Daily Papers

Systems for multimodal emotion recognition (ER) are commonly trained to extract features from different modalities (e.g., visual, audio, and textual) that are combined to predict individual basic emotions. However, compound emotions often occur in real-world scenarios, and the uncertainty of recognizing such complex emotions over diverse modalities is challenging for feature-based models As an alternative, emerging multimodal large language models (LLMs) like BERT and LLaMA rely on explicit non-verbal cues that may be translated from different non-textual modalities (e.g., audio and visual) into text. Textualization of modalities augments data with emotional cues to help the LLM encode the interconnections between all modalities in a shared text space. In such text-based models, prior knowledge of ER tasks is leveraged to textualize relevant nonverbal cues such as audio tone from vocal expressions, and action unit intensity from facial expressions. Since the pre-trained weights are publicly available for many LLMs, training on large-scale datasets is unnecessary, allowing fine-tuning for downstream tasks such as compound ER (CER). This paper compares the potential of text- and feature-based approaches for compound multimodal ER in videos. Experiments were conducted on the challenging C-EXPR-DB dataset in the wild for CER, and contrasted with results on the MELD dataset for basic ER. Our results indicate that multimodal textualization provides lower accuracy than feature-based models on C-EXPR-DB, where text transcripts are captured in the wild. However, higher accuracy can be achieved when the video data has rich transcripts. Our code is available.

Causal precedence between biochemical interactions is crucial in the biomedical domain, because it transforms collections of individual interactions, e.g., bindings and phosphorylations, into the causal mechanisms needed to inform meaningful search and inference. Here, we analyze causal precedence in the biomedical domain as distinct from open-domain, temporal precedence. First, we describe a novel, hand-annotated text corpus of causal precedence in the biomedical domain. Second, we use this corpus to investigate a battery of models of precedence, covering rule-based, feature-based, and latent representation models. The highest-performing individual model achieved a micro F1 of 43 points, approaching the best performers on the simpler temporal-only precedence tasks. Feature-based and latent representation models each outperform the rule-based models, but their performance is complementary to one another. We apply a sieve-based architecture to capitalize on this lack of overlap, achieving a micro F1 score of 46 points.

Attentional mechanisms are order-invariant. Positional encoding is a crucial component to allow attention-based deep model architectures such as Transformer to address sequences or images where the position of information matters. In this paper, we propose a novel positional encoding method based on learnable Fourier features. Instead of hard-coding each position as a token or a vector, we represent each position, which can be multi-dimensional, as a trainable encoding based on learnable Fourier feature mapping, modulated with a multi-layer perceptron. The representation is particularly advantageous for a spatial multi-dimensional position, e.g., pixel positions on an image, where L_2 distances or more complex positional relationships need to be captured. Our experiments based on several public benchmark tasks show that our learnable Fourier feature representation for multi-dimensional positional encoding outperforms existing methods by both improving the accuracy and allowing faster convergence.

Legal judgment prediction is the task of automatically predicting the outcome of a court case, given a text describing the case's facts. Previous work on using neural models for this task has focused on Chinese; only feature-based models (e.g., using bags of words and topics) have been considered in English. We release a new English legal judgment prediction dataset, containing cases from the European Court of Human Rights. We evaluate a broad variety of neural models on the new dataset, establishing strong baselines that surpass previous feature-based models in three tasks: (1) binary violation classification; (2) multi-label classification; (3) case importance prediction. We also explore if models are biased towards demographic information via data anonymization. As a side-product, we propose a hierarchical version of BERT, which bypasses BERT's length limitation.

This paper presents an empirical comparison of two strategies for Vietnamese Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging from unsegmented text: (i) a pipeline strategy where we consider the output of a word segmenter as the input of a POS tagger, and (ii) a joint strategy where we predict a combined segmentation and POS tag for each syllable. We also make a comparison between state-of-the-art (SOTA) feature-based and neural network-based models. On the benchmark Vietnamese treebank (Nguyen et al., 2009), experimental results show that the pipeline strategy produces better scores of POS tagging from unsegmented text than the joint strategy, and the highest accuracy is obtained by using a feature-based model.

Intentionally luring readers to click on a particular content by exploiting their curiosity defines a title as clickbait. Although several studies focused on detecting clickbait titles in English articles, low resource language like Bangla has not been given adequate attention. To tackle clickbait titles in Bangla, we have constructed the first Bangla clickbait detection dataset containing 15,056 labeled news articles and 65,406 unlabelled news articles extracted from clickbait dense news sites. Each article has been labeled by three expert linguists and includes an article's title, body, and other metadata. By incorporating labeled and unlabelled data, we finetune a pretrained Bangla transformer model in an adversarial fashion using Semi Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks (SS GANs). The proposed model acts as a good baseline for this dataset, outperforming traditional neural network models (LSTM, GRU, CNN) and linguistic feature based models. We expect that this dataset and the detailed analysis and comparison of these clickbait detection models will provide a fundamental basis for future research into detecting clickbait titles in Bengali articles. We have released the corresponding code and dataset.

Drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction is crucial for identifying new therapeutics and detecting mechanisms of action. While structure-based methods accurately model physical interactions between a drug and its protein target, cell-based assays such as Cell Painting can better capture complex DTI interactions. This paper introduces MOTIVE, a Morphological cOmpound Target Interaction Graph dataset that comprises Cell Painting features for 11,000 genes and 3,600 compounds along with their relationships extracted from seven publicly available databases. We provide random, cold-source (new drugs), and cold-target (new genes) data splits to enable rigorous evaluation under realistic use cases. Our benchmark results show that graph neural networks that use Cell Painting features consistently outperform those that learn from graph structure alone, feature-based models, and topological heuristics. MOTIVE accelerates both graph ML research and drug discovery by promoting the development of more reliable DTI prediction models. MOTIVE resources are available at https://github.com/carpenter-singh-lab/motive.

Addressing the dual challenges of local redundancy and global dependencies in video understanding, this work innovatively adapts the Mamba to the video domain. The proposed VideoMamba overcomes the limitations of existing 3D convolution neural networks and video transformers. Its linear-complexity operator enables efficient long-term modeling, which is crucial for high-resolution long video understanding. Extensive evaluations reveal VideoMamba's four core abilities: (1) Scalability in the visual domain without extensive dataset pretraining, thanks to a novel self-distillation technique; (2) Sensitivity for recognizing short-term actions even with fine-grained motion differences; (3) Superiority in long-term video understanding, showcasing significant advancements over traditional feature-based models; and (4) Compatibility with other modalities, demonstrating robustness in multi-modal contexts. Through these distinct advantages, VideoMamba sets a new benchmark for video understanding, offering a scalable and efficient solution for comprehensive video understanding. All the code and models are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/VideoMamba.

This study presents a deep tabular learning framework for predicting crash severity in electric vehicle (EV) collisions using real-world crash data from Texas (2017-2023). After filtering for electric-only vehicles, 23,301 EV-involved crash records were analyzed. Feature importance techniques using XGBoost and Random Forest identified intersection relation, first harmful event, person age, crash speed limit, and day of week as the top predictors, along with advanced safety features like automatic emergency braking. To address class imbalance, Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique and Edited Nearest Neighbors (SMOTEENN) resampling was applied. Three state-of-the-art deep tabular models, TabPFN, MambaNet, and MambaAttention, were benchmarked for severity prediction. While TabPFN demonstrated strong generalization, MambaAttention achieved superior performance in classifying severe injury cases due to its attention-based feature reweighting. The findings highlight the potential of deep tabular architectures for improving crash severity prediction and enabling data-driven safety interventions in EV crash contexts.

Research related to automatically detecting Alzheimer's disease (AD) is important, given the high prevalence of AD and the high cost of traditional methods. Since AD significantly affects the content and acoustics of spontaneous speech, natural language processing and machine learning provide promising techniques for reliably detecting AD. We compare and contrast the performance of two such approaches for AD detection on the recent ADReSS challenge dataset: 1) using domain knowledge-based hand-crafted features that capture linguistic and acoustic phenomena, and 2) fine-tuning Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT)-based sequence classification models. We also compare multiple feature-based regression models for a neuropsychological score task in the challenge. We observe that fine-tuned BERT models, given the relative importance of linguistics in cognitive impairment detection, outperform feature-based approaches on the AD detection task.

This paper introduces a method for zero-shot video restoration using pre-trained image restoration diffusion models. Traditional video restoration methods often need retraining for different settings and struggle with limited generalization across various degradation types and datasets. Our approach uses a hierarchical token merging strategy for keyframes and local frames, combined with a hybrid correspondence mechanism that blends optical flow and feature-based nearest neighbor matching (latent merging). We show that our method not only achieves top performance in zero-shot video restoration but also significantly surpasses trained models in generalization across diverse datasets and extreme degradations (8times super-resolution and high-standard deviation video denoising). We present evidence through quantitative metrics and visual comparisons on various challenging datasets. Additionally, our technique works with any 2D restoration diffusion model, offering a versatile and powerful tool for video enhancement tasks without extensive retraining. This research leads to more efficient and widely applicable video restoration technologies, supporting advancements in fields that require high-quality video output. See our project page for video results at https://jimmycv07.github.io/DiffIR2VR_web/.

Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) is a severe disease characterized by an elevated pulmonary artery pressure. The gold standard for PH diagnosis is measurement of mean Pulmonary Artery Pressure (mPAP) during an invasive Right Heart Catheterization. In this paper, we investigate noninvasive approach to PH detection utilizing Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Computer Models and Machine Learning. We show using the ablation study, that physics-informed feature engineering based on models of blood circulation increases the performance of Gradient Boosting Decision Trees-based algorithms for classification of PH and regression of values of mPAP. We compare results of regression (with thresholding of estimated mPAP) and classification and demonstrate that metrics achieved in both experiments are comparable. The predicted mPAP values are more informative to the physicians than the probability of PH returned by classification models. They provide the intuitive explanation of the outcome of the machine learning model (clinicians are accustomed to the mPAP metric, contrary to the PH probability).

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable advancements by leveraging tools to interact with external environments, a critical step toward generalized AI. However, the standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approach, which relies on large-scale datasets, often overlooks task-specific characteristics in tool use, leading to performance bottlenecks. To address this issue, we analyze three existing LLMs and uncover key insights: training data can inadvertently impede tool-use behavior, token importance is distributed unevenly, and errors in tool calls fall into a small set of distinct categories. Building on these findings, we propose TL-Training, a task-feature-based framework that mitigates the effects of suboptimal training data, dynamically adjusts token weights to prioritize key tokens during SFT, and incorporates a robust reward mechanism tailored to error categories, optimized through proximal policy optimization. We validate TL-Training by training CodeLLaMA-2-7B and evaluating it on four diverse open-source test sets. Our results demonstrate that the LLM trained by our method matches or surpasses both open- and closed-source LLMs in tool-use performance using only 1,217 training data points. Additionally, our method enhances robustness in noisy environments and improves general task performance, offering a scalable and efficient paradigm for tool-use training in LLMs. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Junjie-Ye/TL-Training.

The activations of Facial Action Units (AUs) mutually influence one another. While the relationship between a pair of AUs can be complex and unique, existing approaches fail to specifically and explicitly represent such cues for each pair of AUs in each facial display. This paper proposes an AU relationship modelling approach that deep learns a unique graph to explicitly describe the relationship between each pair of AUs of the target facial display. Our approach first encodes each AU's activation status and its association with other AUs into a node feature. Then, it learns a pair of multi-dimensional edge features to describe multiple task-specific relationship cues between each pair of AUs. During both node and edge feature learning, our approach also considers the influence of the unique facial display on AUs' relationship by taking the full face representation as an input. Experimental results on BP4D and DISFA datasets show that both node and edge feature learning modules provide large performance improvements for CNN and transformer-based backbones, with our best systems achieving the state-of-the-art AU recognition results. Our approach not only has a strong capability in modelling relationship cues for AU recognition but also can be easily incorporated into various backbones. Our PyTorch code is made available.

For unsupervised image-to-image translation, we propose a discriminator architecture which focuses on the statistical features instead of individual patches. The network is stabilized by distribution matching of key statistical features at multiple scales. Unlike the existing methods which impose more and more constraints on the generator, our method facilitates the shape deformation and enhances the fine details with a greatly simplified framework. We show that the proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models in various challenging applications including selfie-to-anime, male-to-female and glasses removal.

Mobile app reviews are a large-scale data source for software-related knowledge generation activities, including software maintenance, evolution and feedback analysis. Effective extraction of features (i.e., functionalities or characteristics) from these reviews is key to support analysis on the acceptance of these features, identification of relevant new feature requests and prioritization of feature development, among others. Traditional methods focus on syntactic pattern-based approaches, typically context-agnostic, evaluated on a closed set of apps, difficult to replicate and limited to a reduced set and domain of apps. Meanwhile, the pervasiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the Transformer architecture in software engineering tasks lays the groundwork for empirical evaluation of the performance of these models to support feature extraction. In this study, we present T-FREX, a Transformer-based, fully automatic approach for mobile app review feature extraction. First, we collect a set of ground truth features from users in a real crowdsourced software recommendation platform and transfer them automatically into a dataset of app reviews. Then, we use this newly created dataset to fine-tune multiple LLMs on a named entity recognition task under different data configurations. We assess the performance of T-FREX with respect to this ground truth, and we complement our analysis by comparing T-FREX with a baseline method from the field. Finally, we assess the quality of new features predicted by T-FREX through an external human evaluation. Results show that T-FREX outperforms on average the traditional syntactic-based method, especially when discovering new features from a domain for which the model has been fine-tuned.

Knowledge distillation is often used to transfer knowledge from a strong teacher model to a relatively weak student model. Traditional methods include response-based methods and feature-based methods. Response-based methods are widely used but suffer from lower upper limits of performance due to their ignorance of intermediate signals, while feature-based methods have constraints on vocabularies, tokenizers and model architectures. In this paper, we propose a liberal feature-based distillation method (LEAD). LEAD aligns the distribution between the intermediate layers of teacher model and student model, which is effective, extendable, portable and has no requirements on vocabularies, tokenizers, or model architectures. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of LEAD on widely-used benchmarks, including MS MARCO Passage Ranking, TREC 2019 DL Track, MS MARCO Document Ranking and TREC 2020 DL Track. Our code is available in https://github.com/microsoft/SimXNS/tree/main/LEAD.

AI systems frequently exhibit and amplify social biases, including gender bias, leading to harmful consequences in critical areas. This study introduces a novel encoder-decoder approach that leverages model gradients to learn a single monosemantic feature neuron encoding gender information. We show that our method can be used to debias transformer-based language models, while maintaining other capabilities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple encoder-only based models and highlight its potential for broader applications.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a critical requirement for the deployment of deep neural networks. This paper introduces the HEAT model, a new post-hoc OOD detection method estimating the density of in-distribution (ID) samples using hybrid energy-based models (EBM) in the feature space of a pre-trained backbone. HEAT complements prior density estimators of the ID density, e.g. parametric models like the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), to provide an accurate yet robust density estimation. A second contribution is to leverage the EBM framework to provide a unified density estimation and to compose several energy terms. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significance of the two contributions. HEAT sets new state-of-the-art OOD detection results on the CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 benchmark as well as on the large-scale Imagenet benchmark. The code is available at: https://github.com/MarcLafon/heatood.

Text embeddings enable various applications, but their performance deteriorates on longer texts. In this paper, we find that the performance degradation is due to a phenomenon called Length Collapse, where longer text embeddings collapse into a narrow space. This collapse results in a distributional inconsistency between embeddings of different text lengths, ultimately hurting the performance of downstream tasks. Theoretically, by considering the self-attention mechanism inherently functions as a low-pass filter, we prove that long sequences increase the attenuation rate of the low-pass filter effect of the self-attention mechanism. With layers going deeper, excessive low-pass filtering causes the token signals to retain only their Direct-Current (DC) component, which means the input token feature maps will collapse into a narrow space, especially in long texts. Based on the above analysis, we propose to mitigate the undesirable length collapse limitation by introducing a temperature in softmax(), which achieves a higher low-filter attenuation rate. The tuning-free method, called TempScale, can be plugged into multiple transformer-based embedding models. Empirically, we demonstrate that TempScale can improve existing embedding models, especially on long text inputs, bringing up to 0.53% performance gains on 40 datasets from Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) and 0.82% performance gains on 4 datasets from LongEmbed, which specifically focuses on long context retrieval.

Large-scale visual localization systems continue to rely on 3D point clouds built from image collections using structure-from-motion. While the 3D points in these models are represented using local image features, directly matching a query image's local features against the point cloud is challenging due to the scale of the nearest-neighbor search problem. Many recent approaches to visual localization have thus proposed a hybrid method, where first a global (per image) embedding is used to retrieve a small subset of database images, and local features of the query are matched only against those. It seems to have become common belief that global embeddings are critical for said image-retrieval in visual localization, despite the significant downside of having to compute two feature types for each query image. In this paper, we take a step back from this assumption and propose Constrained Approximate Nearest Neighbors (CANN), a joint solution of k-nearest-neighbors across both the geometry and appearance space using only local features. We first derive the theoretical foundation for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval across multiple metrics and then showcase how CANN improves visual localization. Our experiments on public localization benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art global feature-based retrieval and approaches using local feature aggregation schemes. Moreover, it is an order of magnitude faster in both index and query time than feature aggregation schemes for these datasets. Code will be released.

Learning anatomical segmentation from heterogeneous labels in multi-center datasets is a common situation encountered in clinical scenarios, where certain anatomical structures are only annotated in images coming from particular medical centers, but not in the full database. Here we first show how state-of-the-art pixel-level segmentation models fail in naively learning this task due to domain memorization issues and conflicting labels. We then propose to adopt HybridGNet, a landmark-based segmentation model which learns the available anatomical structures using graph-based representations. By analyzing the latent space learned by both models, we show that HybridGNet naturally learns more domain-invariant feature representations, and provide empirical evidence in the context of chest X-ray multiclass segmentation. We hope these insights will shed light on the training of deep learning models with heterogeneous labels from public and multi-center datasets.

Voice Activity Detection (VAD) plays a key role in speech processing, often utilizing hand-crafted or neural features. This study examines the effectiveness of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) and pre-trained model (PTM) features, including wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT, WavLM, UniSpeech, MMS, and Whisper. We propose FusionVAD, a unified framework that combines both feature types using three fusion strategies: concatenation, addition, and cross-attention (CA). Experimental results reveal that simple fusion techniques, particularly addition, outperform CA in both accuracy and efficiency. Fusion-based models consistently surpass single-feature models, highlighting the complementary nature of MFCCs and PTM features. Notably, our best-performing fusion model exceeds the state-of-the-art Pyannote across multiple datasets, achieving an absolute average improvement of 2.04%. These results confirm that simple feature fusion enhances VAD robustness while maintaining computational efficiency.

Generative models have been very popular in the recent years for their image generation capabilities. GAN-based models are highly regarded for their disentangled latent space, which is a key feature contributing to their success in controlled image editing. On the other hand, diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for generating high-quality images. However, the latent space of diffusion models is not as thoroughly explored or understood. Existing methods that aim to explore the latent space of diffusion models usually relies on text prompts to pinpoint specific semantics. However, this approach may be restrictive in areas such as art, fashion, or specialized fields like medicine, where suitable text prompts might not be available or easy to conceive thus limiting the scope of existing work. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method to discover latent semantics in text-to-image diffusion models without relying on text prompts. Our method takes a small set of unlabeled images from specific domains, such as faces or cats, and a pre-trained diffusion model, and discovers diverse semantics in unsupervised fashion using a contrastive learning objective. Moreover, the learned directions can be applied simultaneously, either within the same domain (such as various types of facial edits) or across different domains (such as applying cat and face edits within the same image) without interfering with each other. Our extensive experiments show that our method achieves highly disentangled edits, outperforming existing approaches in both diffusion-based and GAN-based latent space editing methods.

In this paper, we establish a connection between the parameterization of flow-based and energy-based generative models, and present a new flow-based modeling approach called energy-based normalizing flow (EBFlow). We demonstrate that by optimizing EBFlow with score-matching objectives, the computation of Jacobian determinants for linear transformations can be entirely bypassed. This feature enables the use of arbitrary linear layers in the construction of flow-based models without increasing the computational time complexity of each training iteration from O(D^2L) to O(D^3L) for an L-layered model that accepts D-dimensional inputs. This makes the training of EBFlow more efficient than the commonly-adopted maximum likelihood training method. In addition to the reduction in runtime, we enhance the training stability and empirical performance of EBFlow through a number of techniques developed based on our analysis of the score-matching methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant speedup compared to maximum likelihood estimation while outperforming prior methods with a noticeable margin in terms of negative log-likelihood (NLL).

Text-to-SQL parsing and end-to-end question answering (E2E TQA) are two main approaches for Table-based Question Answering task. Despite success on multiple benchmarks, they have yet to be compared and their synergy remains unexplored. In this paper, we identify different strengths and weaknesses through evaluating state-of-the-art models on benchmark datasets: Text-to-SQL demonstrates superiority in handling questions involving arithmetic operations and long tables; E2E TQA excels in addressing ambiguous questions, non-standard table schema, and complex table contents. To combine both strengths, we propose a Synergistic Table-based Question Answering approach that integrate different models via answer selection, which is agnostic to any model types. Further experiments validate that ensembling models by either feature-based or LLM-based answer selector significantly improves the performance over individual models.

Billions of USD are invested in new artists and songs by the music industry every year. This research provides a new strategy for assessing the hit potential of songs, which can help record companies support their investment decisions. A number of models were developed that use both audio data, and a novel feature based on social media listening behaviour. The results show that models based on early adopter behaviour perform well when predicting top 20 dance hits.

In tabular prediction tasks, tree-based models combined with automated feature engineering methods often outperform deep learning approaches that rely on learned representations. While these feature engineering techniques are effective, they typically depend on a pre-defined search space and primarily use validation scores for feature selection, thereby missing valuable insights from previous experiments. To address these limitations, we propose a novel tabular learning framework that utilizes large language models (LLMs), termed Optimizing Column feature generator with decision Tree reasoning (OCTree). Our key idea is to leverage the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to identify effective feature generation rules without manually specifying the search space and provide language-based reasoning information highlighting past experiments as feedback for iterative rule improvements. We use decision trees to convey this reasoning information, as they can be easily represented in natural language, effectively providing knowledge from prior experiments (i.e., the impact of the generated features on performance) to the LLMs. Our empirical results demonstrate that OCTree consistently enhances the performance of various prediction models across diverse benchmarks, outperforming competing automated feature engineering methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jaehyun513/OCTree.

Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a critical challenge in machine learning. Ensemble-based methods, like weight space ensembles that interpolate model parameters, have been shown to achieve superior OOD performance. However, the underlying mechanism for their effectiveness remains unclear. In this study, we closely examine WiSE-FT, a popular weight space ensemble method that interpolates between a pre-trained and a fine-tuned model. We observe an unexpected phenomenon, in which WiSE-FT successfully corrects many cases where each individual model makes incorrect predictions, which contributes significantly to its OOD effectiveness. To gain further insights, we conduct theoretical analysis in a multi-class setting with a large number of spurious features. Our analysis predicts the above phenomenon and it further shows that ensemble-based models reduce prediction errors in the OOD settings by utilizing a more diverse set of spurious features. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that focuses on learning invariant features for better OOD performance, our findings suggest that incorporating a large number of diverse spurious features weakens their individual contributions, leading to improved overall OOD generalization performance. Empirically we demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing diverse spurious features on a MultiColorMNIST dataset, and our experimental results are consistent with the theoretical analysis. Building upon the new theoretical insights into the efficacy of ensemble methods, we further identify an issue of WiSE-FT caused by the overconfidence of fine-tuned models in OOD situations. This overconfidence magnifies the fine-tuned model's incorrect prediction, leading to deteriorated OOD ensemble performance. To remedy this problem, we propose a novel method called BAlaNced averaGing (BANG), which significantly enhances the OOD performance of WiSE-FT.

We present Masked Feature Prediction (MaskFeat) for self-supervised pre-training of video models. Our approach first randomly masks out a portion of the input sequence and then predicts the feature of the masked regions. We study five different types of features and find Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), a hand-crafted feature descriptor, works particularly well in terms of both performance and efficiency. We observe that the local contrast normalization in HOG is essential for good results, which is in line with earlier work using HOG for visual recognition. Our approach can learn abundant visual knowledge and drive large-scale Transformer-based models. Without using extra model weights or supervision, MaskFeat pre-trained on unlabeled videos achieves unprecedented results of 86.7% with MViT-L on Kinetics-400, 88.3% on Kinetics-600, 80.4% on Kinetics-700, 39.8 mAP on AVA, and 75.0% on SSv2. MaskFeat further generalizes to image input, which can be interpreted as a video with a single frame and obtains competitive results on ImageNet.

Vision foundation models, particularly the ViT family, have revolutionized image understanding by providing rich semantic features. However, despite their success in 2D comprehension, their abilities on grasping 3D spatial relationships are still unclear. In this work, we evaluate and enhance the 3D awareness of ViT-based models. We begin by systematically assessing their ability to learn 3D equivariant features, specifically examining the consistency of semantic embeddings across different viewpoints. Our findings indicate that improved 3D equivariance leads to better performance on various downstream tasks, including pose estimation, tracking, and semantic transfer. Building on this insight, we propose a simple yet effective finetuning strategy based on 3D correspondences, which significantly enhances the 3D correspondence understanding of existing vision models. Remarkably, even finetuning on a single object for just one iteration results in substantial performance gains. All code and resources will be made publicly available to support further advancements in 3D-aware vision models. Our code is available at https://github.com/qq456cvb/3DCorrEnhance.

Understanding urban socioeconomic conditions through visual data is a challenging yet essential task for sustainable urban development and policy planning. In this work, we introduce CityLens, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of large language-vision models (LLVMs) in predicting socioeconomic indicators from satellite and street view imagery. We construct a multi-modal dataset covering a total of 17 globally distributed cities, spanning 6 key domains: economy, education, crime, transport, health, and environment, reflecting the multifaceted nature of urban life. Based on this dataset, we define 11 prediction tasks and utilize three evaluation paradigms: Direct Metric Prediction, Normalized Metric Estimation, and Feature-Based Regression. We benchmark 17 state-of-the-art LLVMs across these tasks. Our results reveal that while LLVMs demonstrate promising perceptual and reasoning capabilities, they still exhibit limitations in predicting urban socioeconomic indicators. CityLens provides a unified framework for diagnosing these limitations and guiding future efforts in using LLVMs to understand and predict urban socioeconomic patterns. Our codes and datasets are open-sourced via https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/CityLens.

We present ProtoViT, a method for interpretable image classification combining deep learning and case-based reasoning. This method classifies an image by comparing it to a set of learned prototypes, providing explanations of the form ``this looks like that.'' In our model, a prototype consists of parts, which can deform over irregular geometries to create a better comparison between images. Unlike existing models that rely on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) backbones and spatially rigid prototypes, our model integrates Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones into prototype based models, while offering spatially deformed prototypes that not only accommodate geometric variations of objects but also provide coherent and clear prototypical feature representations with an adaptive number of prototypical parts. Our experiments show that our model can generally achieve higher performance than the existing prototype based models. Our comprehensive analyses ensure that the prototypes are consistent and the interpretations are faithful.

Peer assessment has been widely applied across diverse academic fields over the last few decades and has demonstrated its effectiveness. However, the advantages of peer assessment can only be achieved with high-quality peer reviews. Previous studies have found that high-quality review comments usually comprise several features (e.g., contain suggestions, mention problems, use a positive tone). Thus, researchers have attempted to evaluate peer-review comments by detecting different features using various machine learning and deep learning models. However, there is no single study that investigates using a multi-task learning (MTL) model to detect multiple features simultaneously. This paper presents two MTL models for evaluating peer-review comments by leveraging the state-of-the-art pre-trained language representation models BERT and DistilBERT. Our results demonstrate that BERT-based models significantly outperform previous GloVe-based methods by around 6% in F1-score on tasks of detecting a single feature, and MTL further improves performance while reducing model size.

Intrusion detection systems (IDS) for the Internet of Things (IoT) systems can use AI-based models to ensure secure communications. IoT systems tend to have many connected devices producing massive amounts of data with high dimensionality, which requires complex models. Complex models have notorious problems such as overfitting, low interpretability, and high computational complexity. Adding model complexity penalty (i.e., regularization) can ease overfitting, but it barely helps interpretability and computational efficiency. Feature engineering can solve these issues; hence, it has become critical for IDS in large-scale IoT systems to reduce the size and dimensionality of data, resulting in less complex models with excellent performance, smaller data storage, and fast detection. This paper proposes a new feature engineering method called LEMDA (Light feature Engineering based on the Mean Decrease in Accuracy). LEMDA applies exponential decay and an optional sensitivity factor to select and create the most informative features. The proposed method has been evaluated and compared to other feature engineering methods using three IoT datasets and four AI/ML models. The results show that LEMDA improves the F1 score performance of all the IDS models by an average of 34% and reduces the average training and detection times in most cases.

In the sentiment attitude extraction task, the aim is to identify <<attitudes>> -- sentiment relations between entities mentioned in text. In this paper, we provide a study on attention-based context encoders in the sentiment attitude extraction task. For this task, we adapt attentive context encoders of two types: (i) feature-based; (ii) self-based. Our experiments with a corpus of Russian analytical texts RuSentRel illustrate that the models trained with attentive encoders outperform ones that were trained without them and achieve 1.5-5.9% increase by F1. We also provide the analysis of attention weight distributions in dependence on the term type.

Large language models (LLMs) often acquire knowledge during pretraining that is undesirable in downstream deployments, e.g., sensitive information or copyrighted content. Existing approaches for removing such knowledge rely on fine-tuning, training low-rank adapters or fact-level editing, but these are either too coarse, too shallow, or ineffective. In this work, we propose PISCES (Precise In-parameter Suppression for Concept EraSure), a novel framework for precisely erasing entire concepts from model parameters by directly editing directions that encode them in parameter space. PISCES uses a disentangler model to decompose MLP vectors into interpretable features, identifies those associated with a target concept using automated interpretability techniques, and removes them from model parameters. Experiments on Gemma 2 and Llama 3.1 over various concepts show that PISCES achieves modest gains in efficacy over leading erasure methods, reducing accuracy on the target concept to as low as 7.7%, while dramatically improving erasure specificity (by up to 31%) and robustness (by up to 38%). Overall, these results demonstrate that feature-based in-parameter editing enables a more precise and reliable approach for removing conceptual knowledge in language models.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are critical building blocks in nanotechnology, yet the characterization of their dynamic growth is limited by the experimental challenges in nanoscale motion measurement using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging. Existing ex situ methods offer only static analysis, while in situ techniques often require manual initialization and lack continuous per-particle trajectory decomposition. We present Visual Feature Tracking (VFTrack) an in-situ real-time particle tracking framework that automatically detects and tracks individual CNT particles in SEM image sequences. VFTrack integrates handcrafted or deep feature detectors and matchers within a particle tracking framework to enable kinematic analysis of CNT micropillar growth. A systematic using 13,540 manually annotated trajectories identifies the ALIKED detector with LightGlue matcher as an optimal combination (F1-score of 0.78, alpha-score of 0.89). VFTrack motion vectors decomposed into axial growth, lateral drift, and oscillations, facilitate the calculation of heterogeneous regional growth rates and the reconstruction of evolving CNT pillar morphologies. This work enables advancement in automated nano-material characterization, bridging the gap between physics-based models and experimental observation to enable real-time optimization of CNT synthesis.

Scaling dense retrievers to larger large language model (LLM) backbones has been a dominant strategy for improving their retrieval effectiveness. However, this has substantial cost implications: larger backbones require more expensive hardware (e.g. GPUs with more memory) and lead to higher indexing and querying costs (latency, energy consumption). In this paper, we challenge this paradigm by introducing PromptPRF, a feature-based pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) framework that enables small LLM-based dense retrievers to achieve effectiveness comparable to much larger models. PromptPRF uses LLMs to extract query-independent, structured and unstructured features (e.g., entities, summaries, chain-of-thought keywords, essay) from top-ranked documents. These features are generated offline and integrated into dense query representations via prompting, enabling efficient retrieval without additional training. Unlike prior methods such as GRF, which rely on online, query-specific generation and sparse retrieval, PromptPRF decouples feedback generation from query processing and supports dense retrievers in a fully zero-shot setting. Experiments on TREC DL and BEIR benchmarks demonstrate that PromptPRF consistently improves retrieval effectiveness and offers favourable cost-effectiveness trade-offs. We further present ablation studies to understand the role of positional feedback and analyse the interplay between feature extractor size, PRF depth, and model performance. Our findings demonstrate that with effective PRF design, scaling the retriever is not always necessary, narrowing the gap between small and large models while reducing inference cost.

The emergence of hybrid quantum-classical machine learning (HQML) models opens new horizons of computational intelligence but their fundamental complexity frequently leads to black box behavior that undermines transparency and reliability in their application. Although XAI for quantum systems still in its infancy, a major research gap is evident in robust global and local explainability approaches that are designed for HQML architectures that employ quantized feature encoding followed by classical learning. The gap is the focus of this work, which introduces QuXAI, an framework based upon Q-MEDLEY, an explainer for explaining feature importance in these hybrid systems. Our model entails the creation of HQML models incorporating quantum feature maps, the use of Q-MEDLEY, which combines feature based inferences, preserving the quantum transformation stage and visualizing the resulting attributions. Our result shows that Q-MEDLEY delineates influential classical aspects in HQML models, as well as separates their noise, and competes well against established XAI techniques in classical validation settings. Ablation studies more significantly expose the virtues of the composite structure used in Q-MEDLEY. The implications of this work are critically important, as it provides a route to improve the interpretability and reliability of HQML models, thus promoting greater confidence and being able to engage in safer and more responsible use of quantum-enhanced AI technology.

Toxic comment detection remains a challenging task, where transformer-based models (e.g., BERT) incur high computational costs and degrade on minority toxicity classes, while classical ensembles lack semantic adaptability. We propose xLSTM, a parameter-efficient and theoretically grounded framework that unifies cosine-similarity gating, adaptive feature prioritization, and principled class rebalancing. A learnable reference vector {v} in {R}^d modulates contextual embeddings via cosine similarity, amplifying toxic cues and attenuating benign signals to yield stronger gradients under severe class imbalance. xLSTM integrates multi-source embeddings (GloVe, FastText, BERT CLS) through a projection layer, a character-level BiLSTM for morphological cues, embedding-space SMOTE for minority augmentation, and adaptive focal loss with dynamic class weighting. On the Jigsaw Toxic Comment benchmark, xLSTM attains 96.0% accuracy and 0.88 macro-F1, outperforming BERT by 33% on threat and 28% on identity_hate categories, with 15 times fewer parameters and 50ms inference latency. Cosine gating contributes a +4.8% F1 gain in ablations. The results establish a new efficiency adaptability frontier, demonstrating that lightweight, theoretically informed architectures can surpass large pretrained models on imbalanced, domain-specific NLP tasks.

State space models and Mamba-based models have been increasingly applied across various domains, achieving state-of-the-art performance. This technical report introduces the first attempt to train a transferable Mamba model utilizing contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP). We have trained Mamba models of varying sizes and undertaken comprehensive evaluations of these models on 26 zero-shot classification datasets and 16 out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets. Our findings reveal that a Mamba model with 67 million parameters is on par with a 307 million-parameter Vision Transformer (ViT) model in zero-shot classification tasks, highlighting the parameter efficiency of Mamba models. In tests of OOD generalization, Mamba-based models exhibit exceptional performance in conditions of OOD image contrast or when subjected to high-pass filtering. However, a Hessian analysis indicates that Mamba models feature a sharper and more non-convex landscape compared to ViT-based models, making them more challenging to train. The source code is available at https://github.com/raytrun/mamba-clip.

Domain generalization (DG) aims to learn a robust model from source domains that generalize well on unseen target domains. Recent studies focus on generating novel domain samples or features to diversify distributions complementary to source domains. Yet, these approaches can hardly deal with the restriction that the samples synthesized from various domains can cause semantic distortion. In this paper, we propose an online one-stage Cross Contrasting Feature Perturbation (CCFP) framework to simulate domain shift by generating perturbed features in the latent space while regularizing the model prediction against domain shift. Different from the previous fixed synthesizing strategy, we design modules with learnable feature perturbations and semantic consistency constraints. In contrast to prior work, our method does not use any generative-based models or domain labels. We conduct extensive experiments on a standard DomainBed benchmark with a strict evaluation protocol for a fair comparison. Comprehensive experiments show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art, and quantitative analyses illustrate that our approach can alleviate the domain shift problem in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in educational tasks such as providing writing suggestions to students. Despite their potential, LLMs are known to harbor inherent biases which may negatively impact learners. Previous studies have investigated bias in models and data representations separately, neglecting the potential impact of LLM bias on human writing. In this paper, we investigate how bias transfers through an AI writing support pipeline. We conduct a large-scale user study with 231 students writing business case peer reviews in German. Students are divided into five groups with different levels of writing support: one classroom group with feature-based suggestions and four groups recruited from Prolific -- a control group with no assistance, two groups with suggestions from fine-tuned GPT-2 and GPT-3 models, and one group with suggestions from pre-trained GPT-3.5. Using GenBit gender bias analysis, Word Embedding Association Tests (WEAT), and Sentence Embedding Association Test (SEAT) we evaluate the gender bias at various stages of the pipeline: in model embeddings, in suggestions generated by the models, and in reviews written by students. Our results demonstrate that there is no significant difference in gender bias between the resulting peer reviews of groups with and without LLM suggestions. Our research is therefore optimistic about the use of AI writing support in the classroom, showcasing a context where bias in LLMs does not transfer to students' responses.

While the capabilities of generative models heavily improved in different domains (images, text, graphs, molecules, etc.), their evaluation metrics largely remain based on simplified quantities or manual inspection with limited practicality. To this end, we propose a framework for Multi-level Performance Evaluation of Generative mOdels (MPEGO), which could be employed across different domains. MPEGO aims to quantify generation performance hierarchically, starting from a sub-feature-based low-level evaluation to a global features-based high-level evaluation. MPEGO offers great customizability as the employed features are entirely user-driven and can thus be highly domain/problem-specific while being arbitrarily complex (e.g., outcomes of experimental procedures). We validate MPEGO using multiple generative models across several datasets from the material discovery domain. An ablation study is conducted to study the plausibility of intermediate steps in MPEGO. Results demonstrate that MPEGO provides a flexible, user-driven, and multi-level evaluation framework, with practical insights on the generation quality. The framework, source code, and experiments will be available at https://github.com/GT4SD/mpego.

Heavy computation is a bottleneck limiting deep-learningbased feature matching algorithms to be applied in many realtime applications. However, existing lightweight networks optimized for Euclidean data cannot address classical feature matching tasks, since sparse keypoint based descriptors are expected to be matched. This paper tackles this problem and proposes two concepts: 1) a novel parallel attention model entitled ParaFormer and 2) a graph based U-Net architecture with attentional pooling. First, ParaFormer fuses features and keypoint positions through the concept of amplitude and phase, and integrates self- and cross-attention in a parallel manner which achieves a win-win performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Second, with U-Net architecture and proposed attentional pooling, the ParaFormer-U variant significantly reduces computational complexity, and minimize performance loss caused by downsampling. Sufficient experiments on various applications, including homography estimation, pose estimation, and image matching, demonstrate that ParaFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high efficiency. The efficient ParaFormer-U variant achieves comparable performance with less than 50% FLOPs of the existing attention-based models.

Recent studies in interpretability have explored the inner workings of transformer models trained on tasks across various domains, often discovering that these networks naturally develop highly structured representations. When such representations comprehensively reflect the task domain's structure, they are commonly referred to as "World Models" (WMs). In this work, we identify WMs in transformers trained on maze-solving tasks. By using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) and analyzing attention patterns, we examine the construction of WMs and demonstrate consistency between SAE feature-based and circuit-based analyses. By subsequently intervening on isolated features to confirm their causal role, we find that it is easier to activate features than to suppress them. Furthermore, we find that models can reason about mazes involving more simultaneously active features than they encountered during training; however, when these same mazes (with greater numbers of connections) are provided to models via input tokens instead, the models fail. Finally, we demonstrate that positional encoding schemes appear to influence how World Models are structured within the model's residual stream.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals play a crucial role in understanding brain activity and diagnosing neurological diseases. Because supervised EEG encoders are unable to learn robust EEG patterns and rely too heavily on expensive signal annotation, research has turned to general-purpose self-supervised EEG encoders, known as EEG-based models (EEG-FMs), to achieve robust and scalable EEG feature extraction. However, the readiness of early EEG-FMs for practical applications and the standards for long-term research progress remain unclear. Therefore, a systematic and comprehensive review of first-generation EEG-FMs is necessary to understand their current state-of-the-art and identify key directions for future EEG-FMs. To this end, this study reviews 14 early EEG-FMs and provides a critical comprehensive analysis of their methodologies, empirical findings, and unaddressed research gaps. This review focuses on the latest developments in EEG-based models (EEG-FMs), which have shown great potential for processing and analyzing EEG data. We discuss various EEG-FMs, including their architectures, pretraining strategies, pretraining and downstream datasets, and other details. This review also highlights challenges and future directions in the field, aiming to provide a comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners interested in EEG analysis and related EEG-FM.

This paper presents a significant improvement on the previous conference paper known as DefSent. The prior study seeks to improve sentence embeddings of language models by projecting definition sentences into the vector space of dictionary entries. We discover that this approach is not fully explored due to the methodological limitation of using word embeddings of language models to represent dictionary entries. This leads to two hindrances. First, dictionary entries are constrained by the single-word vocabulary, and thus cannot be fully exploited. Second, semantic representations of language models are known to be anisotropic, but pre-processing word embeddings for DefSent is not allowed because its weight is frozen during training and tied to the prediction layer. In this paper, we propose a novel method to progressively build entry embeddings not subject to the limitations. As a result, definition sentences can be projected into a quasi-isotropic or isotropic vector space of unlimited dictionary entries, so that sentence embeddings of noticeably better quality are attainable. We abbreviate our approach as DefSent+ (a plus version of DefSent), involving the following strengths: 1) the task performance on measuring sentence similarities is significantly improved compared to DefSent; 2) when DefSent+ is used to further train data-augmented models like SIMCSE, SNCSE, and SynCSE, state-of-the-art performance on measuring sentence similarities can be achieved among the approaches without using manually labeled datasets; 3) DefSent+ is also competitive in feature-based transfer for NLP downstream tasks.

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) aims to enable collaborative training of deep learning models while maintaining privacy protection. However, the VFL procedure still has components that are vulnerable to attacks by malicious parties. In our work, we consider feature reconstruction attacks, a common risk targeting input data compromise. We theoretically claim that feature reconstruction attacks cannot succeed without knowledge of the prior distribution on data. Consequently, we demonstrate that even simple model architecture transformations can significantly impact the protection of input data during VFL. Confirming these findings with experimental results, we show that MLP-based models are resistant to state-of-the-art feature reconstruction attacks.

The Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT) is a new track for TREC 2019 to facilitate Conversational Information Seeking (CIS) research and to create a large-scale reusable test collection for conversational search systems. The document corpus is 38,426,252 passages from the TREC Complex Answer Retrieval (CAR) and Microsoft MAchine Reading COmprehension (MARCO) datasets. Eighty information seeking dialogues (30 train, 50 test) are an average of 9 to 10 questions long. Relevance assessments are provided for 30 training topics and 20 test topics. This year 21 groups submitted a total of 65 runs using varying methods for conversational query understanding and ranking. Methods include traditional retrieval based methods, feature based learning-to-rank, neural models, and knowledge enhanced methods. A common theme through the runs is the use of BERT-based neural reranking methods. Leading methods also employed document expansion, conversational query expansion, and generative language models for conversational query rewriting (GPT-2). The results show a gap between automatic systems and those using the manually resolved utterances, with a 35% relative improvement of manual rewrites over the best automatic system.

We propose a novel approach for disentangling visual and semantic features from the backbones of pre-trained diffusion models, enabling visual correspondence in a manner analogous to the well-established semantic correspondence. While diffusion model backbones are known to encode semantically rich features, they must also contain visual features to support their image synthesis capabilities. However, isolating these visual features is challenging due to the absence of annotated datasets. To address this, we introduce an automated pipeline that constructs image pairs with annotated semantic and visual correspondences based on existing subject-driven image generation datasets, and design a contrastive architecture to separate the two feature types. Leveraging the disentangled representations, we propose a new metric, Visual Semantic Matching (VSM), that quantifies visual inconsistencies in subject-driven image generation. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms global feature-based metrics such as CLIP, DINO, and vision--language models in quantifying visual inconsistencies while also enabling spatial localization of inconsistent regions. To our knowledge, this is the first method that supports both quantification and localization of inconsistencies in subject-driven generation, offering a valuable tool for advancing this task. Project Page:https://abdo-eldesokey.github.io/mind-the-glitch/

Research at the intersection of personality psychology, computer science, and linguistics has recently focused increasingly on modeling and predicting personality from language use. We report two major improvements in predicting personality traits from text data: (1) to our knowledge, the most comprehensive set of theory-based psycholinguistic features and (2) hybrid models that integrate a pre-trained Transformer Language Model BERT and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) networks trained on within-text distributions ('text contours') of psycholinguistic features. We experiment with BLSTM models (with and without Attention) and with two techniques for applying pre-trained language representations from the transformer model - 'feature-based' and 'fine-tuning'. We evaluate the performance of the models we built on two benchmark datasets that target the two dominant theoretical models of personality: the Big Five Essay dataset and the MBTI Kaggle dataset. Our results are encouraging as our models outperform existing work on the same datasets. More specifically, our models achieve improvement in classification accuracy by 2.9% on the Essay dataset and 8.28% on the Kaggle MBTI dataset. In addition, we perform ablation experiments to quantify the impact of different categories of psycholinguistic features in the respective personality prediction models.

In knowledge distillation literature, feature-based methods have dominated due to their ability to effectively tap into extensive teacher models. In contrast, logit-based approaches, which aim to distill `dark knowledge' from teachers, typically exhibit inferior performance compared to feature-based methods. To bridge this gap, we present LumiNet, a novel knowledge distillation algorithm designed to enhance logit-based distillation. We introduce the concept of 'perception', aiming to calibrate logits based on the model's representation capability. This concept addresses overconfidence issues in logit-based distillation method while also introducing a novel method to distill knowledge from the teacher. It reconstructs the logits of a sample/instances by considering relationships with other samples in the batch. LumiNet excels on benchmarks like CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and MSCOCO, outperforming leading feature-based methods, e.g., compared to KD with ResNet18 and MobileNetV2 on ImageNet, it shows improvements of 1.5% and 2.05%, respectively.

Most papers caution against using predictive models for disease stratification based on unselected radiomic features, as these features are affected by contouring variability. Instead, they advocate for the use of the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) as a measure of stability for feature selection. However, the direct effect of segmentation variability on the predictive models is rarely studied. This study investigates the impact of segmentation variability on feature stability and predictive performance in radiomics-based prediction of Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) subtype using Magnetic Resonance Imaging. A total of 244 images from the Duke dataset were used, with segmentation variability introduced through modifications of manual segmentations. For each mask, explainable radiomic features were selected using the Shapley Additive exPlanations method and used to train logistic regression models. Feature stability across segmentations was assessed via ICC, Pearson's correlation, and reliability scores quantifying the relationship between feature stability and segmentation variability. Results indicate that segmentation accuracy does not significantly impact predictive performance. While incorporating peritumoral information may reduce feature reproducibility, it does not diminish feature predictive capability. Moreover, feature selection in predictive models is not inherently tied to feature stability with respect to segmentation, suggesting that an overreliance on ICC or reliability scores for feature selection might exclude valuable predictive features.

We study the effects of data size and quality on the performance on Automated Essay Scoring (AES) engines that are designed in accordance with three different paradigms; A frequency and hand-crafted feature-based model, a recurrent neural network model, and a pretrained transformer-based language model that is fine-tuned for classification. We expect that each type of model benefits from the size and the quality of the training data in very different ways. Standard practices for developing training data for AES engines were established with feature-based methods in mind, however, since neural networks are increasingly being considered in a production setting, this work seeks to inform us as to how to establish better training data for neural networks that will be used in production.

Deep learning models are challenged by the distribution shift between the training data and test data. Recently, the large models pre-trained on diverse data have demonstrated unprecedented robustness to various distribution shifts. However, fine-tuning these models can lead to a trade-off between in-distribution (ID) performance and out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness. Existing methods for tackling this trade-off do not explicitly address the OOD robustness problem. In this paper, based on causal analysis of the aforementioned problems, we propose a novel fine-tuning method, which uses masked images as counterfactual samples that help improve the robustness of the fine-tuning model. Specifically, we mask either the semantics-related or semantics-unrelated patches of the images based on class activation map to break the spurious correlation, and refill the masked patches with patches from other images. The resulting counterfactual samples are used in feature-based distillation with the pre-trained model. Extensive experiments verify that regularizing the fine-tuning with the proposed masked images can achieve a better trade-off between ID and OOD performance, surpassing previous methods on the OOD performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Coxy7/robust-finetuning.

In this paper we introduce a new natural language processing dataset and benchmark for predicting prosodic prominence from written text. To our knowledge this will be the largest publicly available dataset with prosodic labels. We describe the dataset construction and the resulting benchmark dataset in detail and train a number of different models ranging from feature-based classifiers to neural network systems for the prediction of discretized prosodic prominence. We show that pre-trained contextualized word representations from BERT outperform the other models even with less than 10% of the training data. Finally we discuss the dataset in light of the results and point to future research and plans for further improving both the dataset and methods of predicting prosodic prominence from text. The dataset and the code for the models are publicly available.

Automatically estimating the complexity of texts for readers has a variety of applications, such as recommending texts with an appropriate complexity level to language learners or supporting the evaluation of text simplification approaches. In this paper, we present our submission to the Text Complexity DE Challenge 2022, a regression task where the goal is to predict the complexity of a German sentence for German learners at level B. Our approach relies on more than 220,000 pseudo-labels created from the German Wikipedia and other corpora to train Transformer-based models, and refrains from any feature engineering or any additional, labeled data. We find that the pseudo-label-based approach gives impressive results yet requires little to no adjustment to the specific task and therefore could be easily adapted to other domains and tasks.

There has been significant debate in the NLP community about whether or not attention weights can be used as an explanation - a mechanism for interpreting how important each input token is for a particular prediction. The validity of "attention as explanation" has so far been evaluated by computing the rank correlation between attention-based explanations and existing feature attribution explanations using LSTM-based models. In our work, we (i) compare the rank correlation between five more recent feature attribution methods and two attention-based methods, on two types of NLP tasks, and (ii) extend this analysis to also include transformer-based models. We find that attention-based explanations do not correlate strongly with any recent feature attribution methods, regardless of the model or task. Furthermore, we find that none of the tested explanations correlate strongly with one another for the transformer-based model, leading us to question the underlying assumption that we should measure the validity of attention-based explanations based on how well they correlate with existing feature attribution explanation methods. After conducting experiments on five datasets using two different models, we argue that the community should stop using rank correlation as an evaluation metric for attention-based explanations. We suggest that researchers and practitioners should instead test various explanation methods and employ a human-in-the-loop process to determine if the explanations align with human intuition for the particular use case at hand.

Currency recognition systems often overlook usability and authenticity assessment, especially in low-resource environments where visually impaired users and offline validation are common. While existing methods focus on denomination classification, they typically ignore physical degradation and forgery, limiting their applicability in real-world conditions. This paper presents a unified framework for currency evaluation that integrates three modules: denomination classification using lightweight CNN models, damage quantification through a novel Unified Currency Damage Index (UCDI), and counterfeit detection using feature-based template matching. The dataset consists of over 82,000 annotated images spanning clean, damaged, and counterfeit notes. Our Custom_CNN model achieves high classification performance with low parameter count. The UCDI metric provides a continuous usability score based on binary mask loss, chromatic distortion, and structural feature loss. The counterfeit detection module demonstrates reliable identification of forged notes across varied imaging conditions. The framework supports real-time, on-device inference and addresses key deployment challenges in constrained environments. Results show that accurate, interpretable, and compact solutions can support inclusive currency evaluation in practical settings.

The Yunshan Cup 2020 track focused on creating a framework for evaluating different methods of part-of-speech (POS). There were two tasks for this track: (1) POS tagging for the Indonesian language, and (2) POS tagging for the Lao tagging. The Indonesian dataset is comprised of 10000 sentences from Indonesian news within 29 tags. And the Lao dataset consists of 8000 sentences within 27 tags. 25 teams registered for the task. The methods of participants ranged from feature-based to neural networks using either classical machine learning techniques or ensemble methods. The best performing results achieve an accuracy of 95.82% for Indonesian and 93.03%, showing that neural sequence labeling models significantly outperform classic feature-based methods and rule-based methods.

Vision foundation models (VFMs) such as DINOv2 and CLIP have achieved impressive results on various downstream tasks, but their limited feature resolution hampers performance in applications requiring pixel-level understanding. Feature upsampling offers a promising direction to address this challenge. In this work, we identify two critical factors for enhancing feature upsampling: the upsampler architecture and the training objective. For the upsampler architecture, we introduce a coordinate-based cross-attention transformer that integrates the high-resolution images with coordinates and low-resolution VFM features to generate sharp, high-quality features. For the training objective, we propose constructing high-resolution pseudo-groundtruth features by leveraging class-agnostic masks and self-distillation. Our approach effectively captures fine-grained details and adapts flexibly to various input and feature resolutions. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing feature upsampling techniques across various downstream tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/andrehuang/loftup.

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.

Recent vision-only perception models for autonomous driving achieved promising results by encoding multi-view image features into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space. A critical step and the main bottleneck of these methods is transforming image features into the BEV coordinate frame. This paper focuses on leveraging geometry information, such as depth, to model such feature transformation. Existing works rely on non-parametric depth distribution modeling leading to significant memory consumption, or ignore the geometry information to address this problem. In contrast, we propose to use parametric depth distribution modeling for feature transformation. We first lift the 2D image features to the 3D space defined for the ego vehicle via a predicted parametric depth distribution for each pixel in each view. Then, we aggregate the 3D feature volume based on the 3D space occupancy derived from depth to the BEV frame. Finally, we use the transformed features for downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Existing semantic segmentation methods do also suffer from an hallucination problem as they do not take visibility information into account. This hallucination can be particularly problematic for subsequent modules such as control and planning. To mitigate the issue, our method provides depth uncertainty and reliable visibility-aware estimations. We further leverage our parametric depth modeling to present a novel visibility-aware evaluation metric that, when taken into account, can mitigate the hallucination problem. Extensive experiments on object detection and semantic segmentation on the nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods on both tasks.

Building AI models with trustworthiness is important especially in regulated areas such as healthcare. In tackling COVID-19, previous work uses convolutional neural networks as the backbone architecture, which has shown to be prone to over-caution and overconfidence in making decisions, rendering them less trustworthy -- a crucial flaw in the context of medical imaging. In this study, we propose a feature learning approach using Vision Transformers, which use an attention-based mechanism, and examine the representation learning capability of Transformers as a new backbone architecture for medical imaging. Through the task of classifying COVID-19 chest radiographs, we investigate into whether generalization capabilities benefit solely from Vision Transformers' architectural advances. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations are conducted on the trustworthiness of the models, through the use of "trust score" computation and a visual explainability technique. We conclude that the attention-based feature learning approach is promising in building trustworthy deep learning models for healthcare.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) in general and feature distillation in particular are promising techniques for reducing the high computational demand of large language models (LLMs). However, traditional feature KD methods typically assume that the teacher and the student share the same hidden size, limiting the flexibility of the student's architecture. A common solution to this problem involves training a linear projector to align their feature spaces, but this introduces additional parameters that must be learned from scratch and often degrades performance on downstream tasks, especially in generative settings. To address this issue, in this work, we propose a novel task-based feature distillation method that enables knowledge transfer between teacher and student models with different hidden layer dimensions, without introducing any new parameters. Leveraging the insight that only a subset of LLM components contribute significantly to a specific downstream task, our approach identifies the most task-relevant hidden units in the teacher and directly distills their activations to the student. Our method is flexible and easily integrates with other distillation frameworks. Empirical results show consistent improvements over prior approaches across diverse tasks, including classification, instruction-following, and summarization, achieving up to a 3\% performance gain over the linear projection baseline.

Despite significant advancements and pervasive use of vision-language models, a paucity of studies has addressed their ethical implications. These models typically require extensive training data, often from hastily reviewed text and image datasets, leading to highly imbalanced datasets and ethical concerns. Additionally, models initially trained in English are frequently fine-tuned for other languages, such as the CLIP model, which can be expanded with more data to enhance capabilities but can add new biases. The CAPIVARA, a CLIP-based model adapted to Portuguese, has shown strong performance in zero-shot tasks. In this paper, we evaluate four different types of discriminatory practices within visual-language models and introduce FairPIVARA, a method to reduce them by removing the most affected dimensions of feature embeddings. The application of FairPIVARA has led to a significant reduction of up to 98% in observed biases while promoting a more balanced word distribution within the model. Our model and code are available at: https://github.com/hiaac-nlp/FairPIVARA.

Mobile app review analysis presents unique challenges due to the low quality, subjective bias, and noisy content of user-generated documents. Extracting features from these reviews is essential for tasks such as feature prioritization and sentiment analysis, but it remains a challenging task. Meanwhile, encoder-only models based on the Transformer architecture have shown promising results for classification and information extraction tasks for multiple software engineering processes. This study explores the hypothesis that encoder-only large language models can enhance feature extraction from mobile app reviews. By leveraging crowdsourced annotations from an industrial context, we redefine feature extraction as a supervised token classification task. Our approach includes extending the pre-training of these models with a large corpus of user reviews to improve contextual understanding and employing instance selection techniques to optimize model fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that this method improves the precision and recall of extracted features and enhances performance efficiency. Key contributions include a novel approach to feature extraction, annotated datasets, extended pre-trained models, and an instance selection mechanism for cost-effective fine-tuning. This research provides practical methods and empirical evidence in applying large language models to natural language processing tasks within mobile app reviews, offering improved performance in feature extraction.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate inconsistent responses when prompted with semantically equivalent paraphrased inputs. Recently, activation steering, a technique that modulates LLMs' behaviours by adjusting their latent representations during inference time, has been explored to improve the semantic consistency of LLMs. However, these methods typically operate at the model component level, such as layer hidden states or attention head outputs. They face a challenge due to the ``polysemanticity issue'', where the model components of LLMs typically encode multiple entangled features, making precise steering difficult. To address this challenge, we drill down to feature-level representations and propose LF-Steering, a novel activation steering approach to precisely identify latent feature representations responsible for semantic inconsistency. More specifically, our method maps the hidden states of the relevant transformer layer into a sparsely activated, high-dimensional feature space based on a sparse autoencoder (SAE), ensuring model steering based on decoupled feature representations with minimal interference. Comprehensive experiments on NLU and NLG datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in enhancing semantic consistency, resulting in significant performance gains for various NLU and NLG tasks.

We propose Reference-Based Modulation (RB-Modulation), a new plug-and-play solution for training-free personalization of diffusion models. Existing training-free approaches exhibit difficulties in (a) style extraction from reference images in the absence of additional style or content text descriptions, (b) unwanted content leakage from reference style images, and (c) effective composition of style and content. RB-Modulation is built on a novel stochastic optimal controller where a style descriptor encodes the desired attributes through a terminal cost. The resulting drift not only overcomes the difficulties above, but also ensures high fidelity to the reference style and adheres to the given text prompt. We also introduce a cross-attention-based feature aggregation scheme that allows RB-Modulation to decouple content and style from the reference image. With theoretical justification and empirical evidence, our framework demonstrates precise extraction and control of content and style in a training-free manner. Further, our method allows a seamless composition of content and style, which marks a departure from the dependency on external adapters or ControlNets.

Multiple instance learning (MIL) is the most widely used framework in computational pathology, encompassing sub-typing, diagnosis, prognosis, and more. However, the existing MIL paradigm typically requires an offline instance feature extractor, such as a pre-trained ResNet or a foundation model. This approach lacks the capability for feature fine-tuning within the specific downstream tasks, limiting its adaptability and performance. To address this issue, we propose a Re-embedded Regional Transformer (R^2T) for re-embedding the instance features online, which captures fine-grained local features and establishes connections across different regions. Unlike existing works that focus on pre-training powerful feature extractor or designing sophisticated instance aggregator, R^2T is tailored to re-embed instance features online. It serves as a portable module that can seamlessly integrate into mainstream MIL models. Extensive experimental results on common computational pathology tasks validate that: 1) feature re-embedding improves the performance of MIL models based on ResNet-50 features to the level of foundation model features, and further enhances the performance of foundation model features; 2) the R^2T can introduce more significant performance improvements to various MIL models; 3) R^2T-MIL, as an R^2T-enhanced AB-MIL, outperforms other latest methods by a large margin.The code is available at: https://github.com/DearCaat/RRT-MIL.

We systematically study a wide variety of image-based generative models spanning semantically-diverse datasets to understand and improve the feature extractors and metrics used to evaluate them. Using best practices in psychophysics, we measure human perception of image realism for generated samples by conducting the largest experiment evaluating generative models to date, and find that no existing metric strongly correlates with human evaluations. Comparing to 16 modern metrics for evaluating the overall performance, fidelity, diversity, and memorization of generative models, we find that the state-of-the-art perceptual realism of diffusion models as judged by humans is not reflected in commonly reported metrics such as FID. This discrepancy is not explained by diversity in generated samples, though one cause is over-reliance on Inception-V3. We address these flaws through a study of alternative self-supervised feature extractors, find that the semantic information encoded by individual networks strongly depends on their training procedure, and show that DINOv2-ViT-L/14 allows for much richer evaluation of generative models. Next, we investigate data memorization, and find that generative models do memorize training examples on simple, smaller datasets like CIFAR10, but not necessarily on more complex datasets like ImageNet. However, our experiments show that current metrics do not properly detect memorization; none in the literature is able to separate memorization from other phenomena such as underfitting or mode shrinkage. To facilitate further development of generative models and their evaluation we release all generated image datasets, human evaluation data, and a modular library to compute 16 common metrics for 8 different encoders at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/dgm-eval.

A key goal in mechanistic interpretability is circuit analysis: finding sparse subgraphs of models corresponding to specific behaviors or capabilities. However, MLP sublayers make fine-grained circuit analysis on transformer-based language models difficult. In particular, interpretable features -- such as those found by sparse autoencoders (SAEs) -- are typically linear combinations of extremely many neurons, each with its own nonlinearity to account for. Circuit analysis in this setting thus either yields intractably large circuits or fails to disentangle local and global behavior. To address this we explore transcoders, which seek to faithfully approximate a densely activating MLP layer with a wider, sparsely-activating MLP layer. We successfully train transcoders on language models with 120M, 410M, and 1.4B parameters, and find them to perform at least on par with SAEs in terms of sparsity, faithfulness, and human-interpretability. We then introduce a novel method for using transcoders to perform weights-based circuit analysis through MLP sublayers. The resulting circuits neatly factorize into input-dependent and input-invariant terms. Finally, we apply transcoders to reverse-engineer unknown circuits in the model, and we obtain novel insights regarding the greater-than circuit in GPT2-small. Our results suggest that transcoders can prove effective in decomposing model computations involving MLPs into interpretable circuits. Code is available at https://github.com/jacobdunefsky/transcoder_circuits.

This research showcases the innovative integration of Large Language Models into machine learning workflows for traffic incident management, focusing on the classification of incident severity using accident reports. By leveraging features generated by modern language models alongside conventional data extracted from incident reports, our research demonstrates improvements in the accuracy of severity classification across several machine learning algorithms. Our contributions are threefold. First, we present an extensive comparison of various machine learning models paired with multiple large language models for feature extraction, aiming to identify the optimal combinations for accurate incident severity classification. Second, we contrast traditional feature engineering pipelines with those enhanced by language models, showcasing the superiority of language-based feature engineering in processing unstructured text. Third, our study illustrates how merging baseline features from accident reports with language-based features can improve the severity classification accuracy. This comprehensive approach not only advances the field of incident management but also highlights the cross-domain application potential of our methodology, particularly in contexts requiring the prediction of event outcomes from unstructured textual data or features translated into textual representation. Specifically, our novel methodology was applied to three distinct datasets originating from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Queensland, Australia. This cross-continental application underlines the robustness of our approach, suggesting its potential for widespread adoption in improving incident management processes globally.

The problem of data sparsity has long been a challenge in recommendation systems, and previous studies have attempted to address this issue by incorporating side information. However, this approach often introduces side effects such as noise, availability issues, and low data quality, which in turn hinder the accurate modeling of user preferences and adversely impact recommendation performance. In light of the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), which possess extensive knowledge bases and strong reasoning capabilities, we propose a novel framework called LLMRec that enhances recommender systems by employing three simple yet effective LLM-based graph augmentation strategies. Our approach leverages the rich content available within online platforms (e.g., Netflix, MovieLens) to augment the interaction graph in three ways: (i) reinforcing user-item interaction egde, (ii) enhancing the understanding of item node attributes, and (iii) conducting user node profiling, intuitively from the natural language perspective. By employing these strategies, we address the challenges posed by sparse implicit feedback and low-quality side information in recommenders. Besides, to ensure the quality of the augmentation, we develop a denoised data robustification mechanism that includes techniques of noisy implicit feedback pruning and MAE-based feature enhancement that help refine the augmented data and improve its reliability. Furthermore, we provide theoretical analysis to support the effectiveness of LLMRec and clarify the benefits of our method in facilitating model optimization. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our LLM-based augmentation approach over state-of-the-art techniques. To ensure reproducibility, we have made our code and augmented data publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/LLMRec.git

We study the effectiveness of Feature Density (FD) using different linguistically-backed feature preprocessing methods in order to estimate dataset complexity, which in turn is used to comparatively estimate the potential performance of machine learning (ML) classifiers prior to any training. We hypothesise that estimating dataset complexity allows for the reduction of the number of required experiments iterations. This way we can optimize the resource-intensive training of ML models which is becoming a serious issue due to the increases in available dataset sizes and the ever rising popularity of models based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN). The problem of constantly increasing needs for more powerful computational resources is also affecting the environment due to alarmingly-growing amount of CO2 emissions caused by training of large-scale ML models. The research was conducted on multiple datasets, including popular datasets, such as Yelp business review dataset used for training typical sentiment analysis models, as well as more recent datasets trying to tackle the problem of cyberbullying, which, being a serious social problem, is also a much more sophisticated problem form the point of view of linguistic representation. We use cyberbullying datasets collected for multiple languages, namely English, Japanese and Polish. The difference in linguistic complexity of datasets allows us to additionally discuss the efficacy of linguistically-backed word preprocessing.

Empowered by Large Language Models (LLMs), recent advancements in Video-based LLMs (VideoLLMs) have driven progress in various video understanding tasks. These models encode video representations through pooling or query aggregation over a vast number of visual tokens, making computational and memory costs affordable. Despite successfully providing an overall comprehension of video content, existing VideoLLMs still face challenges in achieving detailed understanding due to overlooking local information in long-term videos. To tackle this challenge, we introduce LongVLM, a simple yet powerful VideoLLM for long video understanding, building upon the observation that long videos often consist of sequential key events, complex actions, and camera movements. Our approach proposes to decompose long videos into multiple short-term segments and encode local features for each segment via a hierarchical token merging module. These features are concatenated in temporal order to maintain the storyline across sequential short-term segments. Additionally, we propose to integrate global semantics into each local feature to enhance context understanding. In this way, we encode video representations that incorporate both local and global information, enabling the LLM to generate comprehensive responses for long-term videos. Experimental results on the VideoChatGPT benchmark and zero-shot video question-answering datasets demonstrate the superior capabilities of our model over the previous state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative examples show that our model produces more precise responses for long video understanding. Code is available at https://github.com/ziplab/LongVLM.

We investigate the effectiveness of ensembles of pretrained transformer-based language models on short answer questions using the Kaggle Automated Short Answer Scoring dataset. We fine-tune a collection of popular small, base, and large pretrained transformer-based language models, and train one feature-base model on the dataset with the aim of testing ensembles of these models. We used an early stopping mechanism and hyperparameter optimization in training. We observe that generally that the larger models perform slightly better, however, they still fall short of state-of-the-art results one their own. Once we consider ensembles of models, there are ensembles of a number of large networks that do produce state-of-the-art results, however, these ensembles are too large to realistically be put in a production environment.

Over the past decade, predictive modeling of neural responses in the primate visual system has advanced significantly, largely driven by various DNN approaches. These include models optimized directly for visual recognition, cross-modal alignment through contrastive objectives, neural response prediction from scratch, and large language model embeddings.Likewise, different readout mechanisms, ranging from fully linear to spatial-feature factorized methods have been explored for mapping network activations to neural responses. Despite the diversity of these approaches, it remains unclear which method performs best across different visual regions. In this study, we systematically compare these approaches for modeling the human visual system and investigate alternative strategies to improve response predictions. Our findings reveal that for early to mid-level visual areas, response-optimized models with visual inputs offer superior prediction accuracy, while for higher visual regions, embeddings from LLMs based on detailed contextual descriptions of images and task-optimized models pretrained on large vision datasets provide the best fit. Through comparative analysis of these modeling approaches, we identified three distinct regions in the visual cortex: one sensitive primarily to perceptual features of the input that are not captured by linguistic descriptions, another attuned to fine-grained visual details representing semantic information, and a third responsive to abstract, global meanings aligned with linguistic content. We also highlight the critical role of readout mechanisms, proposing a novel scheme that modulates receptive fields and feature maps based on semantic content, resulting in an accuracy boost of 3-23% over existing SOTAs for all models and brain regions. Together, these findings offer key insights into building more precise models of the visual system.

We introduce SMUTF, a unique approach for large-scale tabular data schema matching (SM), which assumes that supervised learning does not affect performance in open-domain tasks, thereby enabling effective cross-domain matching. This system uniquely combines rule-based feature engineering, pre-trained language models, and generative large language models. In an innovative adaptation inspired by the Humanitarian Exchange Language, we deploy 'generative tags' for each data column, enhancing the effectiveness of SM. SMUTF exhibits extensive versatility, working seamlessly with any pre-existing pre-trained embeddings, classification methods, and generative models. Recognizing the lack of extensive, publicly available datasets for SM, we have created and open-sourced the HDXSM dataset from the public humanitarian data. We believe this to be the most exhaustive SM dataset currently available. In evaluations across various public datasets and the novel HDXSM dataset, SMUTF demonstrated exceptional performance, surpassing existing state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy and efficiency, and} improving the F1 score by 11.84% and the AUC of ROC by 5.08%.

Precisely perceiving the geometric and semantic properties of real-world 3D objects is crucial for the continued evolution of augmented reality and robotic applications. To this end, we present (), which incorporates vision-language embeddings of foundation models into 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS). The key contribution of this work is an efficient method to reconstruct and represent 3D vision-language models. This is achieved by distilling feature maps generated from image-based foundation models into those rendered from our 3D model. To ensure high-quality rendering and fast training, we introduce a novel scene representation by integrating strengths from both GS and multi-resolution hash encodings (MHE). Our effective training procedure also introduces a pixel alignment loss that makes the rendered feature distance of same semantic entities close, following the pixel-level semantic boundaries. Our results demonstrate remarkable multi-view semantic consistency, facilitating diverse downstream tasks, beating state-of-the-art methods by 10.2 percent on open-vocabulary language-based object detection, despite that we are 851times faster for inference. This research explores the intersection of vision, language, and 3D scene representation, paving the way for enhanced scene understanding in uncontrolled real-world environments. We plan to release the code upon paper acceptance.

We propose a method to efficiently equip the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with the ability to generate regional captions. SAM presents strong generalizability to segment anything while is short for semantic understanding. By introducing a lightweight query-based feature mixer, we align the region-specific features with the embedding space of language models for later caption generation. As the number of trainable parameters is small (typically in the order of tens of millions), it costs less computation, less memory usage, and less communication bandwidth, resulting in both fast and scalable training. To address the scarcity problem of regional caption data, we propose to first pre-train our model on objection detection and segmentation tasks. We call this step weak supervision pretraining since the pre-training data only contains category names instead of full-sentence descriptions. The weak supervision pretraining allows us to leverage many publicly available object detection and segmentation datasets. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our method and validate each design choice. This work serves as a stepping stone towards scaling up regional captioning data and sheds light on exploring efficient ways to augment SAM with regional semantics. The project page, along with the associated code, can be accessed via the following https://xk-huang.github.io/segment-caption-anything/.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in efficient image super-resolution. However, for CNN-based methods, performance gains often require deeper networks and larger feature maps, which increase complexity and inference costs. Inspired by LoRA's success in fine-tuning large language models, we explore its application to lightweight models and propose Distillation-Supervised Convolutional Low-Rank Adaptation (DSCLoRA), which improves model performance without increasing architectural complexity or inference costs. Specifically, we integrate ConvLoRA into the efficient SR network SPAN by replacing the SPAB module with the proposed SConvLB module and incorporating ConvLoRA layers into both the pixel shuffle block and its preceding convolutional layer. DSCLoRA leverages low-rank decomposition for parameter updates and employs a spatial feature affinity-based knowledge distillation strategy to transfer second-order statistical information from teacher models (pre-trained SPAN) to student models (ours). This method preserves the core knowledge of lightweight models and facilitates optimal solution discovery under certain conditions. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that DSCLoRA improves PSNR and SSIM over SPAN while maintaining its efficiency and competitive image quality. Notably, DSCLoRA ranked first in the Overall Performance Track of the NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge. Our code and models are made publicly available at https://github.com/Yaozzz666/DSCF-SR.

Generative frame interpolation, empowered by large-scale pre-trained video generation models, has demonstrated remarkable advantages in complex scenes. However, existing methods heavily rely on the generative model to independently infer the correspondences between input frames, an ability that is inadequately developed during pre-training. In this work, we propose a novel framework, termed Motion-aware Generative frame interpolation (MoG), to significantly enhance the model's motion awareness by integrating explicit motion guidance. Specifically we investigate two key questions: what can serve as an effective motion guidance, and how we can seamlessly embed this guidance into the generative model. For the first question, we reveal that the intermediate flow from flow-based interpolation models could efficiently provide task-oriented motion guidance. Regarding the second, we first obtain guidance-based representations of intermediate frames by warping input frames' representations using guidance, and then integrate them into the model at both latent and feature levels. To demonstrate the versatility of our method, we train MoG on both real-world and animation datasets. Comprehensive evaluations show that our MoG significantly outperforms the existing methods in both domains, achieving superior video quality and improved fidelity.

Purpose: This study investigated how nodule segmentation and surrounding peritumoral regions influence radionics-based lung cancer classification. Methods: Using 3D CT scans with bounding box annotated nodules, we generated 3D segmentations using four techniques: Otsu, Fuzzy C-Means (FCM), Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). Radiomics features were extracted using the PyRadiomics library, and multiple machine-learning-based classifiers, including Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and KNN, were employed to classify nodules as cancerous or non-cancerous. The best-performing segmentation and model were further analyzed by expanding the initial nodule segmentation into the peritumoral region (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 mm) to understand the influence of the surrounding area on classification. Additionally, we compared our results to deep learning-based feature extractors Foundation Model for Cancer Biomarkers (FMCB) and other state-of-the-art baseline models. Results: Incorporating peritumoral regions significantly enhanced performance, with the best result obtained at 8 mm expansion (AUC = 0.78). Compared to image-based deep learning models, such as FMCB (AUC = 0.71) and ResNet50-SWS++ (AUC = 0.71), our radiomics-based approach demonstrated superior classification accuracy. Conclusion: The study highlights the importance of peritumoral expansion in improving lung cancer classification using radiomics. These findings can inform the development of more robust AI-driven diagnostic tools.

Internet users have been exposing an increasing amount of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on social media. Such exposed PII can cause severe losses to the users, and informing users of their PII exposure is crucial to raise their privacy awareness and encourage them to take protective measures. To this end, advanced automatic techniques are needed. While Information Extraction (IE) techniques can be used to extract the PII automatically, Deep Learning (DL)-based IE models alleviate the need for feature engineering and further improve the efficiency. However, DL-based IE models often require large-scale labeled data for training, but PII-labeled social media posts are difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns. Also, these models rely heavily on pre-trained word embeddings, while PII in social media often varies in forms and thus has no fixed representations in pre-trained word embeddings. In this study, we propose the Deep Transfer Learning for PII Extraction (DTL-PIIE) framework to address these two limitations. DTL-PIIE transfers knowledge learned from publicly available PII data to social media to address the problem of rare PII-labeled data. Moreover, our framework leverages Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to incorporate syntactic patterns to guide PIIE without relying on pre-trained word embeddings. Evaluation against benchmark IE models indicates that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art DL-based IE models. Our framework can facilitate various applications, such as PII misuse prediction and privacy risk assessment, protecting the privacy of internet users.

Sound content is an indispensable element for multimedia works such as video games, music, and films. Recent high-quality diffusion-based sound generation models can serve as valuable tools for the creators. However, despite producing high-quality sounds, these models often suffer from slow inference speeds. This drawback burdens creators, who typically refine their sounds through trial and error to align them with their artistic intentions. To address this issue, we introduce Sound Consistency Trajectory Models (SoundCTM). Our model enables flexible transitioning between high-quality 1-step sound generation and superior sound quality through multi-step generation. This allows creators to initially control sounds with 1-step samples before refining them through multi-step generation. While CTM fundamentally achieves flexible 1-step and multi-step generation, its impressive performance heavily depends on an additional pretrained feature extractor and an adversarial loss, which are expensive to train and not always available in other domains. Thus, we reframe CTM's training framework and introduce a novel feature distance by utilizing the teacher's network for a distillation loss. Additionally, while distilling classifier-free guided trajectories, we train conditional and unconditional student models simultaneously and interpolate between these models during inference. We also propose training-free controllable frameworks for SoundCTM, leveraging its flexible sampling capability. SoundCTM achieves both promising 1-step and multi-step real-time sound generation without using any extra off-the-shelf networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate SoundCTM's capability of controllable sound generation in a training-free manner.

Logical image understanding involves interpreting and reasoning about the relationships and consistency within an image's visual content. This capability is essential in applications such as industrial inspection, where logical anomaly detection is critical for maintaining high-quality standards and minimizing costly recalls. Previous research in anomaly detection (AD) has relied on prior knowledge for designing algorithms, which often requires extensive manual annotations, significant computing power, and large amounts of data for training. Autoregressive, multimodal Vision Language Models (AVLMs) offer a promising alternative due to their exceptional performance in visual reasoning across various domains. Despite this, their application to logical AD remains unexplored. In this work, we investigate using AVLMs for logical AD and demonstrate that they are well-suited to the task. Combining AVLMs with format embedding and a logic reasoner, we achieve SOTA performance on public benchmarks, MVTec LOCO AD, with an AUROC of 86.0% and F1-max of 83.7%, along with explanations of anomalies. This significantly outperforms the existing SOTA method by a large margin.

Recent advances in autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated their potential to rival diffusion models in image synthesis. However, for complex spatially-conditioned generation, current AR approaches rely on fine-tuning the pre-trained model, leading to significant training costs. In this paper, we propose the Efficient Control Model (ECM), a plug-and-play framework featuring a lightweight control module that introduces control signals via a distributed architecture. This architecture consists of context-aware attention layers that refine conditional features using real-time generated tokens, and a shared gated feed-forward network (FFN) designed to maximize the utilization of its limited capacity and ensure coherent control feature learning. Furthermore, recognizing the critical role of early-stage generation in determining semantic structure, we introduce an early-centric sampling strategy that prioritizes learning early control sequences. This approach reduces computational cost by lowering the number of training tokens per iteration, while a complementary temperature scheduling during inference compensates for the resulting insufficient training of late-stage tokens. Extensive experiments on scale-based AR models validate that our method achieves high-fidelity and diverse control over image generation, surpassing existing baselines while significantly improving both training and inference efficiency.

Video virtual try-on aims to generate realistic sequences that maintain garment identity and adapt to a person's pose and body shape in source videos. Traditional image-based methods, relying on warping and blending, struggle with complex human movements and occlusions, limiting their effectiveness in video try-on applications. Moreover, video-based models require extensive, high-quality data and substantial computational resources. To tackle these issues, we reconceptualize video try-on as a process of generating videos conditioned on garment descriptions and human motion. Our solution, WildVidFit, employs image-based controlled diffusion models for a streamlined, one-stage approach. This model, conditioned on specific garments and individuals, is trained on still images rather than videos. It leverages diffusion guidance from pre-trained models including a video masked autoencoder for segment smoothness improvement and a self-supervised model for feature alignment of adjacent frame in the latent space. This integration markedly boosts the model's ability to maintain temporal coherence, enabling more effective video try-on within an image-based framework. Our experiments on the VITON-HD and DressCode datasets, along with tests on the VVT and TikTok datasets, demonstrate WildVidFit's capability to generate fluid and coherent videos. The project page website is at wildvidfit-project.github.io.

Interpretability tools that offer explanations in the form of a dialogue have demonstrated their efficacy in enhancing users' understanding, as one-off explanations may occasionally fall short in providing sufficient information to the user. Current solutions for dialogue-based explanations, however, require many dependencies and are not easily transferable to tasks they were not designed for. With LLMCheckup, we present an easily accessible tool that allows users to chat with any state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) about its behavior. We enable LLMs to generate all explanations by themselves and take care of intent recognition without fine-tuning, by connecting them with a broad spectrum of Explainable AI (XAI) tools, e.g. feature attributions, embedding-based similarity, and prompting strategies for counterfactual and rationale generation. LLM (self-)explanations are presented as an interactive dialogue that supports follow-up questions and generates suggestions. LLMCheckup provides tutorials for operations available in the system, catering to individuals with varying levels of expertise in XAI and supports multiple input modalities. We introduce a new parsing strategy called multi-prompt parsing substantially enhancing the parsing accuracy of LLMs. Finally, we showcase the tasks of fact checking and commonsense question answering.

Modern Code Review (MCR) is an informal tool-assisted quality assurance practice. It relies on the asynchronous communication among the authors of code changes and reviewers, who are developers that provide feedback. However, from candidate developers, some are able to provide better feedback than others given a particular context. The selection of reviewers is thus an important task, which can benefit from automated support. Many approaches have been proposed in this direction, using for example data from code review repositories to recommend reviewers. In this paper, we propose the use of team-related features to improve the performance of predictions that are helpful to build code reviewer recommenders, with our target predictions being the identification of reviewers that would participate in a review and the provided amount of feedback. We evaluate the prediction power of these features, which are related to code ownership, workload, and team relationship. This evaluation was done by carefully addressing challenges imposed by the MCR domain, such as temporal aspects of the dataset and unbalanced classes. Moreover, given that it is currently unknown how much past data is needed for building MCR prediction models with acceptable performance, we explore the amount of past data used to build prediction models. Our results show that, individually, features related to code ownership have the best prediction power. However, based on feature selection, we conclude that all proposed features together with lines of code can make the best predictions for both reviewer participation and amount of feedback. Regarding the amount of past data, the timeframes of 3, 6, 9, and 12 months of data produce similar results. Therefore, models can be trained considering short timeframes, thus reducing the computational costs with negligible impact in the prediction performance ...

In no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), the challenge of limited dataset sizes hampers the development of robust and generalizable models. Conventional methods address this issue by utilizing large datasets to extract rich representations for IQA. Also, some approaches propose vision language models (VLM) based IQA, but the domain gap between generic VLM and IQA constrains their scalability. In this work, we propose a novel pretraining framework that constructs a generalizable representation for IQA by selectively extracting quality-related knowledge from VLM and leveraging the scalability of large datasets. Specifically, we select optimal text prompts for five representative image quality attributes and use VLM to generate pseudo-labels. Numerous attribute-aware pseudo-labels can be generated with large image datasets, allowing our IQA model to learn rich representations about image quality. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple IQA datasets and exhibits remarkable generalization capabilities. Leveraging these strengths, we propose several applications, such as evaluating image generation models and training image enhancement models, demonstrating our model's real-world applicability.

Giant Star-forming Clumps (GSFCs) are areas of intensive star-formation that are commonly observed in high-redshift (z>1) galaxies but their formation and role in galaxy evolution remain unclear. High-resolution observations of low-redshift clumpy galaxy analogues are rare and restricted to a limited set of galaxies but the increasing availability of wide-field galaxy survey data makes the detection of large clumpy galaxy samples increasingly feasible. Deep Learning, and in particular CNNs, have been successfully applied to image classification tasks in astrophysical data analysis. However, one application of DL that remains relatively unexplored is that of automatically identifying and localising specific objects or features in astrophysical imaging data. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of using Deep learning-based object detection models to localise GSFCs in astrophysical imaging data. We apply the Faster R-CNN object detection framework (FRCNN) to identify GSFCs in low redshift (z<0.3) galaxies. Unlike other studies, we train different FRCNN models not on simulated images with known labels but on real observational data that was collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Legacy Survey and labelled by volunteers from the citizen science project `Galaxy Zoo: Clump Scout'. The FRCNN model relies on a CNN component as a `backbone' feature extractor. We show that CNNs, that have been pre-trained for image classification using astrophysical images, outperform those that have been pre-trained on terrestrial images. In particular, we compare a domain-specific CNN -`Zoobot' - with a generic classification backbone and find that Zoobot achieves higher detection performance and also requires smaller training data sets to do so. Our final model is capable of producing GSFC detections with a completeness and purity of >=0.8 while only being trained on ~5,000 galaxy images.

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models that were initially proposed for realistic image generation have recently shown success in various perception tasks (e.g., object detection and image segmentation) and are increasingly gaining attention in computer vision. However, extending such models to multi-frame human pose estimation is non-trivial due to the presence of the additional temporal dimension in videos. More importantly, learning representations that focus on keypoint regions is crucial for accurate localization of human joints. Nevertheless, the adaptation of the diffusion-based methods remains unclear on how to achieve such objective. In this paper, we present DiffPose, a novel diffusion architecture that formulates video-based human pose estimation as a conditional heatmap generation problem. First, to better leverage temporal information, we propose SpatioTemporal Representation Learner which aggregates visual evidences across frames and uses the resulting features in each denoising step as a condition. In addition, we present a mechanism called Lookup-based MultiScale Feature Interaction that determines the correlations between local joints and global contexts across multiple scales. This mechanism generates delicate representations that focus on keypoint regions. Altogether, by extending diffusion models, we show two unique characteristics from DiffPose on pose estimation task: (i) the ability to combine multiple sets of pose estimates to improve prediction accuracy, particularly for challenging joints, and (ii) the ability to adjust the number of iterative steps for feature refinement without retraining the model. DiffPose sets new state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks: PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, and PoseTrack21.

Recent studies indicate that large multimodal models (LMMs) are highly robust against natural distribution shifts, often surpassing previous baselines. Despite this, domain-specific adaptation is still necessary, particularly in specialized areas like healthcare. Due to the impracticality of fine-tuning LMMs given their vast parameter space, this work investigates in-context learning (ICL) as an effective alternative for enhancing LMMs' adaptability. We find that the success of ICL heavily relies on the choice of demonstration, mirroring challenges seen in large language models but introducing unique complexities for LMMs facing distribution shifts. Our study addresses this by evaluating an unsupervised ICL method, TopKNearestPR, which selects in-context examples through a nearest example search based on feature similarity. We uncover that its effectiveness is limited by the deficiencies of pre-trained vision encoders under distribution shift scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose InvariantSelectPR, a novel method leveraging Class-conditioned Contrastive Invariance (CCI) for more robust demonstration selection. Specifically, CCI enhances pre-trained vision encoders by improving their discriminative capabilities across different classes and ensuring invariance to domain-specific variations. This enhancement allows the encoders to effectively identify and retrieve the most informative examples, which are then used to guide LMMs in adapting to new query samples under varying distributions. Our experiments show that InvariantSelectPR substantially improves the adaptability of LMMs, achieving significant performance gains on benchmark datasets, with a 34.2%uparrow accuracy increase in 7-shot on Camelyon17 and 16.9%uparrow increase in 7-shot on HAM10000 compared to the baseline zero-shot performance.

Recently, many attempts have been made to construct a transformer base U-shaped architecture, and new methods have been proposed that outperformed CNN-based rivals. However, serious problems such as blockiness and cropped edges in predicted masks remain because of transformers' patch partitioning operations. In this work, we propose a new U-shaped architecture for medical image segmentation with the help of the newly introduced focal modulation mechanism. The proposed architecture has asymmetric depths for the encoder and decoder. Due to the ability of the focal module to aggregate local and global features, our model could simultaneously benefit the wide receptive field of transformers and local viewing of CNNs. This helps the proposed method balance the local and global feature usage to outperform one of the most powerful transformer-based U-shaped models called Swin-UNet. We achieved a 1.68% higher DICE score and a 0.89 better HD metric on the Synapse dataset. Also, with extremely limited data, we had a 4.25% higher DICE score on the NeoPolyp dataset. Our implementations are available at: https://github.com/givkashi/Focal-UNet

Image inpainting aims at restoring missing regions of corrupted images, which has many applications such as image restoration and object removal. However, current GAN-based generative inpainting models do not explicitly exploit the structural or textural consistency between restored contents and their surrounding contexts.To address this limitation, we propose to enforce the alignment (or closeness) between the local data submanifolds (or subspaces) around restored images and those around the original (uncorrupted) images during the learning process of GAN-based inpainting models. We exploit Local Intrinsic Dimensionality (LID) to measure, in deep feature space, the alignment between data submanifolds learned by a GAN model and those of the original data, from a perspective of both images (denoted as iLID) and local patches (denoted as pLID) of images. We then apply iLID and pLID as regularizations for GAN-based inpainting models to encourage two levels of submanifold alignment: 1) an image-level alignment for improving structural consistency, and 2) a patch-level alignment for improving textural details. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets show that our proposed model can generate more accurate results than state-of-the-art models.

Diffusion-based text-to-image generation models have significantly advanced the field of art content synthesis. However, current portrait stylization methods generally require either model fine-tuning based on examples or the employment of DDIM Inversion to revert images to noise space, both of which substantially decelerate the image generation process. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents an inversion-free portrait stylization framework based on diffusion models that accomplishes content and style feature fusion in merely four sampling steps. We observed that Latent Consistency Models employing consistency distillation can effectively extract representative Consistency Features from noisy images. To blend the Consistency Features extracted from both content and style images, we introduce a Style Enhancement Attention Control technique that meticulously merges content and style features within the attention space of the target image. Moreover, we propose a feature merging strategy to amalgamate redundant features in Consistency Features, thereby reducing the computational load of attention control. Extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of our proposed framework in enhancing stylization efficiency and fidelity. The code is available at https://github.com/liujin112/ZePo.

In this paper, we introduce Dynamic Layer Operations (DLO), a novel approach for vertically scaling transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) by dynamically expanding, activating, or skipping layers using a sophisticated routing policy based on layerwise feature similarity. Unlike traditional Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods that focus on extending the model width, our approach targets model depth, addressing the redundancy observed across layer representations for various input samples. Our framework is integrated with the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) stage, eliminating the need for resource-intensive Continual Pre-Training (CPT). Experimental results demonstrate that DLO not only outperforms the original unscaled models but also achieves comparable results to densely expanded models with significantly improved efficiency. Our work offers a promising direction for building efficient yet powerful LLMs. We will release our implementation and model weights upon acceptance.

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

Existing autoregressive (AR) image generative models use a token-by-token generation schema. That is, they predict a per-token probability distribution and sample the next token from that distribution. The main challenge is how to model the complex distribution of high-dimensional tokens. Previous methods either are too simplistic to fit the distribution or result in slow generation speed. Instead of fitting the distribution of the whole tokens, we explore using a AR model to generate each token in a feature-by-feature way, i.e., taking the generated features as input and generating the next feature. Based on that, we propose ARINAR (AR-in-AR), a bi-level AR model. The outer AR layer take previous tokens as input, predicts a condition vector z for the next token. The inner layer, conditional on z, generates features of the next token autoregressively. In this way, the inner layer only needs to model the distribution of a single feature, for example, using a simple Gaussian Mixture Model. On the ImageNet 256x256 image generation task, ARINAR-B with 213M parameters achieves an FID of 2.75, which is comparable to the state-of-the-art MAR-B model (FID=2.31), while five times faster than the latter.

Large Language Models (LLM) have made significant advances in the recent past becoming more mainstream in Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled human-facing applications. However, LLMs often generate stereotypical output inherited from historical data, amplifying societal biases and raising ethical concerns. This work introduces i) the Multi-Grain Stereotype Dataset, which includes 52,751 instances of gender, race, profession and religion stereotypic text and ii) a novel stereotype classifier for English text. We design several experiments to rigorously test the proposed model trained on the novel dataset. Our experiments show that training the model in a multi-class setting can outperform the one-vs-all binary counterpart. Consistent feature importance signals from different eXplainable AI tools demonstrate that the new model exploits relevant text features. We utilise the newly created model to assess the stereotypic behaviour of the popular GPT family of models and observe the reduction of bias over time. In summary, our work establishes a robust and practical framework for auditing and evaluating the stereotypic bias in LLM.

While recently developed NLP explainability methods let us open the black box in various ways (Madsen et al., 2022), a missing ingredient in this endeavor is an interactive tool offering a conversational interface. Such a dialogue system can help users explore datasets and models with explanations in a contextualized manner, e.g. via clarification or follow-up questions, and through a natural language interface. We adapt the conversational explanation framework TalkToModel (Slack et al., 2022) to the NLP domain, add new NLP-specific operations such as free-text rationalization, and illustrate its generalizability on three NLP tasks (dialogue act classification, question answering, hate speech detection). To recognize user queries for explanations, we evaluate fine-tuned and few-shot prompting models and implement a novel Adapter-based approach. We then conduct two user studies on (1) the perceived correctness and helpfulness of the dialogues, and (2) the simulatability, i.e. how objectively helpful dialogical explanations are for humans in figuring out the model's predicted label when it's not shown. We found rationalization and feature attribution were helpful in explaining the model behavior. Moreover, users could more reliably predict the model outcome based on an explanation dialogue rather than one-off explanations.

Convolutional neural network (CNN) models for computer vision are powerful but lack explainability in their most basic form. This deficiency remains a key challenge when applying CNNs in important domains. Recent work on explanations through feature importance of approximate linear models has moved from input-level features (pixels or segments) to features from mid-layer feature maps in the form of concept activation vectors (CAVs). CAVs contain concept-level information and could be learned via clustering. In this work, we rethink the ACE algorithm of Ghorbani et~al., proposing an alternative invertible concept-based explanation (ICE) framework to overcome its shortcomings. Based on the requirements of fidelity (approximate models to target models) and interpretability (being meaningful to people), we design measurements and evaluate a range of matrix factorization methods with our framework. We find that non-negative concept activation vectors (NCAVs) from non-negative matrix factorization provide superior performance in interpretability and fidelity based on computational and human subject experiments. Our framework provides both local and global concept-level explanations for pre-trained CNN models.

We introduce methods for discovering and applying sparse feature circuits. These are causally implicated subnetworks of human-interpretable features for explaining language model behaviors. Circuits identified in prior work consist of polysemantic and difficult-to-interpret units like attention heads or neurons, rendering them unsuitable for many downstream applications. In contrast, sparse feature circuits enable detailed understanding of unanticipated mechanisms. Because they are based on fine-grained units, sparse feature circuits are useful for downstream tasks: We introduce SHIFT, where we improve the generalization of a classifier by ablating features that a human judges to be task-irrelevant. Finally, we demonstrate an entirely unsupervised and scalable interpretability pipeline by discovering thousands of sparse feature circuits for automatically discovered model behaviors.

We consider the problem of text-to-video generation tasks with precise control for various applications such as camera movement control and video-to-video editing. Most methods tacking this problem rely on providing user-defined controls, such as binary masks or camera movement embeddings. In our approach we propose OnlyFlow, an approach leveraging the optical flow firstly extracted from an input video to condition the motion of generated videos. Using a text prompt and an input video, OnlyFlow allows the user to generate videos that respect the motion of the input video as well as the text prompt. This is implemented through an optical flow estimation model applied on the input video, which is then fed to a trainable optical flow encoder. The output feature maps are then injected into the text-to-video backbone model. We perform quantitative, qualitative and user preference studies to show that OnlyFlow positively compares to state-of-the-art methods on a wide range of tasks, even though OnlyFlow was not specifically trained for such tasks. OnlyFlow thus constitutes a versatile, lightweight yet efficient method for controlling motion in text-to-video generation. Models and code will be made available on GitHub and HuggingFace.

How to effectively explore spatial-temporal features is important for video colorization. Instead of stacking multiple frames along the temporal dimension or recurrently propagating estimated features that will accumulate errors or cannot explore information from far-apart frames, we develop a memory-based feature propagation module that can establish reliable connections with features from far-apart frames and alleviate the influence of inaccurately estimated features. To extract better features from each frame for the above-mentioned feature propagation, we explore the features from large-pretrained visual models to guide the feature estimation of each frame so that the estimated features can model complex scenarios. In addition, we note that adjacent frames usually contain similar contents. To explore this property for better spatial and temporal feature utilization, we develop a local attention module to aggregate the features from adjacent frames in a spatial-temporal neighborhood. We formulate our memory-based feature propagation module, large-pretrained visual model guided feature estimation module, and local attention module into an end-to-end trainable network (named ColorMNet) and show that it performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on both the benchmark datasets and real-world scenarios. The source code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/yyang181/colormnet.

While current skeleton action recognition models demonstrate impressive performance on large-scale datasets, their adaptation to new application scenarios remains challenging. These challenges are particularly pronounced when facing new action categories, diverse performers, and varied skeleton layouts, leading to significant performance degeneration. Additionally, the high cost and difficulty of collecting skeleton data make large-scale data collection impractical. This paper studies one-shot and limited-scale learning settings to enable efficient adaptation with minimal data. Existing approaches often overlook the rich mutual information between labeled samples, resulting in sub-optimal performance in low-data scenarios. To boost the utility of labeled data, we identify the variability among performers and the commonality within each action as two key attributes. We present SkeletonX, a lightweight training pipeline that integrates seamlessly with existing GCN-based skeleton action recognizers, promoting effective training under limited labeled data. First, we propose a tailored sample pair construction strategy on two key attributes to form and aggregate sample pairs. Next, we develop a concise and effective feature aggregation module to process these pairs. Extensive experiments are conducted on NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD with various GCN backbones, demonstrating that the pipeline effectively improves performance when trained from scratch with limited data. Moreover, it surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods in the one-shot setting, with only 1/10 of the parameters and much fewer FLOPs. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/zzysteve/SkeletonX

In this study, we present seg2med, an advanced medical image synthesis framework that uses Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) to generate high-quality synthetic medical images conditioned on anatomical masks from TotalSegmentator. The framework synthesizes CT and MR images from segmentation masks derived from real patient data and XCAT digital phantoms, achieving a Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) of 0.94 +/- 0.02 for CT and 0.89 +/- 0.04 for MR images compared to ground-truth images of real patients. It also achieves a Feature Similarity Index Measure (FSIM) of 0.78 +/- 0.04 for CT images from XCAT. The generative quality is further supported by a Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) of 3.62 for CT image generation. Additionally, seg2med can generate paired CT and MR images with consistent anatomical structures and convert images between CT and MR modalities, achieving SSIM values of 0.91 +/- 0.03 for MR-to-CT and 0.77 +/- 0.04 for CT-to-MR conversion. Despite the limitations of incomplete anatomical details in segmentation masks, the framework shows strong performance in cross-modality synthesis and multimodal imaging. seg2med also demonstrates high anatomical fidelity in CT synthesis, achieving a mean Dice coefficient greater than 0.90 for 11 abdominal organs and greater than 0.80 for 34 organs out of 59 in 58 test cases. The highest Dice of 0.96 +/- 0.01 was recorded for the right scapula. Leveraging the TotalSegmentator toolkit, seg2med enables segmentation mask generation across diverse datasets, supporting applications in clinical imaging, data augmentation, multimodal synthesis, and diagnostic algorithm development.

Network Pruning is a promising way to address the huge computing resource demands of the deployment and inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). Retraining-free is important for LLMs' pruning methods. However, almost all of the existing retraining-free pruning approaches for LLMs focus on unstructured pruning, which requires specific hardware support for acceleration. In this paper, we propose a novel retraining-free structured pruning framework for LLMs, named FLAP (FLuctuation-based Adaptive Structured Pruning). It is hardware-friendly by effectively reducing storage and enhancing inference speed. For effective structured pruning of LLMs, we highlight three critical elements that demand the utmost attention: formulating structured importance metrics, adaptively searching the global compressed model, and implementing compensation mechanisms to mitigate performance loss. First, FLAP determines whether the output feature map is easily recoverable when a column of weight is removed, based on the fluctuation pruning metric. Then it standardizes the importance scores to adaptively determine the global compressed model structure. At last, FLAP adds additional bias terms to recover the output feature maps using the baseline values. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on a variety of language benchmarks. Without any retraining, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, including LLM-Pruner and the extension of Wanda in structured pruning. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/FLAP.

The design of modern recommender systems relies on understanding which parts of the feature space are relevant for solving a given recommendation task. However, real-world data sets in this domain are often characterized by their large size, sparsity, and noise, making it challenging to identify meaningful signals. Feature ranking represents an efficient branch of algorithms that can help address these challenges by identifying the most informative features and facilitating the automated search for more compact and better-performing models (AutoML). We introduce OutRank, a system for versatile feature ranking and data quality-related anomaly detection. OutRank was built with categorical data in mind, utilizing a variant of mutual information that is normalized with regard to the noise produced by features of the same cardinality. We further extend the similarity measure by incorporating information on feature similarity and combined relevance. The proposed approach's feasibility is demonstrated by speeding up the state-of-the-art AutoML system on a synthetic data set with no performance loss. Furthermore, we considered a real-life click-through-rate prediction data set where it outperformed strong baselines such as random forest-based approaches. The proposed approach enables exploration of up to 300% larger feature spaces compared to AutoML-only approaches, enabling faster search for better models on off-the-shelf hardware.

Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) models achieve strong performance in segmenting novel classes with minimal labeled examples, yet their decision-making processes remain largely opaque. While explainable AI has advanced significantly in standard computer vision tasks, interpretability in FSS remains virtually unexplored despite its critical importance for understanding model behavior and guiding support set selection in data-scarce scenarios. This paper introduces the first dedicated method for interpreting matching-based FSS models by leveraging their inherent structural properties. Our Affinity Explainer approach extracts attribution maps that highlight which pixels in support images contribute most to query segmentation predictions, using matching scores computed between support and query features at multiple feature levels. We extend standard interpretability evaluation metrics to the FSS domain and propose additional metrics to better capture the practical utility of explanations in few-shot scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on FSS benchmark datasets, using different models, demonstrate that our Affinity Explainer significantly outperforms adapted standard attribution methods. Qualitative analysis reveals that our explanations provide structured, coherent attention patterns that align with model architectures and and enable effective model diagnosis. This work establishes the foundation for interpretable FSS research, enabling better model understanding and diagnostic for more reliable few-shot segmentation systems. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/pasqualedem/AffinityExplainer.

Despite the impressive advancements of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), existing approaches suffer from a fundamental bottleneck: inefficient visual-language integration. Current methods either disrupt the model's inherent structure or introduce severe long-context computational burden, severely limiting scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we rethink multimodal integration and present LaVi, a novel LVLM that enables seamless and efficient vision-language fusion through internal feature modulation within the Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike dominant LVLMs that rely on visual token concatenation, LaVi bypasses long-context expansion by introducing a lightweight and adaptive transformation, which incorporates visual context by injecting token-wise vision-conditioned deltas into the affine parameters of layer normalization. This mechanism directly modulates linguistic hidden states based on visual input, ensuring precise vision-language alignment while preserving the LLM's linguistic priors and drastically reducing computational costs. Extensive evaluations across 15 image and video benchmarks demonstrate that LaVi not only achieves state-of-the-art multimodal performance but also dramatically enhances efficiency. Compared to LLaVA-OV-7B, LaVi reduces FLOPs by 94.0%, improves inference speed by 3.1 times, and cuts memory usage in half - establishing LaVi as a scalable and practical solution for real-time multimodal reasoning. The code and models will be released soon.

We surface a new threat to closed-weight Large Language Models (LLMs) that enables an attacker to compute optimization-based prompt injections. Specifically, we characterize how an attacker can leverage the loss-like information returned from the remote fine-tuning interface to guide the search for adversarial prompts. The fine-tuning interface is hosted by an LLM vendor and allows developers to fine-tune LLMs for their tasks, thus providing utility, but also exposes enough information for an attacker to compute adversarial prompts. Through an experimental analysis, we characterize the loss-like values returned by the Gemini fine-tuning API and demonstrate that they provide a useful signal for discrete optimization of adversarial prompts using a greedy search algorithm. Using the PurpleLlama prompt injection benchmark, we demonstrate attack success rates between 65% and 82% on Google's Gemini family of LLMs. These attacks exploit the classic utility-security tradeoff - the fine-tuning interface provides a useful feature for developers but also exposes the LLMs to powerful attacks.

Scene representations using 3D Gaussian primitives have produced excellent results in modeling the appearance of static and dynamic 3D scenes. Many graphics applications, however, demand the ability to manipulate both the appearance and the physical properties of objects. We introduce Feature Splatting, an approach that unifies physics-based dynamic scene synthesis with rich semantics from vision language foundation models that are grounded by natural language. Our first contribution is a way to distill high-quality, object-centric vision-language features into 3D Gaussians, that enables semi-automatic scene decomposition using text queries. Our second contribution is a way to synthesize physics-based dynamics from an otherwise static scene using a particle-based simulator, in which material properties are assigned automatically via text queries. We ablate key techniques used in this pipeline, to illustrate the challenge and opportunities in using feature-carrying 3D Gaussians as a unified format for appearance, geometry, material properties and semantics grounded on natural language. Project website: https://feature-splatting.github.io/

Robustness of reasoning remains a significant challenge for large language models, and addressing it is essential for the practical applicability of AI-driven reasoning systems. We introduce Semantic Self-Verification (SSV), a novel approach that addresses the key challenge in combining language models with the rigor of logical solvers: to accurately formulate the reasoning problem from natural language to the formal language of the solver. SSV uses a consistency-based approach to produce strong abstract formalizations of problems using concrete instantiations that are generated by the model and verified by the solver. In addition to significantly advancing the overall reasoning accuracy over the state-of-the-art, a key novelty that this approach presents is a feature of verification that has near-perfect precision over a significant coverage of cases, as we demonstrate on open reasoning benchmarks. We propose such *near-certain reasoning* as a new approach to reduce the need for manual verification in many cases, taking us closer to more dependable and autonomous AI reasoning systems.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on general-purpose text embedding tasks. While dense embeddings have dominated related research, we introduce the first Lexicon-based EmbeddiNgS (LENS) leveraging LLMs that achieve competitive performance on these tasks. Regarding the inherent tokenization redundancy issue and unidirectional attention limitations in traditional causal LLMs, LENS consolidates the vocabulary space through token embedding clustering, and investigates bidirectional attention and various pooling strategies. Specifically, LENS simplifies lexicon matching by assigning each dimension to a specific token cluster, where semantically similar tokens are grouped together, and unlocking the full potential of LLMs through bidirectional attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LENS outperforms dense embeddings on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), delivering compact feature representations that match the sizes of dense counterparts. Notably, combining LENSE with dense embeddings achieves state-of-the-art performance on the retrieval subset of MTEB (i.e. BEIR).

As the field of automated machine learning (AutoML) advances, it becomes increasingly important to incorporate domain knowledge into these systems. We present an approach for doing so by harnessing the power of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we introduce Context-Aware Automated Feature Engineering (CAAFE), a feature engineering method for tabular datasets that utilizes an LLM to iteratively generate additional semantically meaningful features for tabular datasets based on the description of the dataset. The method produces both Python code for creating new features and explanations for the utility of the generated features. Despite being methodologically simple, CAAFE improves performance on 11 out of 14 datasets -- boosting mean ROC AUC performance from 0.798 to 0.822 across all dataset - similar to the improvement achieved by using a random forest instead of logistic regression on our datasets. Furthermore, CAAFE is interpretable by providing a textual explanation for each generated feature. CAAFE paves the way for more extensive semi-automation in data science tasks and emphasizes the significance of context-aware solutions that can extend the scope of AutoML systems to semantic AutoML. We release our https://github.com/automl/CAAFE{code}, a simple https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1mCA8xOAJZ4MaB_alZvyARTMjhl6RZf0a{demo} and a https://pypi.org/project/caafe/{python package}.