs photometric). In particular, prevalent ControlNet and OmniControl variants combine multiple conditioning signals (e.g., text, mask, reference) via static concatenation or additive adapters which cannot dynamically prioritize or suppress conflicting modalities, thus resulting in artifacts like color bleeding across mask boundaries, identity or style drift, and unpredictable behavior under multi-condition inputs. To address this, we propose Condition-Aware Routing of Experts (CARE-Edit) that aligns model computation with specific editing competencies. At its core, a lightweight latent-attention router assigns encoded diffusion tokens to four specialized experts--Text, Mask, Reference, and Base--based on multi-modal conditions and diffusion timesteps: (i) a Mask Repaint module first refines coarse user-defined masks for precise spatial guidance; (ii) the router applies sparse top-K selection to dynamically allocate computation to the most relevant experts; (iii) a Latent Mixture module subsequently fuses expert outputs, coherently integrating semantic, spatial, and stylistic information to the base images. Experiments validate CARE-Edit's strong performance on contextual editing tasks, including erasure, replacement, text-driven edits, and style transfer. Empirical analysis further reveals task-specific behavior of specialized experts, showcasing the importance of dynamic, condition-aware processing to mitigate multi-condition conflicts.

Prompt learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for adapting vision-language models such as CLIP to downstream tasks. However, existing methods often overfit to seen data, leading to significant performance degradation when generalizing to novel classes or unseen domains. To address this limitation, we propose DiSa, a Directional Saliency-Aware Prompt Learning framework that integrates two complementary regularization strategies to enhance generalization. First, our Cross-Interactive Regularization (CIR) fosters cross-modal alignment by enabling cooperative learning between prompted and frozen encoders. Within CIR, a saliency-aware masking strategy guides the image encoder to prioritize semantically critical image regions, reducing reliance on less informative patches. Second, we introduce a directional regularization strategy that aligns visual embeddings with class-wise prototype features in a directional manner to prioritize consistency in feature orientation over strict proximity. This approach ensures robust generalization by leveraging stable prototype directions derived from class-mean statistics. Extensive evaluations on 11 diverse image classification benchmarks demonstrate that DiSa consistently outperforms state-of-the-art prompt learning methods across various settings, including base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset transfer, domain generalization, and few-shot learning.

Facial image manipulation has achieved great progress in recent years. However, previous methods either operate on a predefined set of face attributes or leave users little freedom to interactively manipulate images. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a novel framework termed MaskGAN, enabling diverse and interactive face manipulation. Our key insight is that semantic masks serve as a suitable intermediate representation for flexible face manipulation with fidelity preservation. MaskGAN has two main components: 1) Dense Mapping Network (DMN) and 2) Editing Behavior Simulated Training (EBST). Specifically, DMN learns style mapping between a free-form user modified mask and a target image, enabling diverse generation results. EBST models the user editing behavior on the source mask, making the overall framework more robust to various manipulated inputs. Specifically, it introduces dual-editing consistency as the auxiliary supervision signal. To facilitate extensive studies, we construct a large-scale high-resolution face dataset with fine-grained mask annotations named CelebAMask-HQ. MaskGAN is comprehensively evaluated on two challenging tasks: attribute transfer and style copy, demonstrating superior performance over other state-of-the-art methods. The code, models, and dataset are available at https://github.com/switchablenorms/CelebAMask-HQ.

Recently, prefix-tuning has gained increasing attention as a parameter-efficient finetuning method for large-scale pretrained language models. The method keeps the pretrained models fixed and only updates the prefix token parameters for each downstream task. Despite being lightweight and modular, prefix-tuning still lacks robustness to textual adversarial attacks. However, most currently developed defense techniques necessitate auxiliary model update and storage, which inevitably hamper the modularity and low storage of prefix-tuning. In this work, we propose a robust prefix-tuning framework that preserves the efficiency and modularity of prefix-tuning. The core idea of our framework is leveraging the layerwise activations of the language model by correctly-classified training data as the standard for additional prefix finetuning. During the test phase, an extra batch-level prefix is tuned for each batch and added to the original prefix for robustness enhancement. Extensive experiments on three text classification benchmarks show that our framework substantially improves robustness over several strong baselines against five textual attacks of different types while maintaining comparable accuracy on clean texts. We also interpret our robust prefix-tuning framework from the optimal control perspective and pose several directions for future research.

With the rapid advancement of stereo vision technologies, stereo image compression has emerged as a crucial field that continues to draw significant attention. Previous approaches have primarily employed a unidirectional paradigm, where the compression of one view is dependent on the other, resulting in imbalanced compression. To address this issue, we introduce a symmetric bidirectional stereo image compression architecture, named BiSIC. Specifically, we propose a 3D convolution based codec backbone to capture local features and incorporate bidirectional attention blocks to exploit global features. Moreover, we design a novel cross-dimensional entropy model that integrates various conditioning factors, including the spatial context, channel context, and stereo dependency, to effectively estimate the distribution of latent representations for entropy coding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed BiSIC outperforms conventional image/video compression standards, as well as state-of-the-art learning-based methods, in terms of both PSNR and MS-SSIM.

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has shown marvelous improvements across various NLP tasks, and its consecutive variants have been proposed to further improve the performance of the pre-trained language models. In this paper, we aim to first introduce the whole word masking (wwm) strategy for Chinese BERT, along with a series of Chinese pre-trained language models. Then we also propose a simple but effective model called MacBERT, which improves upon RoBERTa in several ways. Especially, we propose a new masking strategy called MLM as correction (Mac). To demonstrate the effectiveness of these models, we create a series of Chinese pre-trained language models as our baselines, including BERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, RBT, etc. We carried out extensive experiments on ten Chinese NLP tasks to evaluate the created Chinese pre-trained language models as well as the proposed MacBERT. Experimental results show that MacBERT could achieve state-of-the-art performances on many NLP tasks, and we also ablate details with several findings that may help future research. We open-source our pre-trained language models for further facilitating our research community. Resources are available: https://github.com/ymcui/Chinese-BERT-wwm

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has recently been established as a potent pre-training paradigm. A pretext task is constructed by masking patches in an input image, and this masked content is then predicted by a neural network using visible patches as sole input. This pre-training leads to state-of-the-art performance when finetuned for high-level semantic tasks, e.g. image classification and object detection. In this paper we instead seek to learn representations that transfer well to a wide variety of 3D vision and lower-level geometric downstream tasks, such as depth prediction or optical flow estimation. Inspired by MIM, we propose an unsupervised representation learning task trained from pairs of images showing the same scene from different viewpoints. More precisely, we propose the pretext task of cross-view completion where the first input image is partially masked, and this masked content has to be reconstructed from the visible content and the second image. In single-view MIM, the masked content often cannot be inferred precisely from the visible portion only, so the model learns to act as a prior influenced by high-level semantics. In contrast, this ambiguity can be resolved with cross-view completion from the second unmasked image, on the condition that the model is able to understand the spatial relationship between the two images. Our experiments show that our pretext task leads to significantly improved performance for monocular 3D vision downstream tasks such as depth estimation. In addition, our model can be directly applied to binocular downstream tasks like optical flow or relative camera pose estimation, for which we obtain competitive results without bells and whistles, i.e., using a generic architecture without any task-specific design.

Due to the large success in object detection and instance segmentation, Mask R-CNN attracts great attention and is widely adopted as a strong baseline for arbitrary-shaped scene text detection and spotting. However, two issues remain to be settled. The first is dense text case, which is easy to be neglected but quite practical. There may exist multiple instances in one proposal, which makes it difficult for the mask head to distinguish different instances and degrades the performance. In this work, we argue that the performance degradation results from the learning confusion issue in the mask head. We propose to use an MLP decoder instead of the "deconv-conv" decoder in the mask head, which alleviates the issue and promotes robustness significantly. And we propose instance-aware mask learning in which the mask head learns to predict the shape of the whole instance rather than classify each pixel to text or non-text. With instance-aware mask learning, the mask branch can learn separated and compact masks. The second is that due to large variations in scale and aspect ratio, RPN needs complicated anchor settings, making it hard to maintain and transfer across different datasets. To settle this issue, we propose an adaptive label assignment in which all instances especially those with extreme aspect ratios are guaranteed to be associated with enough anchors. Equipped with these components, the proposed method named MAYOR achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks including DAST1500, MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2015, CTW1500, and Total-Text.

Pre-training with random masked inputs has emerged as a novel trend in self-supervised training. However, supervised learning still faces a challenge in adopting masking augmentations, primarily due to unstable training. In this paper, we propose a novel way to involve masking augmentations dubbed Masked Sub-branch (MaskSub). MaskSub consists of the main-branch and sub-branch, the latter being a part of the former. The main-branch undergoes conventional training recipes, while the sub-branch merits intensive masking augmentations, during training. MaskSub tackles the challenge by mitigating adverse effects through a relaxed loss function similar to a self-distillation loss. Our analysis shows that MaskSub improves performance, with the training loss converging faster than in standard training, which suggests our method stabilizes the training process. We further validate MaskSub across diverse training scenarios and models, including DeiT-III training, MAE finetuning, CLIP finetuning, BERT training, and hierarchical architectures (ResNet and Swin Transformer). Our results show that MaskSub consistently achieves impressive performance gains across all the cases. MaskSub provides a practical and effective solution for introducing additional regularization under various training recipes. Code available at https://github.com/naver-ai/augsub

Masked image modeling (MIM) methods typically operate in either raw pixel space (reconstructing masked patches) or latent feature space (aligning with a pre-trained teacher). We present MEDiC (Multi-objective Exploration of Distillation from CLIP), a framework that combines both spaces in a single pipeline through three complementary objectives: patch-level token distillation from a frozen CLIP encoder, global CLS alignment, and pixel reconstruction via a lightweight decoder. We conduct a systematic investigation of the design space surrounding this multi-objective framework. First, we show that all three objectives provide complementary information, with the full combination reaching 73.9% kNN accuracy on ImageNet-1K. Second, we introduce hierarchical clustering with relative position bias for evolved masking and find that, despite producing more semantically coherent masks than prior methods, evolved masking does not outperform simple block masking in the teacher-guided distillation setting, a finding we attribute to the teacher's inherent semantic awareness. Third, we reveal that optimal scalar loss weights are extremely fragile, with small perturbations causing drops of up to 17 percentage points in kNN accuracy. Our framework achieves 73.9% kNN and 85.1% fine-tuning accuracy with ViT-Base at 300 epochs.

Masked diffusion models (MDM) are powerful generative models for discrete data that generate samples by progressively unmasking tokens in a sequence. Each token can take one of two states: masked or unmasked. We observe that token sequences often remain unchanged between consecutive sampling steps; consequently, the model repeatedly processes identical inputs, leading to redundant computation. To address this inefficiency, we propose the Partial masking scheme (Prime), which augments MDM by allowing tokens to take intermediate states interpolated between the masked and unmasked states. This design enables the model to make predictions based on partially observed token information, and facilitates a fine-grained denoising process. We derive a variational training objective and introduce a simple architectural design to accommodate intermediate-state inputs. Our method demonstrates superior performance across a diverse set of generative modeling tasks. On text data, it achieves a perplexity of 15.36 on OpenWebText, outperforming previous MDM (21.52), autoregressive models (17.54), and their hybrid variants (17.58), without relying on an autoregressive formulation. On image data, it attains competitive FID scores of 3.26 on CIFAR-10 and 6.98 on ImageNet-32, comparable to leading continuous generative models.

Masked Autoencoders (MAE) have been prevailing paradigms for large-scale vision representation pre-training. By reconstructing masked image patches from a small portion of visible image regions, MAE forces the model to infer semantic correlation within an image. Recently, some approaches apply semantic-rich teacher models to extract image features as the reconstruction target, leading to better performance. However, unlike the low-level features such as pixel values, we argue the features extracted by powerful teacher models already encode rich semantic correlation across regions in an intact image.This raises one question: is reconstruction necessary in Masked Image Modeling (MIM) with a teacher model? In this paper, we propose an efficient MIM paradigm named MaskAlign. MaskAlign simply learns the consistency of visible patch features extracted by the student model and intact image features extracted by the teacher model. To further advance the performance and tackle the problem of input inconsistency between the student and teacher model, we propose a Dynamic Alignment (DA) module to apply learnable alignment. Our experimental results demonstrate that masked modeling does not lose effectiveness even without reconstruction on masked regions. Combined with Dynamic Alignment, MaskAlign can achieve state-of-the-art performance with much higher efficiency. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/OpenPerceptionX/maskalign.

We introduce CM3, a family of causally masked generative models trained over a large corpus of structured multi-modal documents that can contain both text and image tokens. Our new causally masked approach generates tokens left to right while also masking out a small number of long token spans that are generated at the end of the string, instead of their original positions. The casual masking object provides a type of hybrid of the more common causal and masked language models, by enabling full generative modeling while also providing bidirectional context when generating the masked spans. We train causally masked language-image models on large-scale web and Wikipedia articles, where each document contains all of the text, hypertext markup, hyperlinks, and image tokens (from a VQVAE-GAN), provided in the order they appear in the original HTML source (before masking). The resulting CM3 models can generate rich structured, multi-modal outputs while conditioning on arbitrary masked document contexts, and thereby implicitly learn a wide range of text, image, and cross modal tasks. They can be prompted to recover, in a zero-shot fashion, the functionality of models such as DALL-E, GENRE, and HTLM. We set the new state-of-the-art in zero-shot summarization, entity linking, and entity disambiguation while maintaining competitive performance in the fine-tuning setting. We can generate images unconditionally, conditioned on text (like DALL-E) and do captioning all in a zero-shot setting with a single model.

Recent advances in zero-shot referring image segmentation (RIS), driven by models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and CLIP, have made substantial progress in aligning visual and textual information. Despite these successes, the extraction of precise and high-quality mask region representations remains a critical challenge, limiting the full potential of RIS tasks. In this paper, we introduce a training-free, hybrid global-local feature extraction approach that integrates detailed mask-specific features with contextual information from the surrounding area, enhancing mask region representation. To further strengthen alignment between mask regions and referring expressions, we propose a spatial guidance augmentation strategy that improves spatial coherence, which is essential for accurately localizing described areas. By incorporating multiple spatial cues, this approach facilitates more robust and precise referring segmentation. Extensive experiments on standard RIS benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing zero-shot RIS models, achieving substantial performance gains. We believe our approach advances RIS tasks and establishes a versatile framework for region-text alignment, offering broader implications for cross-modal understanding and interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/fhgyuanshen/HybridGL .

Recent conditional image generation methods produce images of remarkable diversity, fidelity and realism. However, the majority of these methods allow conditioning only on labels or text prompts, which limits their level of control over the generation result. In this paper, we introduce MaskSketch, an image generation method that allows spatial conditioning of the generation result using a guiding sketch as an extra conditioning signal during sampling. MaskSketch utilizes a pre-trained masked generative transformer, requiring no model training or paired supervision, and works with input sketches of different levels of abstraction. We show that intermediate self-attention maps of a masked generative transformer encode important structural information of the input image, such as scene layout and object shape, and we propose a novel sampling method based on this observation to enable structure-guided generation. Our results show that MaskSketch achieves high image realism and fidelity to the guiding structure. Evaluated on standard benchmark datasets, MaskSketch outperforms state-of-the-art methods for sketch-to-image translation, as well as unpaired image-to-image translation approaches.

We introduce directional routing, a lightweight mechanism that gives each transformer attention head learned suppression directions controlled by a shared router, at 3.9% parameter cost. We train a 433M-parameter model alongside an identical baseline in a single run, then trace the resulting circuits through mechanistic interpretability. Routing becomes the model's dominant computational pathway. Disabling it collapses factual recall to near-zero probability across all 8 test prompts and drops induction accuracy from 93.4% to 0.0%. Knocking out individual attention heads has negligible effect: the primary mover head's removal actually increases target probability, and induction heads retain 98.6% accuracy without their strongest member. The coordination mechanism is irreplaceable; the components it coordinates are not. The model also self-organizes, without explicit pressure, into two regimes: domain-adaptive routing in early layers and fixed syntactic pruning in late layers, where the least-varying layer is the most critical (+42.6 PPL when disabled). Routing reduces perplexity 31-56% relative to the baseline, though downstream multiple-choice benchmarks do not yet reflect these gains.

In this work, we re-examine inter-patch dependencies in the decoding mechanism of masked autoencoders (MAE). We decompose this decoding mechanism for masked patch reconstruction in MAE into self-attention and cross-attention. Our investigations suggest that self-attention between mask patches is not essential for learning good representations. To this end, we propose a novel pretraining framework: Cross-Attention Masked Autoencoders (CrossMAE). CrossMAE's decoder leverages only cross-attention between masked and visible tokens, with no degradation in downstream performance. This design also enables decoding only a small subset of mask tokens, boosting efficiency. Furthermore, each decoder block can now leverage different encoder features, resulting in improved representation learning. CrossMAE matches MAE in performance with 2.5 to 3.7times less decoding compute. It also surpasses MAE on ImageNet classification and COCO instance segmentation under the same compute. Code and models: https://crossmae.github.io

Masked modeling has emerged as a powerful self-supervised learning framework, but existing methods largely rely on random masking, disregarding the structural properties of different modalities. In this work, we introduce structured noise-based masking, a simple yet effective approach that naturally aligns with the spatial, temporal, and spectral characteristics of video and audio data. By filtering white noise into distinct color noise distributions, we generate structured masks that preserve modality-specific patterns without requiring handcrafted heuristics or access to the data. Our approach improves the performance of masked video and audio modeling frameworks without any computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that structured noise masking achieves consistent improvement over random masking for standard and advanced masked modeling methods, highlighting the importance of modality-aware masking strategies for representation learning.

In this paper, we introduce Mask2Map, a novel end-to-end online HD map construction method designed for autonomous driving applications. Our approach focuses on predicting the class and ordered point set of map instances within a scene, represented in the bird's eye view (BEV). Mask2Map consists of two primary components: the Instance-Level Mask Prediction Network (IMPNet) and the Mask-Driven Map Prediction Network (MMPNet). IMPNet generates Mask-Aware Queries and BEV Segmentation Masks to capture comprehensive semantic information globally. Subsequently, MMPNet enhances these query features using local contextual information through two submodules: the Positional Query Generator (PQG) and the Geometric Feature Extractor (GFE). PQG extracts instance-level positional queries by embedding BEV positional information into Mask-Aware Queries, while GFE utilizes BEV Segmentation Masks to generate point-level geometric features. However, we observed limited performance in Mask2Map due to inter-network inconsistency stemming from different predictions to Ground Truth (GT) matching between IMPNet and MMPNet. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Inter-network Denoising Training method, which guides the model to denoise the output affected by both noisy GT queries and perturbed GT Segmentation Masks. Our evaluation conducted on nuScenes and Argoverse2 benchmarks demonstrates that Mask2Map achieves remarkable performance improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods, with gains of 10.1% mAP and 4.1 mAP, respectively. Our code can be found at https://github.com/SehwanChoi0307/Mask2Map.

Existing methodologies in open vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation primarily concentrate on establishing a unified feature space encompassing 3D, 2D, and textual modalities. Nevertheless, traditional techniques such as global feature alignment or vision-language model distillation tend to impose only approximate correspondence, struggling notably with delineating fine-grained segmentation boundaries. To address this gap, we propose a more meticulous mask-level alignment between 3D features and the 2D-text embedding space through a cross-modal mask reasoning framework, XMask3D. In our approach, we developed a mask generator based on the denoising UNet from a pre-trained diffusion model, leveraging its capability for precise textual control over dense pixel representations and enhancing the open-world adaptability of the generated masks. We further integrate 3D global features as implicit conditions into the pre-trained 2D denoising UNet, enabling the generation of segmentation masks with additional 3D geometry awareness. Subsequently, the generated 2D masks are employed to align mask-level 3D representations with the vision-language feature space, thereby augmenting the open vocabulary capability of 3D geometry embeddings. Finally, we fuse complementary 2D and 3D mask features, resulting in competitive performance across multiple benchmarks for 3D open vocabulary semantic segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/XMask3D.

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) is a powerful self-supervised strategy for visual pre-training without the use of labels. MIM applies random crops to input images, processes them with an encoder, and then recovers the masked inputs with a decoder, which encourages the network to capture and learn structural information about objects and scenes. The intermediate feature representations obtained from MIM are suitable for fine-tuning on downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose an Image Modeling framework based on random orthogonal projection instead of binary masking as in MIM. Our proposed Random Orthogonal Projection Image Modeling (ROPIM) reduces spatially-wise token information under guaranteed bound on the noise variance and can be considered as masking entire spatial image area under locally varying masking degrees. Since ROPIM uses a random subspace for the projection that realizes the masking step, the readily available complement of the subspace can be used during unmasking to promote recovery of removed information. In this paper, we show that using random orthogonal projection leads to superior performance compared to crop-based masking. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on several popular benchmarks.

Creating visual layouts is a critical step in graphic design. Automatic generation of such layouts is essential for scalable and diverse visual designs. To advance conditional layout generation, we introduce BLT, a bidirectional layout transformer. BLT differs from previous work on transformers in adopting non-autoregressive transformers. In training, BLT learns to predict the masked attributes by attending to surrounding attributes in two directions. During inference, BLT first generates a draft layout from the input and then iteratively refines it into a high-quality layout by masking out low-confident attributes. The masks generated in both training and inference are controlled by a new hierarchical sampling policy. We verify the proposed model on six benchmarks of diverse design tasks. Experimental results demonstrate two benefits compared to the state-of-the-art layout transformer models. First, our model empowers layout transformers to fulfill controllable layout generation. Second, it achieves up to 10x speedup in generating a layout at inference time than the layout transformer baseline. Code is released at https://shawnkx.github.io/blt.

Most convolutional network (CNN)-based inpainting methods adopt standard convolution to indistinguishably treat valid pixels and holes, making them limited in handling irregular holes and more likely to generate inpainting results with color discrepancy and blurriness. Partial convolution has been suggested to address this issue, but it adopts handcrafted feature re-normalization, and only considers forward mask-updating. In this paper, we present a learnable attention map module for learning feature renormalization and mask-updating in an end-to-end manner, which is effective in adapting to irregular holes and propagation of convolution layers. Furthermore, learnable reverse attention maps are introduced to allow the decoder of U-Net to concentrate on filling in irregular holes instead of reconstructing both holes and known regions, resulting in our learnable bidirectional attention maps. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-arts in generating sharper, more coherent and visually plausible inpainting results. The source code and pre-trained models will be available.

Pruning large language models (LLMs) is a challenging task due to their enormous size. The primary difficulty is fine-tuning the model after pruning, which is needed to recover the lost performance caused by dropping weights. Recent approaches have either ignored fine-tuning entirely, focusing on efficient pruning criteria, or attempted layer-wise weight updates, preserving the behavior of each layer. However, even layer-wise weight updates can be costly for LLMs, and previous works have resorted to various approximations. In our paper, we propose a fast and optimal weight update algorithm for pruned layers based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Coupled with a simple iterative pruning mask selection, our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art pruning performance across a wide range of LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/fmfi-compbio/admm-pruning.

Combining Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) with diffusion models offers a powerful method for executing image editing tasks based on human language instructions. However, language instructions alone often fall short in accurately conveying user requirements, particularly when users want to add, replace elements in specific areas of an image. Luckily, masks can effectively indicate the exact locations or elements to be edited, while they require users to precisely draw the shapes at the desired locations, which is highly user-unfriendly. To address this, we propose FlexEdit, an end-to-end image editing method that leverages both free-shape masks and language instructions for Flexible Editing. Our approach employs a VLLM in comprehending the image content, mask, and user instructions. Additionally, we introduce the Mask Enhance Adapter (MEA) that fuses the embeddings of the VLLM with the image data, ensuring a seamless integration of mask information and model output embeddings. Furthermore, we construct FSMI-Edit, a benchmark specifically tailored for free-shape mask, including 8 types of free-shape mask. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in LLM-based image editing, and our simple prompting technique stands out in its effectiveness. The code and data can be found at https://github.com/A-new-b/flex_edit.

Global dependency modeling and spatial position modeling are two core issues of the foundational architecture design in current deep learning frameworks. Recently, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision, leveraging the powerful global dependency modeling capability of the self-attention mechanism. Furthermore, Mamba2 has demonstrated its significant potential in natural language processing tasks by explicitly modeling the spatial adjacency prior through the structured mask. In this paper, we propose Polyline Path Masked Attention (PPMA) that integrates the self-attention mechanism of ViTs with an enhanced structured mask of Mamba2, harnessing the complementary strengths of both architectures. Specifically, we first ameliorate the traditional structured mask of Mamba2 by introducing a 2D polyline path scanning strategy and derive its corresponding structured mask, polyline path mask, which better preserves the adjacency relationships among image tokens. Notably, we conduct a thorough theoretical analysis on the structural characteristics of the proposed polyline path mask and design an efficient algorithm for the computation of the polyline path mask. Next, we embed the polyline path mask into the self-attention mechanism of ViTs, enabling explicit modeling of spatial adjacency prior. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks, including image classification, object detection, and segmentation, demonstrate that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches based on both state-space models and Transformers. For example, our proposed PPMA-T/S/B models achieve 48.7%/51.1%/52.3% mIoU on the ADE20K semantic segmentation task, surpassing RMT-T/S/B by 0.7%/1.3%/0.3%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/zhongchenzhao/PPMA.

Masked image modeling (MIM) has shown great promise for self-supervised learning (SSL) yet been criticized for learning inefficiency. We believe the insufficient utilization of training signals should be responsible. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a conceptually simple yet learning-efficient MIM training scheme, termed Disjoint Masking with Joint Distillation (DMJD). For disjoint masking (DM), we sequentially sample multiple masked views per image in a mini-batch with the disjoint regulation to raise the usage of tokens for reconstruction in each image while keeping the masking rate of each view. For joint distillation (JD), we adopt a dual branch architecture to respectively predict invisible (masked) and visible (unmasked) tokens with superior learning targets. Rooting in orthogonal perspectives for training efficiency improvement, DM and JD cooperatively accelerate the training convergence yet not sacrificing the model generalization ability. Concretely, DM can train ViT with half of the effective training epochs (3.7 times less time-consuming) to report competitive performance. With JD, our DMJD clearly improves the linear probing classification accuracy over ConvMAE by 5.8%. On fine-grained downstream tasks like semantic segmentation, object detection, etc., our DMJD also presents superior generalization compared with state-of-the-art SSL methods. The code and model will be made public at https://github.com/mx-mark/DMJD.

The success of bidirectional encoders using masked language models, such as BERT, on numerous natural language processing tasks has prompted researchers to attempt to incorporate these pre-trained models into neural machine translation (NMT) systems. However, proposed methods for incorporating pre-trained models are non-trivial and mainly focus on BERT, which lacks a comparison of the impact that other pre-trained models may have on translation performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that simply using the output (contextualized embeddings) of a tailored and suitable bilingual pre-trained language model (dubbed BiBERT) as the input of the NMT encoder achieves state-of-the-art translation performance. Moreover, we also propose a stochastic layer selection approach and a concept of dual-directional translation model to ensure the sufficient utilization of contextualized embeddings. In the case of without using back translation, our best models achieve BLEU scores of 30.45 for En->De and 38.61 for De->En on the IWSLT'14 dataset, and 31.26 for En->De and 34.94 for De->En on the WMT'14 dataset, which exceeds all published numbers.

The bifurcation of generative modeling into autoregressive approaches for discrete data (text) and diffusion approaches for continuous data (images) hinders the development of truly unified multimodal systems. While Masked Language Models (MLMs) offer efficient bidirectional context, they traditionally lack the generative fidelity of autoregressive models and the semantic continuity of diffusion models. Furthermore, extending masked generation to multimodal settings introduces severe alignment challenges and training instability. In this work, we propose CoM-DAD (Coupled Manifold Discrete Absorbing Diffusion), a novel probabilistic framework that reformulates multimodal generation as a hierarchical dual-process. CoM-DAD decouples high-level semantic planning from low-level token synthesis. First, we model the semantic manifold via a continuous latent diffusion process; second, we treat token generation as a discrete absorbing diffusion process, regulated by a Variable-Rate Noise Schedule, conditioned on these evolving semantic priors. Crucially, we introduce a Stochastic Mixed-Modal Transport strategy that aligns disparate modalities without requiring heavy contrastive dual-encoders. Our method demonstrates superior stability over standard masked modeling, establishing a new paradigm for scalable, unified text-image generation.

Collecting and annotating images with pixel-wise labels is time-consuming and laborious. In contrast, synthetic data can be freely available using a generative model (e.g., DALL-E, Stable Diffusion). In this paper, we show that it is possible to automatically obtain accurate semantic masks of synthetic images generated by the Off-the-shelf Stable Diffusion model, which uses only text-image pairs during training. Our approach, called DiffuMask, exploits the potential of the cross-attention map between text and image, which is natural and seamless to extend the text-driven image synthesis to semantic mask generation. DiffuMask uses text-guided cross-attention information to localize class/word-specific regions, which are combined with practical techniques to create a novel high-resolution and class-discriminative pixel-wise mask. The methods help to reduce data collection and annotation costs obviously. Experiments demonstrate that the existing segmentation methods trained on synthetic data of DiffuMask can achieve a competitive performance over the counterpart of real data (VOC 2012, Cityscapes). For some classes (e.g., bird), DiffuMask presents promising performance, close to the stateof-the-art result of real data (within 3% mIoU gap). Moreover, in the open-vocabulary segmentation (zero-shot) setting, DiffuMask achieves a new SOTA result on Unseen class of VOC 2012. The project website can be found at https://weijiawu.github.io/DiffusionMask/.

This paper presents a new framework for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation with the pre-trained vision-language model, named Side Adapter Network (SAN). Our approach models the semantic segmentation task as a region recognition problem. A side network is attached to a frozen CLIP model with two branches: one for predicting mask proposals, and the other for predicting attention bias which is applied in the CLIP model to recognize the class of masks. This decoupled design has the benefit CLIP in recognizing the class of mask proposals. Since the attached side network can reuse CLIP features, it can be very light. In addition, the entire network can be trained end-to-end, allowing the side network to be adapted to the frozen CLIP model, which makes the predicted mask proposals CLIP-aware. Our approach is fast, accurate, and only adds a few additional trainable parameters. We evaluate our approach on multiple semantic segmentation benchmarks. Our method significantly outperforms other counterparts, with up to 18 times fewer trainable parameters and 19 times faster inference speed. We hope our approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research in open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. The code will be available at https://github.com/MendelXu/SAN.

Multimodal learning seeks to combine data from multiple input sources to enhance the performance of different downstream tasks. In real-world scenarios, performance can degrade substantially if some input modalities are missing. Existing methods that can handle missing modalities involve custom training or adaptation steps for each input modality combination. These approaches are either tied to specific modalities or become computationally expensive as the number of input modalities increases. In this paper, we propose Masked Modality Projection (MMP), a method designed to train a single model that is robust to any missing modality scenario. We achieve this by randomly masking a subset of modalities during training and learning to project available input modalities to estimate the tokens for the masked modalities. This approach enables the model to effectively learn to leverage the information from the available modalities to compensate for the missing ones, enhancing missing modality robustness. We conduct a series of experiments with various baseline models and datasets to assess the effectiveness of this strategy. Experiments demonstrate that our approach improves robustness to different missing modality scenarios, outperforming existing methods designed for missing modalities or specific modality combinations.

Large Language Models increasingly possess capabilities that carry dual-use risks. While data filtering has emerged as a pretraining-time mitigation, it faces significant challenges: labeling whether data is harmful is expensive at scale, and given improving sample efficiency with larger models, even small amounts of mislabeled content could give rise to dangerous capabilities. To address risks associated with mislabeled harmful content, prior work proposed Gradient Routing (Cloud et al., 2024) -- a technique that localizes target knowledge into a dedicated subset of model parameters so they can later be removed. We explore an improved variant of Gradient Routing, which we call Selective GradienT Masking (SGTM), with particular focus on evaluating its robustness to label noise. SGTM zero-masks selected gradients such that target domain examples only update their dedicated parameters. We test SGTM's effectiveness in two applications: removing knowledge of one language from a model trained on a bilingual synthetic dataset, and removing biology knowledge from a model trained on English Wikipedia. In both cases SGTM provides better retain/forget trade-off in the presence of labeling errors compared to both data filtering and a previously proposed instantiation of Gradient Routing. Unlike shallow unlearning approaches that can be quickly undone through fine-tuning, SGTM exhibits strong robustness to adversarial fine-tuning, requiring seven times more fine-tuning steps to reach baseline performance on the forget set compared to a finetuning-based unlearning method (RMU). Our results suggest SGTM provides a promising pretraining-time complement to existing safety mitigations, particularly in settings where label noise is unavoidable.

We introduce ``Partition Generative Models'' (PGMs), a novel approach to masked generative modeling (MGMs), particularly effective for masked diffusion language modeling (MDLMs). PGM divides tokens into two distinct groups and employs sparse attention patterns to prevent cross-group information exchange. Hence, the model is trained to predict tokens in one group based solely on information from the other group. This partitioning strategy eliminates the need for MASK tokens entirely. While traditional MGMs inefficiently process MASK tokens during generation, PGMs achieve greater computational efficiency by operating exclusively on unmasked tokens. Our experiments on OpenWebText with a context length of 1024 tokens demonstrate that PGMs deliver at least 5x improvements in both latency and throughput compared to MDLM when using the same number of sampling steps, while generating samples with better generative perplexity than MDLM. Finally, we show that PGMs can be distilled with Self-Distillation Through Time (SDTT), a method originally devised for MDLM, in order to achieve further inference gains.

3D reconstruction from in-the-wild images remains a challenging task due to inconsistent lighting conditions and transient distractors. Existing methods typically rely on heuristic strategies to handle the low-quality training data, which often struggle to produce stable and consistent reconstructions, frequently resulting in visual artifacts. In this work, we propose Asymmetric Dual 3DGS, a novel framework that leverages the stochastic nature of these artifacts: they tend to vary across different training runs due to minor randomness. Specifically, our method trains two 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models in parallel, enforcing a consistency constraint that encourages convergence on reliable scene geometry while suppressing inconsistent artifacts. To prevent the two models from collapsing into similar failure modes due to confirmation bias, we introduce a divergent masking strategy that applies two complementary masks: a multi-cue adaptive mask and a self-supervised soft mask, which leads to an asymmetric training process of the two models, reducing shared error modes. In addition, to improve the efficiency of model training, we introduce a lightweight variant called Dynamic EMA Proxy, which replaces one of the two models with a dynamically updated Exponential Moving Average (EMA) proxy, and employs an alternating masking strategy to preserve divergence. Extensive experiments on challenging real-world datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches while achieving high efficiency. Codes and trained models will be released.

All-in-one image restoration aims to handle multiple degradation types using one model. This paper proposes a simple pipeline for all-in-one blind image restoration to Restore Anything with Masks (RAM). We focus on the image content by utilizing Mask Image Modeling to extract intrinsic image information rather than distinguishing degradation types like other methods. Our pipeline consists of two stages: masked image pre-training and fine-tuning with mask attribute conductance. We design a straightforward masking pre-training approach specifically tailored for all-in-one image restoration. This approach enhances networks to prioritize the extraction of image content priors from various degradations, resulting in a more balanced performance across different restoration tasks and achieving stronger overall results. To bridge the gap of input integrity while preserving learned image priors as much as possible, we selectively fine-tuned a small portion of the layers. Specifically, the importance of each layer is ranked by the proposed Mask Attribute Conductance (MAC), and the layers with higher contributions are selected for finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code and model will be released at https://github.com/Dragonisss/RAM{https://github.com/Dragonisss/RAM}.

Pixel-wise capabilities are essential for building interactive intelligent systems. However, pixel-wise multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) remain difficult to scale due to complex region-level encoders, specialized segmentation decoders, and incompatible training objectives. To address these challenges, we present SAMTok, a discrete mask tokenizer that converts any region mask into two special tokens and reconstructs the mask using these tokens with high fidelity. By treating masks as new language tokens, SAMTok enables base MLLMs (such as the QwenVL series) to learn pixel-wise capabilities through standard next-token prediction and simple reinforcement learning, without architectural modifications and specialized loss design. SAMTok builds on SAM2 and is trained on 209M diverse masks using a mask encoder and residual vector quantizer to produce discrete, compact, and information-rich tokens. With 5M SAMTok-formatted mask understanding and generation data samples, QwenVL-SAMTok attains state-of-the-art or comparable results on region captioning, region VQA, grounded conversation, referring segmentation, scene graph parsing, and multi-round interactive segmentation. We further introduce a textual answer-matching reward that enables efficient reinforcement learning for mask generation, delivering substantial improvements on GRES and GCG benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a scalable and straightforward paradigm for equipping MLLMs with strong pixel-wise capabilities. Our code and models are available.

Modeling users' dynamic and evolving preferences from their historical behaviors is challenging and crucial for recommendation systems. Previous methods employ sequential neural networks (e.g., Recurrent Neural Network) to encode users' historical interactions from left to right into hidden representations for making recommendations. Although these methods achieve satisfactory results, they often assume a rigidly ordered sequence which is not always practical. We argue that such left-to-right unidirectional architectures restrict the power of the historical sequence representations. For this purpose, we introduce a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for sequential Recommendation (BERT4Rec). However, jointly conditioning on both left and right context in deep bidirectional model would make the training become trivial since each item can indirectly "see the target item". To address this problem, we train the bidirectional model using the Cloze task, predicting the masked items in the sequence by jointly conditioning on their left and right context. Comparing with predicting the next item at each position in a sequence, the Cloze task can produce more samples to train a more powerful bidirectional model. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms various state-of-the-art sequential models consistently.

In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on compressing large pre-trained transformer models for resource-constrained devices. However, traditional pruning methods often leave the embedding layer untouched, leading to model over-parameterization. Additionally, they require extensive compression time with large datasets to maintain performance in pruned models. To address these challenges, we propose VTrans, an iterative pruning framework guided by the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) principle. Our method compresses all structural components, including embeddings, attention heads, and layers using VIB-trained masks. This approach retains only essential weights in each layer, ensuring compliance with specified model size or computational constraints. Notably, our method achieves upto 70% more compression than prior state-of-the-art approaches, both task-agnostic and task-specific. We further propose faster variants of our method: Fast-VTrans utilizing only 3% of the data and Faster-VTrans, a time efficient alternative that involves exclusive finetuning of VIB masks, accelerating compression by upto 25 times with minimal performance loss compared to previous methods. Extensive experiments on BERT, ROBERTa, and GPT-2 models substantiate the efficacy of our method. Moreover, our method demonstrates scalability in compressing large models such as LLaMA-2-7B, achieving superior performance compared to previous pruning methods. Additionally, we use attention-based probing to qualitatively assess model redundancy and interpret the efficiency of our approach. Notably, our method considers heads with high attention to special and current tokens in un-pruned model as foremost candidates for pruning while retained heads are observed to attend more to task-critical keywords.

Recent segmentation methods leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown reliable object-level segmentation and enhanced spatial perception. However, almost all previous methods predominantly rely on specialist mask decoders to interpret masks from generated segmentation-related embeddings and visual features, or incorporate multiple additional tokens to assist. This paper aims to investigate whether and how we can unlock segmentation from MLLM itSELF with 1 segmentation Embedding (SELF1E) while achieving competitive results, which eliminates the need for external decoders. To this end, our approach targets the fundamental limitation of resolution reduction in pixel-shuffled image features from MLLMs. First, we retain image features at their original uncompressed resolution, and refill them with residual features extracted from MLLM-processed compressed features, thereby improving feature precision. Subsequently, we integrate pixel-unshuffle operations on image features with and without LLM processing, respectively, to unleash the details of compressed features and amplify the residual features under uncompressed resolution, which further enhances the resolution of refilled features. Moreover, we redesign the attention mask with dual perception pathways, i.e., image-to-image and image-to-segmentation, enabling rich feature interaction between pixels and the segmentation token. Comprehensive experiments across multiple segmentation tasks validate that SELF1E achieves performance competitive with specialist mask decoder-based methods, demonstrating the feasibility of decoder-free segmentation in MLLMs. Project page: https://github.com/ANDYZAQ/SELF1E.

Recent years have seen remarkable progress of text generation in different contexts, such as the most common setting of generating text from scratch, and the emerging paradigm of retrieval-and-rewriting. Text infilling, which fills missing text portions of a sentence or paragraph, is also of numerous use in real life, yet is under-explored. Previous work has focused on restricted settings by either assuming single word per missing portion or limiting to a single missing portion to the end of the text. This paper studies the general task of text infilling, where the input text can have an arbitrary number of portions to be filled, each of which may require an arbitrary unknown number of tokens. We study various approaches for the task, including a self-attention model with segment-aware position encoding and bidirectional context modeling. We create extensive supervised data by masking out text with varying strategies. Experiments show the self-attention model greatly outperforms others, creating a strong baseline for future research.

Taking greedy decoding algorithm as it should be, this work focuses on further strengthening the model itself for Chinese word segmentation (CWS), which results in an even more fast and more accurate CWS model. Our model consists of an attention only stacked encoder and a light enough decoder for the greedy segmentation plus two highway connections for smoother training, in which the encoder is composed of a newly proposed Transformer variant, Gaussian-masked Directional (GD) Transformer, and a biaffine attention scorer. With the effective encoder design, our model only needs to take unigram features for scoring. Our model is evaluated on SIGHAN Bakeoff benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that with the highest segmentation speed, the proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art or comparable performance against strong baselines in terms of strict closed test setting.

We present an efficient method of utilizing pretrained language models, where we learn selective binary masks for pretrained weights in lieu of modifying them through finetuning. Extensive evaluations of masking BERT and RoBERTa on a series of NLP tasks show that our masking scheme yields performance comparable to finetuning, yet has a much smaller memory footprint when several tasks need to be inferred simultaneously. Through intrinsic evaluations, we show that representations computed by masked language models encode information necessary for solving downstream tasks. Analyzing the loss landscape, we show that masking and finetuning produce models that reside in minima that can be connected by a line segment with nearly constant test accuracy. This confirms that masking can be utilized as an efficient alternative to finetuning.

As the core building block of vision transformers, attention is a powerful tool to capture long-range dependency. However, such power comes at a cost: it incurs a huge computation burden and heavy memory footprint as pairwise token interaction across all spatial locations is computed. A series of works attempt to alleviate this problem by introducing handcrafted and content-agnostic sparsity into attention, such as restricting the attention operation to be inside local windows, axial stripes, or dilated windows. In contrast to these approaches, we propose a novel dynamic sparse attention via bi-level routing to enable a more flexible allocation of computations with content awareness. Specifically, for a query, irrelevant key-value pairs are first filtered out at a coarse region level, and then fine-grained token-to-token attention is applied in the union of remaining candidate regions (\ie, routed regions). We provide a simple yet effective implementation of the proposed bi-level routing attention, which utilizes the sparsity to save both computation and memory while involving only GPU-friendly dense matrix multiplications. Built with the proposed bi-level routing attention, a new general vision transformer, named BiFormer, is then presented. As BiFormer attends to a small subset of relevant tokens in a query adaptive manner without distraction from other irrelevant ones, it enjoys both good performance and high computational efficiency, especially in dense prediction tasks. Empirical results across several computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation verify the effectiveness of our design. Code is available at https://github.com/rayleizhu/BiFormer.

Scene text spotting is of great importance to the computer vision community due to its wide variety of applications. Recent methods attempt to introduce linguistic knowledge for challenging recognition rather than pure visual classification. However, how to effectively model the linguistic rules in end-to-end deep networks remains a research challenge. In this paper, we argue that the limited capacity of language models comes from 1) implicit language modeling; 2) unidirectional feature representation; and 3) language model with noise input. Correspondingly, we propose an autonomous, bidirectional and iterative ABINet++ for scene text spotting. Firstly, the autonomous suggests enforcing explicitly language modeling by decoupling the recognizer into vision model and language model and blocking gradient flow between both models. Secondly, a novel bidirectional cloze network (BCN) as the language model is proposed based on bidirectional feature representation. Thirdly, we propose an execution manner of iterative correction for the language model which can effectively alleviate the impact of noise input. Finally, to polish ABINet++ in long text recognition, we propose to aggregate horizontal features by embedding Transformer units inside a U-Net, and design a position and content attention module which integrates character order and content to attend to character features precisely. ABINet++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on both scene text recognition and scene text spotting benchmarks, which consistently demonstrates the superiority of our method in various environments especially on low-quality images. Besides, extensive experiments including in English and Chinese also prove that, a text spotter that incorporates our language modeling method can significantly improve its performance both in accuracy and speed compared with commonly used attention-based recognizers.

Structural neural network pruning aims to remove the redundant channels in the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by pruning the filters of less importance to the final output accuracy. To reduce the degradation of performance after pruning, many methods utilize the loss with sparse regularization to produce structured sparsity. In this paper, we analyze these sparsity-training-based methods and find that the regularization of unpruned channels is unnecessary. Moreover, it restricts the network's capacity, which leads to under-fitting. To solve this problem, we propose a novel pruning method, named MaskSparsity, with pruning-aware sparse regularization. MaskSparsity imposes the fine-grained sparse regularization on the specific filters selected by a pruning mask, rather than all the filters of the model. Before the fine-grained sparse regularization of MaskSparity, we can use many methods to get the pruning mask, such as running the global sparse regularization. MaskSparsity achieves 63.03%-FLOPs reduction on ResNet-110 by removing 60.34% of the parameters, with no top-1 accuracy loss on CIFAR-10. On ILSVRC-2012, MaskSparsity reduces more than 51.07% FLOPs on ResNet-50, with only a loss of 0.76% in the top-1 accuracy. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/MaskSparsity. Moreover, we have integrated the code of MaskSparity into a PyTorch pruning toolkit, EasyPruner, at https://gitee.com/casia_iva_engineer/easypruner.

Learned Image Compression (LIC) has shown remarkable progress in recent years. Existing works commonly employ CNN-based or self-attention-based modules as transform methods for compression. However, there is no prior research on neural transform that focuses on specific regions. In response, we introduce the class-agnostic segmentation masks (i.e. semantic masks without category labels) for extracting region-adaptive contextual information. Our proposed module, Region-Adaptive Transform, applies adaptive convolutions on different regions guided by the masks. Additionally, we introduce a plug-and-play module named Scale Affine Layer to incorporate rich contexts from various regions. While there have been prior image compression efforts that involve segmentation masks as additional intermediate inputs, our approach differs significantly from them. Our advantages lie in that, to avoid extra bitrate overhead, we treat these masks as privilege information, which is accessible during the model training stage but not required during the inference phase. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to employ class-agnostic masks as privilege information and achieve superior performance in pixel-fidelity metrics, such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). The experimental results demonstrate our improvement compared to previously well-performing methods, with about 8.2% bitrate saving compared to VTM-17.0. The source code is available at https://github.com/GityuxiLiu/SegPIC-for-Image-Compression.

Recently, how to achieve precise image editing has attracted increasing attention, especially given the remarkable success of text-to-image generation models. To unify various spatial-aware image editing abilities into one framework, we adopt the concept of layers from the design domain to manipulate objects flexibly with various operations. The key insight is to transform the spatial-aware image editing task into a combination of two sub-tasks: multi-layered latent decomposition and multi-layered latent fusion. First, we segment the latent representations of the source images into multiple layers, which include several object layers and one incomplete background layer that necessitates reliable inpainting. To avoid extra tuning, we further explore the inner inpainting ability within the self-attention mechanism. We introduce a key-masking self-attention scheme that can propagate the surrounding context information into the masked region while mitigating its impact on the regions outside the mask. Second, we propose an instruction-guided latent fusion that pastes the multi-layered latent representations onto a canvas latent. We also introduce an artifact suppression scheme in the latent space to enhance the inpainting quality. Due to the inherent modular advantages of such multi-layered representations, we can achieve accurate image editing, and we demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses the latest spatial editing methods, including Self-Guidance and DiffEditor. Last, we show that our approach is a unified framework that supports various accurate image editing tasks on more than six different editing tasks.

In this paper we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive approach for incorporating various masking mechanisms into Transformers architectures in a scalable way. We show that recent results on linear causal attention (Choromanski et al., 2021) and log-linear RPE-attention (Luo et al., 2021) are special cases of this general mechanism. However by casting the problem as a topological (graph-based) modulation of unmasked attention, we obtain several results unknown before, including efficient d-dimensional RPE-masking and graph-kernel masking. We leverage many mathematical techniques ranging from spectral analysis through dynamic programming and random walks to new algorithms for solving Markov processes on graphs. We provide a corresponding empirical evaluation.

This work presents Robust Representation Learning via Adaptive Mask (RAM++), a two-stage framework for all-in-one image restoration. RAM++ integrates high-level semantic understanding with low-level texture generation to achieve content-oriented robust restoration. It addresses the limitations of existing degradation-oriented methods in extreme scenarios (e.g., degradations strongly coupled with image structures). RAM++ also mitigates common challenges such as unbalanced performance across tasks, overfitting to seen degradations, and weak generalization to unseen ones through three key designs: 1) Adaptive Semantic-Aware Mask (AdaSAM): a pretraining strategy that applies pixel-level masks to semantically rich and textured regions. This design enables the network to learn both generative priors and image content priors from various degradations. 2) Mask Attribute Conductance (MAC): a selective fine-tuning strategy that adjusts the layers with higher contributions to bridge the integrity gap between masked pretraining and full-image fine-tuning while retaining learned priors. 3) Robust Feature Regularization (RFR): a strategy that leverages DINOv2's semantically consistent and degradation-invariant representations, together with efficient feature fusion, to achieve faithful and semantically coherent restoration. With these designs, RAM++ achieves robust, well-balanced, and state-of-the-art performance across seen, unseen, extreme, and mixed degradations. Our code and model will be released at https://github.com/DragonisCV/RAM

Adapting language models (LMs) to novel domains is often achieved through fine-tuning a pre-trained LM (PLM) on domain-specific data. Fine-tuning introduces new knowledge into an LM, enabling it to comprehend and efficiently perform a target domain task. Fine-tuning can however be inadvertently insensitive if it ignores the wide array of disparities (e.g in word meaning) between source and target domains. For instance, words such as chronic and pressure may be treated lightly in social conversations, however, clinically, these words are usually an expression of concern. To address insensitive fine-tuning, we propose Mask Specific Language Modeling (MSLM), an approach that efficiently acquires target domain knowledge by appropriately weighting the importance of domain-specific terms (DS-terms) during fine-tuning. MSLM jointly masks DS-terms and generic words, then learns mask-specific losses by ensuring LMs incur larger penalties for inaccurately predicting DS-terms compared to generic words. Results of our analysis show that MSLM improves LMs sensitivity and detection of DS-terms. We empirically show that an optimal masking rate not only depends on the LM, but also on the dataset and the length of sequences. Our proposed masking strategy outperforms advanced masking strategies such as span- and PMI-based masking.

The model is usually kept integral in the mainstream large language model (LLM) fine-tuning protocols. No works have questioned whether maintaining the integrity of the model is indispensable for performance. In this work, we introduce Mask Fine-Tuning (MFT), a brand-new LLM fine-tuning paradigm to show that properly breaking the integrity of the model can surprisingly lead to improved performance. Specifically, MFT learns a set of binary masks supervised by the typical LLM fine-tuning objective. Extensive experiments show that MFT gains a consistent performance boost across various domains and backbones (e.g., 1.95%/1.88% average gain in coding with LLaMA2-7B/3.1-8B). Detailed procedures are provided to study the proposed MFT from different hyperparameter perspectives for better insight. In particular, MFT naturally updates the current LLM training protocol by deploying it on a complete well-trained model. This study extends the functionality of mask learning from its conventional network pruning context for model compression to a more general scope.

Using token representation from bidirectional language models (LMs) such as BERT is still a widely used approach for token-classification tasks. Even though there exist much larger unidirectional LMs such as Llama-2, they are rarely used to replace the token representation of bidirectional LMs. In this work, we hypothesize that their lack of bidirectionality is keeping them behind. To that end, we propose to newly train a small backward LM and concatenate its representations to those of existing LM for downstream tasks. Through experiments in named entity recognition, we demonstrate that introducing backward model improves the benchmark performance more than 10 points. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method is especially effective for rare domains and in few-shot learning settings.

Autoregressive models (ARMs) are hindered by slow sequential inference. While masked diffusion models (MDMs) offer a parallel alternative, they suffer from critical drawbacks: high computational overhead from precluding Key-Value (KV) caching, and incoherent generation arising from learning dependencies over an intractable space of token combinations. To address these limitations, we introduce ReFusion, a novel masked diffusion model that achieves superior performance and efficiency by elevating parallel decoding from the token level to a higher slot level, where each slot is a fixed-length, contiguous sub-sequence. This is achieved through an iterative ``plan-and-infill'' decoding process: a diffusion-based planning step first identifies a set of weakly dependent slots, and an autoregressive infilling step then decodes these selected slots in parallel. The slot-based design simultaneously unlocks full KV cache reuse with a unified causal framework and reduces the learning complexity from the token combination space to a manageable slot-level permutation space. Extensive experiments on seven diverse benchmarks show that ReFusion not only overwhelmingly surpasses prior MDMs with 34% performance gains and an over 18times speedup on average, but also bridges the performance gap to strong ARMs while maintaining a 2.33times average speedup.

Recent studies have revealed various manifestations of position bias in transformer architectures, from the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon to attention sinks, yet a comprehensive theoretical understanding of how attention masks and positional encodings shape these biases remains elusive. This paper presents a graph-theoretic framework for analyzing position bias in multi-layer attention. Modeling attention masks as directed graphs, we quantify how tokens interact with contextual information based on their sequential positions. We uncover two key insights: First, causal masking inherently biases attention toward earlier positions, as tokens in deeper layers attend to increasingly more contextualized representations of earlier tokens. Second, we characterize the competing effects of the causal mask and relative positional encodings, such as the decay mask and rotary positional encoding (RoPE): while both mechanisms introduce distance-based decay within individual attention maps, their aggregate effect across multiple attention layersx2013coupled with the causal maskx2013leads to a trade-off between the long-term decay effects and the cumulative importance of early sequence positions. Through controlled numerical experiments, we not only validate our theoretical findings but also reproduce position biases observed in real-world LLMs. Our framework offers a principled foundation for understanding positional biases in transformers, shedding light on the complex interplay of attention mechanism components and guiding more informed architectural design.

Click-Through Rate(CTR) estimation has become one of the most fundamental tasks in many real-world applications and it's important for ranking models to effectively capture complex high-order features. Shallow feed-forward network is widely used in many state-of-the-art DNN models such as FNN, DeepFM and xDeepFM to implicitly capture high-order feature interactions. However, some research has proved that addictive feature interaction, particular feed-forward neural networks, is inefficient in capturing common feature interaction. To resolve this problem, we introduce specific multiplicative operation into DNN ranking system by proposing instance-guided mask which performs element-wise product both on the feature embedding and feed-forward layers guided by input instance. We also turn the feed-forward layer in DNN model into a mixture of addictive and multiplicative feature interactions by proposing MaskBlock in this paper. MaskBlock combines the layer normalization, instance-guided mask, and feed-forward layer and it is a basic building block to be used to design new ranking model under various configurations. The model consisting of MaskBlock is called MaskNet in this paper and two new MaskNet models are proposed to show the effectiveness of MaskBlock as basic building block for composing high performance ranking systems. The experiment results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed MaskNet models outperform state-of-the-art models such as DeepFM and xDeepFM significantly, which implies MaskBlock is an effective basic building unit for composing new high performance ranking systems.

Recent studies show that the attention heads in Transformer are not equal. We relate this phenomenon to the imbalance training of multi-head attention and the model dependence on specific heads. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple masking method: HeadMask, in two specific ways. Experiments show that translation improvements are achieved on multiple language pairs. Subsequent empirical analyses also support our assumption and confirm the effectiveness of the method.

Existing deep learning based image inpainting methods use a standard convolutional network over the corrupted image, using convolutional filter responses conditioned on both valid pixels as well as the substitute values in the masked holes (typically the mean value). This often leads to artifacts such as color discrepancy and blurriness. Post-processing is usually used to reduce such artifacts, but are expensive and may fail. We propose the use of partial convolutions, where the convolution is masked and renormalized to be conditioned on only valid pixels. We further include a mechanism to automatically generate an updated mask for the next layer as part of the forward pass. Our model outperforms other methods for irregular masks. We show qualitative and quantitative comparisons with other methods to validate our approach.

Recent advances in deep learning have shown exciting promise in filling large holes and lead to another orientation for image inpainting. However, existing learning-based methods often create artifacts and fallacious textures because of insufficient cognition understanding. Previous generative networks are limited with single receptive type and give up pooling in consideration of detail sharpness. Human cognition is constant regardless of the target attribute. As multiple receptive fields improve the ability of abstract image characterization and pooling can keep feature invariant, specifically, deep inception learning is adopted to promote high-level feature representation and enhance model learning capacity for local patches. Moreover, approaches for generating diverse mask images are introduced and a random mask dataset is created. We benchmark our methods on ImageNet, Places2 dataset, and CelebA-HQ. Experiments for regular, irregular, and custom regions completion are all performed and free-style image inpainting is also presented. Quantitative comparisons with previous state-of-the-art methods show that ours obtain much more natural image completions.

Recent text-to-image models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality images. However, when tasked with multi-concept generation which creates images containing multiple characters or objects, existing methods often suffer from attribute confusion, resulting in severe text-image inconsistency. We found that attribute confusion occurs when a certain region of the latent features attend to multiple or incorrect prompt tokens. In this work, we propose novel Semantic Protection Diffusion (SPDiffusion) to protect the semantics of regions from the influence of irrelevant tokens, eliminating the confusion of non-corresponding attributes. In the SPDiffusion framework, we design a Semantic Protection Mask (SP-Mask) to represent the relevance of the regions and the tokens, and propose a Semantic Protection Cross-Attention (SP-Attn) to shield the influence of irrelevant tokens on specific regions in the generation process. To evaluate our method, we created a diverse multi-concept benchmark, and SPDiffusion achieves state-of-the-art results on this benchmark, proving its effectiveness. Our method can be combined with many other application methods or backbones, such as ControlNet, Story Diffusion, PhotoMaker and PixArt-alpha to enhance their multi-concept capabilities, demonstrating strong compatibility and scalability.

Recent studies have highlighted a phenomenon in large language models (LLMs) known as "the reversal curse," in which the order of knowledge entities in the training data biases the models' comprehension. For example, if a model is trained on sentences where entity A consistently appears before entity B, it can respond to queries about A by providing B as the answer. However, it may encounter confusion when presented with questions concerning B. We contend that the reversal curse is partially a result of specific model training objectives, particularly evident in the prevalent use of the next-token prediction within most causal language models. For the next-token prediction, models solely focus on a token's preceding context, resulting in a restricted comprehension of the input. In contrast, we illustrate that the GLM, trained using the autoregressive blank infilling objective where tokens to be predicted have access to the entire context, exhibits better resilience against the reversal curse. We propose a novel training method, BIdirectional Casual language modeling Optimization (BICO), designed to mitigate the reversal curse when fine-tuning pretrained causal language models on new data. BICO modifies the causal attention mechanism to function bidirectionally and employs a mask denoising optimization. In the task designed to assess the reversal curse, our approach improves Llama's accuracy from the original 0% to around 70%. We hope that more attention can be focused on exploring and addressing these inherent weaknesses of the current LLMs, in order to achieve a higher level of intelligence.

Recently, diffusion-based methods, like InstructPix2Pix (IP2P), have achieved effective instruction-based image editing, requiring only natural language instructions from the user. However, these methods often inadvertently alter unintended areas and struggle with multi-instruction editing, resulting in compromised outcomes. To address these issues, we introduce the Focus on Your Instruction (FoI), a method designed to ensure precise and harmonious editing across multiple instructions without extra training or test-time optimization. In the FoI, we primarily emphasize two aspects: (1) precisely extracting regions of interest for each instruction and (2) guiding the denoising process to concentrate within these regions of interest. For the first objective, we identify the implicit grounding capability of IP2P from the cross-attention between instruction and image, then develop an effective mask extraction method. For the second objective, we introduce a cross attention modulation module for rough isolation of target editing regions and unrelated regions. Additionally, we introduce a mask-guided disentangle sampling strategy to further ensure clear region isolation. Experimental results demonstrate that FoI surpasses existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, especially excelling in multi-instruction editing task.

Text-to-image generation has witnessed great progress, especially with the recent advancements in diffusion models. Since texts cannot provide detailed conditions like object appearance, reference images are usually leveraged for the control of objects in the generated images. However, existing methods still suffer limited accuracy when the relationship between the foreground and background is complicated. To address this issue, we develop a framework termed Mask-ControlNet by introducing an additional mask prompt. Specifically, we first employ large vision models to obtain masks to segment the objects of interest in the reference image. Then, the object images are employed as additional prompts to facilitate the diffusion model to better understand the relationship between foreground and background regions during image generation. Experiments show that the mask prompts enhance the controllability of the diffusion model to maintain higher fidelity to the reference image while achieving better image quality. Comparison with previous text-to-image generation methods demonstrates our method's superior quantitative and qualitative performance on the benchmark datasets.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) excel in visual-language tasks by leveraging numerous visual tokens for fine-grained visual information, but this token redundancy results in significant computational costs. Previous research aimed at reducing visual tokens during inference typically leverages importance maps derived from attention scores among vision-only tokens or vision-language tokens to prune tokens across one or multiple pruning stages. Despite this progress, pruning frameworks and strategies remain simplistic and insufficiently explored, often resulting in substantial performance degradation. In this paper, we propose VFlowOpt, a token pruning framework that introduces an importance map derivation process and a progressive pruning module with a recycling mechanism. The hyperparameters of its pruning strategy are further optimized by a visual information flow-guided method. Specifically, we compute an importance map for image tokens based on their attention-derived context relevance and patch-level information entropy. We then decide which tokens to retain or prune and aggregate the pruned ones as recycled tokens to avoid potential information loss. Finally, we apply a visual information flow-guided method that regards the last token in the LMM as the most representative signal of text-visual interactions. This method minimizes the discrepancy between token representations in LMMs with and without pruning, thereby enabling superior pruning strategies tailored to different LMMs. Experiments demonstrate that VFlowOpt can prune 90% of visual tokens while maintaining comparable performance, leading to an 89% reduction in KV-Cache memory and 3.8 times faster inference.

Masked image modeling (MIM) has become a leading self-supervised learning strategy. MIMs such as Masked Autoencoder (MAE) learn strong representations by randomly masking input tokens for the encoder to process, with the decoder reconstructing the masked tokens to the input. However, MIM pre-trained encoders often exhibit a limited attention span, attributed to MIM's sole focus on regressing masked tokens only, which may impede the encoder's broader context learning. To tackle the limitation, we improve MIM by explicitly incorporating unmasked tokens into the training process. Specifically, our method enables the encoder to learn from broader context supervision, allowing unmasked tokens to experience broader contexts while the decoder reconstructs masked tokens. Thus, the encoded unmasked tokens are equipped with extensive contextual information, empowering masked tokens to leverage the enhanced unmasked tokens for MIM. As a result, our simple remedy trains more discriminative representations revealed by achieving 84.2% top-1 accuracy with ViT-B on ImageNet-1K with 0.6%p gain. We attribute the success to the enhanced pre-training method, as evidenced by the singular value spectrum and attention analyses. Finally, our models achieve significant performance gains at the downstream semantic segmentation and fine-grained visual classification tasks; and on diverse robust evaluation metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/lut

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}.

Structured channel pruning has been shown to significantly accelerate inference time for convolution neural networks (CNNs) on modern hardware, with a relatively minor loss of network accuracy. Recent works permanently zero these channels during training, which we observe to significantly hamper final accuracy, particularly as the fraction of the network being pruned increases. We propose Soft Masking for cost-constrained Channel Pruning (SMCP) to allow pruned channels to adaptively return to the network while simultaneously pruning towards a target cost constraint. By adding a soft mask re-parameterization of the weights and channel pruning from the perspective of removing input channels, we allow gradient updates to previously pruned channels and the opportunity for the channels to later return to the network. We then formulate input channel pruning as a global resource allocation problem. Our method outperforms prior works on both the ImageNet classification and PASCAL VOC detection datasets.

We introduce a novel diffusion transformer, LazyDiffusion, that generates partial image updates efficiently. Our approach targets interactive image editing applications in which, starting from a blank canvas or an image, a user specifies a sequence of localized image modifications using binary masks and text prompts. Our generator operates in two phases. First, a context encoder processes the current canvas and user mask to produce a compact global context tailored to the region to generate. Second, conditioned on this context, a diffusion-based transformer decoder synthesizes the masked pixels in a "lazy" fashion, i.e., it only generates the masked region. This contrasts with previous works that either regenerate the full canvas, wasting time and computation, or confine processing to a tight rectangular crop around the mask, ignoring the global image context altogether. Our decoder's runtime scales with the mask size, which is typically small, while our encoder introduces negligible overhead. We demonstrate that our approach is competitive with state-of-the-art inpainting methods in terms of quality and fidelity while providing a 10x speedup for typical user interactions, where the editing mask represents 10% of the image.

Self-supervised pre-training techniques have achieved remarkable progress in Document AI. Most multimodal pre-trained models use a masked language modeling objective to learn bidirectional representations on the text modality, but they differ in pre-training objectives for the image modality. This discrepancy adds difficulty to multimodal representation learning. In this paper, we propose LayoutLMv3 to pre-train multimodal Transformers for Document AI with unified text and image masking. Additionally, LayoutLMv3 is pre-trained with a word-patch alignment objective to learn cross-modal alignment by predicting whether the corresponding image patch of a text word is masked. The simple unified architecture and training objectives make LayoutLMv3 a general-purpose pre-trained model for both text-centric and image-centric Document AI tasks. Experimental results show that LayoutLMv3 achieves state-of-the-art performance not only in text-centric tasks, including form understanding, receipt understanding, and document visual question answering, but also in image-centric tasks such as document image classification and document layout analysis. The code and models are publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutlmv3.

The recently proposed data augmentation TransMix employs attention labels to help visual transformers (ViT) achieve better robustness and performance. However, TransMix is deficient in two aspects: 1) The image cropping method of TransMix may not be suitable for ViTs. 2) At the early stage of training, the model produces unreliable attention maps. TransMix uses unreliable attention maps to compute mixed attention labels that can affect the model. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose MaskMix and Progressive Attention Labeling (PAL) in image and label space, respectively. In detail, from the perspective of image space, we design MaskMix, which mixes two images based on a patch-like grid mask. In particular, the size of each mask patch is adjustable and is a multiple of the image patch size, which ensures each image patch comes from only one image and contains more global contents. From the perspective of label space, we design PAL, which utilizes a progressive factor to dynamically re-weight the attention weights of the mixed attention label. Finally, we combine MaskMix and Progressive Attention Labeling as our new data augmentation method, named MixPro. The experimental results show that our method can improve various ViT-based models at scales on ImageNet classification (73.8\% top-1 accuracy based on DeiT-T for 300 epochs). After being pre-trained with MixPro on ImageNet, the ViT-based models also demonstrate better transferability to semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. Furthermore, compared to TransMix, MixPro also shows stronger robustness on several benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/fistyee/MixPro.