pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Beyond the Destination: A Novel Benchmark for Exploration-Aware Embodied Question Answering
Authors: Kaixuan Jiang, Yang Liu, Weixing Chen, Jingzhou Luo, Ziliang Chen, Ling Pan, Guanbin Li, Liang Lin
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Embodied Question Answering, Question Answering

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is a challenging task in embodied intelligence that requires agents to dynamically explore 3D environments, actively gather visual information, and perform multi-step reasoning to answer questions. However, current EQA approaches suffer from critical limitations in exploration efficiency, dataset design, and evaluation metrics. Moreover, existing datasets often introduce biases or prior knowledge, leading to disembodied reasoning, while frontier-based exploration strategies struggle in cluttered environments and fail to ensure fine-grained exploration of task-relevant areas. To address these challenges, we construct the EXPloration-awaRe Embodied queStion anSwering Benchmark (EXPRESS-Bench), the largest dataset designed specifically to evaluate both exploration and reasoning capabilities. EXPRESS-Bench consists of 777 exploration trajectories and 2,044 question-trajectory pairs. To improve exploration efficiency, we propose Fine-EQA, a hybrid exploration model that integrates frontier-based and goal-oriented navigation to guide agents toward task-relevant regions more effectively. Additionally, we introduce a novel evaluation metric, Exploration-Answer Consistency (EAC), which ensures faithful assessment by measuring the alignment between answer grounding and exploration reliability. Extensive experimental comparisons with state-of-the-art EQA models demonstrate the effectiveness of our EXPRESS-Bench in advancing embodied exploration and question reasoning.
DriveGEN: Generalized and Robust 3D Detection in Driving via Controllable Text-to-Image Diffusion Generation
Authors: Hongbin Lin, Zilu Guo, Yifan Zhang, Shuaicheng Niu, Yafeng Li, Ruimao Zhang, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: 3D geometry, Autonomous Driving, Denoising

In autonomous driving, vision-centric 3D detection aims to identify 3D objects from images. However, high data collection costs and diverse real-world scenarios limit the scale of training data. Once distribution shifts occur between training and test data, existing methods often suffer from performance degradation, known as Out-of-Distribution (OOD) problems. To address this, controllable Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion offers a potential solution for training data enhancement, which is required to generate diverse OOD scenarios with precise 3D object geometry. Nevertheless, existing controllable T2I approaches are restricted by the limited scale of training data or struggle to preserve all annotated 3D objects. In this paper, we present DriveGEN, a method designed to improve the robustness of 3D detectors in Driving via Training-Free Controllable Text-to-Image Diffusion Generation. Without extra diffusion model training, DriveGEN consistently preserves objects with precise 3D geometry across diverse OOD generations, consisting of 2 stages: 1) Self-Prototype Extraction: We empirically find that self-attention features are semantic-aware but require accurate region selection for 3D objects. Thus, we extract precise object features via layouts to capture 3D object geometry, termed self-prototypes. 2) Prototype-Guided Diffusion: To preserve objects across various OOD scenarios, we perform semantic-aware feature alignment and shallow feature alignment during denoising. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DriveGEN in improving 3D detection. The code is available at https://github.com/Hongbin98/DriveGEN.
Direction-Aware Diagonal Autoregressive Image Generation
Authors: Yijia Xu, Jianzhong Ju, Jian Luan, Jinshi Cui
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

The raster-ordered image token sequence exhibits a significant Euclidean distance between index-adjacent tokens at line breaks, making it unsuitable for autoregressive generation. To address this issue, this paper proposes Direction-Aware Diagonal Autoregressive Image Generation (DAR) method, which generates image tokens following a diagonal scanning order. The proposed diagonal scanning order ensures that tokens with adjacent indices remain in close proximity while enabling causal attention to gather information from a broader range of directions. Additionally, two direction-aware modules: 4D-RoPE and direction embeddings are introduced, enhancing the model's capability to handle frequent changes in generation direction. To leverage the representational capacity of the image tokenizer, we use its codebook as the image token embeddings. We propose models of varying scales, ranging from 485M to 2.0B. On the 256$\times$256 ImageNet benchmark, our DAR-XL (2.0B) outperforms all previous autoregressive image generators, achieving a state-of-the-art FID score of 1.37.
Minding Fuzzy Regions: A Data-driven Alternating Learning Paradigm for Stable Lesion Segmentation
Authors: Lexin Fang, Yunyang Xu, Xiang Ma, Xuemei Li, Caiming Zhang
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning has achieved significant advancements in medical image segmentation, but existing models still face challenges in accurately segmenting lesion regions. The main reason is that some lesion regions in medical images have unclear boundaries, irregular shapes, and small tissue density differences, leading to label ambiguity. However, the existing model treats all data equally without taking quality differences into account in the training process, resulting in noisy labels negatively impacting model training and unstable feature representations. In this paper, a data-driven alternating learning (DALE) paradigm is proposed to optimize the model's training process, achieving stable and high-precision segmentation. The paradigm focuses on two key points: (1) reducing the impact of noisy labels, and (2) calibrating unstable representations. To mitigate the negative impact of noisy labels, a loss consistency-based collaborative optimization method is proposed, and its effectiveness is theoretically demonstrated. Specifically, the label confidence parameters are introduced to dynamically adjust the influence of labels of different confidence levels during model training, thus reducing the influence of noise labels. To calibrate the learning bias of unstable representations, a distribution alignment method is proposed. This method restores the underlying distribution of unstable representations, thereby enhancing the discriminative capability of fuzzy region representations. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and model backbones demonstrate the superiority of the DALE paradigm, achieving an average performance improvement of up to 7.16%.
GaussianIP: Identity-Preserving Realistic 3D Human Generation via Human-Centric Diffusion Prior
Authors: Zichen Tang, Yuan YAO, Miaomiao Cui, Liefeng Bo, Hongyu Yang
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

Text-guided 3D human generation has advanced with the development of efficient 3D representations and 2D-lifting methods like Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). However, current methods suffer from prolonged training times and often produce results that lack fine facial and garment details. In this paper, we propose GaussianIP, an effective two-stage framework for generating identity-preserving realistic 3D humans from text and image prompts. Our core insight is to leverage human-centric knowledge to facilitate the generation process. In stage 1, we propose a novel Adaptive Human Distillation Sampling (AHDS) method to rapidly generate a 3D human that maintains high identity consistency with the image prompt and achieves a realistic appearance. Compared to traditional SDS methods, AHDS better aligns with the human-centric generation process, enhancing visual quality with notably fewer training steps. To further improve the visual quality of the face and clothes regions, we design a View-Consistent Refinement (VCR) strategy in stage 2. Specifically, it produces detail-enhanced results of the multi-view images from stage 1 iteratively, ensuring the 3D texture consistency across views via mutual attention and distance-guided attention fusion. Then a polished version of the 3D human can be achieved by directly perform reconstruction with the refined images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GaussianIP outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and training efficiency, particularly in generating identity-preserving results. Our code is available at: https://github.com/silence-tang/GaussianIP.
Stabilizing Quantization-Aware Training by Implicit-Regularization on Hessian Matrix
Authors: Junbiao Pang, Tianyang Cai
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Network Compression, Quantization

Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) is one of the prevailing neural network compression solutions. However, its stability has been challenged for yielding deteriorating performances as the quantization error is inevitable. We find that the sharp landscape of loss, which leads to a dramatic performance drop, is an essential factor that causes instability. Theoretically, we have discovered that the perturbations in the feature would bring a flat local minima. However, simply adding perturbations into either weight or feature empirically deteriorates the performance of the Full Precision (FP) model. In this paper, we propose Feature-Perturbed Quantization (FPQ) to stochastically perturb the feature and employ the feature distillation method to the quantized model. Our method generalizes well to different network architectures and various QAT methods. Furthermore, we mathematically show that FPQ implicitly regularizes the Hessian norm, which calibrates the smoothness of a loss landscape. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) QAT methods and even the FP counterparts.
Neurons: Emulating the Human Visual Cortex Improves Fidelity and Interpretability in fMRI-to-Video Reconstruction
Authors: Haonan Wang, Qixiang Zhang, Lehan Wang, Xuanqi Huang, Xiaomeng Li
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation, Video Reconstruction

Decoding visual stimuli from neural activity is essential for understanding the human brain. While fMRI methods have successfully reconstructed static images, fMRI-to-video reconstruction faces challenges due to the need for capturing spatiotemporal dynamics like motion and scene transitions. Recent approaches have improved semantic and perceptual alignment but struggle to integrate coarse fMRI data with detailed visual features. Inspired by the hierarchical organization of the visual system, we propose NEURONS, a novel framework that decouples learning into four correlated sub-tasks: key object segmentation, concept recognition, scene description, and blurry video reconstruction. This approach simulates the visual cortex's functional specialization, allowing the model to capture diverse video content. In the inference stage, NEURONS generates robust conditioning signals for a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion model to reconstruct the videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NEURONS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving solid improvements in video consistency (26.6%) and semantic-level accuracy (19.1%). Notably, NEURONS shows a strong functional correlation with the visual cortex, highlighting its potential for brain-computer interfaces and clinical applications. Code and model weights will be available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/NEURONS.
Uncertainty-Aware Normal-Guided Gaussian Splatting for Surface Reconstruction from Sparse Image Sequences
Authors: Zhen Tan, Xieyuanli Chen, Jinpu Zhang, Lei Feng, Dewen Hu
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Novel View Synthesis, Surface Reconstruction

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has achieved impressive rendering performance in novel view synthesis. However, its efficacy diminishes considerably in sparse image sequences, where inherent data sparsity amplifies geometric uncertainty during optimization. This often leads to convergence at suboptimal local minima, resulting in noticeable structural artifacts in the reconstructed scenes.To mitigate these issues, we propose Uncertainty-aware Normal-Guided Gaussian Splatting (UNG-GS), a novel framework featuring an explicit Spatial Uncertainty Field (SUF) to quantify geometric uncertainty within the 3DGS pipeline. UNG-GS enables high-fidelity rendering and achieves high-precision reconstruction without relying on priors. Specifically, we first integrate Gaussian-based probabilistic modeling into the training of 3DGS to optimize the SUF, providing the model with adaptive error tolerance. An uncertainty-aware depth rendering strategy is then employed to weight depth contributions based on the SUF, effectively reducing noise while preserving fine details. Furthermore, an uncertainty-guided normal refinement method adjusts the influence of neighboring depth values in normal estimation, promoting robust results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UNG-GS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both sparse and dense sequences. The code will be open-source.
Zero-TIG: Temporal Consistency-Aware Zero-Shot Illumination-Guided Low-light Video Enhancement
Authors: Yini Li, Nantheera Anantrasirichai
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Enhancement, Zero-Shot Learning

Low-light and underwater videos suffer from poor visibility, low contrast, and high noise, necessitating enhancements in visual quality. However, existing approaches typically rely on paired ground truth, which limits their practicality and often fails to maintain temporal consistency. To overcome these obstacles, this paper introduces a novel zero-shot learning approach named Zero-TIG, leveraging the Retinex theory and optical flow techniques. The proposed network consists of an enhancement module and a temporal feedback module. The enhancement module comprises three subnetworks: low-light image denoising, illumination estimation, and reflection denoising. The temporal enhancement module ensures temporal consistency by incorporating histogram equalization, optical flow computation, and image warping to align the enhanced previous frame with the current frame, thereby maintaining continuity. Additionally, we address color distortion in underwater data by adaptively balancing RGB channels. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves low-light video enhancement without the need for paired training data, making it a promising and applicable method for real-world scenario enhancement.
Multi-Stage Generative Upscaler: Reconstructing Football Broadcast Images via Diffusion Models
Authors: Luca Martini, Daniele Zolezzi, Saverio Iacono, Gianni Viardo Vercelli
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, Sports Analytics, Video Enhancement

The reconstruction of low-resolution football broadcast images presents a significant challenge in sports broadcasting, where detailed visuals are essential for analysis and audience engagement. This study introduces a multi-stage generative upscaling framework leveraging Diffusion Models to enhance degraded images, transforming inputs as small as $64 \times 64$ pixels into high-fidelity $1024 \times 1024$ outputs. By integrating an image-to-image pipeline, ControlNet conditioning, and LoRA fine-tuning, our approach surpasses traditional upscaling methods in restoring intricate textures and domain-specific elements such as player details and jersey logos. The custom LoRA is trained on a custom football dataset, ensuring adaptability to sports broadcast needs. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements over conventional models, with ControlNet refining fine details and LoRA enhancing task-specific elements. These findings highlight the potential of diffusion-based image reconstruction in sports media, paving the way for future applications in automated video enhancement and real-time sports analytics.
FastVID: Dynamic Density Pruning for Fast Video Large Language Models
Authors: Leqi Shen, Guoqiang Gong, Tao He, Yifeng Zhang, Pengzhang Liu, Sicheng Zhao, Guiguang Ding
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00

Video Large Language Models have shown impressive capabilities in video comprehension, yet their practical deployment is hindered by substantial inference costs caused by redundant video tokens. Existing pruning techniques fail to fully exploit the spatiotemporal redundancy inherent in video data. To bridge this gap, we perform a systematic analysis of video redundancy from two perspectives: temporal context and visual context. Leveraging this insight, we propose Dynamic Density Pruning for Fast Video LLMs termed FastVID. Specifically, FastVID dynamically partitions videos into temporally ordered segments to preserve temporal structure and applies a density-based token pruning strategy to maintain essential visual information. Our method significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining temporal and visual integrity. Extensive evaluations show that FastVID achieves state-of-the-art performance across various short- and long-video benchmarks on leading Video LLMs, including LLaVA-OneVision and LLaVA-Video. Notably, FastVID effectively prunes 90% of video tokens while retaining 98.0% of LLaVA-OneVision's original performance. The code is available at https://github.com/LunarShen/FastVID.
Online Test-time Adaptation for 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Practical Perspective with Estimated 2D Poses
Authors: Qiuxia Lin, Kerui Gu, Linlin Yang, Angela Yao
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Test-time Adaptation

Online test-time adaptation for 3D human pose estimation is used for video streams that differ from training data. Ground truth 2D poses are used for adaptation, but only estimated 2D poses are available in practice. This paper addresses adapting models to streaming videos with estimated 2D poses. Comparing adaptations reveals the challenge of limiting estimation errors while preserving accurate pose information. To this end, we propose adaptive aggregation, a two-stage optimization, and local augmentation for handling varying levels of estimated pose error. First, we perform adaptive aggregation across videos to initialize the model state with labeled representative samples. Within each video, we use a two-stage optimization to benefit from 2D fitting while minimizing the impact of erroneous updates. Second, we employ local augmentation, using adjacent confident samples to update the model before adapting to the current non-confident sample. Our method surpasses state-of-the-art by a large margin, advancing adaptation towards more practical settings of using estimated 2D poses.
Provenance Detection for AI-Generated Images: Combining Perceptual Hashing, Homomorphic Encryption, and AI Detection Models
Authors: Shree Singhi, Aayan Yadav, Aayush Gupta, Shariar Ebrahimi, Parisa Hassanizadeh
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00

As AI-generated sensitive images become more prevalent, identifying their source is crucial for distinguishing them from real images. Conventional image watermarking methods are vulnerable to common transformations like filters, lossy compression, and screenshots, often applied during social media sharing. Watermarks can also be faked or removed if models are open-sourced or leaked since images can be rewatermarked. We have developed a three-part framework for secure, transformation-resilient AI content provenance detection, to address these limitations. We develop an adversarially robust state-of-the-art perceptual hashing model, DinoHash, derived from DINOV2, which is robust to common transformations like filters, compression, and crops. Additionally, we integrate a Multi-Party Fully Homomorphic Encryption~(MP-FHE) scheme into our proposed framework to ensure the protection of both user queries and registry privacy. Furthermore, we improve previous work on AI-generated media detection. This approach is useful in cases where the content is absent from our registry. DinoHash significantly improves average bit accuracy by 12% over state-of-the-art watermarking and perceptual hashing methods while maintaining superior true positive rate (TPR) and false positive rate (FPR) tradeoffs across various transformations. Our AI-generated media detection results show a 25% improvement in classification accuracy on commonly used real-world AI image generators over existing algorithms. By combining perceptual hashing, MP-FHE, and an AI content detection model, our proposed framework provides better robustness and privacy compared to previous work.
NF-SLAM: Effective, Normalizing Flow-supported Neural Field representations for object-level visual SLAM in automotive applications
Authors: Li Cui, Yang Ding, Richard Hartley, Zirui Xie, Laurent Kneip, Zhenghua Yu
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00

We propose a novel, vision-only object-level SLAM framework for automotive applications representing 3D shapes by implicit signed distance functions. Our key innovation consists of augmenting the standard neural representation by a normalizing flow network. As a result, achieving strong representation power on the specific class of road vehicles is made possible by compact networks with only 16-dimensional latent codes. Furthermore, the newly proposed architecture exhibits a significant performance improvement in the presence of only sparse and noisy data, which is demonstrated through comparative experiments on synthetic data. The module is embedded into the back-end of a stereo-vision based framework for joint, incremental shape optimization. The loss function is given by a combination of a sparse 3D point-based SDF loss, a sparse rendering loss, and a semantic mask-based silhouette-consistency term. We furthermore leverage semantic information to determine keypoint extraction density in the front-end. Finally, experimental results on real-world data reveal accurate and reliable performance comparable to alternative frameworks that make use of direct depth readings. The proposed method performs well with only sparse 3D points obtained from bundle adjustment, and eventually continues to deliver stable results even under exclusive use of the mask-consistency term.
LLaVA-MLB: Mitigating and Leveraging Attention Bias for Training-Free Video LLMs
Authors: Leqi Shen, Tao He, Guoqiang Gong, Fan Yang, Yifeng Zhang, Pengzhang Liu, Sicheng Zhao, Guiguang Ding
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Understanding

Training-free video large language models (LLMs) leverage pretrained Image LLMs to process video content without the need for further training. A key challenge in such approaches is the difficulty of retaining essential visual and temporal information, constrained by the token limits in Image LLMs. To address this, we propose a two-stage method for selecting query-relevant tokens based on the LLM attention scores: compressing the video sequence and then expanding the sequence. However, during the compression stage, Image LLMs often exhibit a positional attention bias in video sequences, where attention is overly concentrated on later frames, causing early-frame information to be underutilized. To alleviate this attention bias during sequence compression, we propose Gridded Attention Pooling for preserving spatiotemporal structure. Additionally, we introduce Visual Summarization Tail to effectively utilize this bias, facilitating overall video understanding during sequence expansion. In this way, our method effectively Mitigates and Leverages attention Bias (LLaVA-MLB), enabling the frozen Image LLM for detailed video understanding. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior performance in both efficiency and accuracy. Our code will be released.