Daily Papers

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enhances model performance while maintaining computational efficiency, making it well-suited for large-scale applications. However, expert in exist MoE paradigm works as an individual, thereby lacking high-quality expert interactions. Moreover, they have not been effectively extended to attention block, which constrains further efficiency improvements. To tackle these issues, we propose Union-of-Experts (UoE), which decomposes transformer into an equitant group of experts, and then implement dynamic routing on input data and experts. Our approach advances MoE design with three key innovations: (1) We conducted equitant expert decomposition on both MLP blocks and attention blocks based on matrix partition in tensor parallelism. (2) We developed two routing paradigms: patch wise data selection and expert selection, to apply routing across different levels. (3) We design the architecture of UoE model, including Selective Multi-Head Attention (SMHA) and Union-of-MLP-Experts (UoME). (4) We develop parallel implementation of UoE's routing and computation operation, and optimize efficiency based on the hardware processing analysis. The experiments demonstrate that the model employed with UoE surpass Full Attention, state-of-art MoEs and efficient transformers in several tasks across image and natural language domains. The source codes are available at https://github.com/YujiaoYang-work/UoE.

To alleviate the computational burden of large language models (LLMs), architectures with activation sparsity, represented by mixture-of-experts (MoE), have attracted increasing attention. However, the non-differentiable and inflexible routing of vanilla MoE hurts model performance. Moreover, while each token activates only a few parameters, these sparsely-activated architectures exhibit low chunk-level sparsity, indicating that the union of multiple consecutive tokens activates a large ratio of parameters. Such a sparsity pattern is unfriendly for acceleration under low-resource conditions (e.g., end-side devices) and incompatible with mainstream acceleration techniques (e.g., speculative decoding). To address these challenges, we introduce a novel MoE architecture, BlockFFN, as well as its efficient training and deployment techniques. Specifically, we use a router integrating ReLU activation and RMSNorm for differentiable and flexible routing. Next, to promote both token-level sparsity (TLS) and chunk-level sparsity (CLS), CLS-aware training objectives are designed, making BlockFFN more acceleration-friendly. Finally, we implement efficient acceleration kernels, combining activation sparsity and speculative decoding for the first time. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of BlockFFN over other MoE baselines, achieving over 80% TLS and 70% 8-token CLS. Our kernels achieve up to 3.67times speedup on real end-side devices than dense models. All codes and checkpoints are available publicly (https://github.com/thunlp/BlockFFN).

Mixture of Experts (MoE) LLMs face significant obstacles due to their massive parameter scale, which imposes memory, storage, and deployment challenges. Although recent expert merging methods promise greater efficiency by consolidating multiple experts, they are fundamentally hindered by parameter conflicts arising from expert specialization. In this paper, we present Sub-MoE, a novel MoE compression framework via Subspace Expert Merging. Our key insight is to perform joint Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on concatenated expert weights, reducing conflicting parameters by extracting shared U-matrices while enabling effective merging of the expert-specific V components. Specifically, Sub-MoE consists of two innovative phases: (1) Adaptive Expert Clustering, which groups functionally coherent experts via K-means clustering based on cosine similarity of expert outputs; and (2) Subspace Expert Merging, which first enforces Experts Union Decomposition to derive the shared U-matrix across experts in the same group, then pursues frequency-based merging for individual V-matrices, and finalizes expert reconstruction using the merged V-matrix. In this way, we align and fuse experts in a shared subspace, and can be extended with intra-expert compression for further inference optimization. Extensive experiments on Mixtral, DeepSeek, and Qwen-1.5|3 MoE LLMs demonstrate that our Sub-MoE significantly outperforms existing expert pruning and merging methods. Notably, our Sub-MoE maintains 96\%|86\% of original performance with 25\%|50\% expert reduction on Mixtral-8x7B in zero-shot benchmarks. Code will be released at https://github.com/lliai/MoERazor.

In this paper, we present Toloka Visual Question Answering, a new crowdsourced dataset allowing comparing performance of machine learning systems against human level of expertise in the grounding visual question answering task. In this task, given an image and a textual question, one has to draw the bounding box around the object correctly responding to that question. Every image-question pair contains the response, with only one correct response per image. Our dataset contains 45,199 pairs of images and questions in English, provided with ground truth bounding boxes, split into train and two test subsets. Besides describing the dataset and releasing it under a CC BY license, we conducted a series of experiments on open source zero-shot baseline models and organized a multi-phase competition at WSDM Cup that attracted 48 participants worldwide. However, by the time of paper submission, no machine learning model outperformed the non-expert crowdsourcing baseline according to the intersection over union evaluation score.

We study sets of delta tubes in R^3, with the property that not too many tubes can be contained inside a common convex set V. We show that the union of tubes from such a set must have almost maximal volume. As a consequence, we prove that every Kakeya set in R^3 has Minkowski and Hausdorff dimension 3.

This paper proposes a new framework to detect, segment, and estimate the localization of the eyes from a periocular Near-Infra-Red iris image under alcohol consumption. The purpose of the system is to measure the fitness for duty. Fitness systems allow us to determine whether a person is physically or psychologically able to perform their tasks. Our framework is based on an object detector trained from scratch to detect both eyes from a single image. Then, two efficient networks were used for semantic segmentation; a Criss-Cross attention network and DenseNet10, with only 122,514 and 210,732 parameters, respectively. These networks can find the pupil, iris, and sclera. In the end, the binary output eye mask is used for pupil and iris diameter estimation with high precision. Five state-of-the-art algorithms were used for this purpose. A mixed proposal reached the best results. A second contribution is establishing an alcohol behavior curve to detect the alcohol presence utilizing a stream of images captured from an iris instance. Also, a manually labeled database with more than 20k images was created. Our best method obtains a mean Intersection-over-Union of 94.54% with DenseNet10 with only 210,732 parameters and an error of only 1-pixel on average.

Biomedical text mining and question-answering are essential yet highly demanding tasks, particularly in the face of the exponential growth of biomedical literature. In this work, we present our participation in the 13th edition of the BioASQ challenge, which involves biomedical semantic question-answering for Task 13b and biomedical question-answering for developing topics for the Synergy task. We deploy a selection of open-source large language models (LLMs) as retrieval-augmented generators to answer biomedical questions. Various models are used to process the questions. A majority voting system combines their output to determine the final answer for Yes/No questions, while for list and factoid type questions, the union of their answers in used. We evaluated 13 state-of-the-art open source LLMs, exploring all possible model combinations to contribute to the final answer, resulting in tailored LLM pipelines for each question type. Our findings provide valuable insight into which combinations of LLMs consistently produce superior results for specific question types. In the four rounds of the 2025 BioASQ challenge, our system achieved notable results: in the Synergy task, we secured 1st place for ideal answers and 2nd place for exact answers in round 2, as well as two shared 1st places for exact answers in round 3 and 4.

Instrumental variable methods have been widely used to identify causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. A key identification condition known as the exclusion restriction states that the instrument cannot have a direct effect on the outcome which is not mediated by the exposure in view. In the health and social sciences, such an assumption is often not credible. To address this concern, we consider identification conditions of the population average treatment effect with an invalid instrumental variable which does not satisfy the exclusion restriction, and derive the efficient influence function targeting the identifying functional under a nonparametric observed data model. We propose a novel multiply robust locally efficient estimator of the average treatment effect that is consistent in the union of multiple parametric nuisance models, as well as a multiply debiased machine learning estimator for which the nuisance parameters are estimated using generic machine learning methods, that effectively exploit various forms of linear or nonlinear structured sparsity in the nuisance parameter space. When one cannot be confident that any of these machine learners is consistent at sufficiently fast rates to ensure n-consistency for the average treatment effect, we introduce a new criteria for selective machine learning which leverages the multiple robustness property in order to ensure small bias. The proposed methods are illustrated through extensive simulations and a data analysis evaluating the causal effect of 401(k) participation on savings.

Post-training compression of large language models (LLMs) largely relies on low-rank weight approximation, which represents each column of a weight matrix in a shared low-dimensional subspace. While this is a computationally efficient strategy, the imposed structural constraint is rigid and can lead to a noticeable model accuracy drop. In this work, we propose CoSpaDi (Compression via Sparse Dictionary Learning), a novel training-free compression framework that replaces low-rank decomposition with a more flexible structured sparse factorization in which each weight matrix is represented with a dense dictionary and a column-sparse coefficient matrix. This formulation enables a union-of-subspaces representation: different columns of the original weight matrix are approximated in distinct subspaces spanned by adaptively selected dictionary atoms, offering greater expressiveness than a single invariant basis. Crucially, CoSpaDi leverages a small calibration dataset to optimize the factorization such that the output activations of compressed projection layers closely match those of the original ones, thereby minimizing functional reconstruction error rather than mere weight approximation. This data-aware strategy preserves better model fidelity without any fine-tuning under reasonable compression ratios. Moreover, the resulting structured sparsity allows efficient sparse-dense matrix multiplication and is compatible with post-training quantization for further memory and latency gains. We evaluate CoSpaDi across multiple Llama and Qwen models under per-layer and per-group settings at 20-50\% compression ratios, demonstrating consistent superiority over state-of-the-art data-aware low-rank methods both in accuracy and perplexity. Our results establish structured sparse dictionary learning as a powerful alternative to conventional low-rank approaches for efficient LLM deployment.

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly trained on datasets consisting of fixed-length token sequences. These datasets are created by randomly concatenating documents of various lengths and then chunking them into sequences of a predetermined target length. However, this method of concatenation can lead to cross-document attention within a sequence, which is neither a desirable learning signal nor computationally efficient. Additionally, training on long sequences becomes computationally prohibitive due to the quadratic cost of attention. In this study, we introduce dataset decomposition, a novel variable sequence length training technique, to tackle these challenges. We decompose a dataset into a union of buckets, each containing sequences of the same size extracted from a unique document. During training, we use variable sequence length and batch size, sampling simultaneously from all buckets with a curriculum. In contrast to the concat-and-chunk baseline, which incurs a fixed attention cost at every step of training, our proposed method incurs a penalty proportional to the actual document lengths at each step, resulting in significant savings in training time. We train an 8k context-length 1B model at the same cost as a 2k context-length model trained with the baseline approach. Experiments on a web-scale corpus demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances performance on standard language evaluations and long-context benchmarks, reaching target accuracy 3x faster compared to the baseline. Our method not only enables efficient pretraining on long sequences but also scales effectively with dataset size. Lastly, we shed light on a critical yet less studied aspect of training large language models: the distribution and curriculum of sequence lengths, which results in a non-negligible difference in performance.

Skin diseases affect millions of people worldwide, across all ethnicities. Increasing diagnosis accessibility requires fair and accurate segmentation and classification of dermatology images. However, the scarcity of annotated medical images, especially for rare diseases and underrepresented skin tones, poses a challenge to the development of fair and accurate models. In this study, we introduce a Fair, Efficient, and Diverse Diffusion-based framework for skin lesion segmentation and malignancy classification. FEDD leverages semantically meaningful feature embeddings learned through a denoising diffusion probabilistic backbone and processes them via linear probes to achieve state-of-the-art performance on Diverse Dermatology Images (DDI). We achieve an improvement in intersection over union of 0.18, 0.13, 0.06, and 0.07 while using only 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20% labeled samples, respectively. Additionally, FEDD trained on 10% of DDI demonstrates malignancy classification accuracy of 81%, 14% higher compared to the state-of-the-art. We showcase high efficiency in data-constrained scenarios while providing fair performance for diverse skin tones and rare malignancy conditions. Our newly annotated DDI segmentation masks and training code can be found on https://github.com/hectorcarrion/fedd.

We present a novel differentiable rendering framework for joint geometry, material, and lighting estimation from multi-view images. In contrast to previous methods which assume a simplified environment map or co-located flashlights, in this work, we formulate the lighting of a static scene as one neural incident light field (NeILF) and one outgoing neural radiance field (NeRF). The key insight of the proposed method is the union of the incident and outgoing light fields through physically-based rendering and inter-reflections between surfaces, making it possible to disentangle the scene geometry, material, and lighting from image observations in a physically-based manner. The proposed incident light and inter-reflection framework can be easily applied to other NeRF systems. We show that our method can not only decompose the outgoing radiance into incident lights and surface materials, but also serve as a surface refinement module that further improves the reconstruction detail of the neural surface. We demonstrate on several datasets that the proposed method is able to achieve state-of-the-art results in terms of geometry reconstruction quality, material estimation accuracy, and the fidelity of novel view rendering.

We present Diffusion Soup, a compartmentalization method for Text-to-Image Generation that averages the weights of diffusion models trained on sharded data. By construction, our approach enables training-free continual learning and unlearning with no additional memory or inference costs, since models corresponding to data shards can be added or removed by re-averaging. We show that Diffusion Soup samples from a point in weight space that approximates the geometric mean of the distributions of constituent datasets, which offers anti-memorization guarantees and enables zero-shot style mixing. Empirically, Diffusion Soup outperforms a paragon model trained on the union of all data shards and achieves a 30% improvement in Image Reward (.34 to .44) on domain sharded data, and a 59% improvement in IR (.37 to .59) on aesthetic data. In both cases, souping also prevails in TIFA score (respectively, 85.5 to 86.5 and 85.6 to 86.8). We demonstrate robust unlearning -- removing any individual domain shard only lowers performance by 1% in IR (.45 to .44) -- and validate our theoretical insights on anti-memorization using real data. Finally, we showcase Diffusion Soup's ability to blend the distinct styles of models finetuned on different shards, resulting in the zero-shot generation of hybrid styles.

Existing Text-to-SQL generators require the entire schema to be encoded with the user text. This is expensive or impractical for large databases with tens of thousands of columns. Standard dense retrieval techniques are inadequate for schema subsetting of a large structured database, where the correct semantics of retrieval demands that we rank sets of schema elements rather than individual elements. In response, we propose a two-stage process for effective coverage during retrieval. First, we instruct an LLM to hallucinate a minimal DB schema deemed adequate to answer the query. We use the hallucinated schema to retrieve a subset of the actual schema, by composing the results from multiple dense retrievals. Remarkably, hallucination x2013 generally considered a nuisance x2013 turns out to be actually useful as a bridging mechanism. Since no existing benchmarks exist for schema subsetting on large databases, we introduce three benchmarks. Two semi-synthetic datasets are derived from the union of schemas in two well-known datasets, SPIDER and BIRD, resulting in 4502 and 798 schema elements respectively. A real-life benchmark called SocialDB is sourced from an actual large data warehouse comprising 17844 schema elements. We show that our method1 leads to significantly higher recall than SOTA retrieval-based augmentation methods.

Reliably identifying reinforced concrete defects (RCDs)plays a crucial role in assessing the structural integrity, traffic safety, and long-term durability of concrete bridges, which represent the most common bridge type worldwide. Nevertheless, available datasets for the recognition of RCDs are small in terms of size and class variety, which questions their usability in real-world scenarios and their role as a benchmark. Our contribution to this problem is "dacl10k", an exceptionally diverse RCD dataset for multi-label semantic segmentation comprising 9,920 images deriving from real-world bridge inspections. dacl10k distinguishes 12 damage classes as well as 6 bridge components that play a key role in the building assessment and recommending actions, such as restoration works, traffic load limitations or bridge closures. In addition, we examine baseline models for dacl10k which are subsequently evaluated. The best model achieves a mean intersection-over-union of 0.42 on the test set. dacl10k, along with our baselines, will be openly accessible to researchers and practitioners, representing the currently biggest dataset regarding number of images and class diversity for semantic segmentation in the bridge inspection domain.

We consider the problem of simultaneously clustering and learning a linear representation of data lying close to a union of low-dimensional manifolds, a fundamental task in machine learning and computer vision. When the manifolds are assumed to be linear subspaces, this reduces to the classical problem of subspace clustering, which has been studied extensively over the past two decades. Unfortunately, many real-world datasets such as natural images can not be well approximated by linear subspaces. On the other hand, numerous works have attempted to learn an appropriate transformation of the data, such that data is mapped from a union of general non-linear manifolds to a union of linear subspaces (with points from the same manifold being mapped to the same subspace). However, many existing works have limitations such as assuming knowledge of the membership of samples to clusters, requiring high sampling density, or being shown theoretically to learn trivial representations. In this paper, we propose to optimize the Maximal Coding Rate Reduction metric with respect to both the data representation and a novel doubly stochastic cluster membership, inspired by state-of-the-art subspace clustering results. We give a parameterization of such a representation and membership, allowing efficient mini-batching and one-shot initialization. Experiments on CIFAR-10, -20, -100, and TinyImageNet-200 datasets show that the proposed method is much more accurate and scalable than state-of-the-art deep clustering methods, and further learns a latent linear representation of the data.

Despite their remarkable achievements and widespread adoption, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have revealed significant security vulnerabilities, highlighting the urgent need for robust safety evaluation benchmarks. Existing MLLM safety benchmarks, however, fall short in terms of data quality and coverge, and modal risk combinations, resulting in inflated and contradictory evaluation results, which hinders the discovery and governance of security concerns. Besides, we argue that vulnerabilities to harmful queries and oversensitivity to harmless ones should be considered simultaneously in MLLMs safety evaluation, whereas these were previously considered separately. In this paper, to address these shortcomings, we introduce Unified Safety Benchmarks (USB), which is one of the most comprehensive evaluation benchmarks in MLLM safety. Our benchmark features high-quality queries, extensive risk categories, comprehensive modal combinations, and encompasses both vulnerability and oversensitivity evaluations. From the perspective of two key dimensions: risk categories and modality combinations, we demonstrate that the available benchmarks -- even the union of the vast majority of them -- are far from being truly comprehensive. To bridge this gap, we design a sophisticated data synthesis pipeline that generates extensive, high-quality complementary data addressing previously unexplored aspects. By combining open-source datasets with our synthetic data, our benchmark provides 4 distinct modality combinations for each of the 61 risk sub-categories, covering both English and Chinese across both vulnerability and oversensitivity dimensions.

Dataset distillation aims to minimize the time and memory needed for training deep networks on large datasets, by creating a small set of synthetic images that has a similar generalization performance to that of the full dataset. However, current dataset distillation techniques fall short, showing a notable performance gap when compared to training on the original data. In this work, we are the first to argue that using just one synthetic subset for distillation will not yield optimal generalization performance. This is because the training dynamics of deep networks drastically change during the training. Hence, multiple synthetic subsets are required to capture the training dynamics at different phases of training. To address this issue, we propose Progressive Dataset Distillation (PDD). PDD synthesizes multiple small sets of synthetic images, each conditioned on the previous sets, and trains the model on the cumulative union of these subsets without requiring additional training time. Our extensive experiments show that PDD can effectively improve the performance of existing dataset distillation methods by up to 4.3%. In addition, our method for the first time enable generating considerably larger synthetic datasets.

This work focuses on training a single visual relationship detector predicting over the union of label spaces from multiple datasets. Merging labels spanning different datasets could be challenging due to inconsistent taxonomies. The issue is exacerbated in visual relationship detection when second-order visual semantics are introduced between pairs of objects. To address this challenge, we propose UniVRD, a novel bottom-up method for Unified Visual Relationship Detection by leveraging vision and language models (VLMs). VLMs provide well-aligned image and text embeddings, where similar relationships are optimized to be close to each other for semantic unification. Our bottom-up design enables the model to enjoy the benefit of training with both object detection and visual relationship datasets. Empirical results on both human-object interaction detection and scene-graph generation demonstrate the competitive performance of our model. UniVRD achieves 38.07 mAP on HICO-DET, outperforming the current best bottom-up HOI detector by 14.26 mAP. More importantly, we show that our unified detector performs as well as dataset-specific models in mAP, and achieves further improvements when we scale up the model. Our code will be made publicly available on GitHub.

Accelerating large language model (LLM) inference is critical for real-world deployments requiring high throughput and low latency. Contextual sparsity, where each token dynamically activates only a small subset of the model parameters, shows promise but does not scale to large batch sizes due to union of active neurons quickly approaching dense computation. We introduce Polar Sparsity, highlighting a key shift in sparsity importance from MLP to Attention layers as we scale batch size and sequence length. While MLP layers become more compute-efficient under batching, their sparsity vanishes. In contrast, attention becomes increasingly more expensive at scale, while their head sparsity remains stable and batch-invariant. We develop hardware-efficient, sparsity-aware GPU kernels for selective MLP and Attention computations, delivering up to \(2.2\times\) end-to-end speedups for models like OPT, LLaMA-2 \& 3, across various batch sizes and sequence lengths without compromising accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate that contextual sparsity can scale effectively to large batch sizes, delivering substantial inference acceleration with minimal changes, making Polar Sparsity practical for large-scale, high-throughput LLM deployment systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/susavlsh10/Polar-Sparsity.

Existing LLM training and inference frameworks struggle in boosting efficiency with sparsity while maintaining the integrity of context and model architecture. Inspired by the sharding concept in database and the fact that attention parallelizes over heads on accelerators, we propose Sparsely-Sharded (S2) Attention, an attention algorithm that allocates heterogeneous context partitions for different attention heads to divide and conquer. S2-Attention enforces each attention head to only attend to a partition of contexts following a strided sparsity pattern, while the full context is preserved as the union of all the shards. As attention heads are processed in separate thread blocks, the context reduction for each head can thus produce end-to-end speed-up and memory reduction. At inference, LLMs trained with S2-Attention can then take the KV cache reduction as free meals with guaranteed model quality preserve. In experiments, we show S2-Attentioncan provide as much as (1) 25.3X wall-clock attention speed-up over FlashAttention-2, resulting in 6X reduction in end-to-end training time and 10X inference latency, (2) on-par model training quality compared to default attention, (3)perfect needle retrieval accuracy over 32K context window. On top of the algorithm, we build DKernel, an LLM training and inference kernel library that allows users to customize sparsity patterns for their own models. We open-sourced DKerneland make it compatible with Megatron, Pytorch, and vLLM.

Quality estimation models have been developed to assess the corrections made by grammatical error correction (GEC) models when the reference or gold-standard corrections are not available. An ideal quality estimator can be utilized to combine the outputs of multiple GEC systems by choosing the best subset of edits from the union of all edits proposed by the GEC base systems. However, we found that existing GEC quality estimation models are not good enough in differentiating good corrections from bad ones, resulting in a low F0.5 score when used for system combination. In this paper, we propose GRECO, a new state-of-the-art quality estimation model that gives a better estimate of the quality of a corrected sentence, as indicated by having a higher correlation to the F0.5 score of a corrected sentence. It results in a combined GEC system with a higher F0.5 score. We also propose three methods for utilizing GEC quality estimation models for system combination with varying generality: model-agnostic, model-agnostic with voting bias, and model-dependent method. The combined GEC system outperforms the state of the art on the CoNLL-2014 test set and the BEA-2019 test set, achieving the highest F0.5 scores published to date.

We introduce \`A-la-carte Prompt Tuning (APT), a transformer-based scheme to tune prompts on distinct data so that they can be arbitrarily composed at inference time. The individual prompts can be trained in isolation, possibly on different devices, at different times, and on different distributions or domains. Furthermore each prompt only contains information about the subset of data it was exposed to during training. During inference, models can be assembled based on arbitrary selections of data sources, which we call "\`a-la-carte learning". \`A-la-carte learning enables constructing bespoke models specific to each user's individual access rights and preferences. We can add or remove information from the model by simply adding or removing the corresponding prompts without retraining from scratch. We demonstrate that \`a-la-carte built models achieve accuracy within 5% of models trained on the union of the respective sources, with comparable cost in terms of training and inference time. For the continual learning benchmarks Split CIFAR-100 and CORe50, we achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Hampering the interpretation of benchmark scores, evaluation data contamination has become a growing concern in the evaluation of LLMs, and an active area of research studies its effects. While evaluation data contamination is easily understood intuitively, it is surprisingly difficult to define precisely which samples should be considered contaminated and, consequently, how it impacts benchmark scores. We propose that these questions should be addressed together and that contamination metrics can be assessed based on whether models benefit from the examples they mark contaminated. We propose a novel analysis method called ConTAM, and show with a large scale survey of existing and novel n-gram based contamination metrics across 13 benchmarks and 7 models from 2 different families that ConTAM can be used to better understand evaluation data contamination and its effects. We find that contamination may have a much larger effect than reported in recent LLM releases and benefits models differently at different scales. We also find that considering only the longest contaminated substring provides a better signal than considering a union of all contaminated substrings, and that doing model and benchmark specific threshold analysis greatly increases the specificity of the results. Lastly, we investigate the impact of hyperparameter choices, finding that, among other things, both using larger values of n and disregarding matches that are infrequent in the pre-training data lead to many false negatives. With ConTAM, we provide a method to empirically ground evaluation data contamination metrics in downstream effects. With our exploration, we shed light on how evaluation data contamination can impact LLMs and provide insight into the considerations important when doing contamination analysis. We end our paper by discussing these in more detail and providing concrete suggestions for future work.

This work presents the first quantitative study of alignment errors between small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) geospatial imagery and a priori building polygons and finds that alignment errors are non-uniform and irregular. The work also introduces a publicly available dataset of imagery, building polygons, and human-generated and curated adjustments that can be used to evaluate existing strategies for aligning building polygons with sUAS imagery. There are no efforts that have aligned pre-existing spatial data with sUAS imagery, and thus, there is no clear state of practice. However, this effort and analysis show that the translational alignment errors present in this type of data, averaging 82px and an intersection over the union of 0.65, which would induce further errors and biases in downstream machine learning systems unless addressed. This study identifies and analyzes the translational alignment errors of 21,619 building polygons in fifty-one orthomosaic images, covering 16787.2 Acres (26.23 square miles), constructed from sUAS raw imagery from nine wide-area disasters (Hurricane Ian, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Michael, Hurricane Ida, Hurricane Idalia, Hurricane Laura, the Mayfield Tornado, the Musset Bayou Fire, and the Kilauea Eruption). The analysis finds no uniformity among the angle and distance metrics of the building polygon alignments as they present an average degree variance of 0.4 and an average pixel distance variance of 0.45. This work alerts the sUAS community to the problem of spatial alignment and that a simple linear transform, often used to align satellite imagery, will not be sufficient to align spatial data in sUAS orthomosaic imagery.

Recent studies have shown that robustness to adversarial attacks can be transferred across networks. In other words, we can make a weak model more robust with the help of a strong teacher model. We ask if instead of learning from a static teacher, can models "learn together" and "teach each other" to achieve better robustness? In this paper, we study how interactions among models affect robustness via knowledge distillation. We propose mutual adversarial training (MAT), in which multiple models are trained together and share the knowledge of adversarial examples to achieve improved robustness. MAT allows robust models to explore a larger space of adversarial samples, and find more robust feature spaces and decision boundaries. Through extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, we demonstrate that MAT can effectively improve model robustness and outperform state-of-the-art methods under white-box attacks, bringing sim8% accuracy gain to vanilla adversarial training (AT) under PGD-100 attacks. In addition, we show that MAT can also mitigate the robustness trade-off among different perturbation types, bringing as much as 13.1% accuracy gain to AT baselines against the union of l_infty, l_2 and l_1 attacks. These results show the superiority of the proposed method and demonstrate that collaborative learning is an effective strategy for designing robust models.

Diffusion language models, especially masked discrete diffusion models, have achieved great success recently. While there are some theoretical and primary empirical results showing the advantages of latent reasoning with looped transformers or continuous chain-of-thoughts, continuous diffusion models typically underperform their discrete counterparts. In this paper, we argue that diffusion language models do not necessarily need to be in the discrete space. In particular, we prove that continuous diffusion models have stronger expressivity than discrete diffusions and looped transformers. We attribute the contradiction between the theoretical expressiveness and empirical performance to their practical trainability: while continuous diffusion provides intermediate supervision that looped transformers lack, they introduce additional difficulty decoding tokens into the discrete token space from the continuous representation space. We therefore propose Coevolutionary Continuous Discrete Diffusion (CCDD), which defines a joint multimodal diffusion process on the union of a continuous representation space and a discrete token space, leveraging a single model to simultaneously denoise in the joint space. By combining two modalities, CCDD is expressive with rich semantics in the latent space, as well as good trainability and sample quality with the help of explicit discrete tokens. We also propose effective architectures and advanced training/sampling techniques for CCDD, which reveals strong empirical performance in extensive language modeling experiments on real-world tasks.

Recent empirical studies have demonstrated that diffusion models can effectively learn the image distribution and generate new samples. Remarkably, these models can achieve this even with a small number of training samples despite a large image dimension, circumventing the curse of dimensionality. In this work, we provide theoretical insights into this phenomenon by leveraging key empirical observations: (i) the low intrinsic dimensionality of image data, (ii) a union of manifold structure of image data, and (iii) the low-rank property of the denoising autoencoder in trained diffusion models. These observations motivate us to assume the underlying data distribution of image data as a mixture of low-rank Gaussians and to parameterize the denoising autoencoder as a low-rank model according to the score function of the assumed distribution. With these setups, we rigorously show that optimizing the training loss of diffusion models is equivalent to solving the canonical subspace clustering problem over the training samples. Based on this equivalence, we further show that the minimal number of samples required to learn the underlying distribution scales linearly with the intrinsic dimensions under the above data and model assumptions. This insight sheds light on why diffusion models can break the curse of dimensionality and exhibit the phase transition in learning distributions. Moreover, we empirically establish a correspondence between the subspaces and the semantic representations of image data, facilitating image editing. We validate these results with corroborated experimental results on both simulated distributions and image datasets.

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

3D-aware GANs aim to synthesize realistic 3D scenes such that they can be rendered in arbitrary perspectives to produce images. Although previous methods produce realistic images, they suffer from unstable training or degenerate solutions where the 3D geometry is unnatural. We hypothesize that the 3D geometry is underdetermined due to the insufficient constraint, i.e., being classified as real image to the discriminator is not enough. To solve this problem, we propose to approximate the background as a spherical surface and represent a scene as a union of the foreground placed in the sphere and the thin spherical background. It reduces the degree of freedom in the background field. Accordingly, we modify the volume rendering equation and incorporate dedicated constraints to design a novel 3D-aware GAN framework named BallGAN. BallGAN has multiple advantages as follows. 1) It produces more reasonable 3D geometry; the images of a scene across different viewpoints have better photometric consistency and fidelity than the state-of-the-art methods. 2) The training becomes much more stable. 3) The foreground can be separately rendered on top of different arbitrary backgrounds.

Recent advances show that scaling a pre-trained language model could achieve state-of-the-art performance on many downstream tasks, prompting large language models (LLMs) to become a hot research topic in the field of artificial intelligence. However, due to the resource-intensive nature of training LLMs from scratch, it is urgent and crucial to protect the intellectual property of LLMs against infringement. This has motivated the authors in this paper to propose a novel black-box fingerprinting technique for LLMs, which requires neither model training nor model fine-tuning. We first demonstrate that the outputs of LLMs span a unique vector space associated with each model. We model the problem of ownership authentication as the task of evaluating the similarity between the victim model's space and the output's space of the suspect model. To deal with this problem, we propose two solutions, where the first solution involves verifying whether the outputs of the suspected large model are in the same space as those of the victim model, enabling rapid identification of model infringement, and the second one reconstructs the union of the vector spaces for LLM outputs and the victim model to address situations where the victim model has undergone the Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) attacks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique achieves superior performance in ownership verification and robustness against PEFT attacks. This work reveals inherent characteristics of LLMs and provides a promising solution for ownership verification of LLMs in black-box scenarios, ensuring efficiency, generality and practicality.

Using deep learning, 3D autonomous driving semantic segmentation has become a well-studied subject, with methods that can reach very high performance. Nonetheless, because of the limited size of the training datasets, these models cannot see every type of object and scene found in real-world applications. The ability to be reliable in these various unknown environments is called domain generalization. Despite its importance, domain generalization is relatively unexplored in the case of 3D autonomous driving semantic segmentation. To fill this gap, this paper presents the first benchmark for this application by testing state-of-the-art methods and discussing the difficulty of tackling Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) domain shifts. We also propose the first method designed to address this domain generalization, which we call 3DLabelProp. This method relies on leveraging the geometry and sequentiality of the LiDAR data to enhance its generalization performances by working on partially accumulated point clouds. It reaches a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 50.4% on SemanticPOSS and of 55.2% on PandaSet solid-state LiDAR while being trained only on SemanticKITTI, making it the state-of-the-art method for generalization (+5% and +33% better, respectively, than the second best method). The code for this method is available on GitHub: https://github.com/JulesSanchez/3DLabelProp.

Application of deep learning on histopathological whole slide images (WSIs) holds promise of improving diagnostic efficiency and reproducibility but is largely dependent on the ability to write computer code or purchase commercial solutions. We present a code-free pipeline utilizing free-to-use, open-source software (QuPath, DeepMIB, and FastPathology) for creating and deploying deep learning-based segmentation models for computational pathology. We demonstrate the pipeline on a use case of separating epithelium from stroma in colonic mucosa. A dataset of 251 annotated WSIs, comprising 140 hematoxylin-eosin (HE)-stained and 111 CD3 immunostained colon biopsy WSIs, were developed through active learning using the pipeline. On a hold-out test set of 36 HE and 21 CD3-stained WSIs a mean intersection over union score of 96.6% and 95.3% was achieved on epithelium segmentation. We demonstrate pathologist-level segmentation accuracy and clinical acceptable runtime performance and show that pathologists without programming experience can create near state-of-the-art segmentation solutions for histopathological WSIs using only free-to-use software. The study further demonstrates the strength of open-source solutions in its ability to create generalizable, open pipelines, of which trained models and predictions can seamlessly be exported in open formats and thereby used in external solutions. All scripts, trained models, a video tutorial, and the full dataset of 251 WSIs with ~31k epithelium annotations are made openly available at https://github.com/andreped/NoCodeSeg to accelerate research in the field.

Zero-shot and prompt-based technologies capitalized on using frequently occurring images to transform visual reasoning tasks, which explains why such technologies struggle with valuable yet scarce scientific image sets. In this work, we propose Zenesis, a comprehensive no-code interactive platform designed to minimize barriers posed by data readiness for scientific images. We develop lightweight multi-modal adaptation techniques that enable zero-shot operation on raw scientific data, along with human-in-the-loop refinement and heuristic-based temporal enhancement options. We demonstrate the performance of our approach through comprehensive comparison and validation on challenging Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) data of catalyst-loaded membranes. Zenesis significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving an average accuracy of 0.947, an Intersection over Union (IOU) of 0.858, and a Dice score of 0.923 for amorphous catalyst samples and accuracy of 0.987, an IOU of 0.857, and a Dice score of 0.923 for crystalline samples. These results mark a substantial improvement over traditional methods like Otsu thresholding and even advanced models like Segment Anything Model (SAM) when used in isolation. Our results demonstrate that Zenesis is a powerful tool for scientific applications, particularly in fields where high-quality annotated datasets are unavailable, accelerating accurate analysis of experimental imaging.

Purpose: Face detection is a needed component for the automatic analysis and assistance of human activities during surgical procedures. Efficient face detection algorithms can indeed help to detect and identify the persons present in the room, and also be used to automatically anonymize the data. However, current algorithms trained on natural images do not generalize well to the operating room (OR) images. In this work, we provide a comparison of state-of-the-art face detectors on OR data and also present an approach to train a face detector for the OR by exploiting non-annotated OR images. Methods: We propose a comparison of 6 state-of-the-art face detectors on clinical data using Multi-View Operating Room Faces (MVOR-Faces), a dataset of operating room images capturing real surgical activities. We then propose to use self-supervision, a domain adaptation method, for the task of face detection in the OR. The approach makes use of non-annotated images to fine-tune a state-of-the-art detector for the OR without using any human supervision. Results: The results show that the best model, namely the tiny face detector, yields an average precision of 0.536 at Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.5. Our self-supervised model using non-annotated clinical data outperforms this result by 9.2%. Conclusion: We present the first comparison of state-of-the-art face detectors on operating room images and show that results can be significantly improved by using self-supervision on non-annotated data.

The "Reversal Curse" refers to the scenario where auto-regressive decoder large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A", demonstrating a basic failure of logical deduction. This raises a red flag in the use of GPT models for certain general tasks such as constructing knowledge graphs, considering their adherence to this symmetric principle. In our study, we examined a bidirectional LLM, BERT, and found that it is immune to the reversal curse. Driven by ongoing efforts to construct biomedical knowledge graphs with LLMs, we also embarked on evaluating more complex but essential deductive reasoning capabilities. This process included first training encoder and decoder language models to master the intersection (cap) and union (cup) operations on two sets and then moving on to assess their capability to infer different combinations of union (cup) and intersection (cap) operations on three newly created sets. The findings showed that while both encoder and decoder language models, trained for tasks involving two sets (union/intersection), were proficient in such scenarios, they encountered difficulties when dealing with operations that included three sets (various combinations of union and intersection). Our research highlights the distinct characteristics of encoder and decoder models in simple and complex logical reasoning. In practice, the choice between BERT and GPT should be guided by the specific requirements and nature of the task at hand, leveraging their respective strengths in bidirectional context comprehension and sequence prediction.

Purpose: The capacity to isolate and recognize individual characters from facsimile images of papyrus manuscripts yields rich opportunities for digital analysis. For this reason the `ICDAR 2023 Competition on Detection and Recognition of Greek Letters on Papyri' was held as part of the 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition. This paper discusses our submission to the competition. Methods: We used an ensemble of YOLOv8 models to detect and classify individual characters and employed two different approaches for refining the character predictions, including a transformer based DeiT approach and a ResNet-50 model trained on a large corpus of unlabelled data using SimCLR, a self-supervised learning method. Results: Our submission won the recognition challenge with a mAP of 42.2%, and was runner-up in the detection challenge with a mean average precision (mAP) of 51.4%. At the more relaxed intersection over union threshold of 0.5, we achieved the highest mean average precision and mean average recall results for both detection and classification. Conclusion: The results demonstrate the potential for these techniques for automated character recognition on historical manuscripts. We ran the prediction pipeline on more than 4,500 images from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri to illustrate the utility of our approach, and we release the results publicly in multiple formats.

In remote sensing, most segmentation networks adopt the UNet architecture, often incorporating modules such as Transformers or Mamba to enhance global-local feature interactions within decoder stages. However, these enhancements typically focus on intra-scale relationships and neglect the global contextual dependencies across multiple resolutions. To address this limitation, we introduce the Terrace Convolutional Decoder Network (TNet), a simple yet effective architecture that leverages only convolution and addition operations to progressively integrate low-resolution features (rich in global context) into higher-resolution features (rich in local details) across decoding stages. This progressive fusion enables the model to learn spatially-aware convolutional kernels that naturally blend global and local information in a stage-wise manner. We implement TNet with a ResNet-18 encoder (TNet-R) and evaluate it on three benchmark datasets. TNet-R achieves competitive performance with a mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 85.35\% on ISPRS Vaihingen, 87.05\% on ISPRS Potsdam, and 52.19\% on LoveDA, while maintaining high computational efficiency. Code is publicly available.

A proper scene representation is central to the pursuit of spatial intelligence where agents can robustly reconstruct and efficiently understand 3D scenes. A scene representation is either metric, such as landmark maps in 3D reconstruction, 3D bounding boxes in object detection, or voxel grids in occupancy prediction, or topological, such as pose graphs with loop closures in SLAM or visibility graphs in SfM. In this work, we propose to build Multiview Scene Graphs (MSG) from unposed images, representing a scene topologically with interconnected place and object nodes. The task of building MSG is challenging for existing representation learning methods since it needs to jointly address both visual place recognition, object detection, and object association from images with limited fields of view and potentially large viewpoint changes. To evaluate any method tackling this task, we developed an MSG dataset and annotation based on a public 3D dataset. We also propose an evaluation metric based on the intersection-over-union score of MSG edges. Moreover, we develop a novel baseline method built on mainstream pretrained vision models, combining visual place recognition and object association into one Transformer decoder architecture. Experiments demonstrate our method has superior performance compared to existing relevant baselines.

Increasing numbers of patients with disabilities or elderly people with mobility issues often suffer from a pressure ulcer. The affected areas need regular checks, but they have a difficulty in accessing a hospital. Some remote diagnosis systems are being used for them, but there are limitations in checking a patient's status regularly. In this paper, we present a remote medical assistant that can help pressure ulcer management with image processing techniques. The proposed system includes a mobile application with a deep learning model for wound segmentation and analysis. As there are not enough data to train the deep learning model, we make use of a pretrained model from a relevant domain and data augmentation that is appropriate for this task. First of all, an image preprocessing method using bilinear interpolation is used to resize images and normalize the images. Second, for data augmentation, we use rotation, reflection, and a watershed algorithm. Third, we use a pretrained deep learning model generated from skin wound images similar to pressure ulcer images. Finally, we added an attention module that can provide hints on the pressure ulcer image features. The resulting model provides an accuracy of 99.0%, an intersection over union (IoU) of 99.99%, and a dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 93.4% for pressure ulcer segmentation, which is better than existing results.

Rapid post-earthquake damage assessment is crucial for rescue and resource planning. Still, existing remote sensing methods depend on costly aerial images, expert labeling, and produce only binary damage maps for early-stage evaluation. Although ground-level images from social networks provide a valuable source to fill this gap, a large pixel-level annotated dataset for this task is still unavailable. We introduce EIDSeg, the first large-scale semantic segmentation dataset specifically for post-earthquake social media imagery. The dataset comprises 3,266 images from nine major earthquakes (2008-2023), annotated across five classes of infrastructure damage: Undamaged Building, Damaged Building, Destroyed Building, Undamaged Road, and Damaged Road. We propose a practical three-phase cross-disciplinary annotation protocol with labeling guidelines that enables consistent segmentation by non-expert annotators, achieving over 70% inter-annotator agreement. We benchmark several state-of-the-art segmentation models, identifying Encoder-only Mask Transformer (EoMT) as the top-performing method with a Mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 80.8%. By unlocking social networks' rich ground-level perspective, our work paves the way for a faster, finer-grained damage assessment in the post-earthquake scenario.

Soil sinkholes significantly influence soil degradation, but their irregular shapes, along with interference from shadow and vegetation, make it challenging to accurately quantify their properties using remotely sensed data. We present a novel framework for sinkhole segmentation that combines traditional topographic computations of closed depressions with the newly developed prompt-based Segment Anything Model (SAM). Within this framework, termed SinkSAM, we highlight four key improvements: (1) The integration of topographic computations with SAM enables pixel-level refinement of sinkhole boundaries segmentation; (2) A coherent mathematical prompting strategy, based on closed depressions, addresses the limitations of purely learning-based models (CNNs) in detecting and segmenting undefined sinkhole features, while improving generalization to new, unseen regions; (3) Using Depth Anything V2 monocular depth for automatic prompts eliminates photogrammetric biases, enabling sinkhole mapping without the dependence on LiDAR data; and (4) An established sinkhole database facilitates fine-tuning of SAM, improving its zero-shot performance in sinkhole segmentation. These advancements allow the deployment of SinkSAM, in an unseen test area, in the highly variable semiarid region, achieving an intersection-over-union (IoU) of 40.27\% and surpassing previous results. This paper also presents the first SAM implementation for sinkhole segmentation and demonstrates the robustness of SinkSAM in extracting sinkhole maps using a single RGB image.

Compositional Customized Image Generation aims to customize multiple target concepts within generation content, which has gained attention for its wild application. Existing approaches mainly concentrate on the target entity's appearance preservation, while neglecting the fine-grained interaction control among target entities. To enable the model of such interaction control capability, we focus on human object interaction scenario and propose the task of Customized Human Object Interaction Image Generation(CHOI), which simultaneously requires identity preservation for target human object and the interaction semantic control between them. Two primary challenges exist for CHOI:(1)simultaneous identity preservation and interaction control demands require the model to decompose the human object into self-contained identity features and pose-oriented interaction features, while the current HOI image datasets fail to provide ideal samples for such feature-decomposed learning.(2)inappropriate spatial configuration between human and object may lead to the lack of desired interaction semantics. To tackle it, we first process a large-scale dataset, where each sample encompasses the same pair of human object involving different interactive poses. Then we design a two-stage model Interact-Custom, which firstly explicitly models the spatial configuration by generating a foreground mask depicting the interaction behavior, then under the guidance of this mask, we generate the target human object interacting while preserving their identities features. Furthermore, if the background image and the union location of where the target human object should appear are provided by users, Interact-Custom also provides the optional functionality to specify them, offering high content controllability. Extensive experiments on our tailored metrics for CHOI task demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Accurate 3D semantic occupancy perception is essential for autonomous driving in complex environments with diverse and irregular objects. While vision-centric methods suffer from geometric inaccuracies, LiDAR-based approaches often lack rich semantic information. To address these limitations, MS-Occ, a novel multi-stage LiDAR-camera fusion framework which includes middle-stage fusion and late-stage fusion, is proposed, integrating LiDAR's geometric fidelity with camera-based semantic richness via hierarchical cross-modal fusion. The framework introduces innovations at two critical stages: (1) In the middle-stage feature fusion, the Gaussian-Geo module leverages Gaussian kernel rendering on sparse LiDAR depth maps to enhance 2D image features with dense geometric priors, and the Semantic-Aware module enriches LiDAR voxels with semantic context via deformable cross-attention; (2) In the late-stage voxel fusion, the Adaptive Fusion (AF) module dynamically balances voxel features across modalities, while the High Classification Confidence Voxel Fusion (HCCVF) module resolves semantic inconsistencies using self-attention-based refinement. Experiments on the nuScenes-OpenOccupancy benchmark show that MS-Occ achieves an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 32.1% and a mean IoU (mIoU) of 25.3%, surpassing the state-of-the-art by +0.7% IoU and +2.4% mIoU. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of each module, with substantial improvements in small-object perception, demonstrating the practical value of MS-Occ for safety-critical autonomous driving scenarios.

Foundation models have the potential to transform the landscape of remote sensing (RS) data analysis by enabling large computer vision models to be pre-trained on vast amounts of remote sensing data. These models can then be fine-tuned with small amounts of labeled training and applied to a variety of applications. Most existing foundation models are designed for high spatial resolution, cloud-free satellite imagery or photos, limiting their applicability in scenarios that require frequent temporal monitoring or broad spectral profiles. As a result, foundation models trained solely on cloud-free images have limited utility for applications that involve atmospheric variables or require atmospheric corrections. We introduce SatVision-TOA, a novel foundation model pre-trained on 14-band MODIS L1B Top-Of-Atmosphere (TOA) radiance imagery, addressing the need for models pre-trained to handle moderate- and coarse-resolution all-sky remote sensing data. The SatVision-TOA model is pre-trained using a Masked-Image-Modeling (MIM) framework and the SwinV2 architecture, and learns detailed contextual representations through self-supervised learning without the need for labels. It is a 3 billion parameter model that is trained on 100 million images. To our knowledge this is the largest foundation model trained solely on satellite RS imagery. Results show that SatVision-TOA achieves superior performance over baseline methods on downstream tasks such as 3D cloud retrieval. Notably, the model achieves a mean intersection over union (mIOU) of 0.46, a substantial improvement over the baseline mIOU of 0.22. Additionally, the rate of false negative results in the fine-tuning task were reduced by over 50% compared to the baseline. Our work advances pre-trained vision modeling for multispectral RS by learning from a variety of atmospheric and aerosol conditions to improve cloud and land surface monitoring.

The widespread use of various chemical gases in industrial processes necessitates effective measures to prevent their leakage during transportation and storage, given their high toxicity. Thermal infrared-based computer vision detection techniques provide a straightforward approach to identify gas leakage areas. However, the development of high-quality algorithms has been challenging due to the low texture in thermal images and the lack of open-source datasets. In this paper, we present the RGB-Thermal Cross Attention Network (RT-CAN), which employs an RGB-assisted two-stream network architecture to integrate texture information from RGB images and gas area information from thermal images. Additionally, to facilitate the research of invisible gas detection, we introduce Gas-DB, an extensive open-source gas detection database including about 1.3K well-annotated RGB-thermal images with eight variant collection scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our method successfully leverages the advantages of both modalities, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among RGB-thermal methods, surpassing single-stream SOTA models in terms of accuracy, Intersection of Union (IoU), and F2 metrics by 4.86%, 5.65%, and 4.88%, respectively. The code and data can be found at https://github.com/logic112358/RT-CAN.

Addressing the current lack of a standardized habitat classification system for cultivated land ecosystems, incomplete coverage of habitat types, and the inability of existing models to effectively integrate semantic and texture features-resulting in insufficient segmentation accuracy and blurred boundaries for multi-scale habitats (e.g., large-scale field plots and micro-habitats)-this study developed a comprehensively annotated ultra-high-resolution remote sensing image dataset encompassing 15 categories of cultivated land system habitats. Furthermore, we propose a Dynamic-Weighted Feature Fusion Network (DWFF-Net). The encoder of this model utilizes a frozen-parameter DINOv3 to extract foundational features. By analyzing the relationships between different category images and feature maps, we introduce a data-level adaptive dynamic weighting strategy for feature fusion. The decoder incorporates a dynamic weight computation network to achieve thorough integration of multi-layer features, and a hybrid loss function is adopted to optimize model training. Experimental results on the constructed dataset demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 0.6979 and an F1-score of 0.8049, outperforming the baseline network by 0.021 and 0.0161, respectively. Ablation studies further confirm the complementary nature of multi-layer feature fusion, which effectively improves the IoU for micro-habitat categories such as field ridges. This study establishes a habitat identification framework for cultivated land systems based on adaptive multi-layer feature fusion, enabling sub-meter precision habitat mapping at a low cost and providing robust technical support for fine-grained habitat monitoring in cultivated landscapes.

There has been tremendous progress in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent works have extended these models to video input with promising instruction following capabilities. However, an important missing piece is temporal localization. These models cannot accurately answer the "When?" questions. We identify three key aspects that limit their temporal localization capabilities: (i) time representation, (ii) architecture, and (iii) data. We address these shortcomings by proposing Language Instructed Temporal-Localization Assistant (LITA) with the following features: (1) We introduce time tokens that encode timestamps relative to the video length to better represent time in videos. (2) We introduce SlowFast tokens in the architecture to capture temporal information at fine temporal resolution. (3) We emphasize temporal localization data for LITA. In addition to leveraging existing video datasets with timestamps, we propose a new task, Reasoning Temporal Localization (RTL), along with the dataset, ActivityNet-RTL, for learning and evaluating this task. Reasoning temporal localization requires both the reasoning and temporal localization of Video LLMs. LITA demonstrates strong performance on this challenging task, nearly doubling the temporal mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) of baselines. In addition, we show that our emphasis on temporal localization also substantially improves video-based text generation compared to existing Video LLMs, including a 36% relative improvement of Temporal Understanding. Code is available at: https://github.com/NVlabs/LITA

The escalating global concern over extensive food wastage necessitates innovative solutions to foster a net-zero lifestyle and reduce emissions. The LILA home composter presents a convenient means of recycling kitchen scraps and daily food waste into nutrient-rich, high-quality compost. To capture the nutritional information of the produced compost, we have created and annotated a large high-resolution image dataset of kitchen food waste with segmentation masks of 19 nutrition-rich categories. Leveraging this dataset, we benchmarked four state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models on food waste segmentation, contributing to the assessment of compost quality of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, or Potassium. The experiments demonstrate promising results of using segmentation models to discern food waste produced in our daily lives. Based on the experiments, SegFormer, utilizing MIT-B5 backbone, yields the best performance with a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 67.09. Class-based results are also provided to facilitate further analysis of different food waste classes.

Discussions of minimum parking requirement policies often include maps of parking lots, which are time consuming to construct manually. Open source datasets for such parking lots are scarce, particularly for US cities. This paper introduces the idea of using Near-Infrared (NIR) channels as input and several post-processing techniques to improve the prediction of off-street surface parking lots using satellite imagery. We constructed two datasets with 12,617 image-mask pairs each: one with 3-channel (RGB) and another with 4-channel (RGB + NIR). The datasets were used to train five deep learning models (OneFormer, Mask2Former, SegFormer, DeepLabV3, and FCN) for semantic segmentation, classifying images to differentiate between parking and non-parking pixels. Our results demonstrate that the NIR channel improved accuracy because parking lots are often surrounded by grass, even though the NIR channel needed to be upsampled from a lower resolution. Post-processing including eliminating erroneous holes, simplifying edges, and removing road and building footprints further improved the accuracy. Best model, OneFormer trained on 4-channel input and paired with post-processing techniques achieves a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 84.9 percent and a pixel-wise accuracy of 96.3 percent.

Accurate computer-aided polyp detection and segmentation during colonoscopy examinations can help endoscopists resect abnormal tissue and thereby decrease chances of polyps growing into cancer. Towards developing a fully automated model for pixel-wise polyp segmentation, we propose ResUNet++, which is an improved ResUNet architecture for colonoscopic image segmentation. Our experimental evaluations show that the suggested architecture produces good segmentation results on publicly available datasets. Furthermore, ResUNet++ significantly outperforms U-Net and ResUNet, two key state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, by achieving high evaluation scores with a dice coefficient of 81.33%, and a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 79.27% for the Kvasir-SEG dataset and a dice coefficient of 79.55%, and a mIoU of 79.62% with CVC-612 dataset.