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Sep 23

PEMF-VVTO: Point-Enhanced Video Virtual Try-on via Mask-free Paradigm

Video Virtual Try-on aims to fluently transfer the garment image to a semantically aligned try-on area in the source person video. Previous methods leveraged the inpainting mask to remove the original garment in the source video, thus achieving accurate garment transfer on simple model videos. However, when these methods are applied to realistic video data with more complex scene changes and posture movements, the overly large and incoherent agnostic masks will destroy the essential spatial-temporal information of the original video, thereby inhibiting the fidelity and coherence of the try-on video. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel point-enhanced mask-free video virtual try-on framework (PEMF-VVTO). Specifically, we first leverage the pre-trained mask-based try-on model to construct large-scale paired training data (pseudo-person samples). Training on these mask-free data enables our model to perceive the original spatial-temporal information while realizing accurate garment transfer. Then, based on the pre-acquired sparse frame-cloth and frame-frame point alignments, we design the point-enhanced spatial attention (PSA) and point-enhanced temporal attention (PTA) to further improve the try-on accuracy and video coherence of the mask-free model. Concretely, PSA explicitly guides the garment transfer to desirable locations through the sparse semantic alignments of video frames and cloth. PTA exploits the temporal attention on sparse point correspondences to enhance the smoothness of generated videos. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments clearly illustrate that our PEMF-VVTO can generate more natural and coherent try-on videos than existing state-of-the-art methods.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

OCTET: Object-aware Counterfactual Explanations

Nowadays, deep vision models are being widely deployed in safety-critical applications, e.g., autonomous driving, and explainability of such models is becoming a pressing concern. Among explanation methods, counterfactual explanations aim to find minimal and interpretable changes to the input image that would also change the output of the model to be explained. Such explanations point end-users at the main factors that impact the decision of the model. However, previous methods struggle to explain decision models trained on images with many objects, e.g., urban scenes, which are more difficult to work with but also arguably more critical to explain. In this work, we propose to tackle this issue with an object-centric framework for counterfactual explanation generation. Our method, inspired by recent generative modeling works, encodes the query image into a latent space that is structured in a way to ease object-level manipulations. Doing so, it provides the end-user with control over which search directions (e.g., spatial displacement of objects, style modification, etc.) are to be explored during the counterfactual generation. We conduct a set of experiments on counterfactual explanation benchmarks for driving scenes, and we show that our method can be adapted beyond classification, e.g., to explain semantic segmentation models. To complete our analysis, we design and run a user study that measures the usefulness of counterfactual explanations in understanding a decision model. Code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/OCTET.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 22, 2022

Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are predominantly evaluated by comparing their relative performance on a large suite of tasks. Most published results on deep RL benchmarks compare point estimates of aggregate performance such as mean and median scores across tasks, ignoring the statistical uncertainty implied by the use of a finite number of training runs. Beginning with the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), the shift towards computationally-demanding benchmarks has led to the practice of evaluating only a small number of runs per task, exacerbating the statistical uncertainty in point estimates. In this paper, we argue that reliable evaluation in the few run deep RL regime cannot ignore the uncertainty in results without running the risk of slowing down progress in the field. We illustrate this point using a case study on the Atari 100k benchmark, where we find substantial discrepancies between conclusions drawn from point estimates alone versus a more thorough statistical analysis. With the aim of increasing the field's confidence in reported results with a handful of runs, we advocate for reporting interval estimates of aggregate performance and propose performance profiles to account for the variability in results, as well as present more robust and efficient aggregate metrics, such as interquartile mean scores, to achieve small uncertainty in results. Using such statistical tools, we scrutinize performance evaluations of existing algorithms on other widely used RL benchmarks including the ALE, Procgen, and the DeepMind Control Suite, again revealing discrepancies in prior comparisons. Our findings call for a change in how we evaluate performance in deep RL, for which we present a more rigorous evaluation methodology, accompanied with an open-source library rliable, to prevent unreliable results from stagnating the field.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 30, 2021

Mantis Shrimp: Exploring Photometric Band Utilization in Computer Vision Networks for Photometric Redshift Estimation

We present Mantis Shrimp, a multi-survey deep learning model for photometric redshift estimation that fuses ultra-violet (GALEX), optical (PanSTARRS), and infrared (UnWISE) imagery. Machine learning is now an established approach for photometric redshift estimation, with generally acknowledged higher performance in areas with a high density of spectroscopically identified galaxies over template-based methods. Multiple works have shown that image-based convolutional neural networks can outperform tabular-based color/magnitude models. In comparison to tabular models, image models have additional design complexities: it is largely unknown how to fuse inputs from different instruments which have different resolutions or noise properties. The Mantis Shrimp model estimates the conditional density estimate of redshift using cutout images. The density estimates are well calibrated and the point estimates perform well in the distribution of available spectroscopically confirmed galaxies with (bias = 1e-2), scatter (NMAD = 2.44e-2) and catastrophic outlier rate (eta=17.53%). We find that early fusion approaches (e.g., resampling and stacking images from different instruments) match the performance of late fusion approaches (e.g., concatenating latent space representations), so that the design choice ultimately is left to the user. Finally, we study how the models learn to use information across bands, finding evidence that our models successfully incorporates information from all surveys. The applicability of our model to the analysis of large populations of galaxies is limited by the speed of downloading cutouts from external servers; however, our model could be useful in smaller studies such as generating priors over redshift for stellar population synthesis.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 15, 2025

FullPart: Generating each 3D Part at Full Resolution

Part-based 3D generation holds great potential for various applications. Previous part generators that represent parts using implicit vector-set tokens often suffer from insufficient geometric details. Another line of work adopts an explicit voxel representation but shares a global voxel grid among all parts; this often causes small parts to occupy too few voxels, leading to degraded quality. In this paper, we propose FullPart, a novel framework that combines both implicit and explicit paradigms. It first derives the bounding box layout through an implicit box vector-set diffusion process, a task that implicit diffusion handles effectively since box tokens contain little geometric detail. Then, it generates detailed parts, each within its own fixed full-resolution voxel grid. Instead of sharing a global low-resolution space, each part in our method - even small ones - is generated at full resolution, enabling the synthesis of intricate details. We further introduce a center-point encoding strategy to address the misalignment issue when exchanging information between parts of different actual sizes, thereby maintaining global coherence. Moreover, to tackle the scarcity of reliable part data, we present PartVerse-XL, the largest human-annotated 3D part dataset to date with 40K objects and 320K parts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FullPart achieves state-of-the-art results in 3D part generation. We will release all code, data, and model to benefit future research in 3D part generation.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 30, 2025 1

Three Buddhist Vocabularies: Computational Stylometry of the English Pali Canon across Sutta, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma

We present a computational stylometric analysis of the Tipitaka across all three Pitakas in English translation, extending earlier work on the Sutta Pitaka alone. The corpus spans 134,831 segments from Bhikkhu Sujato's Sutta Pitaka (114,591 segments, CC0), Bhikkhu Brahmali's Vinaya Pitaka (7,923 segments, CC0 2026), I.B. Horner's 1938 Vinaya translation (2,826 segments), three English translations of the Abhidhammattha Sangaha compendium (2,077 segments), and cross-tradition Vinaya texts from the Dharmaguptaka and Mulasarvastivada schools. We compute Zipf rank-frequency distributions with OLS-fitted exponents, Moving Average TTR (MATTR-500), numeral-word density, and vocabulary overlap (Jaccard and Szymkiewicz-Simpson coefficients). Main findings: (1) all corpora show Zipf-consistent distributions (R2 > 0.989); the Vinaya is closest to ideal Zipf slope -1 and the Sangaha corpus deviates most, with 'consciousness' displacing grammatical particles at rank 8; (2) MATTR-500 shows the Sutta and Vinaya Theravada are nearly identical in lexical diversity (0.399 and 0.400), while the Sangaha corpus is genuinely more diverse (0.560), confirmed by size-controlled subsampling; (3) the Sangaha corpus has the highest numeral-word density (3.26%), consistent with its systematic enumeration of mental and material categories; (4) the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya shares 20.0% vocabulary (Jaccard) and 49.1% (overlap coefficient) with the Theravada Vinaya, reflecting shared legal heritage across two millennia; (5) two English translations of the same Vinaya source text share only 24.2% of their vocabulary across 88 years, with 'musing' versus 'absorption' for jhana and 'defeat' versus 'expulsion' for parajika as the most diagnostic shifts. All results are point estimates; no significance testing is conducted. Code and data are released as open-source extensions to the Darshana Graph corpus (arXiv:2606.18222).

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 24

The Extrapolation Cliff in On-Policy Distillation of Near-Deterministic Structured Outputs

On-policy distillation (OPD) is widely used for LLM post-training. When pushed with a reward-extrapolation coefficient lambda > 1, the student can lift past the teacher in domain, but past a threshold lambda* the same step violates the output contract on structured-output tasks. In a single-position Bernoulli reduction, we derive a closed-form base-relative clip-safety threshold lambda*(p,b,c) determined by three measurable quantities: the teacher modal probability, the warm-start mass, and the importance-sampling clip strength. Above lambda*, the extrapolated fixed point exits the clip-safe region, changing training from format-preserving to format-collapsing. We extend the rule to calibrated K-ary listwise JSON tasks where a single binding equivalence class dominates the output contract and SFT retains parse headroom. On Amazon Fashion, three pre-registered tests--a fine-grid cliff interval, a budget-extension test, and a small-clip cross-prediction--fall within their locked prediction windows, with the small-clip value matching the closed-form prediction below grid resolution. Operating just below lambda*, ListOPD brings a 1.7B Qwen3 student to in-domain parity with an 8B-SFT baseline at one-fifth the parameters. The gain is driven primarily by format adherence: NDCG@1 on parsed outputs remains flat across lambda, while parse validity sharply changes at the predicted boundary. The cliff diagnostic is rubric-independent, whereas the parity claim uses a Gemini-graded rubric and inherits that evaluator's exposure.

VideoFlow: Exploiting Temporal Cues for Multi-frame Optical Flow Estimation

We introduce VideoFlow, a novel optical flow estimation framework for videos. In contrast to previous methods that learn to estimate optical flow from two frames, VideoFlow concurrently estimates bi-directional optical flows for multiple frames that are available in videos by sufficiently exploiting temporal cues. We first propose a TRi-frame Optical Flow (TROF) module that estimates bi-directional optical flows for the center frame in a three-frame manner. The information of the frame triplet is iteratively fused onto the center frame. To extend TROF for handling more frames, we further propose a MOtion Propagation (MOP) module that bridges multiple TROFs and propagates motion features between adjacent TROFs. With the iterative flow estimation refinement, the information fused in individual TROFs can be propagated into the whole sequence via MOP. By effectively exploiting video information, VideoFlow presents extraordinary performance, ranking 1st on all public benchmarks. On the Sintel benchmark, VideoFlow achieves 1.649 and 0.991 average end-point-error (AEPE) on the final and clean passes, a 15.1% and 7.6% error reduction from the best-published results (1.943 and 1.073 from FlowFormer++). On the KITTI-2015 benchmark, VideoFlow achieves an F1-all error of 3.65%, a 19.2% error reduction from the best-published result (4.52% from FlowFormer++). Code is released at https://github.com/XiaoyuShi97/VideoFlow.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 14, 2023

Pathformer: Recursive Path Query Encoding for Complex Logical Query Answering

Complex Logical Query Answering (CLQA) over incomplete knowledge graphs is a challenging task. Recently, Query Embedding (QE) methods are proposed to solve CLQA by performing multi-hop logical reasoning. However, most of them only consider historical query context information while ignoring future information, which leads to their failure to capture the complex dependencies behind the elements of a query. In recent years, the transformer architecture has shown a strong ability to model long-range dependencies between words. The bidirectional attention mechanism proposed by the transformer can solve the limitation of these QE methods regarding query context. Still, as a sequence model, it is difficult for the transformer to model complex logical queries with branch structure computation graphs directly. To this end, we propose a neural one-point embedding method called Pathformer based on the tree-like computation graph, i.e., query computation tree. Specifically, Pathformer decomposes the query computation tree into path query sequences by branches and then uses the transformer encoder to recursively encode these path query sequences to obtain the final query embedding. This allows Pathformer to fully utilize future context information to explicitly model the complex interactions between various parts of the path query. Experimental results show that Pathformer outperforms existing competitive neural QE methods, and we found that Pathformer has the potential to be applied to non-one-point embedding space.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 21, 2024

EXAONE Tabular 1.0 : Technical Report

EXAONE Tabular is a compact tabular foundation model family for classification and regression via in-context learning, producing predictions without dataset-specific gradient updates. Pretrained exclusively on a synthetic structural-causal-model (SCM) prior, its central contribution is an architecture-centered redesign of tabular in-context learning. Rather than compressing features into a fixed row embedding before a separate row-level learner, EXAONE Tabular interleaves feature-axis attention within each item with support-conditioned item-axis attention within each feature at every Transformer layer, mediated by item-summary and feature-summary tokens. Across four public benchmarks, EXAONE Tabular combines strong predictive performance with high efficiency. On TabArena, its 20.81M-parameter classification model ranks first overall, surpassing tuned ensembles and 4-hour AutoML pipelines, while regression reaches the performance regime of the 1.64B-parameter TabFM at roughly 1/11 the inference cost. On BCCO and TALENT, EXAONE Tabular ranks second in classification and first in regression. On ScoringBench, it achieves the best mean rank for both point-estimation and predictive-distribution quality, leading the R^2, RMSE, and CRPS evaluations. Together, these results establish EXAONE Tabular as a state-of-the-art compact tabular foundation model family, combining strong predictive performance across classification, point regression, and probabilistic regression with an efficient model design.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 25

BEV-DG: Cross-Modal Learning under Bird's-Eye View for Domain Generalization of 3D Semantic Segmentation

Cross-modal Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to exploit the complementarity of 2D-3D data to overcome the lack of annotation in a new domain. However, UDA methods rely on access to the target domain during training, meaning the trained model only works in a specific target domain. In light of this, we propose cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view for Domain Generalization (DG) of 3D semantic segmentation, called BEV-DG. DG is more challenging because the model cannot access the target domain during training, meaning it needs to rely on cross-modal learning to alleviate the domain gap. Since 3D semantic segmentation requires the classification of each point, existing cross-modal learning is directly conducted point-to-point, which is sensitive to the misalignment in projections between pixels and points. To this end, our approach aims to optimize domain-irrelevant representation modeling with the aid of cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view. We propose BEV-based Area-to-area Fusion (BAF) to conduct cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view, which has a higher fault tolerance for point-level misalignment. Furthermore, to model domain-irrelevant representations, we propose BEV-driven Domain Contrastive Learning (BDCL) with the help of cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view. We design three domain generalization settings based on three 3D datasets, and BEV-DG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art competitors with tremendous margins in all settings.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 12, 2023

A Quantitative Evaluation of Dense 3D Reconstruction of Sinus Anatomy from Monocular Endoscopic Video

Generating accurate 3D reconstructions from endoscopic video is a promising avenue for longitudinal radiation-free analysis of sinus anatomy and surgical outcomes. Several methods for monocular reconstruction have been proposed, yielding visually pleasant 3D anatomical structures by retrieving relative camera poses with structure-from-motion-type algorithms and fusion of monocular depth estimates. However, due to the complex properties of the underlying algorithms and endoscopic scenes, the reconstruction pipeline may perform poorly or fail unexpectedly. Further, acquiring medical data conveys additional challenges, presenting difficulties in quantitatively benchmarking these models, understanding failure cases, and identifying critical components that contribute to their precision. In this work, we perform a quantitative analysis of a self-supervised approach for sinus reconstruction using endoscopic sequences paired with optical tracking and high-resolution computed tomography acquired from nine ex-vivo specimens. Our results show that the generated reconstructions are in high agreement with the anatomy, yielding an average point-to-mesh error of 0.91 mm between reconstructions and CT segmentations. However, in a point-to-point matching scenario, relevant for endoscope tracking and navigation, we found average target registration errors of 6.58 mm. We identified that pose and depth estimation inaccuracies contribute equally to this error and that locally consistent sequences with shorter trajectories generate more accurate reconstructions. These results suggest that achieving global consistency between relative camera poses and estimated depths with the anatomy is essential. In doing so, we can ensure proper synergy between all components of the pipeline for improved reconstructions that will facilitate clinical application of this innovative technology.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 22, 2023

Point-DETR3D: Leveraging Imagery Data with Spatial Point Prior for Weakly Semi-supervised 3D Object Detection

Training high-accuracy 3D detectors necessitates massive labeled 3D annotations with 7 degree-of-freedom, which is laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, the form of point annotations is proposed to offer significant prospects for practical applications in 3D detection, which is not only more accessible and less expensive but also provides strong spatial information for object localization. In this paper, we empirically discover that it is non-trivial to merely adapt Point-DETR to its 3D form, encountering two main bottlenecks: 1) it fails to encode strong 3D prior into the model, and 2) it generates low-quality pseudo labels in distant regions due to the extreme sparsity of LiDAR points. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Point-DETR3D, a teacher-student framework for weakly semi-supervised 3D detection, designed to fully capitalize on point-wise supervision within a constrained instance-wise annotation budget.Different from Point-DETR which encodes 3D positional information solely through a point encoder, we propose an explicit positional query initialization strategy to enhance the positional prior. Considering the low quality of pseudo labels at distant regions produced by the teacher model, we enhance the detector's perception by incorporating dense imagery data through a novel Cross-Modal Deformable RoI Fusion (D-RoI).Moreover, an innovative point-guided self-supervised learning technique is proposed to allow for fully exploiting point priors, even in student models.Extensive experiments on representative nuScenes dataset demonstrate our Point-DETR3D obtains significant improvements compared to previous works. Notably, with only 5% of labeled data, Point-DETR3D achieves over 90% performance of its fully supervised counterpart.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 22, 2024

ELMES: An Automated Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models in Educational Scenarios

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents transformative opportunities for education, generating numerous novel application scenarios. However, significant challenges remain: evaluation metrics vary substantially across different educational scenarios, while many emerging scenarios lack appropriate assessment metrics. Current benchmarks predominantly measure general intelligence rather than pedagogical capabilities. To address this gap, we introduce ELMES, an open-source automated evaluation framework specifically designed for assessing LLMs in educational settings. ELMES features a modular architecture that enables researchers to create dynamic, multi-agent dialogues through simple configuration files, facilitating flexible scenario design without requiring extensive programming expertise. The framework incorporates a hybrid evaluation engine that objectively quantifies traditionally subjective pedagogical metrics using an LLM-as-a-Judge methodology. We conduct systematic benchmarking of state-of-the-art LLMs across four critical educational scenarios: Knowledge Point Explanation, Guided Problem-Solving Teaching, Interdisciplinary Lesson Plan Generation, and Contextualized Question Generation, employing fine-grained metrics developed in collaboration with education specialists. Our results demonstrate distinct capability distributions among models, revealing context-specific strengths and limitations. ELMES provides educators and researchers with an accessible evaluation framework that significantly reduces adaptation barriers for diverse educational applications while advancing the practical implementation of LLMs in pedagogy. The framework is publicly available at https://github.com/sii-research/elmes.git.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 27, 2025

Two-stage Estimation of Latent Variable Regression Models: A General, Root-N Consistent Solution

Latent variable (LV) models are widely used in psychological research to investigate relationships among unobservable constructs. When one-stage estimation of the overall LV model is challenging, two-stage factor score regression (FSR) serves as a convenient alternative: the measurement model is fitted to obtain factor scores in the first stage, which are then used to fit the structural model in the subsequent stage. However, naive application of FSR is known to yield biased estimates of structural parameters. In this paper, we develop a generic bias-correction framework for two-stage estimation of parametric statistical models and tailor it specifically to FSR. Unlike existing bias-corrected FSR solutions, the proposed method applies to a broader class of LV models and does not require computing specific types of factor scores. We establish the root-n consistency of the proposed bias-corrected two-stage estimator under mild regularity conditions. To ensure broad applicability and minimize reliance on complex analytical derivations, we introduce a stochastic approximation algorithm for point estimation and a Monte Carlo-based procedure for variance estimation. In a sequence of Monte Carlo experiments, we demonstrate that the bias-corrected FSR estimator performs comparably to the ``gold standard'' one-stage maximum likelihood estimator. These results suggest that our approach offers a straightforward yet effective alternative for estimating LV models.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 24

QuantSightBench: Evaluating LLM Quantitative Forecasting with Prediction Intervals

Forecasting has become a natural benchmark for reasoning under uncertainty. Yet existing evaluations of large language models remain limited to judgmental tasks in simple formats, such as binary or multiple-choice questions. In practice, however, forecasting spans a far broader scope. Across domains such as economics, public health, and social demographics, decisions hinge on numerical estimates over continuous quantities, a capability that current benchmarks do not capture. Evaluating such estimates requires a format that makes uncertainty explicit and testable. We propose prediction intervals as a natural and rigorous interface for this purpose. They demand scale awareness, internal consistency across confidence levels, and calibration over a continuum of outcomes, making them a more suitable evaluation format than point estimates for numerical forecasting. To assess this capability, we introduce a new benchmark QuantSightBench, and evaluate frontier models under multiple settings, assessing both empirical coverage and interval sharpness. Our results show that none of the 11 evaluated frontier and open-weight models achieves the 90\% coverage target, with the top performers Gemini 3.1 Pro (79.1\%), Grok 4 (76.4\%), and GPT-5.4 (75.3\%) all falling at least 10 percentage points short. Calibration degrades sharply at extreme magnitudes, revealing systematic overconfidence across all evaluated models.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 16

RetailSMV: Exocentric vs. Egocentric Adaptation of Foundation Video World Models in Retail

Foundation video diffusion models are increasingly viewed as world simulators for embodied agents, yet their pretraining on internet-scale generic video leaves them poorly aligned with real-world deployment domains. We study parameter-efficient adaptation of a pretrained foundation video world model to retail scenes: when synchronized egocentric and exocentric video of the same activity are available, which viewpoint of training data produces the strongest adapted model? We introduce RetailSMV (Retail Synchronized Multi-View), a corpus of 32,105 captioned retail clips from five supermarkets with synchronized ego/exo capture from the store-staff perspective (stocking, arranging, weighing, managing supply carts, scanning at checkout), rather than the customer-centric framing of prior retail video corpora, and train three matched Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) configurations of Cosmos3-Nano (egocentric-only, exocentric-only, combined) under identical hyperparameters. On a 200-clip held-out test set evaluated with seven complementary metrics under a strict paired statistical protocol, exocentric-only adaptation matches or exceeds combined adaptation on six of seven point estimates and is significantly better on LPIPS, PSNR, and DreamSim, despite training on only 15,985 exocentric clips (versus 32,105 for combined). A symmetric paired comparison further shows that adding exocentric data to egocentric-only training helps while adding egocentric data to exocentric-only training hurts. The absolute adaptation gap is largest at the shortest rollout time, identifying the near-horizon prediction window as the regime in which adaptation is most beneficial.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 30

Can Edge-Deployable Vision-Language Models Identify Species?

Camera traps often run in the field on edge hardware with limited or no connectivity, making small, locally-deployable vision-language models (VLMs) -- not frontier-scale ones -- the practically relevant class to evaluate for species identification. We test whether models in this deployment-relevant 2--8B range carry genuine taxonomic knowledge, evaluating four such VLMs (Qwen3-VL 2B/4B/8B, Gemma3 4B) against the domain-specific specialist BioCLIP (300M parameters) on a 96-species task, comparing clean iNaturalist photographs against camera-trap imagery from 6 LILA.science collections, on two independently-sampled evaluation sets. All models identify species far above chance, but every model -- general-purpose or specialist -- degrades sharply on field imagery (domain gaps of 9.6--26.6 percentage points, consistent across taxonomic levels and both evaluation sets), indicating the degradation reflects general image legibility rather than fine-grained discrimination failure. BioCLIP substantially outperforms every VLM tested (by 33.2--59.2 percentage points across an expanded 200-image sample for every model) despite its far smaller size, suggesting the gap reflects specialized training data rather than model scale; yet BioCLIP's own domain gap (18.0 points) is statistically indistinguishable from the best VLM's (22.3 points), suggesting the clean-to-field degradation itself is a property of the image-quality shift rather than a general-purpose-model weakness. Under open-set prompting, 5.9--9.6% of responses are syntactically valid but taxonomically nonexistent species names; the relative fabrication-rate ranking across models replicates exactly across both evaluation sets, a more robust finding than any single point estimate.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 9

Successive Linear Approximation VBI for Joint Sparse Signal Recovery and Dynamic Grid Parameters Estimation

For many practical applications in wireless communications, we need to recover a structured sparse signal from a linear observation model with dynamic grid parameters in the sensing matrix. Conventional expectation maximization (EM)-based compressed sensing (CS) methods, such as turbo compressed sensing (Turbo-CS) and turbo variational Bayesian inference (Turbo-VBI), have double-loop iterations, where the inner loop (E-step) obtains a Bayesian estimation of sparse signals and the outer loop (M-step) obtains a point estimation of dynamic grid parameters. This leads to a slow convergence rate. Furthermore, each iteration of the E-step involves a complicated matrix inverse in general. To overcome these drawbacks, we first propose a successive linear approximation VBI (SLA-VBI) algorithm that can provide Bayesian estimation of both sparse signals and dynamic grid parameters. Besides, we simplify the matrix inverse operation based on the majorization-minimization (MM) algorithmic framework. In addition, we extend our proposed algorithm from an independent sparse prior to more complicated structured sparse priors, which can exploit structured sparsity in specific applications to further enhance the performance. Finally, we apply our proposed algorithm to solve two practical application problems in wireless communications and verify that the proposed algorithm can achieve faster convergence, lower complexity, and better performance compared to the state-of-the-art EM-based methods.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 18, 2023

Clustering based Point Cloud Representation Learning for 3D Analysis

Point cloud analysis (such as 3D segmentation and detection) is a challenging task, because of not only the irregular geometries of many millions of unordered points, but also the great variations caused by depth, viewpoint, occlusion, etc. Current studies put much focus on the adaption of neural networks to the complex geometries of point clouds, but are blind to a fundamental question: how to learn an appropriate point embedding space that is aware of both discriminative semantics and challenging variations? As a response, we propose a clustering based supervised learning scheme for point cloud analysis. Unlike current de-facto, scene-wise training paradigm, our algorithm conducts within-class clustering on the point embedding space for automatically discovering subclass patterns which are latent yet representative across scenes. The mined patterns are, in turn, used to repaint the embedding space, so as to respect the underlying distribution of the entire training dataset and improve the robustness to the variations. Our algorithm is principled and readily pluggable to modern point cloud segmentation networks during training, without extra overhead during testing. With various 3D network architectures (i.e., voxel-based, point-based, Transformer-based, automatically searched), our algorithm shows notable improvements on famous point cloud segmentation datasets (i.e.,2.0-2.6% on single-scan and 2.0-2.2% multi-scan of SemanticKITTI, 1.8-1.9% on S3DIS, in terms of mIoU). Our algorithm also demonstrates utility in 3D detection, showing 2.0-3.4% mAP gains on KITTI.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 26, 2023

Uncertainty-Aware Explanations Through Probabilistic Self-Explainable Neural Networks

The lack of transparency of Deep Neural Networks continues to be a limitation that severely undermines their reliability and usage in high-stakes applications. Promising approaches to overcome such limitations are Prototype-Based Self-Explainable Neural Networks (PSENNs), whose predictions rely on the similarity between the input at hand and a set of prototypical representations of the output classes, offering therefore a deep, yet transparent-by-design, architecture. So far, such models have been designed by considering pointwise estimates for the prototypes, which remain fixed after the learning phase of the model. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic reformulation of PSENNs, called Prob-PSENN, which replaces point estimates for the prototypes with probability distributions over their values. This provides not only a more flexible framework for an end-to-end learning of prototypes, but can also capture the explanatory uncertainty of the model, which is a missing feature in previous approaches. In addition, since the prototypes determine both the explanation and the prediction, Prob-PSENNs allow us to detect when the model is making uninformed or uncertain predictions, and to obtain valid explanations for them. Our experiments demonstrate that Prob-PSENNs provide more meaningful and robust explanations than their non-probabilistic counterparts, thus enhancing the explainability and reliability of the models.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 20, 2024

HomoMatcher: Dense Feature Matching Results with Semi-Dense Efficiency by Homography Estimation

Feature matching between image pairs is a fundamental problem in computer vision that drives many applications, such as SLAM. Recently, semi-dense matching approaches have achieved substantial performance enhancements and established a widely-accepted coarse-to-fine paradigm. However, the majority of existing methods focus on improving coarse feature representation rather than the fine-matching module. Prior fine-matching techniques, which rely on point-to-patch matching probability expectation or direct regression, often lack precision and do not guarantee the continuity of feature points across sequential images. To address this limitation, this paper concentrates on enhancing the fine-matching module in the semi-dense matching framework. We employ a lightweight and efficient homography estimation network to generate the perspective mapping between patches obtained from coarse matching. This patch-to-patch approach achieves the overall alignment of two patches, resulting in a higher sub-pixel accuracy by incorporating additional constraints. By leveraging the homography estimation between patches, we can achieve a dense matching result with low computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves higher accuracy compared to previous semi-dense matchers. Meanwhile, our dense matching results exhibit similar end-point-error accuracy compared to previous dense matchers while maintaining semi-dense efficiency.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 10, 2024

FlowBack-Adjoint: Physics-Aware and Energy-Guided Conditional Flow-Matching for All-Atom Protein Backmapping

Coarse-grained (CG) molecular models of proteins can substantially increase the time and length scales accessible to molecular dynamics simulations of proteins, but recovery of accurate all-atom (AA) ensembles from CG simulation trajectories can be essential for exposing molecular mechanisms of folding and docking and for calculation of physical properties requiring atomistic detail. The recently reported deep generative model FlowBack restores AA detail to protein C-alpha traces using a flow-matching architecture and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in generation of AA structural ensembles. Training, however, is performed exclusively on structural data and the absence of any awareness of interatomic energies or forces within training results in small fractions of incorrect bond lengths, atomic clashes, and otherwise high-energy structures. In this work, we introduce FlowBack-Adjoint as a lightweight enhancement that upgrades the pre-trained FlowBack model through a one-time, physics-aware post-training pass. Auxiliary contributions to the flow introduce physical awareness of bond lengths and Lennard-Jones interactions and gradients of a molecular mechanics force field energy are incorporated via adjoint matching to steer the FlowBack-Adjoint vector field to produce lower-energy configurations. In benchmark tests against FlowBack, FlowBack-Adjoint lowers single-point energies by a median of ~78 kcal/mol.residue, reduces errors in bond lengths by >92%, eliminates >98% of molecular clashes, maintains excellent diversity of the AA configurational ensemble, and produces configurations capable of initializing stable all-atom molecular dynamics simulations without requiring energy relaxation. We propose FlowBack-Adjoint as an accurate and efficient physics-aware deep generative model for AA backmapping from C-alpha traces.

  • 3 authors
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Aug 5, 2025

EpiCaR: Knowing What You Don't Know Matters for Better Reasoning in LLMs

Improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) has largely relied on iterative self-training with model-generated data. While effective at boosting accuracy, existing approaches primarily reinforce successful reasoning paths, incurring a substantial calibration cost: models become overconfident and lose the ability to represent uncertainty. This failure has been characterized as a form of model collapse in alignment, where predictive distributions degenerate toward low-variance point estimates. We address this issue by reframing reasoning training as an epistemic learning problem, in which models must learn not only how to reason, but also when their reasoning should be trusted. We propose epistemically-calibrated reasoning (EpiCaR) as a training objective that jointly optimizes reasoning performance and calibration, and instantiate it within an iterative supervised fine-tuning framework using explicit self-evaluation signals. Experiments on Llama-3 and Qwen-3 families demonstrate that our approach achieves Pareto-superiority over standard baselines in both accuracy and calibration, particularly in models with sufficient reasoning capacity (e.g., 3B+). This framework generalizes effectively to OOD mathematical reasoning (GSM8K) and code generation (MBPP). Ultimately, our approach enables a 3X reduction in inference compute, matching the K=30 performance of STaR with only K=10 samples in capable models.

CausalReasoningBenchmark: A Real-World Benchmark for Disentangled Evaluation of Causal Identification and Estimation

Many benchmarks for automated causal inference evaluate a system's performance based on a single numerical output, such as an Average Treatment Effect (ATE). This approach conflates two distinct steps in causal analysis: identification-formulating a valid research design under stated assumptions-and estimation-implementing that design numerically on finite data. We introduce CausalReasoningBenchmark, a benchmark of 173 queries across 138 real-world datasets, curated from 85 peer-reviewed research papers and four widely-used causal-inference textbooks. For each query a system must produce (i) a structured identification specification that names the strategy, the treatment, outcome, and control variables, and all design-specific elements, and (ii) a point estimate with a standard error. By scoring these two components separately, our benchmark enables granular diagnosis: it distinguishes failures in causal reasoning from errors in numerical execution. Baseline results with a state-of-the-art LLM show that, while the model correctly identifies the high-level strategy in 84 % of cases, full identification-specification correctness drops to only 30 %, revealing that the bottleneck lies in the nuanced details of research design rather than in computation. CausalReasoningBenchmark is publicly available on Hugging Face and is designed to foster the development of more robust automated causal-inference systems.

  • 3 authors
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Feb 24

Off-Target Effects of Response-Style Alignment in a Korean 27B Language Model

We post-train Qwen3.8-27B for Korean response style -- verbosity, list and markdown usage, discourse structure and register -- and measure two behaviours the objective never targets: abstention on ambiguous social questions in KoBBQ, where the benchmark-correct answer is UNKNOWN, and unprompted disclosure in securities guidance. Both move, and the changes are expressed primarily through the model's emission policy: how often it answers and how much it says. Matched target-form controls show that answer propensity depends on the training target, not the prompt set or recipe alone. Holding prompts, recipe, data volume and serving fixed and changing only the target text, three style seeds give positive answer-rate point estimates (mean +0.82 pp) and three neutral seeds negative ones (mean -1.53 pp); the observed seed ranges do not overlap and the means differ by 2.34 pp. A length-matched arm lies between them, and a fourth arm that stays short while preserving hedging is unstable across seeds, so which feature of the form is responsible is unresolved. For absolute stereotyped exposure the decomposition into an answer-propensity term and a conditional-composition term is an algebraic identity, not a finding; its empirical content is where the movement went. Across the trained checkpoints the changes are dominated by answer propensity while the composition term stays small, and because that term is evaluated on treatment-dependent answered subsets we do not read it as evidence about latent preference. Two measurement results follow. A between-arm contrast in conditional stereotyped share does not identify a change in conditional content preference when answer status is treatment-dependent. And agreement between two rule detectors for the same construct runs from 0.44 to 0.99 depending on which checkpoint produced the text -- observable without any reference labels.

  • 1 authors
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Sep 9

Paint-Anything: Unified Any-Color Control for Image Generation and Editing

Professional design requires any-color control: the ability to specify an object's target color with any 24-bit hex value for image generation and editing. Prior work has explored color generation, editing, and colorization, but often relies on dedicated color representations or specialized inference procedures. Advances in large language models offer a simpler starting point: even compact models can associate hex values with color semantics. We present Paint-Anything, which learns a shared hex-prompt interface for generation and editing through object-level color supervision. We develop a data pipeline that constructs Paint-500K from real images through object grounding, perceptual color labeling, and editing-pair synthesis. Since shadows make real-image labels only approximate colors, we complement this supervision with pure-color anchors whose pixels exactly match their paired hex values. These anchors are used only at high-noise timesteps, leaving low-noise training to natural images. We further introduce Any Color Benchmark (ACBench), comprising ACBench-T2I and ACBench-Edit, to measure object-level hex color fidelity across both tasks. On FLUX.2-4B, Paint-Anything improves ACBench-T2I and ACBench-Edit scores by 85.3% and 28.3%, respectively, relative to the base model, with ablations supporting the training recipe. It also achieves the highest average CompColor score among the compared methods.

Grokking at the Edge of Numerical Stability

Grokking, the sudden generalization that occurs after prolonged overfitting, is a surprising phenomenon challenging our understanding of deep learning. Although significant progress has been made in understanding grokking, the reasons behind the delayed generalization and its dependence on regularization remain unclear. In this work, we argue that without regularization, grokking tasks push models to the edge of numerical stability, introducing floating point errors in the Softmax function, which we refer to as Softmax Collapse (SC). We demonstrate that SC prevents grokking and that mitigating SC enables grokking without regularization. Investigating the root cause of SC, we find that beyond the point of overfitting, the gradients strongly align with what we call the na\"ive loss minimization (NLM) direction. This component of the gradient does not alter the model's predictions but decreases the loss by scaling the logits, typically by scaling the weights along their current direction. We show that this scaling of the logits explains the delay in generalization characteristic of grokking and eventually leads to SC, halting further learning. To validate our hypotheses, we introduce two key contributions that address the challenges in grokking tasks: StableMax, a new activation function that prevents SC and enables grokking without regularization, and perpGrad, a training algorithm that promotes quick generalization in grokking tasks by preventing NLM altogether. These contributions provide new insights into grokking, elucidating its delayed generalization, reliance on regularization, and the effectiveness of existing grokking-inducing methods. Code for this paper is available at https://github.com/LucasPrietoAl/grokking-at-the-edge-of-numerical-stability.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 8, 2025

MapDiffusion: Generative Diffusion for Vectorized Online HD Map Construction and Uncertainty Estimation in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving requires an understanding of the static environment from sensor data. Learned Bird's-Eye View (BEV) encoders are commonly used to fuse multiple inputs, and a vector decoder predicts a vectorized map representation from the latent BEV grid. However, traditional map construction models provide deterministic point estimates, failing to capture uncertainty and the inherent ambiguities of real-world environments, such as occlusions and missing lane markings. We propose MapDiffusion, a novel generative approach that leverages the diffusion paradigm to learn the full distribution of possible vectorized maps. Instead of predicting a single deterministic output from learned queries, MapDiffusion iteratively refines randomly initialized queries, conditioned on a BEV latent grid, to generate multiple plausible map samples. This allows aggregating samples to improve prediction accuracy and deriving uncertainty estimates that directly correlate with scene ambiguity. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that MapDiffusion achieves state-of-the-art performance in online map construction, surpassing the baseline by 5% in single-sample performance. We further show that aggregating multiple samples consistently improves performance along the ROC curve, validating the benefit of distribution modeling. Additionally, our uncertainty estimates are significantly higher in occluded areas, reinforcing their value in identifying regions with ambiguous sensor input. By modeling the full map distribution, MapDiffusion enhances the robustness and reliability of online vectorized HD map construction, enabling uncertainty-aware decision-making for autonomous vehicles in complex environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025

Unveiling User Perceptions in the Generative AI Era: A Sentiment-Driven Evaluation of AI Educational Apps' Role in Digital Transformation of e-Teaching

The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence into education has driven digital transformation in e-teaching, yet user perceptions of AI educational apps remain underexplored. This study performs a sentiment-driven evaluation of user reviews from top AI ed-apps on the Google Play Store to assess efficacy, challenges, and pedagogical implications. Our pipeline involved scraping app data and reviews, RoBERTa for binary sentiment classification, GPT-4o for key point extraction, and GPT-5 for synthesizing top positive/negative themes. Apps were categorized into seven types (e.g., homework helpers, math solvers, language tools), with overlaps reflecting multifunctional designs. Results indicate predominantly positive sentiments, with homework apps like Edu AI (95.9% positive) and Answer.AI (92.7%) leading in accuracy, speed, and personalization, while language/LMS apps (e.g., Teacher AI at 21.8% positive) lag due to instability and limited features. Positives emphasize efficiency in brainstorming, problem-solving, and engagement; negatives center on paywalls, inaccuracies, ads, and glitches. Trends show that homework helpers outperform specialized tools, highlighting AI's democratizing potential amid risks of dependency and inequity. The discussion proposes future ecosystems with hybrid AI-human models, VR/AR for immersive learning, and a roadmap for developers (adaptive personalization) and policymakers (monetization regulation for inclusivity). This underscores generative AI's role in advancing e-teaching by enabling ethical refinements that foster equitable, innovative environments. The full dataset is available here(https://github.com/erfan-nourbakhsh/GenAI-EdSent).

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 12, 2025 1

TeLLMe v2: An Efficient End-to-End Ternary LLM Prefill and Decode Accelerator with Table-Lookup Matmul on Edge FPGAs

With the emergence of wearable devices and other embedded systems, deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge platforms has become an urgent need. However, this is challenging because of their high computational and memory demands. Although recent low-bit quantization methods (e.g., BitNet, DeepSeek) compress weights to as low as 1.58~bits with minimal accuracy loss, edge deployment is still constrained by limited on-chip resources, power budgets, and the often-neglected long latency of the prefill stage. We present TeLLMe, the first table-lookup-based ternary LLM accelerator for low-power edge FPGAs that fully supports both prefill and autoregressive decoding using 1.58-bit weights and 8-bit activations. TeLLMe incorporates several novel techniques, including (1) a table-lookup-based ternary matrix multiplication (TLMM) engine utilizing grouped activations and online precomputation for low resource utilization and high throughput; (2) a fine-grained analytic URAM-based weight buffer management scheme for efficient loading and compute engine access; (3) a streaming dataflow architecture that fuses floating-point element-wise operations with linear computations to hide latency; (4) a reversed-reordered prefill stage attention with fused attention operations for high memory efficiency; and (5) a resource-efficient specialized decoding stage attention. Under a 5~W power budget, TeLLMe delivers up to 25~tokens/s decoding throughput and 0.45--0.96~s time-to-first-token (TTFT) for 64--128 token prompts, marking a significant energy-efficiency advancement in LLM inference on edge FPGAs.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 3, 2025

Measuring the Symmetry--Data Exchange Rate

Equivariance theory predicts that an architectural symmetry prior reduces sample complexity by a factor of |G|; this is widely cited but rarely measured as a scaling law with controls that separate the prior from its confounds. On a controlled C_n-symmetric task, we report three findings. First, a wrong-group control with identical orbit size and matched compute is worse than no constraint (joint pairwise CI [+0.79, +3.26] excludes zero, robust across estimators); misaligned constraint is actively harmful, not merely unhelpful. Second, an augmentation baseline equipped with test-time orbit averaging matches the equivariant model exactly -- bit-identical per-epoch validation curves across matched cells -- so the architecture-vs-augmentation gap is conditional on asymmetric test-time computation, not unconditional. Third, the relative exchange rate beta_diff = 1.28 is consistent in sign and order of magnitude with the theoretical 1.0 (single-level CI [+0.92, +2.05]); the more conservative two-level bootstrap (seeds x group sizes) widens this to [-0.63, +1.72], including zero, and a finer-N replication on a sqrt(2)-spaced grid is inconclusive (point estimate -0.82). The methodological contributions -- the relative-rate estimator that cancels the shared-difficulty confound, the wrong-group control, and a pre-specified failure taxonomy -- transfer to any inductive bias whose strength can be parameterised. Honest scoping: the primary estimator beta_diff was adopted post-hoc after the initial analysis revealed a positive-slope identifiability problem; the design was never externally pre-registered; and the headline number rests on an OLS slope over seven group sizes on a coarse N grid. This is an exploratory study, not a confirmatory measurement; the wrong-group result is the cleanest finding and the one we report with the most confidence. A registered replication on fresh seeds is future work.

  • 1 authors
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May 30 2

Measuring Faithfulness Depends on How You Measure: Classifier Sensitivity in LLM Chain-of-Thought Evaluation

Recent work on chain-of-thought (CoT) faithfulness reports single aggregate numbers (e.g., DeepSeek-R1 acknowledges hints 39% of the time), implying that faithfulness is an objective, measurable property of a model. This paper demonstrates that it is not. Three classifiers (a regex-only detector, a two-stage regex-plus-LLM pipeline, and an independent Claude Sonnet 4 judge) are applied to 10,276 influenced reasoning traces from 12 open-weight models spanning 9 families and 7B to 1T parameters. On identical data, these classifiers produce overall faithfulness rates of 74.4%, 82.6%, and 69.7%, respectively, with non-overlapping 95% confidence intervals. Per-model gaps range from 2.6 to 30.6 percentage points; all are statistically significant (McNemar's test, p < 0.001). The disagreements are systematic, not random: inter-classifier agreement measured by Cohen's kappa ranges from 0.06 ("slight") for sycophancy hints to 0.42 ("moderate") for grader hints, and the asymmetry is pronounced: for sycophancy, 883 cases are classified as faithful by the pipeline but unfaithful by the Sonnet judge, while only 2 go the other direction. Classifier choice can also reverse model rankings: Qwen3.5-27B ranks 1st under the pipeline but 7th under the Sonnet judge; OLMo-3.1-32B moves in the opposite direction, from 9th to 3rd. The root cause is that different classifiers operationalize related faithfulness constructs at different levels of stringency (lexical mention versus epistemic dependence), and these constructs yield divergent measurements on the same behavior. These results demonstrate that published faithfulness numbers cannot be meaningfully compared across studies that use different classifiers, and that future evaluations should report sensitivity ranges across multiple classification methodologies rather than single point estimates.

  • 1 authors
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Mar 20

Revisiting Cross-View Completion: Self-Supervised Pre-Training via Reconstruction Error Comparison

Self-supervised pre-training via cross-view completion learns strong features for 3D vision from co-visible regions of image pairs. However, the reference view provides little information for reconstructing non-co-visible patches, implicitly yielding a monocular training signal in these regions. We introduce Gekko, which turns this limitation into a useful signal. The relative improvement of the cross-view reconstruction error over a masked-autoencoder error is a self-supervised proxy for co-visibility: large improvements indicate co-visible regions, negligible ones non-co-visible areas. Gekko is a network, trained from scratch, that jointly performs cross-view completion, masked autoencoding, and per-pixel prediction of this relative improvement, providing an additional binocular signal for all masked regions without any ground-truth 3D annotation. Under identical architectures and training data, Gekko consistently outperforms CroCo on zero-shot correspondence estimation, relative pose estimation, and pointmap regression, with up to 6 times higher accuracy at the strictest relative-pose threshold and a 22% drop in end-point error on ETH3D. The extra channel it learns is itself a strong co-visibility detector on unseen scenes, and Gekko's frozen features outperform released cross-view backbones of comparable or larger size. It can also be trained directly from raw videos with a simple stride-based curriculum, removing the cumbersome 3D preprocessing prior methods require while matching models trained on curated data. Code and pre-trained models are publicly available.

  • 3 authors
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Aug 31

openJiuwen: Beyond Static Harnesses for Long-Horizon Coding Agents

Long-horizon coding agents operate over evolving repository states while increasingly relying on heterogeneous capabilities, delegated agents, and multi-agent coordination. These trends pose two complementary challenges for the agent harness. First, developers need to compose capabilities, reconfigure execution logic, and scale increasingly complex agent systems without repeatedly rebuilding orchestration. Second, complex coding tasks continuously produce new evidence---such as semantic diagnostics, execution outcomes, task progress, and changing context relevance---that should dynamically influence subsequent runtime decisions. We characterize these challenges as Structural Composability and Runtime Adaptivity. We present openJiuwen, an open-source harness designed for both developer composability and adaptive task execution. openJiuwen provides a shared execution substrate and Rail-based capability composition across single agents, delegated sub-agents, and Swarm Flow, enabling developers to construct sophisticated agent harnesses under common execution semantics. It further adapts framework-controlled runtime decisions around a fixed model policy, allowing evolving evidence to dynamically affect context, feedback, and task control toward successful completion. We systematically evaluate openJiuwen on SWE-bench Verified and Terminal-Bench 2.1, where it achieves 82.6% and 87.19%, respectively, exceeding the strongest selected official-leaderboard point estimates by 3.4 and 3.39 percentage points. These results show that openJiuwen achieves strong performance on complex coding tasks while providing a composable and adaptive harness design.

  • 20 authors
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Aug 27

A UAV-Based VNIR Hyperspectral Benchmark Dataset for Landmine and UXO Detection

This paper introduces a novel benchmark dataset of Visible and Near-Infrared (VNIR) hyperspectral imagery acquired via an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform for landmine and unexploded ordnance (UXO) detection research. The dataset was collected over a controlled test field seeded with 143 realistic surrogate landmine and UXO targets, including surface, partially buried, and fully buried configurations. Data acquisition was performed using a Headwall Nano-Hyperspec sensor mounted on a multi-sensor drone platform, flown at an altitude of approximately 20.6 m, capturing 270 contiguous spectral bands spanning 398-1002 nm. Radiometric calibration, orthorectification, and mosaicking were performed followed by reflectance retrieval using a two-point Empirical Line Method (ELM), with reference spectra acquired using an SVC spectroradiometer. Cross-validation against six reference objects yielded RMSE values below 1.0 and SAM values between 1 and 6 degrees in the 400-900 nm range, demonstrating high spectral fidelity. The dataset is released alongside raw radiance cubes, GCP/AeroPoint data, and reference spectra to support reproducible research. This contribution fills a critical gap in open-access UAV-based hyperspectral data for landmine detection and offers a multi-sensor benchmark when combined with previously published drone-based electromagnetic induction (EMI) data from the same test field.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 2, 2025

A Probabilistic Perspective on Unlearning and Alignment for Large Language Models

Comprehensive evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is an open research problem. Existing evaluations rely on deterministic point estimates generated via greedy decoding. However, we find that deterministic evaluations fail to capture the whole output distribution of a model, yielding inaccurate estimations of model capabilities. This is particularly problematic in critical contexts such as unlearning and alignment, where precise model evaluations are crucial. To remedy this, we introduce the first formal probabilistic evaluation framework for LLMs. Namely, we propose novel metrics with high probability guarantees concerning the output distribution of a model. Our metrics are application-independent and allow practitioners to make more reliable estimates about model capabilities before deployment. Our experimental analysis reveals that deterministic evaluations falsely indicate successful unlearning and alignment, whereas our probabilistic evaluations better capture model capabilities. We show how to overcome challenges associated with probabilistic outputs in a case study on unlearning by introducing (1) a novel loss based on entropy optimization, and (2) adaptive temperature scaling. We demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances unlearning in probabilistic settings on recent benchmarks. Overall, our proposed shift from point estimates to probabilistic evaluations of output distributions represents an important step toward comprehensive evaluations of LLMs. Code available at https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/daml/probabilistic-unlearning/.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 28, 2025

Fourier is Frontier: Frequency-Aware Autoencoding for High-Fidelity Music Reconstruction

Continuous-latent audio autoencoders form the backbone of latent music generators, yet decoders at high compression rates commonly exhibit three failure modes: high-frequency loss, phase incoherence, and stereo-image collapse. These share a structural root: waveform autoencoders lack an explicit frequency axis, leaving no handle for targeted per-band correction. Among five matched-budget representations, the complex STFT achieves the lowest full-band and high-frequency spectral distances, providing direct access to magnitude and phase at every bin. Building on this, we present ear-VAE2, a complex-spectral autoencoder with cross-channel interaction. Spec-SnakeBeta learns a periodic activation per frequency bin with frequency-dependent initialization, outperforming other activation variants while using fewer parameters than the fully independent variant. Duplex-Aware Refiner applies band-specific corrections to magnitude and phase following duplex theory of sound localization. On the 546-track Song Describer Dataset, ear-VAE2 achieves the best point estimates on five of seven reconstruction metrics. The Duplex-Aware Refiner reduces Mel Distance by 19.4% and uses ~45% fewer residual-output dimensions than the Unconstrained Refiner, while also lowering spectral distances, spatial-cue errors, and receiving higher ratings from professional engineers. The downstream generator using ear-VAE2 latents achieves better point estimates on all 12 automatic metrics.Demo page is available at https://eps-acoustic-revolution-lab.github.io/EAR_VAE2/.

  • 3 authors
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Aug 19

Adapting Without Gradients: Affine Statistics Transport and What Its Certificate Can Tell You

Test-time adaptation (TTA) typically assumes that model parameters can be updated at inference time. This assumption is restrictive for inference-only accelerators, frozen or third-party models, and memory-constrained deployments, and standard BatchNorm-based TTA configurations may also become inactive on architectures without BatchNorm. We study adaptation when the learned model must remain frozen. We introduce CASTER, a gradient-free method that stores source class statistics in a discriminative subspace, estimates a class-shared affine transformation from target-batch moments, and analytically transports the source class distributions before classification. CASTER requires no backward pass, optimizer state, or stored source feature bank. Across four backbones and seven datasets, it outperforms k-NN on identical frozen features in 27 of 28 backbone-dataset settings while retaining a median of 18x less state. Affine transport is not always reliable. On ImageNet-C, where batches contain only 64 samples for 1000 classes, unconditional transport loses 21.2 top-1 points. We therefore introduce an empirical residual-to-margin transportability certificate. Across 307 evaluation cells, every transport losing more than 10 points has certificate value above 3.9, although benign and destructive regimes are not perfectly separated. Gating converts an average -3.35-point effect of unconditional transport into a +1.69-point gain, and performance remains within 0.3 points of the best threshold over a broad threshold range. Finally, we show that this certificate is mechanism-specific: when applied to Tent, it accepts only 4.3% of updates and preserves 0.6% of Tent's available gain. These results position CASTER as a lightweight adaptation mechanism for frozen-model deployment, together with an explicit account of when its safety signal is informative and when it is not.

Talan Talan
·
Aug 30 2

COMI: Coarse-to-fine Context Compression via Marginal Information Gain

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks. However, their deployment in long context scenarios remains hindered by computational inefficiency and information redundancy. Context compression methods address these challenges by significantly reducing input length and eliminating redundancy. We propose COMI, a coarse-to-fine adaptive context compression framework that jointly optimizes for semantic relevance and diversity under high compression rates. We introduce Marginal Information Gain (MIG), a metric defined as the relevance of a unit to the input query minus its semantic redundancy with other units, guiding the compression process to prioritize information that is both relevant and low redundant. The framework operates in two stages: (1) Coarse-Grained Group Reallocation, where the context is partitioned into groups and dynamically assigned compression rates based on inter-group MIG, ensuring compression budgets align with information value distribution; and (2) Fine-Grained Token Merging, where tokens within each group are fused via an intra-group MIG-based weighting mechanism, thereby preserving key semantics while avoiding the accumulation of redundancy. Extensive experiments across question-answering (e.g., NaturalQuestions, 2WikiMQA, HotpotQA and NarrativeQA), summarization (e.g., MultiNews) with various backbones (e.g., LLaMA-2-7B, Qwen2-7B) show that COMI outperforms existing baselines by a large margin, e.g., approximately 25-point Exact Match (EM) improvement under 32x compression constraint with Qwen2-7B on NaturalQuestions.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 2

Beyond Gene Reconstruction: Learning Cell Representations through Complementary Transcriptomic Views

The rapid growth of single-cell transcriptomic data has enabled the development of foundation models pretrained primarily by reconstructing masked expression values. This objective encourages these models to learn gene dependencies but does not directly optimize whole-cell representations, which are essential for many downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose a contrastive pretraining framework that learns cell representations through complementary transcriptomic views. Since standard contrastive learning is not readily applicable to single-cell pretraining, we introduce specific adaptations along three dimensions --- co-expression-guided gene partitioning, expression-aware contrast-set construction, and competence-gated contrastive onset. Specifically, we first construct two complementary views of each cell by partitioning its genes according to their co-expression structure. Then, to prevent the model from using gene-set identity as a shortcut, we construct hard negatives by permuting expression values while keeping gene identities unchanged. Finally, we introduce a competence-aware controller to determine how the contrastive objective is applied. Experiments on cell-type annotation and gene regulatory network inference demonstrate competitive transfer under the evaluated protocols. In the six-network GRN evaluation, our method records the highest mean AUROC and AUPRC point estimates among the compared variants, while the highest-scoring variant differs across individual networks. These results establish complementary-view contrastive learning as an effective direction for single-cell pretraining beyond gene reconstruction.

  • 6 authors
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Aug 1

Points-to-3D: Bridging the Gap between Sparse Points and Shape-Controllable Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation has recently garnered significant attention, fueled by 2D diffusion models trained on billions of image-text pairs. Existing methods primarily rely on score distillation to leverage the 2D diffusion priors to supervise the generation of 3D models, e.g., NeRF. However, score distillation is prone to suffer the view inconsistency problem, and implicit NeRF modeling can also lead to an arbitrary shape, thus leading to less realistic and uncontrollable 3D generation. In this work, we propose a flexible framework of Points-to-3D to bridge the gap between sparse yet freely available 3D points and realistic shape-controllable 3D generation by distilling the knowledge from both 2D and 3D diffusion models. The core idea of Points-to-3D is to introduce controllable sparse 3D points to guide the text-to-3D generation. Specifically, we use the sparse point cloud generated from the 3D diffusion model, Point-E, as the geometric prior, conditioned on a single reference image. To better utilize the sparse 3D points, we propose an efficient point cloud guidance loss to adaptively drive the NeRF's geometry to align with the shape of the sparse 3D points. In addition to controlling the geometry, we propose to optimize the NeRF for a more view-consistent appearance. To be specific, we perform score distillation to the publicly available 2D image diffusion model ControlNet, conditioned on text as well as depth map of the learned compact geometry. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate that Points-to-3D improves view consistency and achieves good shape controllability for text-to-3D generation. Points-to-3D provides users with a new way to improve and control text-to-3D generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 25, 2023

SkipOPU: An FPGA-based Overlay Processor for Large Language Models with Dynamically Allocated Computation

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their inference efficiency remains a critical bottleneck due to rapidly growing parameters. Recent advances in dynamic computation allocation address this challenge by exploiting the highly uneven contributions of different tokens and layers, enabling selective execution that significantly reduces redundant computation while preserving model accuracy. However, existing hardware platforms and accelerators are primarily optimized for uniform, static execution, limiting their ability to efficiently support such dynamic inference patterns. In this work, we propose SkipOPU, an FPGA-based overlay processor that dynamically allocates computation across tokens and layers with high flexibility through a lightweight routing mechanism. First, we decouple reduction operations from element-wise computation in nonlinear modules and perform reductions incrementally, which enables both stages to be fused with adjacent linear operations (router or matrix multiplication) for effective latency hiding. Second, motivated by asymmetric sensitivity to numerical precision between activation and weight, we design a PE array that efficiently supports float-fixed hybrid execution. A novel DSP overpacking technique is introduced to maximize hardware utilization while minimizing resource overhead. Finally, we develop a proactive on-chip KV history buffer that exploits cross-layer KV invariance of pruned tokens, eliminating irregular HBM accesses during decoding and supplementing off-chip bandwidth through high-locality on-chip reuse. Experimental results demonstrate that SkipOPU on an AMD U280 FPGA outperforms GPU and other FPGA-based accelerators by 1.23x-3.83x in bandwidth efficiency for LLMs inference with dynamic computation allocation and can reduce up to 25.4% KV storage overhead across varying sequence lengths.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 15

The Compliance Trap: Diagnosing How AI Agents Consume Conflicting Memory

Memory is becoming a core component of long-horizon AI agents, allowing agents to reuse past experience when operating web browsers, software tools, and other interactive environments. Existing work mostly treats memory as a supply problem, asking what experience to write, how to store it, and which entry to retrieve for the next task. Yet we still lack a clear account of how models consume retrieved memory across a multi-step action trajectory. This consumption process matters because it determines not only what memories should be retrieved, but also what models and control policies are needed to use them safely. To diagnose this process, we propose Entry--Propagation--Recovery (E-P-R), a trajectory-level framework that asks where memory first changes an action, whether that change carries forward, and whether the agent can recover after leaving a correct path. We instantiate E-P-R on WebArena and on MemTrapBench, a controlled benchmark we build to isolate these phases. We find that the main failure often begins at entry: agents adopt conflicting memory at the first exposed decision point even when it is task-wrong. Repeated exposure then amplifies this early error, while recovery after divergence is weak. Together, these effects create a compliance trap: across models, conflicting memory induces similar compliance rates, but once agents comply, their success rates collapse to a low floor. Stronger agents therefore suffer larger absolute damage because each compliance event erases more baseline capability. These results suggest that memory-augmented agents should be evaluated not only by retrieval quality or final success rate, but by how they consume memory throughout the trajectory.

  • 3 authors
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Jul 11

SuperMapNet for Long-Range and High-Accuracy Vectorized HD Map Construction

Vectorized HD map is essential for autonomous driving. Remarkable work has been achieved in recent years, but there are still major issues: (1) in the generation of the BEV features, single modality-based methods are of limited perception capability, while direct concatenation-based multi-modal methods fail to capture synergies and disparities between different modalities, resulting in limited ranges with feature holes; (2) in the classification and localization of map elements, only point information is used without the consideration of element infor-mation and neglects the interaction between point information and element information, leading to erroneous shapes and element entanglement with low accuracy. To address above issues, we introduce SuperMapNet for long-range and high-accuracy vectorized HD map construction. It uses both camera images and LiDAR point clouds as input, and first tightly couple semantic information from camera images and geometric information from LiDAR point clouds by a cross-attention based synergy enhancement module and a flow-based disparity alignment module for long-range BEV feature generation. And then, local features from point queries and global features from element queries are tightly coupled by three-level interactions for high-accuracy classification and localization, where Point2Point interaction learns local geometric information between points of the same element and of each point, Element2Element interaction learns relation constraints between different elements and semantic information of each elements, and Point2Element interaction learns complement element information for its constituent points. Experiments on the nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets demonstrate superior performances, surpassing SOTAs over 14.9/8.8 mAP and 18.5/3.1 mAP under hard/easy settings, respectively. The code is made publicly available1.

  • 6 authors
·
May 19, 2025

Factions Within, Uncertain Across: Within-Document Reader Sub-Groups in Social Highlighting

When many people highlight the same document, is the crowd a single consensus, or is it internally structured into reader sub-groups that mark different things -- and is that structure a stable property of a reader or of the document? Building on prior work showing an individual's within-document highlighting signal is a whisper while individuality lives in selection, we ask the group-level question on a co-readership platform using a margin-preserving curveball null. Experiment 1: within a document, readers form strong sub-groups -- pairs agree far beyond what shared salience, mark density, and sentence popularity predict (nearest-neighbour agreement z=+6.3, significant in 88% of documents). Under an eight-block region-preserving null, shared engagement with the same coarse regions of the document accounts for about 40% of this excess; the majority survives as finer reader-specific agreement (z=+3.6, 77% significant). So the within-document crowd is, in a descriptive sense, factional. Experiment 2: is that grouping a stable reader trait? Here we are honest about power. The cross-document split-half reproducibility of a pair's agreement is near zero pooled (+0.078 and 0.000 in two separately drawn samples), and a power calibration shows the test is informative only for pairs that co-read many documents. In the only informative high-overlap subset (k>=4), point estimates are positive but small-sample, imprecise across the separately drawn samples, never significant, and attenuate under the region-preserving null. We therefore leave cross-document stability unresolved: the data is consistent with anything from situational grouping to a weak-to-moderate stable reader trait. The crowd is factional within a document; whether its factions follow the reader across documents is, honestly, beyond our reach.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 9 1

The Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) Dataset and Community Challenges

Catalyst discovery and optimization is key to solving many societal and energy challenges including solar fuels synthesis, long-term energy storage, and renewable fertilizer production. Despite considerable effort by the catalysis community to apply machine learning models to the computational catalyst discovery process, it remains an open challenge to build models that can generalize across both elemental compositions of surfaces and adsorbate identity/configurations, perhaps because datasets have been smaller in catalysis than related fields. To address this we developed the OC20 dataset, consisting of 1,281,040 Density Functional Theory (DFT) relaxations (~264,890,000 single point evaluations) across a wide swath of materials, surfaces, and adsorbates (nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen chemistries). We supplemented this dataset with randomly perturbed structures, short timescale molecular dynamics, and electronic structure analyses. The dataset comprises three central tasks indicative of day-to-day catalyst modeling and comes with pre-defined train/validation/test splits to facilitate direct comparisons with future model development efforts. We applied three state-of-the-art graph neural network models (CGCNN, SchNet, Dimenet++) to each of these tasks as baseline demonstrations for the community to build on. In almost every task, no upper limit on model size was identified, suggesting that even larger models are likely to improve on initial results. The dataset and baseline models are both provided as open resources, as well as a public leader board to encourage community contributions to solve these important tasks.

  • 17 authors
·
Oct 19, 2020

LighthouseGS: Indoor Structure-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting for Panorama-Style Mobile Captures

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled real-time novel view synthesis (NVS) with impressive quality in indoor scenes. However, achieving high-fidelity rendering requires meticulously captured images covering the entire scene, limiting accessibility for general users. We aim to develop a practical 3DGS-based NVS framework using simple panorama-style motion with a handheld camera (e.g., mobile device). While convenient, this rotation-dominant motion and narrow baseline make accurate camera pose and 3D point estimation challenging, especially in textureless indoor scenes. To address these challenges, we propose LighthouseGS, a novel framework inspired by the lighthouse-like sweeping motion of panoramic views. LighthouseGS leverages rough geometric priors, such as mobile device camera poses and monocular depth estimation, and utilizes the planar structures often found in indoor environments. We present a new initialization method called plane scaffold assembly to generate consistent 3D points on these structures, followed by a stable pruning strategy to enhance geometry and optimization stability. Additionally, we introduce geometric and photometric corrections to resolve inconsistencies from motion drift and auto-exposure in mobile devices. Tested on collected real and synthetic indoor scenes, LighthouseGS delivers photorealistic rendering, surpassing state-of-the-art methods and demonstrating the potential for panoramic view synthesis and object placement.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 8, 2025

Tackling Incomplete Data in Air Quality Prediction: A Bayesian Deep Learning Framework for Uncertainty Quantification

Accurate air quality forecasts are vital for public health alerts, exposure assessment, and emissions control. In practice, observational data are often missing in varying proportions and patterns due to collection and transmission issues. These incomplete spatiotemporal records impede reliable inference and risk assessment and can lead to overconfident extrapolation. To address these challenges, we propose an end to end framework, the channel gated learning unit based spatiotemporal bayesian neural field (CGLUBNF). It uses Fourier features with a graph attention encoder to capture multiscale spatial dependencies and seasonal temporal dynamics. A channel gated learning unit, equipped with learnable activations and gated residual connections, adaptively filters and amplifies informative features. Bayesian inference jointly optimizes predictive distributions and parameter uncertainty, producing point estimates and calibrated prediction intervals. We conduct a systematic evaluation on two real world datasets, covering four typical missing data patterns and comparing against five state of the art baselines. CGLUBNF achieves superior prediction accuracy and sharper confidence intervals. In addition, we further validate robustness across multiple prediction horizons and analysis the contribution of extraneous variables. This research lays a foundation for reliable deep learning based spatio-temporal forecasting with incomplete observations in emerging sensing paradigms, such as real world vehicle borne mobile monitoring.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 3, 2025

REMIND: Input Loss Landscapes Reveal Residual Memorization in Post-Unlearning LLMs

Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data from a model without requiring full retraining. This capability is crucial for ensuring privacy, safety, and regulatory compliance. Therefore, verifying whether a model has truly forgotten target data is essential for maintaining reliability and trustworthiness. However, existing evaluation methods often assess forgetting at the level of individual inputs. This approach may overlook residual influence present in semantically similar examples. Such influence can compromise privacy and lead to indirect information leakage. We propose REMIND (Residual Memorization In Neighborhood Dynamics), a novel evaluation method aiming to detect the subtle remaining influence of unlearned data and classify whether the data has been effectively forgotten. REMIND analyzes the model's loss over small input variations and reveals patterns unnoticed by single-point evaluations. We show that unlearned data yield flatter, less steep loss landscapes, while retained or unrelated data exhibit sharper, more volatile patterns. REMIND requires only query-based access, outperforms existing methods under similar constraints, and demonstrates robustness across different models, datasets, and paraphrased inputs, making it practical for real-world deployment. By providing a more sensitive and interpretable measure of unlearning effectiveness, REMIND provides a reliable framework to assess unlearning in language models. As a result, REMIND offers a novel perspective on memorization and unlearning.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 5, 2025

MIST: Mutual Information Via Supervised Training

We propose a fully data-driven approach to designing mutual information (MI) estimators. Since any MI estimator is a function of the observed sample from two random variables, we parameterize this function with a neural network (MIST) and train it end-to-end to predict MI values. Training is performed on a large meta-dataset of 625,000 synthetic joint distributions with known ground-truth MI. To handle variable sample sizes and dimensions, we employ a two-dimensional attention scheme ensuring permutation invariance across input samples. To quantify uncertainty, we optimize a quantile regression loss, enabling the estimator to approximate the sampling distribution of MI rather than return a single point estimate. This research program departs from prior work by taking a fully empirical route, trading universal theoretical guarantees for flexibility and efficiency. Empirically, the learned estimators largely outperform classical baselines across sample sizes and dimensions, including on joint distributions unseen during training. The resulting quantile-based intervals are well-calibrated and more reliable than bootstrap-based confidence intervals, while inference is orders of magnitude faster than existing neural baselines. Beyond immediate empirical gains, this framework yields trainable, fully differentiable estimators that can be embedded into larger learning pipelines. Moreover, exploiting MI's invariance to invertible transformations, meta-datasets can be adapted to arbitrary data modalities via normalizing flows, enabling flexible training for diverse target meta-distributions.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 24, 2025 2

Deep priors for satellite image restoration with accurate uncertainties

Satellite optical images, upon their on-ground receipt, offer a distorted view of the observed scene. Their restoration, including denoising, deblurring, and sometimes super-resolution, is required before their exploitation. Moreover, quantifying the uncertainties related to this restoration helps to reduce the risks of misinterpreting the image content. Deep learning methods are now state-of-the-art for satellite image restoration. Among them, direct inversion methods train a specific network for each sensor, and generally provide a point estimation of the restored image without the associated uncertainties. Alternatively, deep regularization (DR) methods learn a deep prior on target images before plugging it, as the regularization term, into a model-based optimization scheme. This allows for restoring images from several sensors with a single network and possibly for estimating associated uncertainties. In this paper, we introduce VBLE-xz, a DR method that solves the inverse problem in the latent space of a variational compressive autoencoder (CAE). We adapt the regularization strength by modulating the bitrate of the trained CAE with a training-free approach. Then, VBLE-xz estimates relevant uncertainties jointly in the latent and in the image spaces by sampling an explicit posterior estimated within variational inference. This enables fast posterior sampling, unlike state-of-the-art DR methods that use Markov chains or diffusion-based approaches. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments on very high-resolution simulated and real Pléiades images, asserting the performance, robustness and scalability of the proposed method. They demonstrate that VBLE-xz represents a compelling alternative to direct inversion methods when uncertainty quantification is required. The code associated to this paper is available in https://github.com/MaudBqrd/VBLExz.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024

Operadic consistency: a label-free signal for compositional reasoning failures in LLMs

Detecting LLM reasoning failures at inference time without ground-truth labels has motivated a wide range of confidence baselines, including self-consistency, semantic entropy, and P(True), built on within-question sampling and self-evaluation. Operad theory, the formalism for systems built by iterated substitution, suggests a complementary diagnostic: a model's direct answer to a compositional query should agree with the answer it produces by composing a stated decomposition of the same query. We instantiate this idea as operadic consistency (OC), a per-question signal. Across twelve instruction-tuned LLMs (4B to 671B parameters, open-weights and closed-source) on four multi-hop QA datasets, OC is strongly correlated with accuracy on every dataset (Pearson r in [0.86, 0.94], all p leq 0.0004), and is the only signal we evaluate with r geq 0.85 uniformly across all four datasets. Chain-of-thought self-consistency (CoT-SC; Wang et al., 2023) matches OC on HotpotQA and DROP (r = 0.93, 0.87) but drops to r approx 0.45 on MuSiQue and StrategyQA. At the per-question level, OC contributes information beyond CoT-SC and semantic entropy on every dataset (cluster-robust p leq 10^{-16} for the OC coefficient), and the conclusion is robust to additionally controlling for constructed decomposition-aware baselines (p leq 10^{-13}). The same signal yields selective-prediction improvements (accuracy at fixed coverage) over a tuned CoT-SC baseline at the equal-cost K = 3 budget (AUARC lifts of +0.086 to +0.096 and AUROC lifts of +0.092 to +0.164; 95% CIs exclude zero on every cell). On five frontier thinking models, where the decomposition is extracted from the model's own chain of thought, the same equal-cost comparison gives positive selective-prediction point-estimate lift on all 16 (dataset, budget, metric) cells tested, with 95% CIs excluding zero on 12 of the 16.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 10

All You Need is a Second Look: Towards Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection

Arbitrary-shaped text detection is a challenging task since curved texts in the wild are of the complex geometric layouts. Existing mainstream methods follow the instance segmentation pipeline to obtain the text regions. However, arbitraryshaped texts are difficult to be depicted through one single segmentation network because of the varying scales. In this paper, we propose a two-stage segmentation-based detector, termed as NASK (Need A Second looK), for arbitrary-shaped text detection. Compared to the traditional single-stage segmentation network, our NASK conducts the detection in a coarse-to-fine manner with the first stage segmentation spotting the rectangle text proposals and the second one retrieving compact representations. Specifically, NASK is composed of a Text Instance Segmentation (TIS) network (1st stage), a Geometry-aware Text RoI Alignment (GeoAlign) module, and a Fiducial pOint eXpression (FOX) module (2nd stage). Firstly, TIS extracts the augmented features with a novel Group Spatial and Channel Attention (GSCA) module and conducts instance segmentation to obtain rectangle proposals. Then, GeoAlign converts these rectangles into the fixed size and encodes RoI-wise feature representation. Finally, FOX disintegrates the text instance into serval pivotal geometrical attributes to refine the detection results. Extensive experimental results on three public benchmarks including Total-Text, SCUTCTW1500, and ICDAR 2015 verify that our NASK outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 23, 2021

All you need is a second look: Towards Tighter Arbitrary shape text detection

Deep learning-based scene text detection methods have progressed substantially over the past years. However, there remain several problems to be solved. Generally, long curve text instances tend to be fragmented because of the limited receptive field size of CNN. Besides, simple representations using rectangle or quadrangle bounding boxes fall short when dealing with more challenging arbitrary-shaped texts. In addition, the scale of text instances varies greatly which leads to the difficulty of accurate prediction through a single segmentation network. To address these problems, we innovatively propose a two-stage segmentation based arbitrary text detector named NASK (Need A Second looK). Specifically, NASK consists of a Text Instance Segmentation network namely TIS (\(1^{st}\) stage), a Text RoI Pooling module and a Fiducial pOint eXpression module termed as FOX (\(2^{nd}\) stage). Firstly, TIS conducts instance segmentation to obtain rectangle text proposals with a proposed Group Spatial and Channel Attention module (GSCA) to augment the feature expression. Then, Text RoI Pooling transforms these rectangles to the fixed size. Finally, FOX is introduced to reconstruct text instances with a more tighter representation using the predicted geometrical attributes including text center line, text line orientation, character scale and character orientation. Experimental results on two public benchmarks including Total-Text and SCUT-CTW1500 have demonstrated that the proposed NASK achieves state-of-the-art results.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 26, 2020