Daily Papers

Discrete diffusion models offer global context awareness and flexible parallel generation. However, uniform random noise schedulers in standard DLLM training overlook the highly non-uniform information density inherent in real-world sequences. This wastes optimization resources on low-density structural glues while leaving high-density logical pivot points severely under-optimized. To address this, we propose an Information Density Driven Smart Noise Scheduler. By extracting information-dense hubs and applying Complementary Priority Masking, our method decouples a single training instance into mutually reinforcing reasoning and syntax samples, forcing the model to master both logical deduction and foundational sequence structure. Experiments demonstrate that our approach improves average accuracy by ~4\% across four Code and Math reasoning benchmarks, significantly outperforming uniform baselines. Mechanistic analyses further reveal that probabilistic priority masking effectively mitigates contextual collapse during block diffusion training. Overall, this density-aware strategy efficiently unlocks the reasoning potential of diffusion language models at minimal annotation cost, emerging as a promising new masked data training paradigm for Diffusion LLMs. Our processed dataset can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/malr07/opc-sft-stage2-dense-extracted.

Audio and visual signals typically occur simultaneously, and humans possess an innate ability to correlate and synchronize information from these two modalities. Recently, a challenging problem known as Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) has emerged, intending to produce segmentation maps for sounding objects within a scene. However, the methods proposed so far have not sufficiently integrated audio and visual information, and the computational costs have been extremely high. Additionally, the outputs of different stages have not been fully utilized. To facilitate this research, we introduce a novel Progressive Confident Masking Attention Network (PMCANet). It leverages attention mechanisms to uncover the intrinsic correlations between audio signals and visual frames. Furthermore, we design an efficient and effective cross-attention module to enhance semantic perception by selecting query tokens. This selection is determined through confidence-driven units based on the network's multi-stage predictive outputs. Experiments demonstrate that our network outperforms other AVS methods while requiring less computational resources. The code is available at: https://github.com/PrettyPlate/PCMANet.

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.

Text-to-image diffusion models often struggle to achieve accurate semantic alignment between generated images and text prompts while maintaining efficiency for deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Existing approaches either incur substantial computational overhead through noise optimization or compromise semantic fidelity by aggressively pruning tokens. In this work, we propose OptiPrune, a unified framework that combines distribution-aware initial noise optimization with similarity-based token pruning to address both challenges simultaneously. Specifically, (1) we introduce a distribution-aware noise optimization module guided by attention scores to steer the initial latent noise toward semantically meaningful regions, mitigating issues such as subject neglect and feature entanglement; (2) we design a hardware-efficient token pruning strategy that selects representative base tokens via patch-wise similarity, injects randomness to enhance generalization, and recovers pruned tokens using maximum similarity copying before attention operations. Our method preserves the Gaussian prior during noise optimization and enables efficient inference without sacrificing alignment quality. Experiments on benchmark datasets, including Animal-Animal, demonstrate that OptiPrune achieves state-of-the-art prompt-image consistency with significantly reduced computational cost.

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.

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.

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.

Current foundation model for photoplethysmography (PPG) signals is challenged by the intrinsic redundancy and noise of the signal. Standard masked modeling often yields trivial solutions while contrastive methods lack morphological precision. To address these limitations, we propose a Statistical-prior Informed Generative Masking Architecture (SIGMA-PPG), a generative foundation model featuring a Prior-Guided Adversarial Masking mechanism, where a reinforcement learning-driven teacher leverages statistical priors to create challenging learning paths that prevent overfitting to noise. We also incorporate a semantic consistency constraint via vector quantization to ensure that physiologically identical waveforms (even those altered by recording artifacts or minor perturbations) map to shared indices. This enhances codebook semantic density and eliminates redundant feature structures. Pre-trained on over 120,000 hours of data, SIGMA-PPG achieves superior average performance compared to five state-of-the-art baselines across 12 diverse downstream tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/ZonghengGuo/SigmaPPG.

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.

We introduce pluralistic salient object detection (PSOD), a novel task aimed at generating multiple plausible salient segmentation results for a given input image. Unlike conventional SOD methods that produce a single segmentation mask for salient objects, this new setting recognizes the inherent complexity of real-world images, comprising multiple objects, and the ambiguity in defining salient objects due to different user intentions. To study this task, we present two new SOD datasets "DUTS-MM" and "DUS-MQ", along with newly designed evaluation metrics. DUTS-MM builds upon the DUTS dataset but enriches the ground-truth mask annotations from three aspects which 1) improves the mask quality especially for boundary and fine-grained structures; 2) alleviates the annotation inconsistency issue; and 3) provides multiple ground-truth masks for images with saliency ambiguity. DUTS-MQ consists of approximately 100K image-mask pairs with human-annotated preference scores, enabling the learning of real human preferences in measuring mask quality. Building upon these two datasets, we propose a simple yet effective pluralistic SOD baseline based on a Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) design. Equipped with two prediction heads, it simultaneously predicts multiple masks using different query prompts and predicts human preference scores for each mask candidate. Extensive experiments and analyses underscore the significance of our proposed datasets and affirm the effectiveness of our PSOD framework.

A common approach to explain NLP models, is to use importance measures that express which tokens are important for a prediction. Unfortunately, such explanations are often wrong despite being persuasive. Therefore, it is essential to measure their faithfulness. One such metric is if tokens are truly important, then masking them should result in worse model performance. However, token masking introduces out-of-distribution issues and existing solutions are computationally expensive and employ proxy-models. Furthermore, other metrics are very limited in scope. In this work, we propose an inherently faithfulness measurable model that addresses these challenges. This is achieved by using a novel fine-tuning method that incorporates masking, such that masking tokens become in-distribution by design. This differs from existing approaches, which are completely model-agnostic but are inapplicable in practice. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by applying it to various tasks and validate it using statistical in-distribution tests. Additionally, because masking is in-distribution, importance measures which themselves use masking become more faithful, thus our model becomes more explainable.

The self-supervised objective of masking-and-predicting has led to promising performance gains on a variety of downstream tasks. However, while most approaches randomly mask tokens, there is strong intuition that deciding what to mask can substantially improve learning outcomes. We investigate this in continued pretraining setting in which pretrained models continue to pretrain on domain-specific data before performing some downstream task. We introduce Difference-Masking, a masking strategy that automatically chooses what to mask during continued pretraining by considering what makes a task domain different from the pretraining domain. Empirically, we find that Difference-Masking outperforms baselines on continued pretraining settings across four diverse language-only and multimodal video tasks.

We present UGround, a Unified visual Grounding paradigm that dynamically selects intermediate layers across Unrolled transformers as ``mask as prompt'', diverging from the prevailing pipeline that leverages the fixed last hidden layer as ``<SEG> as prompt''. UGround addresses two primary challenges posed by the prevailing paradigm: (1) its reliance on the fixed last hidden layer, which sequentially amplifies cumulative errors arising from layer-by-layer propagation without intermediate correction, and (2) its use of <SEG> as a prompt, which implicitly projects textual embeddings into visual space without explicit spatial cues (\eg, coordinates). Central to UGround is Policy-Prompted Masking, which comprises two key components: Stochastic Skip Connection (SSC) and Mask as Prompt (MasP). SSC is a reinforcement learning policy that, via stochastic sampling, allows each <SEG> token to slide across unrolled transformer layers, enabling dynamic layer selection at which it connects to the vision model (\eg, SAM) in a skip-connection fashion. Given the selected hidden layer, MasP uses the similarity map derived from the <SEG> token and image tokens as a soft logit mask to prompt SAM for mask generation, offering explicit spatial cues through its activation regions. To validate the effectiveness of UGround, we, for the first time, have unified visual grounding within a single framework from an attribute perspective, spanning from traditional refer expression segmentation to newly proposed reasoning segmentation, single-target to multi-target, positive query to false premise (empty target). All codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/rui-qian/UGround{https://github.com/rui-qian/UGround}.

Understanding the internal representations of large language models is crucial for ensuring their reliability and safety, with sparse autoencoders (SAEs) emerging as a promising interpretability approach. However, current SAE training methods face feature absorption, where features (or neurons) are absorbed into each other to minimize L_1 penalty, making it difficult to consistently identify and analyze model behaviors. We introduce Adaptive Temporal Masking (ATM), a novel training approach that dynamically adjusts feature selection by tracking activation magnitudes, frequencies, and reconstruction contributions to compute importance scores that evolve over time. ATM applies a probabilistic masking mechanism based on statistical thresholding of these importance scores, creating a more natural feature selection process. Through extensive experiments on the Gemma-2-2b model, we demonstrate that ATM achieves substantially lower absorption scores compared to existing methods like TopK and JumpReLU SAEs, while maintaining excellent reconstruction quality. These results establish ATM as a principled solution for learning stable, interpretable features in neural networks, providing a foundation for more reliable model analysis.

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 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.

We introduce an attention-based method that uses learned binary attention masks to ensure that only attended image regions influence the prediction. Context can strongly affect object perception, sometimes leading to biased representations, particularly when objects appear in out-of-distribution backgrounds. At the same time, many image-level object-centric tasks require identifying relevant regions, often requiring context. To address this conundrum, we propose a two-stage framework: stage 1 processes the full image to discover object parts and identify task-relevant regions, while stage 2 leverages input attention masking to restrict its receptive field to these regions, enabling a focused analysis while filtering out potentially spurious information. Both stages are trained jointly, allowing stage 2 to refine stage 1. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness against spurious correlations and out-of-distribution backgrounds.

Image segmentation is about grouping pixels with different semantics, e.g., category or instance membership, where each choice of semantics defines a task. While only the semantics of each task differ, current research focuses on designing specialized architectures for each task. We present Masked-attention Mask Transformer (Mask2Former), a new architecture capable of addressing any image segmentation task (panoptic, instance or semantic). Its key components include masked attention, which extracts localized features by constraining cross-attention within predicted mask regions. In addition to reducing the research effort by at least three times, it outperforms the best specialized architectures by a significant margin on four popular datasets. Most notably, Mask2Former sets a new state-of-the-art for panoptic segmentation (57.8 PQ on COCO), instance segmentation (50.1 AP on COCO) and semantic segmentation (57.7 mIoU on ADE20K).

Diffusion models learn to restore noisy data, which is corrupted with different levels of noise, by optimizing the weighted sum of the corresponding loss terms, i.e., denoising score matching loss. In this paper, we show that restoring data corrupted with certain noise levels offers a proper pretext task for the model to learn rich visual concepts. We propose to prioritize such noise levels over other levels during training, by redesigning the weighting scheme of the objective function. We show that our simple redesign of the weighting scheme significantly improves the performance of diffusion models regardless of the datasets, architectures, and sampling strategies.

The ability to remove features from the input of machine learning models is very important to understand and interpret model predictions. However, this is non-trivial for vision models since masking out parts of the input image typically causes large distribution shifts. This is because the baseline color used for masking (typically grey or black) is out of distribution. Furthermore, the shape of the mask itself can contain unwanted signals which can be used by the model for its predictions. Recently, there has been some progress in mitigating this issue (called missingness bias) in image masking for vision transformers. In this work, we propose a new masking method for CNNs we call layer masking in which the missingness bias caused by masking is reduced to a large extent. Intuitively, layer masking applies a mask to intermediate activation maps so that the model only processes the unmasked input. We show that our method (i) is able to eliminate or minimize the influence of the mask shape or color on the output of the model, and (ii) is much better than replacing the masked region by black or grey for input perturbation based interpretability techniques like LIME. Thus, layer masking is much less affected by missingness bias than other masking strategies. We also demonstrate how the shape of the mask may leak information about the class, thus affecting estimates of model reliance on class-relevant features derived from input masking. Furthermore, we discuss the role of data augmentation techniques for tackling this problem, and argue that they are not sufficient for preventing model reliance on mask shape. The code for this project is publicly available at https://github.com/SriramB-98/layer_masking

Recovering the masked speech frames is widely applied in speech representation learning. However, most of these models use random masking in the pre-training. In this work, we proposed two kinds of masking approaches: (1) speech-level masking, making the model to mask more speech segments than silence segments, (2) phoneme-level masking, forcing the model to mask the whole frames of the phoneme, instead of phoneme pieces. We pre-trained the model via these two approaches, and evaluated on two downstream tasks, phoneme classification and speaker recognition. The experiments demonstrated that the proposed masking approaches are beneficial to improve the performance of speech representation.

Autoregressive (AR) vision-language models (VLMs) have long dominated multimodal understanding, reasoning, and graphical user interface (GUI) grounding. Recently, discrete diffusion vision-language models (DVLMs) have shown strong performance in multimodal reasoning, offering bidirectional attention, parallel token generation, and iterative refinement. However, their potential for GUI grounding remains unexplored. In this work, we evaluate whether discrete DVLMs can serve as a viable alternative to AR models for GUI grounding. We adapt LLaDA-V for single-turn action and bounding-box prediction, framing the task as text generation from multimodal input. To better capture the hierarchical structure of bounding-box geometry, we propose a hybrid masking schedule that combines linear and deterministic masking, improving grounding accuracy by up to 6.1 points in Step Success Rate (SSR) over the GUI-adapted LLaDA-V trained with linear masking. Evaluations on four datasets spanning web, desktop, and mobile interfaces show that the adapted diffusion model with hybrid masking consistently outperforms the linear-masked variant and performs competitively with autoregressive counterparts despite limited pretraining. Systematic ablations reveal that increasing diffusion steps, generation length, and block length improves accuracy but also increases latency, with accuracy plateauing beyond a certain number of diffusion steps. Expanding the training data with diverse GUI domains further reduces latency by about 1.3 seconds and improves grounding accuracy by an average of 20 points across benchmarks. These results demonstrate that discrete DVLMs are a promising modeling framework for GUI grounding and represent an important step toward diffusion-based GUI agents.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has gained prominence through low-rank adaptation methods like LoRA. In this paper, we focus on sparsity-based PEFT (SPEFT), which introduces trainable sparse adaptations to the weight matrices in the model, offering greater flexibility in selecting fine-tuned parameters compared to low-rank methods. We conduct the first systematic evaluation of salience metrics for SPEFT, inspired by zero-cost NAS proxies, and identify simple gradient-based metrics is reliable, and results are on par with the best alternatives, offering both computational efficiency and robust performance. Additionally, we compare static and dynamic masking strategies, finding that static masking, which predetermines non-zero entries before training, delivers efficiency without sacrificing performance, while dynamic masking offers no substantial benefits. Across NLP tasks, a simple gradient-based, static SPEFT consistently outperforms other fine-tuning methods for LLMs, providing a simple yet effective baseline for SPEFT. Our work challenges the notion that complexity is necessary for effective PEFT. Our work is open source and available to the community at [https://github.com/0-ml/speft].

Masked language model and autoregressive language model are two types of language models. While pretrained masked language models such as BERT overwhelm the line of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, autoregressive language models such as GPT are especially capable in natural language generation (NLG). In this paper, we propose a probabilistic masking scheme for the masked language model, which we call probabilistically masked language model (PMLM). We implement a specific PMLM with a uniform prior distribution on the masking ratio named u-PMLM. We prove that u-PMLM is equivalent to an autoregressive permutated language model. One main advantage of the model is that it supports text generation in arbitrary order with surprisingly good quality, which could potentially enable new applications over traditional unidirectional generation. Besides, the pretrained u-PMLM also outperforms BERT on a set of downstream NLU tasks.

End-to-end models reach state-of-the-art performance for speech recognition, but global soft attention is not monotonic, which might lead to convergence problems, to instability, to bad generalisation, cannot be used for online streaming, and is also inefficient in calculation. Monotonicity can potentially fix all of this. There are several ad-hoc solutions or heuristics to introduce monotonicity, but a principled introduction is rarely found in literature so far. In this paper, we present a mathematically clean solution to introduce monotonicity, by introducing a new latent variable which represents the audio position or segment boundaries. We compare several monotonic latent models to our global soft attention baseline such as a hard attention model, a local windowed soft attention model, and a segmental soft attention model. We can show that our monotonic models perform as good as the global soft attention model. We perform our experiments on Switchboard 300h. We carefully outline the details of our training and release our code and configs.

We present a masked diffusion language modeling framework for data-efficient training for the BabyLM 2025 Challenge. Our approach applies diffusion training objectives to language modeling under strict data constraints, incorporating frequency-informed masking that prioritizes learning from rare tokens while maintaining theoretical validity. We explore multiple noise scheduling strategies, including two-mode approaches, and investigate different noise weighting schemes within the NELBO objective. We evaluate our method on the BabyLM benchmark suite, measuring linguistic competence, world knowledge, and human-likeness. Results show performance competitive to hybrid autoregressive-masked baselines, demonstrating that diffusion-based training offers a viable alternative for data-restricted language learning.

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has been widely used as the denoising objective in pre-training language models (PrLMs). Existing PrLMs commonly adopt a Random-Token Masking strategy where a fixed masking ratio is applied and different contents are masked by an equal probability throughout the entire training. However, the model may receive complicated impact from pre-training status, which changes accordingly as training time goes on. In this paper, we show that such time-invariant MLM settings on masking ratio and masked content are unlikely to deliver an optimal outcome, which motivates us to explore the influence of time-variant MLM settings. We propose two scheduled masking approaches that adaptively tune the masking ratio and masked content in different training stages, which improves the pre-training efficiency and effectiveness verified on the downstream tasks. Our work is a pioneer study on time-variant masking strategy on ratio and content and gives a better understanding of how masking ratio and masked content influence the MLM pre-training.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) suffer from prohibitive inference costs due to the massive number of visual tokens processed by the language decoder. Existing pruning methods often lead to significant performance degradation because the irreversible removal of visual tokens causes a distribution shift in the hidden states that deviates from the pre-trained full-token regime. To address this, we propose Representation Consistency Pruner, which we refer to as RCP, as a novel framework that integrates cumulative visual token pruning with a delayed repair mechanism. Specifically, we introduce a cross-attention pruner that leverages the intrinsic attention of the LLM as a baseline to predict cumulative masks, ensuring consistent and monotonic token reduction across layers. To compensate for the resulting information loss, we design a delayed repair adapter denoted as DRA, which caches the essence of pruned tokens and applies FiLM-based modulation specifically to the answer generation tokens. We employ a repair loss to match the first and second-order statistics of the pruned representations with a full-token teacher. RCP is highly efficient because it trains only lightweight plug-in modules while allowing for physical token discarding at inference. Extensive experiments on LVLM benchmarks demonstrate that RCP removes up to 88.9\% of visual tokens and reduces FLOPs by up to 85.7\% with only a marginal average accuracy drop, and outperforms prior methods that avoid fine-tuning the original model on several widely used benchmarks.

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.

Block diffusion LLMs are emerging as a promising next paradigm for language generation, but their use of KV caching makes memory access a dominant bottleneck in long-context settings. While dynamic sparse attention has been actively explored, existing methods designed for autoregressive LLMs rely on approximate importance estimation and perform poorly when adapted to block diffusion. This work identifies a key opportunity unique to block diffusion: attention at the first All-[MASK] denoising step reliably predicts important KV entries and budget requirements, enabling MAGE to perform a single exact attention pass per block and reuse it for training-free sparse denoising. Across long-context benchmarks including LongBench and Needle-in-a-Haystack, MAGE achieves near-lossless accuracy with a fraction of the KV budget while delivering up to 3-4x end-to-end speedup, consistently outperforming AR-oriented sparse attention baselines. A lightweight fine-tuning strategy further strengthens [MASK]-guided patterns with minimal cost, requiring only a few hours of training on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU for both 1.5B and 7B models.

Attention scales quadratically with sequence length, fundamentally limiting long-context inference. Existing block-granularity sparsification can reduce latency, but coarse blocks impose an intrinsic sparsity ceiling, making further improvements difficult even with carefully engineered designs. We present S2O, which performs early stopping for sparse attention via online permutation. Inspired by virtual-to-physical address mapping in memory systems, S2O revisits and factorizes FlashAttention execution, enabling inference to load non-contiguous tokens rather than a contiguous span in the original order. Motivated by fine-grained structures in attention heatmaps, we transform explicit permutation into an online, index-guided, discrete loading policy; with extremely lightweight preprocessing and index-remapping overhead, it concentrates importance on a small set of high-priority blocks. Building on this importance-guided online permutation for loading, S2O further introduces an early-stopping rule: computation proceeds from high to low importance; once the current block score falls below a threshold, S2O terminates early and skips the remaining low-contribution blocks, thereby increasing effective sparsity and reducing computation under a controlled error budget. As a result, S2O substantially raises the practical sparsity ceiling. On Llama-3.1-8B under a 128K context, S2O reduces single-operator MSE by 3.82times at matched sparsity, and reduces prefill compute density by 3.31times at matched MSE; meanwhile, it preserves end-to-end accuracy and achieves 7.51times attention and 3.81times end-to-end speedups.

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.

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.

Self-supervised representation learning follows a paradigm of withholding some part of the data and tasking the network to predict it from the remaining part. Among many techniques, data augmentation lies at the core for creating the information gap. Towards this end, masking has emerged as a generic and powerful tool where content is withheld along the sequential dimension, e.g., spatial in images, temporal in audio, and syntactic in language. In this paper, we explore the orthogonal channel dimension for generic data augmentation by exploiting precision redundancy. The data for each channel is quantized through a non-uniform quantizer, with the quantized value sampled randomly within randomly sampled quantization bins. From another perspective, quantization is analogous to channel-wise masking, as it removes the information within each bin, but preserves the information across bins. Our approach significantly surpasses existing generic data augmentation methods, while showing on par performance against modality-specific augmentations. We comprehensively evaluate our approach on vision, audio, 3D point clouds, as well as the DABS benchmark which is comprised of various data modalities. The code is available at https: //github.com/microsoft/random_quantize.

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}.

We present Fast Language-Image Pre-training (FLIP), a simple and more efficient method for training CLIP. Our method randomly masks out and removes a large portion of image patches during training. Masking allows us to learn from more image-text pairs given the same wall-clock time and contrast more samples per iteration with similar memory footprint. It leads to a favorable trade-off between accuracy and training time. In our experiments on 400 million image-text pairs, FLIP improves both accuracy and speed over the no-masking baseline. On a large diversity of downstream tasks, FLIP dominantly outperforms the CLIP counterparts trained on the same data. Facilitated by the speedup, we explore the scaling behavior of increasing the model size, data size, or training length, and report encouraging results and comparisons. We hope that our work will foster future research on scaling vision-language learning.

Attention mechanisms are the core of foundation models, but their quadratic complexity remains a critical bottleneck for scaling. This challenge has driven the development of efficient attention mechanisms, with sparsity emerging as the dominant paradigm. Current methods typically retain or discard entire key-value blocks with binary masks, resulting in substantial information loss under high sparsity. To mitigate this gap, we present Pyramid Sparse Attention (PSA), a versatile module applicable to both video understanding and generation tasks. Instead of binary masking, PSA introduces multi-level pooled KV representations, enabling finer mask granularity. Specifically, each query block dynamically allocates lower pooling levels to critical KV blocks and higher levels to less important ones, creating an informative interpolation between full retention and complete pruning. This design, analogous to fixed-point quantization and classical feature pyramid networks in computer vision, effectively mitigates information loss while preserving computational efficiency under a low compute budget. It works with a native, hardware-friendly kernel that leverages decoupled block-tile design to ensure efficient execution. Across video understanding and generation benchmarks, PSA preserves contextual information and visual fidelity, consistently outperforming or achieving comparable performance over existing sparse attention baselines with superior efficiency-quality trade-offs. Our code and model weights are publicly available at: http://ziplab.co/PSA

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.

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices remains challenging due to their quadratically increasing computations with the sequence length. Existing studies for dynamic attention pruning are designed for hardware with massively parallel computation capabilities, such as GPUs or TPUs, and aim at long context lengths (e.g., 64K), making them unsuitable for edge scenarios. We present DeltaLLM, a training-free framework that exploits temporal sparsity in attention patterns to enable efficient LLM inference across both the prefilling and decoding stages, on resource-constrained edge devices. DeltaLLM introduces an accuracy- and memory-aware delta matrix construction strategy that introduces temporal sparsity, and a context-aware hybrid attention mechanism that combines full attention in a local context window with delta approximation outside it to increase accuracy. We evaluate our framework on the edge-device-friendly BitNet-b1.58-2B-4T model and Llama3.2-1B-Instruct model across diverse language tasks. The results show that on BitNet, our framework increases the attention sparsity from 0% to 60% during the prefilling stage with slight accuracy improvement on the WG task, and 0% to 57% across both the prefilling and decoding stages, with even higher F1 score from 29.63 to 30.97 on SQuAD-v2 task. On the Llama model, it can also achieve up to 60% sparsity during the prefilling stage and around 57% across both stages with negligible accuracy drop. These results demonstrate that DeltaLLM offers a promising solution for efficient edge deployment, requiring no fine-tuning and seamlessly integrating with existing inference pipelines.

In the application of Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) methods for Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification, attention mechanisms often focus on a subset of discriminative instances, which are closely linked to overfitting. To mitigate overfitting, we present Attention-Challenging MIL (ACMIL). ACMIL combines two techniques based on separate analyses for attention value concentration. Firstly, UMAP of instance features reveals various patterns among discriminative instances, with existing attention mechanisms capturing only some of them. To remedy this, we introduce Multiple Branch Attention (MBA) to capture more discriminative instances using multiple attention branches. Secondly, the examination of the cumulative value of Top-K attention scores indicates that a tiny number of instances dominate the majority of attention. In response, we present Stochastic Top-K Instance Masking (STKIM), which masks out a portion of instances with Top-K attention values and allocates their attention values to the remaining instances. The extensive experimental results on three WSI datasets with two pre-trained backbones reveal that our ACMIL outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, through heatmap visualization and UMAP visualization, this paper extensively illustrates ACMIL's effectiveness in suppressing attention value concentration and overcoming the overfitting challenge. The source code is available at https://github.com/dazhangyu123/ACMIL.

Several recent works have directly extended the image masked autoencoder (MAE) with random masking into video domain, achieving promising results. However, unlike images, both spatial and temporal information are important for video understanding. This suggests that the random masking strategy that is inherited from the image MAE is less effective for video MAE. This motivates the design of a novel masking algorithm that can more efficiently make use of video saliency. Specifically, we propose a motion-guided masking algorithm (MGM) which leverages motion vectors to guide the position of each mask over time. Crucially, these motion-based correspondences can be directly obtained from information stored in the compressed format of the video, which makes our method efficient and scalable. On two challenging large-scale video benchmarks (Kinetics-400 and Something-Something V2), we equip video MAE with our MGM and achieve up to +1.3% improvement compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, our MGM achieves equivalent performance to previous video MAE using up to 66% fewer training epochs. Lastly, we show that MGM generalizes better to downstream transfer learning and domain adaptation tasks on the UCF101, HMDB51, and Diving48 datasets, achieving up to +4.9% improvement compared to baseline methods.

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.

Self-attention is of vital importance in semantic segmentation as it enables modeling of long-range context, which translates into improved performance. We argue that it is equally important to model short-range context, especially to tackle cases where not only the regions of interest are small and ambiguous, but also when there exists an imbalance between the semantic classes. To this end, we propose Masked Supervised Learning (MaskSup), an effective single-stage learning paradigm that models both short- and long-range context, capturing the contextual relationships between pixels via random masking. Experimental results demonstrate the competitive performance of MaskSup against strong baselines in both binary and multi-class segmentation tasks on three standard benchmark datasets, particularly at handling ambiguous regions and retaining better segmentation of minority classes with no added inference cost. In addition to segmenting target regions even when large portions of the input are masked, MaskSup is also generic and can be easily integrated into a variety of semantic segmentation methods. We also show that the proposed method is computationally efficient, yielding an improved performance by 10\% on the mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) while requiring 3times less learnable parameters.

Diffusion-based talking head models generate high-quality, photorealistic videos but suffer from slow inference, limiting practical applications. Existing acceleration methods for general diffusion models fail to exploit the temporal and spatial redundancies unique to talking head generation. In this paper, we propose a task-specific framework addressing these inefficiencies through two key innovations. First, we introduce Lightning-fast Caching-based Parallel denoising prediction (LightningCP), caching static features to bypass most model layers in inference time. We also enable parallel prediction using cached features and estimated noisy latents as inputs, efficiently bypassing sequential sampling. Second, we propose Decoupled Foreground Attention (DFA) to further accelerate attention computations, exploiting the spatial decoupling in talking head videos to restrict attention to dynamic foreground regions. Additionally, we remove reference features in certain layers to bring extra speedup. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly improves inference speed while preserving video quality.

Modern Language Models (LMs) owe much of their success to masked causal attention, the backbone of Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) models. Although GPTs can process the entire user prompt at once, the causal masking is applied to all input tokens step-by-step, mimicking the generation process. This imposes an unnecessary constraint during the initial "prefill" phase when the model processes the input prompt and generates the internal representations before producing any output tokens. In this work, attention is masked based on the known block structure at the prefill phase, followed by the conventional token-by-token autoregressive process after that. For example, in a typical chat prompt, the system prompt is treated as one block, and the user prompt as the next one. Each of these is treated as a unit for the purpose of masking, such that the first tokens in each block can access the subsequent tokens in a non-causal manner. Then, the model answer is generated in the conventional causal manner. This Segment-by-Segment scheme entails no additional computational overhead. When integrating it into models such as Llama and Qwen, state-of-the-art performance is consistently achieved.

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.

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

A key challenge with procedure planning in instructional videos lies in how to handle a large decision space consisting of a multitude of action types that belong to various tasks. To understand real-world video content, an AI agent must proficiently discern these action types (e.g., pour milk, pour water, open lid, close lid, etc.) based on brief visual observation. Moreover, it must adeptly capture the intricate semantic relation of the action types and task goals, along with the variable action sequences. Recently, notable progress has been made via the integration of diffusion models and visual representation learning to address the challenge. However, existing models employ rudimentary mechanisms to utilize task information to manage the decision space. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a simple yet effective enhancement - a masked diffusion model. The introduced mask acts akin to a task-oriented attention filter, enabling the diffusion/denoising process to concentrate on a subset of action types. Furthermore, to bolster the accuracy of task classification, we harness more potent visual representation learning techniques. In particular, we learn a joint visual-text embedding, where a text embedding is generated by prompting a pre-trained vision-language model to focus on human actions. We evaluate the method on three public datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/ffzzy840304/Masked-PDPP.

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.

Anomaly segmentation is a critical task for driving applications, and it is approached traditionally as a per-pixel classification problem. However, reasoning individually about each pixel without considering their contextual semantics results in high uncertainty around the objects' boundaries and numerous false positives. We propose a paradigm change by shifting from a per-pixel classification to a mask classification. Our mask-based method, Mask2Anomaly, demonstrates the feasibility of integrating an anomaly detection method in a mask-classification architecture. Mask2Anomaly includes several technical novelties that are designed to improve the detection of anomalies in masks: i) a global masked attention module to focus individually on the foreground and background regions; ii) a mask contrastive learning that maximizes the margin between an anomaly and known classes; and iii) a mask refinement solution to reduce false positives. Mask2Anomaly achieves new state-of-the-art results across a range of benchmarks, both in the per-pixel and component-level evaluations. In particular, Mask2Anomaly reduces the average false positives rate by 60% wrt the previous state-of-the-art. Github page: https://github.com/shyam671/Mask2Anomaly-Unmasking-Anomalies-in-Road-Scene-Segmentation.

Most works on transformers trained with the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective use the original BERT model's fixed masking rate of 15%. Our work instead dynamically schedules the masking ratio throughout training. We found that linearly decreasing the masking rate from 30% to 15% over the course of pretraining improves average GLUE accuracy by 0.46% in BERT-base, compared to a standard 15% fixed rate. Further analyses demonstrate that the gains from scheduling come from being exposed to both high and low masking rate regimes. Our results demonstrate that masking rate scheduling is a simple way to improve the quality of masked language models and achieve up to a 1.89x speedup in pretraining.

The quadratic complexity of self-attention during the prefill phase impedes long-context inference in large language models. Existing sparse attention methods face a trade-off among context adaptivity, sampling overhead, and fine-tuning costs. We propose VSPrefill, a mechanism requiring lightweight training that uses the vertical-slash structural pattern in attention distributions. Our compact VSIndexer module predicts context-aware importance scores for vertical columns and slash diagonals from key-value representations augmented with RoPE. This approach constructs sparse masks with linear complexity without modifying the backbone parameters. During inference, an adaptive cumulative-threshold strategy allocates sparsity budgets per layer, while a fused kernel executes attention with on-the-fly index merging. Evaluated on Qwen3-4B-Instruct and LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct across the LongBench and RULER benchmarks, VSPrefill preserves 98.35% of the full attention accuracy while delivering a 4.95x average speedup at a context length of 128k. These results establish a new Pareto frontier in the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.

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.

Recently, various studies have been directed towards exploring dense passage retrieval techniques employing pre-trained language models, among which the masked auto-encoder (MAE) pre-training architecture has emerged as the most promising. The conventional MAE framework relies on leveraging the passage reconstruction of decoder to bolster the text representation ability of encoder, thereby enhancing the performance of resulting dense retrieval systems. Within the context of building the representation ability of the encoder through passage reconstruction of decoder, it is reasonable to postulate that a ``more demanding'' decoder will necessitate a corresponding increase in the encoder's ability. To this end, we propose a novel token importance aware masking strategy based on pointwise mutual information to intensify the challenge of the decoder. Importantly, our approach can be implemented in an unsupervised manner, without adding additional expenses to the pre-training phase. Our experiments verify that the proposed method is both effective and robust on large-scale supervised passage retrieval datasets and out-of-domain zero-shot retrieval benchmarks.

This paper investigates the limitations of the normalization in attention mechanisms. We begin with a theoretical framework that enables the identification of the model's selective ability and the geometric separation involved in token selection. Our analysis includes explicit bounds on distances and separation criteria for token vectors under softmax scaling. Through experiments with pre-trained GPT-2 model, we empirically validate our theoretical results and analyze key behaviors of the attention mechanism. Notably, we demonstrate that as the number of selected tokens increases, the model's ability to distinguish informative tokens declines, often converging toward a uniform selection pattern. We also show that gradient sensitivity under softmax normalization presents challenges during training, especially at low temperature settings. These findings advance current understanding of softmax-based attention mechanism and motivate the need for more robust normalization and selection strategies in future attention architectures.

Vision-language models (VLMs) typically encode substantially more visual tokens than text tokens, resulting in significant token redundancy. Pruning uninformative visual tokens is therefore crucial for improving computational efficiency, and language-to-vision attention has become a widely used importance criterion for this purpose. However, we find that attention in VLMs is systematically biased. It disproportionately favors tokens appearing later in the sequence, manifesting as over-attention to lower image regions, and assigns inflated scores to semantically empty padding tokens. These behaviors stem from intrinsic recency bias and attention sink effects inherited from large language models (LLMs), and they distort attention-based pruning by preserving irrelevant visual content. To derive a pruning criterion better aligned with semantic relevance, we introduce two lightweight yet effective debiasing techniques that restore the reliability of attention. The first compensates for positional distortions by removing recency-induced attention trends, producing a content-aware and position-agnostic importance measure. The second suppresses attention sink effects by eliminating spurious attention on padding tokens. Our method is model-agnostic, pruning-method-agnostic, and task-agnostic, enabling plug-and-play integration with existing VLM pruning models. Despite its simplicity, our approach consistently delivers strong performance gains. We evaluate our method on ten vision-language benchmarks spanning both image-based and video-based tasks, in comparison with seven state-of-the-art visual token pruning methods and across two representative VLM architectures. Our method achieves substantial performance gains, demonstrating strong effectiveness and generalizability. Our code is available at https://github.com/intcomp/attention-bias.

Self-supervised learning has become an incredibly successful method for feature learning, widely applied to many downstream tasks. It has proven especially effective for discriminative tasks, surpassing the trending generative models. However, generative models perform better in image generation and detail enhancement. Thus, it is natural for us to find a connection between SSL and generative models to further enhance the representation capacity of SSL. As generative models can create new samples by approximating the data distribution, such modeling should also lead to a semantic understanding of the raw visual data, which is necessary for recognition tasks. This enlightens us to combine the core principle of the diffusion model: diffusion noise, with SSL to learn a competitive recognition model. Specifically, diffusion noise can be viewed as a particular state of mask that reveals a close relationship between masked image modeling (MIM) and diffusion models. In this paper, we propose N-JEPA (Noise-based JEPA) to incorporate diffusion noise into MIM by the position embedding of masked tokens. The multi-level noise schedule is a series of feature augmentations to further enhance the robustness of our model. We perform a comprehensive study to confirm its effectiveness in the classification of downstream tasks. Codes will be released soon in public.

Recent approaches for segmentation have leveraged pretrained generative models as feature extractors, treating segmentation as a downstream adaptation task via indirect feature retrieval. This implicit use suffers from a fundamental misalignment in representation. It also depends heavily on indirect feature extraction pipelines, which complicate the workflow and limit adaptation. In this paper, we argue that instead of indirect adaptation, segmentation tasks should be trained directly in a generative manner. We identify a key obstacle to this unified formulation: VAE latents of binary masks are sharply distributed, noise robust, and linearly separable, distinct from natural image latents. To bridge this gap, we introduce timesteps sampling strategy for binary masks that emphasizes extreme noise levels for segmentation and moderate noise for image generation, enabling harmonious joint training. We present GenMask, a DiT trains to generate black-and-white segmentation masks as well as colorful images in RGB space under the original generative objective. GenMask preserves the original DiT architecture while removing the need of feature extraction pipelines tailored for segmentation tasks. Empirically, GenMask attains state-of-the-art performance on referring and reasoning segmentation benchmarks and ablations quantify the contribution of each component.

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.

Masked language models (MLMs) conventionally mask 15% of tokens due to the belief that more masking would leave insufficient context to learn good representations; this masking rate has been widely used, regardless of model sizes or masking strategies. In this work, we revisit this important choice of MLM pre-training. We first establish that 15% is not universally optimal, and larger models should adopt a higher masking rate. Specifically, we find that masking 40% outperforms 15% for BERT-large size models on GLUE and SQuAD. Interestingly, an extremely high masking rate of 80% can still preserve 95% fine-tuning performance and most of the accuracy in linguistic probing, challenging the conventional wisdom about the role of the masking rate. We then examine the interplay between masking rates and masking strategies and find that uniform masking requires a higher masking rate compared to sophisticated masking strategies such as span or PMI masking. Finally, we argue that increasing the masking rate has two distinct effects: it leads to more corruption, which makes the prediction task more difficult; it also enables more predictions, which benefits optimization. Using this framework, we revisit BERT's 80-10-10 corruption strategy. Together, our results contribute to a better understanding of MLM pre-training.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently demonstrated strong multimodal understanding, yet their fine-grained visual perception is often constrained by low input resolutions. A common remedy is to partition high-resolution images into multiple sub-images for separate encoding, but this approach drastically inflates the number of visual tokens and introduces prohibitive inference overhead. To overcome this challenge, we propose Pyramid Token Pruning (PTP), a training-free strategy that hierarchically integrates bottom-up visual saliency at both region and token levels with top-down instruction-guided relevance. Inspired by human visual cognition, PTP selectively preserves more tokens from salient regions while further emphasizing those most relevant to task instructions. Extensive experiments on 13 diverse benchmarks show that PTP substantially reduces computational cost, memory usage, and inference latency, with negligible performance degradation.

Masked language modeling is widely used for pretraining large language models for natural language understanding (NLU). However, random masking is suboptimal, allocating an equal masking rate for all tokens. In this paper, we propose InforMask, a new unsupervised masking strategy for training masked language models. InforMask exploits Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) to select the most informative tokens to mask. We further propose two optimizations for InforMask to improve its efficiency. With a one-off preprocessing step, InforMask outperforms random masking and previously proposed masking strategies on the factual recall benchmark LAMA and the question answering benchmark SQuAD v1 and v2.

Dynamic model pruning is a recent direction that allows for the inference of a different sub-network for each input sample during deployment. However, current dynamic methods rely on learning a continuous channel gating through regularization by inducing sparsity loss. This formulation introduces complexity in balancing different losses (e.g task loss, regularization loss). In addition, regularization based methods lack transparent tradeoff hyperparameter selection to realize a computational budget. Our contribution is two-fold: 1) decoupled task and pruning losses. 2) Simple hyperparameter selection that enables FLOPs reduction estimation before training. Inspired by the Hebbian theory in Neuroscience: "neurons that fire together wire together", we propose to predict a mask to process k filters in a layer based on the activation of its previous layer. We pose the problem as a self-supervised binary classification problem. Each mask predictor module is trained to predict if the log-likelihood for each filter in the current layer belongs to the top-k activated filters. The value k is dynamically estimated for each input based on a novel criterion using the mass of heatmaps. We show experiments on several neural architectures, such as VGG, ResNet and MobileNet on CIFAR and ImageNet datasets. On CIFAR, we reach similar accuracy to SOTA methods with 15% and 24% higher FLOPs reduction. Similarly in ImageNet, we achieve lower drop in accuracy with up to 13% improvement in FLOPs reduction.

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.

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 advances in large language models highlighted the excessive quadratic cost of self-attention. Despite the significant research efforts, subquadratic attention methods still suffer from inferior performance in practice. We hypothesize that dynamic, learned content-based sparsity can lead to more efficient attention mechanisms. We present Mixture of Sparse Attention (MoSA), a novel approach inspired by Mixture of Experts (MoE) with expert choice routing. MoSA dynamically selects tokens for each attention head, allowing arbitrary sparse attention patterns. By selecting k tokens from a sequence of length T, MoSA reduces the computational complexity of each attention head from O(T^2) to O(k^2 + T). This enables using more heads within the same computational budget, allowing higher specialization. We show that among the tested sparse attention variants, MoSA is the only one that can outperform the dense baseline, sometimes with up to 27% better perplexity for an identical compute budget. MoSA can also reduce the resource usage compared to dense self-attention. Despite using torch implementation without an optimized kernel, perplexity-matched MoSA models are simultaneously faster in wall-clock time, require less memory for training, and drastically reduce the size of the KV-cache compared to the dense transformer baselines.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown impressive performance across multi-modal tasks by encoding images into thousands of tokens. However, the large number of image tokens results in significant computational overhead, and the use of dynamic high-resolution inputs further increases this burden. Previous approaches have attempted to reduce the number of image tokens through token pruning, typically by selecting tokens based on attention scores or image token diversity. Through empirical studies, we observe that existing methods often overlook the joint impact of pruning on both the current layer's output (local) and the outputs of subsequent layers (global), leading to suboptimal pruning decisions. To address this challenge, we propose Balanced Token Pruning (BTP), a plug-and-play method for pruning vision tokens. Specifically, our method utilizes a small calibration set to divide the pruning process into multiple stages. In the early stages, our method emphasizes the impact of pruning on subsequent layers, whereas in the deeper stages, the focus shifts toward preserving the consistency of local outputs. Extensive experiments across various LVLMs demonstrate the broad effectiveness of our approach on multiple benchmarks. Our method achieves a 78% compression rate while preserving 96.7% of the original models' performance on average.

Recent advances in diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in video generation. However, the computational intensity remains a significant challenge for practical applications. While feature caching has been proposed to reduce the computational burden of diffusion models, existing methods typically overlook the heterogeneous significance of individual blocks, resulting in suboptimal reuse and degraded output quality. To this end, we address this gap by introducing ProfilingDiT, a novel adaptive caching strategy that explicitly disentangles foreground and background-focused blocks. Through a systematic analysis of attention distributions in diffusion models, we reveal a key observation: 1) Most layers exhibit a consistent preference for either foreground or background regions. 2) Predicted noise shows low inter-step similarity initially, which stabilizes as denoising progresses. This finding inspires us to formulate a selective caching strategy that preserves full computation for dynamic foreground elements while efficiently caching static background features. Our approach substantially reduces computational overhead while preserving visual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves significant acceleration (e.g., 2.01 times speedup for Wan2.1) while maintaining visual fidelity across comprehensive quality metrics, establishing a viable method for efficient video generation.

Diffusion models have achieved impressive results in generating high-quality images. Yet, they often struggle to faithfully align the generated images with the input prompts. This limitation arises from synchronous denoising, where all pixels simultaneously evolve from random noise to clear images. As a result, during generation, the prompt-related regions can only reference the unrelated regions at the same noise level, failing to obtain clear context and ultimately impairing text-to-image alignment. To address this issue, we propose asynchronous diffusion models -- a novel framework that allocates distinct timesteps to different pixels and reformulates the pixel-wise denoising process. By dynamically modulating the timestep schedules of individual pixels, prompt-related regions are denoised more gradually than unrelated regions, thereby allowing them to leverage clearer inter-pixel context. Consequently, these prompt-related regions achieve better alignment in the final images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our asynchronous diffusion models can significantly improve text-to-image alignment across diverse prompts. The code repository for this work is available at https://github.com/hu-zijing/AsynDM.

While MLLMs have demonstrated adequate image understanding capabilities, they still struggle with pixel-level comprehension, limiting their practical applications. Current evaluation tasks like VQA and visual grounding remain too coarse to assess fine-grained pixel comprehension accurately. Though segmentation is foundational for pixel-level understanding, existing methods often require MLLMs to generate implicit tokens, decoded through external pixel decoders. This approach disrupts the MLLM's text output space, potentially compromising language capabilities and reducing flexibility and extensibility, while failing to reflect the model's intrinsic pixel-level understanding. Thus, we introduce the Human-Like Mask Annotation Task (HLMAT), a new paradigm where MLLMs mimic human annotators using interactive segmentation tools. Modeling segmentation as a multi-step Markov Decision Process, HLMAT enables MLLMs to iteratively generate text-based click points, achieving high-quality masks without architectural changes or implicit tokens. Through this setup, we develop SegAgent, a model fine-tuned on human-like annotation trajectories, which achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and supports additional tasks like mask refinement and annotation filtering. HLMAT provides a protocol for assessing fine-grained pixel understanding in MLLMs and introduces a vision-centric, multi-step decision-making task that facilitates exploration of MLLMs' visual reasoning abilities. Our adaptations of policy improvement method StaR and PRM-guided tree search further enhance model robustness in complex segmentation tasks, laying a foundation for future advancements in fine-grained visual perception and multi-step decision-making for MLLMs.

Scaling the size of a model enhances its capabilities but significantly increases computation complexity. Mixture-of-Experts models (MoE) address the issue by allowing model size to scale up without substantially increasing training or inference costs. Despite their promising results, MoE models encounter several challenges. Primarily, for dynamic routing methods, the dispersion of training tokens across multiple experts can lead to underfitting, particularly for infrequent tokens. Additionally, while fixed routing methods can mitigate that issue, they compromise on the diversity of representations. In this paper, we propose MaskMoE, a method designed to enhance token-level learning by employing a routing masking technique within the Mixture-of-Experts model. MaskMoE is capable of maintaining representation diversity while achieving more comprehensive training. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous dominant Mixture-of-Experts models in terms of both perplexity (PPL) and downstream task performance.

We investigate the design of pooling methods used to summarize the outputs of transformer embedding models, primarily motivated by reinforcement learning and vision applications. This work considers problems where a subset of the input vectors contains requisite information for a downstream task (signal) while the rest are distractors (noise). By framing pooling as vector quantization with the goal of minimizing signal loss, we demonstrate that the standard methods used to aggregate transformer outputs, AvgPool, MaxPool, and ClsToken, are vulnerable to performance collapse as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of inputs fluctuates. We then show that an attention-based adaptive pooling method can approximate the signal-optimal vector quantizer within derived error bounds for any SNR. Our theoretical results are first validated by supervised experiments on a synthetic dataset designed to isolate the SNR problem, then generalized to standard relational reasoning, multi-agent reinforcement learning, and vision benchmarks with noisy observations, where transformers with adaptive pooling display superior robustness across tasks.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) enable the joint processing of text and images. However, the inclusion of vision data significantly expands the prompt length. Along with the quadratic complexity of the attention computation, this results in a longer prefill duration. An approach to mitigate this bottleneck is to leverage the inherent sparsity in the attention computation. In our analysis of attention patterns in VLMs, we observe that a substantial portion of layers exhibit minimal cross-image attention, except through attention-sink tokens per image. These sparse attention patterns fall into distinct categories: sink-only, document mask and a hybrid document-sink mask. Based on this, we propose BlindSight: a training-free approach to optimize VLM inference using a input template-aware attention sparsity mask. We utilize samples from a dataset to derive a prompt-agnostic sparsity categorization for every attention head. We evaluate the proposed technique using VLMs such as Qwen2-VL, Qwen2.5-VL and Gemma-3. BlindSight results in a 32%-41% reduction in FLOPs on average with -2%-+2% accuracy compared to the original model in most evaluated multi-image understanding benchmarks.

Driven by large-data pre-training, Segment Anything Model (SAM) has been demonstrated as a powerful and promptable framework, revolutionizing the segmentation models. Despite the generality, customizing SAM for specific visual concepts without man-powered prompting is under explored, e.g., automatically segmenting your pet dog in different images. In this paper, we propose a training-free Personalization approach for SAM, termed as PerSAM. Given only a single image with a reference mask, PerSAM first localizes the target concept by a location prior, and segments it within other images or videos via three techniques: target-guided attention, target-semantic prompting, and cascaded post-refinement. In this way, we effectively adapt SAM for private use without any training. To further alleviate the mask ambiguity, we present an efficient one-shot fine-tuning variant, PerSAM-F. Freezing the entire SAM, we introduce two learnable weights for multi-scale masks, only training 2 parameters within 10 seconds for improved performance. To demonstrate our efficacy, we construct a new segmentation dataset, PerSeg, for personalized evaluation, and test our methods on video object segmentation with competitive performance. Besides, our approach can also enhance DreamBooth to personalize Stable Diffusion for text-to-image generation, which discards the background disturbance for better target appearance learning. Code is released at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/Personalize-SAM

Attention Model has now become an important concept in neural networks that has been researched within diverse application domains. This survey provides a structured and comprehensive overview of the developments in modeling attention. In particular, we propose a taxonomy which groups existing techniques into coherent categories. We review salient neural architectures in which attention has been incorporated, and discuss applications in which modeling attention has shown a significant impact. We also describe how attention has been used to improve the interpretability of neural networks. Finally, we discuss some future research directions in attention. We hope this survey will provide a succinct introduction to attention models and guide practitioners while developing approaches for their applications.

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.

Modern approaches typically formulate semantic segmentation as a per-pixel classification task, while instance-level segmentation is handled with an alternative mask classification. Our key insight: mask classification is sufficiently general to solve both semantic- and instance-level segmentation tasks in a unified manner using the exact same model, loss, and training procedure. Following this observation, we propose MaskFormer, a simple mask classification model which predicts a set of binary masks, each associated with a single global class label prediction. Overall, the proposed mask classification-based method simplifies the landscape of effective approaches to semantic and panoptic segmentation tasks and shows excellent empirical results. In particular, we observe that MaskFormer outperforms per-pixel classification baselines when the number of classes is large. Our mask classification-based method outperforms both current state-of-the-art semantic (55.6 mIoU on ADE20K) and panoptic segmentation (52.7 PQ on COCO) models.

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

Constrained by the separate encoding of vision and language, existing grounding and referring segmentation works heavily rely on bulky Transformer-based fusion en-/decoders and a variety of early-stage interaction technologies. Simultaneously, the current mask visual language modeling (MVLM) fails to capture the nuanced referential relationship between image-text in referring tasks. In this paper, we propose OneRef, a minimalist referring framework built on the modality-shared one-tower transformer that unifies the visual and linguistic feature spaces. To modeling the referential relationship, we introduce a novel MVLM paradigm called Mask Referring Modeling (MRefM), which encompasses both referring-aware mask image modeling and referring-aware mask language modeling. Both modules not only reconstruct modality-related content but also cross-modal referring content. Within MRefM, we propose a referring-aware dynamic image masking strategy that is aware of the referred region rather than relying on fixed ratios or generic random masking schemes. By leveraging the unified visual language feature space and incorporating MRefM's ability to model the referential relations, our approach enables direct regression of the referring results without resorting to various complex techniques. Our method consistently surpasses existing approaches and achieves SoTA performance on both grounding and segmentation tasks, providing valuable insights for future research. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/linhuixiao/OneRef.

Promptable segmentation typically requires instance-specific manual prompts to guide the segmentation of each desired object. To minimize such a need, task-generic promptable segmentation has been introduced, which employs a single task-generic prompt to segment various images of different objects in the same task. Current methods use Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to reason detailed instance-specific prompts from a task-generic prompt for improving segmentation accuracy. The effectiveness of this segmentation heavily depends on the precision of these derived prompts. However, MLLMs often suffer hallucinations during reasoning, resulting in inaccurate prompting. While existing methods focus on eliminating hallucinations to improve a model, we argue that MLLM hallucinations can reveal valuable contextual insights when leveraged correctly, as they represent pre-trained large-scale knowledge beyond individual images. In this paper, we utilize hallucinations to mine task-related information from images and verify its accuracy for enhancing precision of the generated prompts. Specifically, we introduce an iterative Prompt-Mask Cycle generation framework (ProMaC) with a prompt generator and a mask generator.The prompt generator uses a multi-scale chain of thought prompting, initially exploring hallucinations for extracting extended contextual knowledge on a test image.These hallucinations are then reduced to formulate precise instance-specific prompts, directing the mask generator to produce masks that are consistent with task semantics by mask semantic alignment. The generated masks iteratively induce the prompt generator to focus more on task-relevant image areas and reduce irrelevant hallucinations, resulting jointly in better prompts and masks. Experiments on 5 benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of ProMaC. Code given in https://lwpyh.github.io/ProMaC/.

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.

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.

Diffusion Transformers, particularly for video generation, achieve remarkable quality but suffer from quadratic attention complexity, leading to prohibitive latency. Existing acceleration methods face a fundamental trade-off: dynamically estimating sparse attention patterns at each denoising step incurs high computational overhead and estimation errors, while static sparsity patterns remain fixed and often suboptimal throughout denoising. We identify a key structural property of diffusion attention, namely, its sparsity patterns exhibit strong temporal coherence across denoising steps. Tiles deemed non-essential at step t typically remain so at step t+δ. Leveraging this observation, we introduce LiteAttention, a method that exploits temporal coherence to enable evolutionary computation skips across the denoising sequence. By marking non-essential tiles early and propagating skip decisions forward, LiteAttention eliminates redundant attention computations without repeated profiling overheads, combining the adaptivity of dynamic methods with the efficiency of static ones. We implement a highly optimized LiteAttention kernel on top of FlashAttention and demonstrate substantial speedups on production video diffusion models, with no degradation in quality. The code and implementation details will be publicly released.

Endowing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with visual grounding capability can significantly enhance AIs' understanding of the visual world and their interaction with humans. However, existing methods typically fine-tune the parameters of LMMs to learn additional segmentation tokens and overfit grounding and segmentation datasets. Such a design would inevitably cause a catastrophic diminution in the indispensable conversational capability of general AI assistants. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate state-of-the-art grounding LMMs across a suite of multimodal question-answering benchmarks, observing pronounced performance drops that indicate vanishing general knowledge comprehension and weakened instruction following ability. To address this issue, we present F-LMM -- grounding frozen off-the-shelf LMMs in human-AI conversations -- a straightforward yet effective design based on the fact that word-pixel correspondences conducive to visual grounding inherently exist in the attention weights of well-trained LMMs. Using only a few trainable CNN layers, we can translate word-pixel attention weights to mask logits, which a SAM-based mask refiner can further optimise. Our F-LMM neither learns special segmentation tokens nor utilises high-quality grounded instruction-tuning data, but achieves competitive performance on referring expression segmentation and panoptic narrative grounding benchmarks while completely preserving LMMs' original conversational ability. Additionally, with instruction-following ability preserved and grounding ability obtained, our F-LMM can perform visual chain-of-thought reasoning and better resist object hallucinations.

While humans effortlessly draw visual objects and shapes by adaptively allocating attention based on their complexity, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain constrained by rigid token representations. Bridging this gap, we propose ALTo, an adaptive length tokenizer for autoregressive mask generation. To achieve this, a novel token length predictor is designed, along with a length regularization term and a differentiable token chunking strategy. We further build ALToLLM that seamlessly integrates ALTo into MLLM. Preferences on the trade-offs between mask quality and efficiency is implemented by group relative policy optimization (GRPO). Experiments demonstrate that ALToLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance with adaptive token cost on popular segmentation benchmarks. Code and models are released at https://github.com/yayafengzi/ALToLLM.

Diffusion models have revolutionized generative tasks, especially in the domain of text-to-image synthesis; however, their iterative denoising process demands substantial computational resources. In this paper, we present a novel acceleration strategy that integrates token-level pruning with caching techniques to tackle this computational challenge. By employing noise relative magnitude, we identify significant token changes across denoising iterations. Additionally, we enhance token selection by incorporating spatial clustering and ensuring distributional balance. Our experiments demonstrate reveal a 50%-60% reduction in computational costs while preserving the performance of the model, thereby markedly increasing the efficiency of diffusion models. The code is available at https://github.com/ada-cheng/CAT-Pruning

In visual generation, the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms results in high memory and computational costs, especially for longer token sequences required in high-resolution image or multi-frame video generation. To address this, prior research has explored techniques such as sparsification and quantization. However, these techniques face significant challenges under low density and reduced bitwidths. Through systematic analysis, we identify that the core difficulty stems from the dispersed and irregular characteristics of visual attention patterns. Therefore, instead of introducing specialized sparsification and quantization design to accommodate such patterns, we propose an alternative strategy: *reorganizing* the attention pattern to alleviate the challenges. Inspired by the local aggregation nature of visual feature extraction, we design a novel **Pattern-Aware token ReOrdering (PARO)** technique, which unifies the diverse attention patterns into a hardware-friendly block-wise pattern. This unification substantially simplifies and enhances both sparsification and quantization. We evaluate the performance-efficiency trade-offs of various design choices and finalize a methodology tailored for the unified pattern. Our approach, **PAROAttention**, achieves video and image generation with lossless metrics, and nearly identical results from full-precision (FP) baselines, while operating at notably lower density (~20%-30%) and bitwidth (**INT8/INT4**), achieving a **1.9x** to **2.7x** end-to-end latency speedup.

Transformer-based language models rely on positional encoding (PE) to handle token order and support context length extrapolation. However, existing PE methods lack theoretical clarity and rely on limited evaluation metrics to substantiate their extrapolation claims. We propose the Bayesian Attention Mechanism (BAM), a theoretical framework that formulates positional encoding as a prior within a probabilistic model. BAM unifies existing methods (e.g., NoPE and ALiBi) and motivates a new Generalized Gaussian positional prior that substantially improves long-context generalization. Empirically, BAM enables accurate information retrieval at 500times the training context length, outperforming previous state-of-the-art context length generalization in long context retrieval accuracy while maintaining comparable perplexity and introducing minimal additional parameters.

Motivated by the factorization inherent in the original fast multipole method and the improved fast Gauss transform we introduce a factorable form of attention that operates efficiently in high dimensions. This approach reduces the computational and memory complexity of the attention mechanism in transformers from O(N^2) to O(N). In comparison to previous attempts, our work presents a linearly scaled attention mechanism that maintains the full representation of the attention matrix without compromising on sparsification and incorporates the all-to-all relationship between tokens. We explore the properties of our new attention metric and conduct tests in various standard settings. Results indicate that our attention mechanism has a robust performance and holds significant promise for diverse applications where self-attention is used.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have adopted visual token pruning strategies to mitigate substantial computational overhead incurred by extensive visual token sequences. While prior works primarily focus on either attention-based or diversity-based pruning methods, in-depth analysis of these approaches' characteristics and limitations remains largely unexplored. In this work, we conduct thorough empirical analysis using effective rank (erank) as a measure of feature diversity and attention score entropy to investigate visual token processing mechanisms and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Our analysis reveals two insights: (1) Our erank-based quantitative analysis shows that many diversity-oriented pruning methods preserve substantially less feature diversity than intended; moreover, analysis using the CHAIR dataset reveals that the diversity they do retain is closely tied to increased hallucination frequency compared to attention-based pruning. (2) We further observe that attention-based approaches are more effective on simple images where visual evidence is concentrated, while diversity-based methods better handle complex images with distributed features. Building on these empirical insights, we show that incorporating image-aware adjustments into existing hybrid pruning strategies consistently improves their performance. We also provide a minimal instantiation of our empirical findings through a simple adaptive pruning mechanism, which achieves strong and reliable performance across standard benchmarks as well as hallucination-specific evaluations. Our project page available at https://cvsp-lab.github.io/AgilePruner.

Low-resolution image segmentation is crucial in real-world applications such as robotics, augmented reality, and large-scale scene understanding, where high-resolution data is often unavailable due to computational constraints. To address this challenge, we propose MaskAttn-UNet, a novel segmentation framework that enhances the traditional U-Net architecture via a mask attention mechanism. Our model selectively emphasizes important regions while suppressing irrelevant backgrounds, thereby improving segmentation accuracy in cluttered and complex scenes. Unlike conventional U-Net variants, MaskAttn-UNet effectively balances local feature extraction with broader contextual awareness, making it particularly well-suited for low-resolution inputs. We evaluate our approach on three benchmark datasets with input images rescaled to 128x128 and demonstrate competitive performance across semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation tasks. Our results show that MaskAttn-UNet achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods at significantly lower computational cost than transformer-based models, making it an efficient and scalable solution for low-resolution segmentation in resource-constrained scenarios.

We present MILO (Metric for Image- and Latent-space Optimization), a lightweight, multiscale, perceptual metric for full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA). MILO is trained using pseudo-MOS (Mean Opinion Score) supervision, in which reproducible distortions are applied to diverse images and scored via an ensemble of recent quality metrics that account for visual masking effects. This approach enables accurate learning without requiring large-scale human-labeled datasets. Despite its compact architecture, MILO outperforms existing metrics across standard FR-IQA benchmarks and offers fast inference suitable for real-time applications. Beyond quality prediction, we demonstrate the utility of MILO as a perceptual loss in both image and latent domains. In particular, we show that spatial masking modeled by MILO, when applied to latent representations from a VAE encoder within Stable Diffusion, enables efficient and perceptually aligned optimization. By combining spatial masking with a curriculum learning strategy, we first process perceptually less relevant regions before progressively shifting the optimization to more visually distorted areas. This strategy leads to significantly improved performance in tasks like denoising, super-resolution, and face restoration, while also reducing computational overhead. MILO thus functions as both a state-of-the-art image quality metric and as a practical tool for perceptual optimization in generative pipelines.

Many training-free sparse attention methods are effective for accelerating diffusion models. Recently, several works suggest that making sparse attention trainable can further increase sparsity while preserving generation quality. We study three key questions: (1) when do the two common masking rules, i.e., Top-k and Top-p, fail, and how can we avoid these failures? (2) why can trainable sparse attention reach higher sparsity than training-free methods? (3) what are the limitations of fine-tuning sparse attention using the diffusion loss, and how can we address them? Based on this analysis, we propose SpargeAttention2, a trainable sparse attention method that achieves high sparsity without degrading generation quality. SpargeAttention2 includes (i) a hybrid masking rule that combines Top-k and Top-p for more robust masking at high sparsity, (ii) an efficient trainable sparse attention implementation, and (iii) a distillation-inspired fine-tuning objective to better preserve generation quality during fine-tuning using sparse attention. Experiments on video diffusion models show that SpargeAttention2 reaches 95% attention sparsity and a 16.2x attention speedup while maintaining generation quality, consistently outperforming prior sparse attention methods.

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.

We present significant extensions to diffusion-based sequence generation models, blurring the line with autoregressive language models. We introduce hyperschedules, which assign distinct noise schedules to individual token positions, generalizing both autoregressive models (e.g., GPT) and conventional diffusion models (e.g., SEDD, MDLM) as special cases. Second, we propose two hybrid token-wise noising processes that interpolate between absorbing and uniform processes, enabling the model to fix past mistakes, and we introduce a novel inference algorithm that leverages this new feature in a simplified context inspired from MDLM. To support efficient training and inference, we design attention masks compatible with KV-caching. Our methods achieve state-of-the-art perplexity and generate diverse, high-quality sequences across standard benchmarks, suggesting a promising path for autoregressive diffusion-based sequence generation.

We propose a simple yet efficient anchor-free instance segmentation, called CenterMask, that adds a novel spatial attention-guided mask (SAG-Mask) branch to anchor-free one stage object detector (FCOS) in the same vein with Mask R-CNN. Plugged into the FCOS object detector, the SAG-Mask branch predicts a segmentation mask on each box with the spatial attention map that helps to focus on informative pixels and suppress noise. We also present an improved backbone networks, VoVNetV2, with two effective strategies: (1) residual connection for alleviating the optimization problem of larger VoVNet lee2019energy and (2) effective Squeeze-Excitation (eSE) dealing with the channel information loss problem of original SE. With SAG-Mask and VoVNetV2, we deign CenterMask and CenterMask-Lite that are targeted to large and small models, respectively. Using the same ResNet-101-FPN backbone, CenterMask achieves 38.3%, surpassing all previous state-of-the-art methods while at a much faster speed. CenterMask-Lite also outperforms the state-of-the-art by large margins at over 35fps on Titan Xp. We hope that CenterMask and VoVNetV2 can serve as a solid baseline of real-time instance segmentation and backbone network for various vision tasks, respectively. The Code is available at https://github.com/youngwanLEE/CenterMask.

As a common image editing operation, image composition involves integrating foreground objects into background scenes. In this paper, we expand the application of the concept of Affordance from human-centered image composition tasks to a more general object-scene composition framework, addressing the complex interplay between foreground objects and background scenes. Following the principle of Affordance, we define the affordance-aware object insertion task, which aims to seamlessly insert any object into any scene with various position prompts. To address the limited data issue and incorporate this task, we constructed the SAM-FB dataset, which contains over 3 million examples across more than 3,000 object categories. Furthermore, we propose the Mask-Aware Dual Diffusion (MADD) model, which utilizes a dual-stream architecture to simultaneously denoise the RGB image and the insertion mask. By explicitly modeling the insertion mask in the diffusion process, MADD effectively facilitates the notion of affordance. Extensive experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and exhibits strong generalization performance on in-the-wild images. Please refer to our code on https://github.com/KaKituken/affordance-aware-any.

Visual tokens dominate inference cost in vision-language models (VLMs), yet many carry redundant information. Existing pruning methods alleviate this but typically rely on attention magnitude or similarity scores. We reformulate visual token pruning as capacity constrained communication: given a fixed budget K, the model must allocate limited bandwidth to maximally preserve visual information. We propose AutoSelect, which attaches a lightweight Scorer and Denoiser to a frozen VLM and trains with only the standard next token prediction loss, without auxiliary objectives or extra annotations. During training, a variance preserving noise gate modulates each token's information flow according to its predicted importance so that gradients propagate through all tokens; a diagonal attention Denoiser then recovers the perturbed representations. At inference, only the Scorer and a hard top-K selection remain, adding negligible latency. On ten VLM benchmarks, AutoSelect retains 96.5% of full model accuracy while accelerating LLM prefill by 2.85x with only 0.69 ms overhead, and transfers to different VLM backbones without architecture-specific tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/MedHK23/AutoSelect.

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/).

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown significant capability in vision-language understanding. However, one critical issue that persists in these models is sycophancy, which means models are unduly influenced by leading or deceptive prompts, resulting in biased outputs and hallucinations. Despite the progress in LVLMs, evaluating and mitigating sycophancy is yet much under-explored. In this work, we fill this gap by systematically analyzing sycophancy on various VL benchmarks with curated leading queries and further proposing a text contrastive decoding method for mitigation. While the specific sycophantic behavior varies significantly among models, our analysis reveals the severe deficiency of all LVLMs in resilience of sycophancy across various tasks. For improvement, we propose Leading Query Contrastive Decoding (LQCD), a model-agnostic method focusing on calibrating the LVLMs' over-reliance on leading cues by identifying and suppressing the probabilities of sycophancy tokens at the decoding stage. Extensive experiments show that LQCD effectively mitigate sycophancy, outperforming both prompt engineering methods and common methods for hallucination mitigation. We further demonstrate that LQCD does not hurt but even slightly improves LVLMs' responses to neutral queries, suggesting it being a more effective strategy for general-purpose decoding but not limited to sycophancy.

Dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and surface normal prediction, can be easily formulated as per-pixel classification (discrete outputs) or regression (continuous outputs). This per-pixel prediction paradigm has remained popular due to the prevalence of fully convolutional networks. However, on the recent frontier of segmentation task, the community has been witnessing a shift of paradigm from per-pixel prediction to cluster-prediction with the emergence of transformer architectures, particularly the mask transformers, which directly predicts a label for a mask instead of a pixel. Despite this shift, methods based on the per-pixel prediction paradigm still dominate the benchmarks on the other dense prediction tasks that require continuous outputs, such as depth estimation and surface normal prediction. Motivated by the success of DORN and AdaBins in depth estimation, achieved by discretizing the continuous output space, we propose to generalize the cluster-prediction based method to general dense prediction tasks. This allows us to unify dense prediction tasks with the mask transformer framework. Remarkably, the resulting model PolyMaX demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks of NYUD-v2 dataset. We hope our simple yet effective design can inspire more research on exploiting mask transformers for more dense prediction tasks. Code and model will be made available.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of multimodal tasks. However, their inference efficiency is constrained by the large number of visual tokens processed during decoding. To address this challenge, we propose Per-Layer Per-Head Vision Token Pruning (PLPHP), a two-level fine-grained pruning method including Layer-Level Retention Rate Allocation and Head-Level Vision Token Pruning. Motivated by the Vision Token Re-attention phenomenon across decoder layers, we dynamically adjust token retention rates layer by layer. Layers that exhibit stronger attention to visual information preserve more vision tokens, while layers with lower vision attention are aggressively pruned. Furthermore, PLPHP applies pruning at the attention head level, enabling different heads within the same layer to independently retain critical context. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PLPHP delivers an 18% faster decoding speed and reduces the Key-Value Cache (KV Cache) size by over 50%, all at the cost of 0.46% average performance drop, while also achieving notable performance improvements in multi-image tasks. These results highlight the effectiveness of fine-grained token pruning and contribute to advancing the efficiency and scalability of LVLMs. Our source code will be made publicly available.

As a class of fruitful approaches, diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have shown excellent advantages in high-resolution image reconstruction. On the other hand, masked autoencoders (MAEs), as popular self-supervised vision learners, have demonstrated simpler and more effective image reconstruction and transfer capabilities on downstream tasks. However, they all require extremely high training costs, either due to inherent high temporal-dependence (i.e., excessively long diffusion steps) or due to artificially low spatial-dependence (i.e., human-formulated high mask ratio, such as 0.75). To the end, this paper presents LMD, a faster image reconstruction framework with latent masking diffusion. First, we propose to project and reconstruct images in latent space through a pre-trained variational autoencoder, which is theoretically more efficient than in the pixel-based space. Then, we combine the advantages of MAEs and DPMs to design a progressive masking diffusion model, which gradually increases the masking proportion by three different schedulers and reconstructs the latent features from simple to difficult, without sequentially performing denoising diffusion as in DPMs or using fixed high masking ratio as in MAEs, so as to alleviate the high training time-consumption predicament. Our approach allows for learning high-capacity models and accelerate their training (by 3x or more) and barely reduces the original accuracy. Inference speed in downstream tasks also significantly outperforms the previous approaches.

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.

Recently, transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable performance on audio-visual segmentation (AVS) tasks. However, their expensive computational cost makes real-time inference impractical. By characterizing attention maps of the network, we identify two key obstacles in AVS models: 1) attention dissipation, corresponding to the over-concentrated attention weights by Softmax within restricted frames, and 2) inefficient, burdensome transformer decoder, caused by narrow focus patterns in early stages. In this paper, we introduce AVESFormer, the first real-time Audio-Visual Efficient Segmentation transformer that achieves fast, efficient and light-weight simultaneously. Our model leverages an efficient prompt query generator to correct the behaviour of cross-attention. Additionally, we propose ELF decoder to bring greater efficiency by facilitating convolutions suitable for local features to reduce computational burdens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AVESFormer significantly enhances model performance, achieving 79.9% on S4, 57.9% on MS3 and 31.2% on AVSS, outperforming previous state-of-the-art and achieving an excellent trade-off between performance and speed. Code can be found at https://github.com/MarkXCloud/AVESFormer.git.

The ability to predict future visual observations conditioned on past observations and motor commands can enable embodied agents to plan solutions to a variety of tasks in complex environments. This work shows that we can create good video prediction models by pre-training transformers via masked visual modeling. Our approach, named MaskViT, is based on two simple design decisions. First, for memory and training efficiency, we use two types of window attention: spatial and spatiotemporal. Second, during training, we mask a variable percentage of tokens instead of a fixed mask ratio. For inference, MaskViT generates all tokens via iterative refinement where we incrementally decrease the masking ratio following a mask scheduling function. On several datasets we demonstrate that MaskViT outperforms prior works in video prediction, is parameter efficient, and can generate high-resolution videos (256x256). Further, we demonstrate the benefits of inference speedup (up to 512x) due to iterative decoding by using MaskViT for planning on a real robot. Our work suggests that we can endow embodied agents with powerful predictive models by leveraging the general framework of masked visual modeling with minimal domain knowledge.

Recent advancements in image segmentation have focused on enhancing the efficiency of the models to meet the demands of real-time applications, especially on edge devices. However, existing research has primarily concentrated on single-task settings, especially on semantic segmentation, leading to redundant efforts and specialized architectures for different tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a novel architecture for efficient multi-task image segmentation, capable of handling various segmentation tasks without sacrificing efficiency or accuracy. We introduce BiSeNetFormer, that leverages the efficiency of two-stream semantic segmentation architectures and it extends them into a mask classification framework. Our approach maintains the efficient spatial and context paths to capture detailed and semantic information, respectively, while leveraging an efficient transformed-based segmentation head that computes the binary masks and class probabilities. By seamlessly supporting multiple tasks, namely semantic and panoptic segmentation, BiSeNetFormer offers a versatile solution for multi-task segmentation. We evaluate our approach on popular datasets, Cityscapes and ADE20K, demonstrating impressive inference speeds while maintaining competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art architectures. Our results indicate that BiSeNetFormer represents a significant advancement towards fast, efficient, and multi-task segmentation networks, bridging the gap between model efficiency and task adaptability.

Despite recent advances in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs), these models still suffer from generating hallucinatory responses that do not align with the visual input provided. To mitigate such hallucinations, we introduce Efficient Contrastive Decoding (ECD), a simple method that leverages probabilistic hallucination detection to shift the output distribution towards contextually accurate answers at inference time. By contrasting token probabilities and hallucination scores, ECD subtracts hallucinated concepts from the original distribution, effectively suppressing hallucinations. Notably, our proposed method can be applied to any open-source LVLM and does not require additional LVLM training. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and across different LVLMs. Our experiments show that ECD effectively mitigates hallucinations, outperforming state-of-the-art methods with respect to performance on LVLM benchmarks and computation time.

Foreground segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision, encompassing various subdivision tasks. Previous research has typically designed task-specific architectures for each task, leading to a lack of unification. Moreover, they primarily focus on recognizing foreground objects without effectively distinguishing them from the background. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of the background and its relationship with the foreground. We introduce FOCUS, the Foreground ObjeCts Universal Segmentation framework that can handle multiple foreground tasks. We develop a multi-scale semantic network using the edge information of objects to enhance image features. To achieve boundary-aware segmentation, we propose a novel distillation method, integrating the contrastive learning strategy to refine the prediction mask in multi-modal feature space. We conduct extensive experiments on a total of 13 datasets across 5 tasks, and the results demonstrate that FOCUS consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art task-specific models on most metrics.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced multimodal learning but face high computational costs due to the large number of visual tokens, motivating token pruning to improve inference efficiency. The key challenge lies in identifying which tokens are truly important. Most existing approaches rely on attention-based criteria to estimate token importance. However, they inherently suffer from certain limitations, such as positional bias. In this work, we explore a new perspective on token importance based on token transitions in LVLMs. We observe that the transition of token representations provides a meaningful signal of semantic information. Based on this insight, we propose TransPrune, a training-free and efficient token pruning method. Specifically, TransPrune progressively prunes tokens by assessing their importance through a combination of Token Transition Variation (TTV)-which measures changes in both the magnitude and direction of token representations-and Instruction-Guided Attention (IGA), which measures how strongly the instruction attends to image tokens via attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TransPrune achieves comparable multimodal performance to original LVLMs, such as LLaVA-v1.5 and LLaVA-Next, across eight benchmarks, while reducing inference TFLOPs by more than half. Moreover, TTV alone can serve as an effective criterion without relying on attention, achieving performance comparable to attention-based methods. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the paper at https://github.com/liaolea/TransPrune.

Attention mechanisms are ubiquitous components in neural architectures applied to natural language processing. In addition to yielding gains in predictive accuracy, attention weights are often claimed to confer interpretability, purportedly useful both for providing insights to practitioners and for explaining why a model makes its decisions to stakeholders. We call the latter use of attention mechanisms into question by demonstrating a simple method for training models to produce deceptive attention masks. Our method diminishes the total weight assigned to designated impermissible tokens, even when the models can be shown to nevertheless rely on these features to drive predictions. Across multiple models and tasks, our approach manipulates attention weights while paying surprisingly little cost in accuracy. Through a human study, we show that our manipulated attention-based explanations deceive people into thinking that predictions from a model biased against gender minorities do not rely on the gender. Consequently, our results cast doubt on attention's reliability as a tool for auditing algorithms in the context of fairness and accountability.

Most existing approaches to referring segmentation achieve strong performance only through fine-tuning or by composing multiple pre-trained models, often at the cost of additional training and architectural modifications. Meanwhile, large-scale generative diffusion models encode rich semantic information, making them attractive as general-purpose feature extractors. In this work, we introduce a new method that directly exploits features, attention scores, from diffusion transformers for downstream tasks, requiring neither architectural modifications nor additional training. To systematically evaluate these features, we extend benchmarks with vision-language grounding tasks spanning both images and videos. Our key insight is that stop words act as attention magnets: they accumulate surplus attention and can be filtered to reduce noise. Moreover, we identify global attention sinks (GAS) emerging in deeper layers and show that they can be safely suppressed or redirected onto auxiliary tokens, leading to sharper and more accurate grounding maps. We further propose an attention redistribution strategy, where appended stop words partition background activations into smaller clusters, yielding sharper and more localized heatmaps. Building on these findings, we develop RefAM, a simple training-free grounding framework that combines cross-attention maps, GAS handling, and redistribution. Across zero-shot referring image and video segmentation benchmarks, our approach consistently outperforms prior methods, establishing a new state of the art without fine-tuning or additional components.

Most advanced visual grounding methods rely on Transformers for visual-linguistic feature fusion. However, these Transformer-based approaches encounter a significant drawback: the computational costs escalate quadratically due to the self-attention mechanism in the Transformer Encoder, particularly when dealing with high-resolution images or long context sentences. This quadratic increase in computational burden restricts the applicability of visual grounding to more intricate scenes, such as conversation-based reasoning segmentation, which involves lengthy language expressions. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective multi-task visual grounding (EEVG) framework based on Transformer Decoder to address this issue, which reduces the cost in both language and visual aspects. In the language aspect, we employ the Transformer Decoder to fuse visual and linguistic features, where linguistic features are input as memory and visual features as queries. This allows fusion to scale linearly with language expression length. In the visual aspect, we introduce a parameter-free approach to reduce computation by eliminating background visual tokens based on attention scores. We then design a light mask head to directly predict segmentation masks from the remaining sparse feature maps. Extensive results and ablation studies on benchmarks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. Code is available in https://github.com/chenwei746/EEVG.

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.

The attention mechanism of a transformer has a quadratic complexity, leading to high inference costs and latency for long sequences. However, attention matrices are mostly sparse, which implies that many entries may be omitted from computation for efficient inference. Sparse attention inference methods aim to reduce this computational burden; however, they also come with a troublesome performance degradation. We discover that one reason for this degradation is that the sparse calculation induces a distributional shift in the attention outputs. The distributional shift causes decoding-time queries to fail to align well with the appropriate keys from the prefill stage, leading to a drop in performance. We propose a simple, novel, and effective procedure for correcting this distributional shift, bringing the distribution of sparse attention outputs closer to that of quadratic attention. Our method can be applied on top of any sparse attention method, and results in an average 36%pt performance increase, recovering 88% of quadratic attention accuracy on the 131K RULER benchmark when applied on top of sliding window attention with sink tokens while only adding a small overhead. Our method can maintain approximately 98.5% sparsity over full quadratic attention, making our model 32 times faster than Flash Attention 2 when processing 1M token prefills.

Vision transformer has emerged as a new paradigm in computer vision, showing excellent performance while accompanied by expensive computational cost. Image token pruning is one of the main approaches for ViT compression, due to the facts that the complexity is quadratic with respect to the token number, and many tokens containing only background regions do not truly contribute to the final prediction. Existing works either rely on additional modules to score the importance of individual tokens, or implement a fixed ratio pruning strategy for different input instances. In this work, we propose an adaptive sparse token pruning framework with a minimal cost. Specifically, we firstly propose an inexpensive attention head importance weighted class attention scoring mechanism. Then, learnable parameters are inserted as thresholds to distinguish informative tokens from unimportant ones. By comparing token attention scores and thresholds, we can discard useless tokens hierarchically and thus accelerate inference. The learnable thresholds are optimized in budget-aware training to balance accuracy and complexity, performing the corresponding pruning configurations for different input instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our method improves the throughput of DeiT-S by 50% and brings only 0.2% drop in top-1 accuracy, which achieves a better trade-off between accuracy and latency than the previous methods.

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.

Diffusion models generate highly realistic images through learning a multi-step denoising process, naturally embodying the principles of multi-task learning (MTL). Despite the inherent connection between diffusion models and MTL, there remains an unexplored area in designing neural architectures that explicitly incorporate MTL into the framework of diffusion models. In this paper, we present Denoising Task Routing (DTR), a simple add-on strategy for existing diffusion model architectures to establish distinct information pathways for individual tasks within a single architecture by selectively activating subsets of channels in the model. What makes DTR particularly compelling is its seamless integration of prior knowledge of denoising tasks into the framework: (1) Task Affinity: DTR activates similar channels for tasks at adjacent timesteps and shifts activated channels as sliding windows through timesteps, capitalizing on the inherent strong affinity between tasks at adjacent timesteps. (2) Task Weights: During the early stages (higher timesteps) of the denoising process, DTR assigns a greater number of task-specific channels, leveraging the insight that diffusion models prioritize reconstructing global structure and perceptually rich contents in earlier stages, and focus on simple noise removal in later stages. Our experiments demonstrate that DTR consistently enhances the performance of diffusion models across various evaluation protocols, all without introducing additional parameters. Furthermore, DTR contributes to accelerating convergence during training. Finally, we show the complementarity between our architectural approach and existing MTL optimization techniques, providing a more complete view of MTL within the context of diffusion training.

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.

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.