OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
UIFace: Unleashing Inherent Model Capabilities to Enhance Intra-Class Diversity in Synthetic Face Recognition
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Face recognition (FR) stands as one of the most crucial applications in computer vision. The accuracy of FR models has significantly improved in recent years due to the availability of large-scale human face datasets. However, directly using these datasets can inevitably lead to privacy and legal problems. Generating synthetic data to train FR models is a feasible solution to circumvent these issues. While existing synthetic-based face recognition methods have made significant progress in generating identity-preserving images, they are severely plagued by context overfitting, resulting in a lack of intra-class diversity of generated images and poor face recognition performance. In this paper, we propose a framework to Unleash Inherent capability of the model to enhance intra-class diversity for synthetic face recognition, shortened as UIFace. Our framework first trains a diffusion model that can perform sampling conditioned on either identity contexts or a learnable empty context. The former generates identity-preserving images but lacks variations, while the latter exploits the model's intrinsic ability to synthesize intra-class-diversified images but with random identities. Then we adopt a novel two-stage sampling strategy during inference to fully leverage the strengths of both types of contexts, resulting in images that are diverse as well as identitypreserving. Moreover, an attention injection module is introduced to further augment the intra-class variations by utilizing attention maps from the empty context to guide the sampling process in ID-conditioned generation. Experiments show that our method significantly surpasses previous approaches with even less training data and half the size of synthetic dataset. The proposed UIFace even achieves comparable performance with FR models trained on real datasets when we further increase the number of synthetic identities.
Mm-Embed: Universal Multimodal Retrieval with Multimodal LLMS
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

State-of-the-art retrieval models typically address a straightforward search scenario, in which retrieval tasks are fixed (e.g., finding a passage to answer a specific question) and only a single modality is supported for both queries and retrieved results. This paper introduces techniques for advancing information retrieval with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), enabling a broader search scenario, termed universal multimodal retrieval, where multiple modalities and diverse retrieval tasks are accommodated. To this end, we first study fine-tuning an MLLM as a bi-encoder retriever on 10 datasets with 16 retrieval tasks. Our empirical results show that the fine-tuned MLLM retriever is capable of understanding challenging queries, composed of both text and image, but it underperforms compared to a smaller CLIP retriever in cross-modal retrieval tasks due to the modality bias exhibited by MLLMs. To address the issue, we propose modality-aware hard negative mining to mitigate the modality bias exhibited by MLLM retrievers. Second, we propose continuously fine-tuning the universal multimodal retriever to enhance its text retrieval capability while preserving multimodal retrieval capability. As a result, our model, MM-Embed, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the multimodal retrieval benchmark M-BEIR, which spans multiple domains and tasks, while also surpassing the state-of-the-art text retrieval model, NV-Embed-v1, on the MTEB retrieval benchmark. We also explore prompting the off-the-shelf MLLMs as zero-shot rerankers to refine the ranking of the candidates from the multimodal retriever. We find that, through prompt-and-reranking, MLLMs can further improve multimodal retrieval when the user queries (e.g., text-image composed queries) are more complex and challenging to understand. These findings also pave the way for advancing universal multimodal retrieval in the future.
SAMRefiner: Taming Segment Anything Model for Universal Mask Refinement
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we explore a principal way to enhance the quality of widely pre-existing coarse masks, enabling them to serve as reliable training data for segmentation models to reduce the annotation cost. In contrast to prior refinement techniques that are tailored to specific models or tasks in a close-world manner, we propose SAMRefiner, a universal and efficient approach by adapting SAM to the mask refinement task. The core technique of our model is the noise-tolerant prompting scheme. Specifically, we introduce a multi-prompt excavation strategy to mine diverse input prompts for SAM (i.e., distance-guided points, context-aware elastic bounding boxes, and Gaussian-style masks) from initial coarse masks. These prompts can collaborate with each other to mitigate the effect of defects in coarse masks. In particular, considering the difficulty of SAM to handle the multi-object case in semantic segmentation, we introduce a split-then-merge (STM) pipeline. Additionally, we extend our method to SAMRefiner++ by introducing an additional IoU adaption step to further boost the performance of the generic SAMRefiner on the target dataset. This step is self-boosted and requires no additional annotation. The proposed framework is versatile and can flexibly cooperate with existing segmentation methods. We evaluate our mask framework on a wide range of benchmarks under different settings, demonstrating better accuracy and efficiency. SAMRefiner holds significant potential to expedite the evolution of refinement tools. Our code is available at https://github.com/linyq2117/SAMRefiner.
OmniPhysGS: 3D Constitutive Gaussians for General Physics-Based Dynamics Generation
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Recently, significant advancements have been made in the reconstruction and generation of 3D assets, including static cases and those with physical interactions. To recover the physical properties of 3D assets, existing methods typically assume that all materials belong to a specific predefined category (e.g., elasticity). However, such assumptions ignore the complex composition of multiple heterogeneous objects in real scenarios and tend to render less physically plausible animation given a wider range of objects. We propose OmniPhysGS for synthesizing a physics-based 3D dynamic scene composed of more general objects. A key design of OmniPhysGS is treating each 3D asset as a collection of constitutive 3D Gaussians. For each Gaussian, its physical material is represented by an ensemble of 12 physical domain-expert sub-models (rubber, metal, honey, water, etc.), which greatly enhances the flexibility of the proposed model. In the implementation, we define a scene by user-specified prompts and supervise the estimation of material weighting factors via a pretrained video diffusion model. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that OmniPhysGS achieves more general and realistic physical dynamics across a broader spectrum of materials, including elastic, viscoelastic, plastic, and fluid substances, as well as interactions between different materials. Our method surpasses existing methods by approximately 3% to 16% in metrics of visual quality and text alignment.
TFG-Flow: Training-free Guidance in Multimodal Generative Flow
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Given an unconditional generative model and a predictor for a target property (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. As a highly efficient technique for steering generative models toward flexible outcomes, training-free guidance has gained increasing attention in diffusion models. However, existing methods only handle data in continuous spaces, while many scientific applications involve both continuous and discrete data (referred to as multimodality). Another emerging trend is the growing use of the simple and general flow matching framework in building generative foundation models, where guided generation remains under-explored. To address this, we introduce TFG-Flow, a novel training-free guidance method for multimodal generative flow. TFG-Flow addresses the curse-of-dimensionality while maintaining the property of unbiased sampling in guiding discrete variables. We validate TFG-Flow on four molecular design tasks and show that TFG-Flow has great potential in drug design by generating molecules with desired properties.
CTSyn: A Foundation Model for Cross Tabular Data Generation
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Generative Foundation Models (GFMs) have achieved remarkable success in producing high-quality synthetic data for images and text. However, their application to tabular data presents significant challenges due to the heterogeneous nature of table features. Current cross-table learning frameworks struggle because they lack a generative model backbone and an effective mechanism to decode heterogeneous feature values. To address these challenges, we propose the Cross-Table Synthesizer (CTSyn), a diffusion-based generative foundation model for tabular data generation. CTSyn comprises two key components. The first is an autoencoder network that consolidates diverse tables into a unified latent space. It dynamically reconstructs table values using a table schema embedding, allowing adaptation to heterogeneous datasets. The second is a conditional latent diffusion model that generates samples from the learned latent space, conditioned on the table schema. Through large-scale pre-training, CTSyn outperforms existing table synthesizers on standard benchmarks in both utility and diversity. These results position CTSyn as a promising framework for synthetic table generation and lay the groundwork for developing large-scale tabular foundation models.
Forgetting Transformer: Softmax Attention with a Forget Gate
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

An essential component of modern recurrent sequence models is the forget gate. While Transformers do not have an explicit recurrent form, we show that a forget gate can be naturally incorporated into Transformers by down-weighting the unnormalized attention scores in a data-dependent way. We name this attention mechanism Forgetting Attention and the resulting model the Forgetting Transformer (FoX). We show that FoX outperforms the Transformer on long-context language modeling, length extrapolation, and short-context downstream tasks, while performing on par with the Transformer on long-context downstream tasks. Moreover, it is compatible with the FlashAttention algorithm and does not require any positional embeddings. Several analyses, including the needle-in-the-haystack test, show that FoX also retains the Transformer's superior long-context capabilities over recurrent sequence models such as Mamba-2, HGRN2, and DeltaNet. We also introduce a "Pro" block design that incorporates some common architectural components in recurrent sequence models and find it significantly improves the performance of both FoX and the Transformer. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhixuan-lin/forgetting-transformer.
SiMHand: Mining Similar Hands for Large-Scale 3D Hand Pose Pre-training
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

We present a framework for pre-training of 3D hand pose estimation from in-the-wild hand images sharing with similar hand characteristics, dubbed SimHand. Pre-training with large-scale images achieves promising results in various tasks, but prior methods for 3D hand pose pre-training have not fully utilized the potential of diverse hand images accessible from in-the-wild videos. To facilitate scalable pre-training, we first prepare an extensive pool of hand images from in-the-wild videos and design our pre-training method with contrastive learning. Specifically, we collect over 2.0M hand images from recent human-centric videos, such as 100DOH and Ego4D. To extract discriminative information from these images, we focus on the similarity of hands: pairs of non-identical samples with similar hand poses. We then propose a novel contrastive learning method that embeds similar hand pairs closer in the feature space. Our method not only learns from similar samples but also adaptively weights the contrastive learning loss based on inter-sample distance, leading to additional performance gains. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional contrastive learning approaches that produce positive pairs sorely from a single image with data augmentation. We achieve significant improvements over the state-of-the-art method (PeCLR) in various datasets, with gains of 15% on FreiHand, 10% on DexYCB, and 4% on AssemblyHands. Our code is available at https://github.com/ut-vision/SiMHand.
DiffSplat: Repurposing Image Diffusion Models for Scalable Gaussian Splat Generation
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advancements in 3D content generation from text or a single image struggle with limited high-quality 3D datasets and inconsistency from 2D multi-view generation. We introduce DiffSplat, a novel 3D generative framework that natively generates 3D Gaussian splats by taming large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. It differs from previous 3D generative models by effectively utilizing web-scale 2D priors while maintaining 3D consistency in a unified model. To bootstrap the training, a lightweight reconstruction model is proposed to instantly produce multi-view Gaussian splat grids for scalable dataset curation. In conjunction with the regular diffusion loss on these grids, a 3D rendering loss is introduced to facilitate 3D coherence across arbitrary views. The compatibility with image diffusion models enables seamless adaptions of numerous techniques for image generation to the 3D realm. Extensive experiments reveal the superiority of DiffSplat in text- and image-conditioned generation tasks and downstream applications. Thorough ablation studies validate the efficacy of each critical design choice and provide insights into the underlying mechanism.
Lean-STaR: Learning to Interleave Thinking and Proving
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Traditional language model-based theorem proving assumes that by training on a sufficient amount of formal proof data, a model will learn to prove theorems. Our key observation is that a wealth of informal information that is not present in formal proofs can be useful for learning to prove theorems. For instance, humans think through steps of a proof, but this thought process is not visible in the resulting code. We present Lean-STaR, a framework for training language models to produce informal thoughts prior to each step of a proof, thereby boosting the model's theorem-proving capabilities. Lean-STaR uses retrospective ground-truth tactics to generate synthetic thoughts for training the language model. At inference time, the trained model directly generates the thoughts prior to the prediction of the tactics in each proof step. Building on the self-taught reasoner framework, we then apply expert iteration to further fine-tune the model on the correct proofs it samples and verifies using the Lean solver. Lean-STaR achieves state-of-the-art results on the miniF2F-test benchmark within the Lean theorem proving environment, significantly outperforming base models ($\boldsymbol{43.4\% \rightarrow 46.3\%,}$ Pass@64). We also analyze the impact of the augmented thoughts on various aspects of the theorem proving process, providing insights into their effectiveness.
Diffusion Attribution Score: Evaluating Training Data Influence in Diffusion Models
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

As diffusion models become increasingly popular, the misuse of copyrighted and private images has emerged as a major concern. One promising solution to mitigate this issue is identifying the contribution of specific training samples in generative models, a process known as data attribution. Existing data attribution methods for diffusion models typically quantify the contribution of a training sample by evaluating the change in diffusion loss when the sample is included or excluded from the training process. However, we argue that the direct usage of diffusion loss cannot represent such a contribution accurately due to the calculation of diffusion loss. Specifically, these approaches measure the divergence between predicted and ground truth distributions, which leads to an indirect comparison between the predicted distributions and cannot represent the variances between model behaviors. To address these issues, we aim to measure the direct comparison between predicted distributions with an attribution score to analyse the training sample importance, which is achieved by Diffusion Attribution Score (\textit{DAS}). Underpinned by rigorous theoretical analysis, we elucidate the effectiveness of DAS. Additionally, we explore strategies to accelerate DAS calculations, facilitating its application to large-scale diffusion models. Our extensive experiments across various datasets and diffusion models demonstrate that DAS significantly surpasses previous benchmarks in terms of the linear data-modelling score, establishing new state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at \hyperlink{here}{https://github.com/Jinxu-Lin/DAS}.
Draw-and-Understand: Leveraging Visual Prompts to Enable MLLMs to Comprehend What You Want
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we present the Draw-and-Understand framework, exploring how to integrate visual prompting understanding capabilities into Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Visual prompts allow users to interact through multi-modal instructions, enhancing the models' interactivity and fine-grained image comprehension. In this framework, we propose a general architecture adaptable to different pre-trained MLLMs, enabling it to recognize various types of visual prompts (such as points, bounding boxes, and free-form shapes) alongside language understanding. Additionally, we introduce MDVP-Instruct-Data, a multi-domain dataset featuring 1.2 million image-visual prompt-text triplets, including natural images, document images, scene text images, mobile/web screenshots, and remote sensing images. Building on this dataset, we introduce MDVP-Bench, a challenging benchmark designed to evaluate a model's ability to understand visual prompting instructions. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework can be easily and effectively applied to various MLLMs, such as SPHINX-X and LLaVA. After training with MDVP-Instruct-Data and image-level instruction datasets, our models exhibit impressive multimodal interaction capabilities and pixel-level understanding, while maintaining their image-level visual perception performance.
Self-Attention-Based Contextual Modulation Improves Neural System Identification
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been shown to be state-of-the-art models for visual cortical neurons. Cortical neurons in the primary visual cortex are sensitive to contextual information mediated by extensive horizontal and feedback connections. Standard CNNs integrate global contextual information to model contextual modulation via two mechanisms: successive convolutions and a fully connected readout layer. In this paper, we find that self-attention (SA), an implementation of non-local network mechanisms, can improve neural response predictions over parameter-matched CNNs in two key metrics: tuning curve correlation and peak tuning. We introduce peak tuning as a metric to evaluate a model's ability to capture a neuron's top feature preference. We factorize networks to assess each context mechanism, revealing that information in the local receptive field is most important for modeling overall tuning, but surround information is critically necessary for characterizing the tuning peak. We find that self-attention can replace posterior spatial-integration convolutions when learned incrementally, and is further enhanced in the presence of a fully connected readout layer, suggesting that the two context mechanisms are complementary. Finally, we find that decomposing receptive field learning and contextual modulation learning in an incremental manner may be an effective and robust mechanism for learning surround-center interactions.
PixWizard: Versatile Image-to-Image Visual Assistant with Open-Language Instructions
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

This paper presents a versatile image-to-image visual assistant, PixWizard, designed for image generation, manipulation, and translation based on free-from language instructions. To this end, we tackle a variety of vision tasks into a unified image-text-to-image generation framework and curate an Omni Pixel-to-Pixel Instruction-Tuning Dataset. By constructing detailed instruction templates in natural language, we comprehensively include a large set of diverse vision tasks such as text-to-image generation, image restoration, image grounding, dense image prediction, image editing, controllable generation, inpainting/outpainting, and more. Furthermore, we adopt Diffusion Transformers (DiT) as our foundation model and extend its capabilities with a flexible any resolution mechanism, enabling the model to dynamically process images based on the aspect ratio of the input, closely aligning with human perceptual processes. The model also incorporates structure-aware and semantic-aware guidance to facilitate effective fusion of information from the input image. Our experiments demonstrate that PixWizard not only shows impressive generative and understanding abilities for images with diverse resolutions but also exhibits promising generalization capabilities with unseen tasks and human instructions. The code and related resources are available at https://github.com/AFeng-x/PixWizard
MatryoshkaKV: Adaptive KV Compression via Trainable Orthogonal Projection
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

KV cache has become a de facto technique for the inference of large language models (LLMs), where tensors of shape (layer number, head number, sequence length, feature dimension) are introduced to cache historical information for self-attention. As the size of the model and data grows, the KV cache can quickly become a bottleneck within the system in both storage and memory transfer. To address this, prior studies usually focus on the first three axes of the cache tensors for compression. This paper supplements them, focusing on the feature dimension axis, by utilizing low-rank projection matrices to transform the cache features into spaces with reduced dimensions. We begin by investigating the canonical orthogonal projection method for data compression through principal component analysis (PCA). We observe the issue with PCA projection where significant performance degradation is observed at low compression rates. To bridge the gap, we propose to directly tune the orthogonal projection matrices with a distillation objective using an elaborate Matryoshka training strategy. After training, we adaptively search for the optimal compression rates for various layers and heads given varying compression budgets. Compared to previous works, our method can easily embrace pre-trained LLMs and hold a smooth tradeoff between performance and compression rate. We empirically witness the high data efficiency of our training procedure and find that our method can sustain over 90% performance with an average KV cache compression rate of 60% (and up to 75% in certain extreme scenarios) for popular LLMs like LLaMA2-7B-base and Mistral-7B-v0.3-base.