pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
RigAnything: Template-Free Autoregressive Rigging for Diverse 3D Assets
Authors: Isabella Liu, Zhan Xu, Wang Yifan, Hao Tan, Zexiang Xu, Xiaolong Wang, Hao Su, Zifan Shi
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00

We present RigAnything, a novel autoregressive transformer-based model, which makes 3D assets rig-ready by probabilistically generating joints, skeleton topologies, and assigning skinning weights in a template-free manner. Unlike most existing auto-rigging methods, which rely on predefined skeleton template and are limited to specific categories like humanoid, RigAnything approaches the rigging problem in an autoregressive manner, iteratively predicting the next joint based on the global input shape and the previous prediction. While autoregressive models are typically used to generate sequential data, RigAnything extends their application to effectively learn and represent skeletons, which are inherently tree structures. To achieve this, we organize the joints in a breadth-first search (BFS) order, enabling the skeleton to be defined as a sequence of 3D locations and the parent index. Furthermore, our model improves the accuracy of position prediction by leveraging diffusion modeling, ensuring precise and consistent placement of joints within the hierarchy. This formulation allows the autoregressive model to efficiently capture both spatial and hierarchical relationships within the skeleton. Trained end-to-end on both RigNet and Objaverse datasets, RigAnything demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across diverse object types, including humanoids, quadrupeds, marine creatures, insects, and many more, surpassing prior methods in quality, robustness, generalizability, and efficiency. Please check our website for more details: https://www.liuisabella.com/RigAnything.
LIFe-GoM: Generalizable Human Rendering with Learned Iterative Feedback Over Multi-Resolution Gaussians-on-Mesh
Authors: Jing Wen, Alexander G. Schwing, Shenlong Wang
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00

Generalizable rendering of an animatable human avatar from sparse inputs relies on data priors and inductive biases extracted from training on large data to avoid scene-specific optimization and to enable fast reconstruction. This raises two main challenges: First, unlike iterative gradient-based adjustment in scene-specific optimization, generalizable methods must reconstruct the human shape representation in a single pass at inference time. Second, rendering is preferably computationally efficient yet of high resolution. To address both challenges we augment the recently proposed dual shape representation, which combines the benefits of a mesh and Gaussian points, in two ways. To improve reconstruction, we propose an iterative feedback update framework, which successively improves the canonical human shape representation during reconstruction. To achieve computationally efficient yet high-resolution rendering, we study a coupled-multi-resolution Gaussians-on-Mesh representation. We evaluate the proposed approach on the challenging THuman2.0, XHuman and AIST++ data. Our approach reconstructs an animatable representation from sparse inputs in less than 1s, renders views with 95.1FPS at $1024 \times 1024$, and achieves PSNR/LPIPS*/FID of 24.65/110.82/51.27 on THuman2.0, outperforming the state-of-the-art in rendering quality.
Exploring the Potential of Encoder-free Architectures in 3D LMMs
Authors: Yiwen Tang, Zoey Guo, Zhuhao Wang, Ray Zhang, Qizhi Chen, Junli Liu, Delin Qu, Zhigang Wang, Dong Wang, Xuelong Li, Bin Zhao
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Encoder-free architectures have been preliminarily explored in the 2D visual domain, yet it remains an open question whether they can be effectively applied to 3D understanding scenarios. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive investigation into the potential of encoder-free architectures to alleviate the challenges of encoder-based 3D Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). These challenges include the failure to adapt to varying point cloud resolutions and the point features from the encoder not meeting the semantic needs of Large Language Models (LLMs). We identify key aspects for 3D LMMs to remove the encoder and enable the LLM to assume the role of the 3D encoder: 1) We propose the LLM-embedded Semantic Encoding strategy in the pre-training stage, exploring the effects of various point cloud self-supervised losses. And we present the Hybrid Semantic Loss to extract high-level semantics. 2) We introduce the Hierarchical Geometry Aggregation strategy in the instruction tuning stage. This incorporates inductive bias into the LLM layers to focus on the local details of the point clouds. To the end, we present the first Encoder-free 3D LMM, ENEL. Our 7B model rivals the current state-of-the-art model, ShapeLLM-13B, achieving 55.10%, 50.98%, and 43.10% on the classification, captioning, and VQA tasks, respectively. Our results demonstrate that the encoder-free architecture is highly promising for replacing encoder-based architectures in the field of 3D understanding. The code is released at https://github.com/Ivan-Tang-3D/ENEL
MME-CoT: Benchmarking Chain-of-Thought in Large Multimodal Models for Reasoning Quality, Robustness, and Efficiency
Authors: Dongzhi Jiang, Renrui Zhang, Ziyu Guo, Yanwei Li, Yu Qi, Xinyan Chen, Liuhui Wang, Jianhan Jin, Claire Guo, Shen Yan, Bo Zhang, Chaoyou Fu, Peng Gao, Hongsheng Li
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Math, MME, Multimodal Reasoning, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Answering questions with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its impact on Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) still lacks a systematic assessment and in-depth investigation. In this paper, we introduce MME-CoT, a specialized benchmark evaluating the CoT reasoning performance of LMMs, spanning six domains: math, science, OCR, logic, space-time, and general scenes. As the first comprehensive study in this area, we propose a thorough evaluation suite incorporating three novel metrics that assess the reasoning quality, robustness, and efficiency at a fine-grained level. Leveraging curated high-quality data and a unique evaluation strategy, we conduct an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art LMMs, uncovering several key insights: 1) Models with reflection mechanism demonstrate a superior CoT quality, with Kimi k1.5 outperforming GPT-4o and demonstrating the highest quality results; 2) CoT prompting often degrades LMM performance on perception-heavy tasks, suggesting a potentially harmful overthinking behavior; and 3) Although the CoT quality is high, LMMs with reflection exhibit significant inefficiency in both normal response and self-correction phases. We hope MME-CoT serves as a foundation for advancing multimodal reasoning in LMMs. Project Page: https://mmecot.github.io/
Embed Any NeRF: Graph Meta-Networks for Neural Tasks on Arbitrary NeRF Architectures
Authors: Francesco Ballerini, Pierluigi Zama Ramirez, Samuele Salti, Luigi Di Stefano
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Representation Learning

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have emerged as a groundbreaking paradigm for representing 3D objects and scenes by encoding shape and appearance information into the weights of a neural network. Recent works have shown how such weights can be used as input to frameworks processing them to solve deep learning tasks. Yet, these frameworks can only process NeRFs with a specific, predefined architecture. In this paper, we present the first framework that can ingest NeRFs with multiple architectures and perform inference on architectures unseen at training time. We achieve this goal by training a Graph Meta-Network in a representation learning framework. Moreover, we show how a contrastive objective is conducive to obtaining an architecture-agnostic latent space. In experiments on both MLP-based and tri-planar NeRFs, our approach demonstrates robust performance in classification and retrieval tasks that either matches or exceeds that of existing frameworks constrained to single architectures, thus providing the first architecture-agnostic method to perform tasks on NeRFs by processing their weights.
Skrr: Skip and Re-use Text Encoder Layers for Memory Efficient Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Hoigi Seo, Wongi Jeong, Jae-sun Seo, Se Young Chun
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Large-scale text encoders in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional performance in generating high-quality images from textual prompts. Unlike denoising modules that rely on multiple iterative steps, text encoders require only a single forward pass to produce text embeddings. However, despite their minimal contribution to total inference time and floating-point operations (FLOPs), text encoders demand significantly higher memory usage, up to eight times more than denoising modules. To address this inefficiency, we propose Skip and Re-use layers (Skrr), a simple yet effective pruning strategy specifically designed for text encoders in T2I diffusion models. Skrr exploits the inherent redundancy in transformer blocks by selectively skipping or reusing certain layers in a manner tailored for T2I tasks, thereby reducing memory consumption without compromising performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Skrr maintains image quality comparable to the original model even under high sparsity levels, outperforming existing blockwise pruning methods. Furthermore, Skrr achieves state-of-the-art memory efficiency while preserving performance across multiple evaluation metrics, including the FID, CLIP, DreamSim, and GenEval scores.
Harnessing Vision Models for Time Series Analysis: A Survey
Authors: Jingchao Ni, Ziming Zhao, ChengAo Shen, Hanghang Tong, Dongjin Song, Wei Cheng, Dongsheng Luo, Haifeng Chen
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Time series analysis has witnessed the inspiring development from traditional autoregressive models, deep learning models, to recent Transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs). Efforts in leveraging vision models for time series analysis have also been made along the way but are less visible to the community due to the predominant research on sequence modeling in this domain. However, the discrepancy between continuous time series and the discrete token space of LLMs, and the challenges in explicitly modeling the correlations of variates in multivariate time series have shifted some research attentions to the equally successful Large Vision Models (LVMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs). To fill the blank in the existing literature, this survey discusses the advantages of vision models over LLMs in time series analysis. It provides a comprehensive and in-depth overview of the existing methods, with dual views of detailed taxonomy that answer the key research questions including how to encode time series as images and how to model the imaged time series for various tasks. Additionally, we address the challenges in the pre- and post-processing steps involved in this framework and outline future directions to further advance time series analysis with vision models.
On the Promise for Assurance of Differentiable Neurosymbolic Reasoning Paradigms
Authors: Luke E. Richards, Jessie Yaros, Jasen Babcock, Coung Ly, Robin Cosbey, Timothy Doster, Cynthia Matuszek
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

To create usable and deployable Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, there requires a level of assurance in performance under many different conditions. Many times, deployed machine learning systems will require more classic logic and reasoning performed through neurosymbolic programs jointly with artificial neural network sensing. While many prior works have examined the assurance of a single component of the system solely with either the neural network alone or entire enterprise systems, very few works have examined the assurance of integrated neurosymbolic systems. Within this work, we assess the assurance of end-to-end fully differentiable neurosymbolic systems that are an emerging method to create data-efficient and more interpretable models. We perform this investigation using Scallop, an end-to-end neurosymbolic library, across classification and reasoning tasks in both the image and audio domains. We assess assurance across adversarial robustness, calibration, user performance parity, and interpretability of solutions for catching misaligned solutions. We find end-to-end neurosymbolic methods present unique opportunities for assurance beyond their data efficiency through our empirical results but not across the board. We find that this class of neurosymbolic models has higher assurance in cases where arithmetic operations are defined and where there is high dimensionality to the input space, where fully neural counterparts struggle to learn robust reasoning operations. We identify the relationship between neurosymbolic models' interpretability to catch shortcuts that later result in increased adversarial vulnerability despite performance parity. Finally, we find that the promise of data efficiency is typically only in the case of class imbalanced reasoning problems.
Zero-shot Concept Bottleneck Models
Authors: Shin'ya Yamaguchi, Kosuke Nishida, Daiki Chijiwa, Yasutoshi Ida
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) are inherently interpretable and intervenable neural network models, which explain their final label prediction by the intermediate prediction of high-level semantic concepts. However, they require target task training to learn input-to-concept and concept-to-label mappings, incurring target dataset collections and training resources. In this paper, we present \textit{zero-shot concept bottleneck models} (Z-CBMs), which predict concepts and labels in a fully zero-shot manner without training neural networks. Z-CBMs utilize a large-scale concept bank, which is composed of millions of vocabulary extracted from the web, to describe arbitrary input in various domains. For the input-to-concept mapping, we introduce concept retrieval, which dynamically finds input-related concepts by the cross-modal search on the concept bank. In the concept-to-label inference, we apply concept regression to select essential concepts from the retrieved concepts by sparse linear regression. Through extensive experiments, we confirm that our Z-CBMs provide interpretable and intervenable concepts without any additional training. Code will be available at https://github.com/yshinya6/zcbm.
Improving Deep Regression with Tightness
Authors: Shihao Zhang, Yuguang Yan, Angela Yao
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

For deep regression, preserving the ordinality of the targets with respect to the feature representation improves performance across various tasks. However, a theoretical explanation for the benefits of ordinality is still lacking. This work reveals that preserving ordinality reduces the conditional entropy $H(Z|Y)$ of representation $Z$ conditional on the target $Y$. However, our findings reveal that typical regression losses do little to reduce $H(Z|Y)$, even though it is vital for generalization performance. With this motivation, we introduce an optimal transport-based regularizer to preserve the similarity relationships of targets in the feature space to reduce $H(Z|Y)$. Additionally, we introduce a simple yet efficient strategy of duplicating the regressor targets, also with the aim of reducing $H(Z|Y)$. Experiments on three real-world regression tasks verify the effectiveness of our strategies to improve deep regression. Code: https://github.com/needylove/Regression_tightness.
Replay-free Online Continual Learning with Self-Supervised MultiPatches
Authors: Giacomo Cignoni, Andrea Cossu, Alex Gomez-Villa, Joost Van de Weijer, Antonio Carta
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Online Continual Learning (OCL) methods train a model on a non-stationary data stream where only a few examples are available at a time, often leveraging replay strategies. However, usage of replay is sometimes forbidden, especially in applications with strict privacy regulations. Therefore, we propose Continual MultiPatches (CMP), an effective plug-in for existing OCL self-supervised learning strategies that avoids the use of replay samples. CMP generates multiple patches from a single example and projects them into a shared feature space, where patches coming from the same example are pushed together without collapsing into a single point. CMP surpasses replay and other SSL-based strategies on OCL streams, challenging the role of replay as a go-to solution for self-supervised OCL.
Shortcut Learning Susceptibility in Vision Classifiers
Authors: Pirzada Suhail, Amit Sethi
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Shortcut learning, where machine learning models exploit spurious correlations in data instead of capturing meaningful features, poses a significant challenge to building robust and generalizable models. This phenomenon is prevalent across various machine learning applications, including vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition, where models may find unintended cues that minimize training loss but fail to capture the underlying structure of the data. Vision classifiers such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), and Vision Transformers (ViTs) leverage distinct architectural principles to process spatial and structural information, making them differently susceptible to shortcut learning. In this study, we systematically evaluate these architectures by introducing deliberate shortcuts into the dataset that are positionally correlated with class labels, creating a controlled setup to assess whether models rely on these artificial cues or learn actual distinguishing features. We perform both quantitative evaluation by training on the shortcut-modified dataset and testing them on two different test sets -- one containing the same shortcuts and another without them -- to determine the extent of reliance on shortcuts. Additionally, qualitative evaluation is performed by using network inversion-based reconstruction techniques to analyze what the models internalize in their weights, aiming to reconstruct the training data as perceived by the classifiers. We evaluate shortcut learning behavior across multiple benchmark datasets, including MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, SVHN, and CIFAR-10, to compare the susceptibility of different vision classifier architectures to shortcut reliance and assess their varying degrees of sensitivity to spurious correlations.
When and How Does CLIP Enable Domain and Compositional Generalization?
Authors: Elias Kempf, Simon Schrodi, Max Argus, Thomas Brox
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Domain Generalization

The remarkable generalization performance of contrastive vision-language models like CLIP is often attributed to the diversity of their training distributions. However, key questions remain unanswered: Can CLIP generalize to an entirely unseen domain when trained on a diverse mixture of domains (domain generalization)? Can it generalize to unseen classes within partially seen domains (compositional generalization)? What factors affect such generalization? To answer these questions, we trained CLIP models on systematically constructed training distributions with controlled domain diversity and object class exposure. Our experiments show that domain diversity is essential for both domain and compositional generalization, yet compositional generalization can be surprisingly weaker than domain generalization when the training distribution contains a suboptimal subset of the test domain. Through data-centric and mechanistic analyses, we find that successful generalization requires learning of shared representations already in intermediate layers and shared circuitry.
EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents
Authors: Rui Yang, Hanyang Chen, Junyu Zhang, Mark Zhao, Cheng Qian, Kangrui Wang, Qineng Wang, Teja Venkat Koripella, Marziyeh Movahedi, Manling Li, Heng Ji, huan zhang, Tong Zhang
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to create embodied agents offers a promising avenue for tackling real-world tasks. While language-centric embodied agents have garnered substantial attention, MLLM-based embodied agents remain underexplored due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation frameworks. To bridge this gap, we introduce EmbodiedBench, an extensive benchmark designed to evaluate vision-driven embodied agents. EmbodiedBench features: (1) a diverse set of 1,128 testing tasks across four environments, ranging from high-level semantic tasks (e.g., household) to low-level tasks involving atomic actions (e.g., navigation and manipulation); and (2) six meticulously curated subsets evaluating essential agent capabilities like commonsense reasoning, complex instruction understanding, spatial awareness, visual perception, and long-term planning. Through extensive experiments, we evaluated 13 leading proprietary and open-source MLLMs within EmbodiedBench. Our findings reveal that: MLLMs excel at high-level tasks but struggle with low-level manipulation, with the best model, GPT-4o, scoring only 28.9% on average. EmbodiedBench provides a multifaceted standardized evaluation platform that not only highlights existing challenges but also offers valuable insights to advance MLLM-based embodied agents. Our code is available at https://embodiedbench.github.io.
Diffusing DeBias: a Recipe for Turning a Bug into a Feature
Authors: Massimiliano Ciranni, Vito Paolo Pastore, Roberto Di Via, Enzo Tartaglione, Francesca Odone, Vittorio Murino
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

Deep learning model effectiveness in classification tasks is often challenged by the quality and quantity of training data which, whenever containing strong spurious correlations between specific attributes and target labels, can result in unrecoverable biases in model predictions. Tackling these biases is crucial in improving model generalization and trust, especially in real-world scenarios. This paper presents Diffusing DeBias (DDB), a novel approach acting as a plug-in for common methods in model debiasing while exploiting the inherent bias-learning tendency of diffusion models. Our approach leverages conditional diffusion models to generate synthetic bias-aligned images, used to train a bias amplifier model, to be further employed as an auxiliary method in different unsupervised debiasing approaches. Our proposed method, which also tackles the common issue of training set memorization typical of this type of tech- niques, beats current state-of-the-art in multiple benchmark datasets by significant margins, demonstrating its potential as a versatile and effective tool for tackling dataset bias in deep learning applications.