pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BOP Challenge 2024 on Model-Based and Model-Free 6D Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Van Nguyen Nguyen, Stephen Tyree, Andrew Guo, Mederic Fourmy, Anas Gouda, Taeyeop Lee, Sungphill Moon, Hyeontae Son, Lukas Ranftl, Jonathan Tremblay, Eric Brachmann, Bertram Drost, Vincent Lepetit, Carsten Rother, Stan Birchfield, Jiri Matas, Yann Labbe, Martin Sundermeyer, Tomas Hodan
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, model, Pose Estimation

We present the evaluation methodology, datasets and results of the BOP Challenge 2024, the 6th in a series of public competitions organized to capture the state of the art in 6D object pose estimation and related tasks. In 2024, our goal was to transition BOP from lab-like setups to real-world scenarios. First, we introduced new model-free tasks, where no 3D object models are available and methods need to onboard objects just from provided reference videos. Second, we defined a new, more practical 6D object detection task where identities of objects visible in a test image are not provided as input. Third, we introduced new BOP-H3 datasets recorded with high-resolution sensors and AR/VR headsets, closely resembling real-world scenarios. BOP-H3 include 3D models and onboarding videos to support both model-based and model-free tasks. Participants competed on seven challenge tracks. Notably, the best 2024 method for model-based 6D localization of unseen objects (FreeZeV2.1) achieves 22% higher accuracy on BOP-Classic-Core than the best 2023 method (GenFlow), and is only 4% behind the best 2023 method for seen objects (GPose2023) although being significantly slower (24.9 vs 2.7s per image). A more practical 2024 method for this task is Co-op which takes only 0.8s per image and is 13% more accurate than GenFlow. Methods have similar rankings on 6D detection as on 6D localization but higher run time. On model-based 2D detection of unseen objects, the best 2024 method (MUSE) achieves 21--29% relative improvement compared to the best 2023 method (CNOS). However, the 2D detection accuracy for unseen objects is still -35% behind the accuracy for seen objects (GDet2023), and the 2D detection stage is consequently the main bottleneck of existing pipelines for 6D localization/detection of unseen objects. The online evaluation system stays open and is available at http://bop.felk.cvut.cz/
Efficient Autoregressive Shape Generation via Octree-Based Adaptive Tokenization
Authors: Kangle Deng, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Yiheng Zhu, Xiaoxia Sun, Chong Shang, Kiran Bhat, Deva Ramanan, Jun-Yan Zhu, Maneesh Agrawala, Tinghui Zhou
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00

Many 3D generative models rely on variational autoencoders (VAEs) to learn compact shape representations. However, existing methods encode all shapes into a fixed-size token, disregarding the inherent variations in scale and complexity across 3D data. This leads to inefficient latent representations that can compromise downstream generation. We address this challenge by introducing Octree-based Adaptive Tokenization, a novel framework that adjusts the dimension of latent representations according to shape complexity. Our approach constructs an adaptive octree structure guided by a quadric-error-based subdivision criterion and allocates a shape latent vector to each octree cell using a query-based transformer. Building upon this tokenization, we develop an octree-based autoregressive generative model that effectively leverages these variable-sized representations in shape generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach reduces token counts by 50% compared to fixed-size methods while maintaining comparable visual quality. When using a similar token length, our method produces significantly higher-quality shapes. When incorporated with our downstream generative model, our method creates more detailed and diverse 3D content than existing approaches.
Sparse Autoencoders Learn Monosemantic Features in Vision-Language Models
Authors: Mateusz Pach, Shyamgopal Karthik, Quentin Bouniot, Serge Belongie, Zeynep Akata
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently been shown to enhance interpretability and steerability in Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we extend the application of SAEs to Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, and introduce a comprehensive framework for evaluating monosemanticity in vision representations. Our experimental results reveal that SAEs trained on VLMs significantly enhance the monosemanticity of individual neurons while also exhibiting hierarchical representations that align well with expert-defined structures (e.g., iNaturalist taxonomy). Most notably, we demonstrate that applying SAEs to intervene on a CLIP vision encoder, directly steer output from multimodal LLMs (e.g., LLaVA) without any modifications to the underlying model. These findings emphasize the practicality and efficacy of SAEs as an unsupervised approach for enhancing both the interpretability and control of VLMs.
Envisioning Beyond the Pixels: Benchmarking Reasoning-Informed Visual Editing
Authors: Xiangyu Zhao, Peiyuan Zhang, Kexian Tang, Hao Li, ZiCheng Zhang, Guangtao Zhai, Junchi Yan, Hua Yang, Xue Yang, Haodong Duan
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Logical Reasoning

Large Multi-modality Models (LMMs) have made significant progress in visual understanding and generation, but they still face challenges in General Visual Editing, particularly in following complex instructions, preserving appearance consistency, and supporting flexible input formats. To address this gap, we introduce RISEBench, the first benchmark for evaluating Reasoning-Informed viSual Editing (RISE). RISEBench focuses on four key reasoning types: Temporal, Causal, Spatial, and Logical Reasoning. We curate high-quality test cases for each category and propose an evaluation framework that assesses Instruction Reasoning, Appearance Consistency, and Visual Plausibility with both human judges and an LMM-as-a-judge approach. Our experiments reveal that while GPT-4o-Native significantly outperforms other open-source and proprietary models, even this state-of-the-art system struggles with logical reasoning tasks, highlighting an area that remains underexplored. As an initial effort, RISEBench aims to provide foundational insights into reasoning-aware visual editing and to catalyze future research. Though still in its early stages, we are committed to continuously expanding and refining the benchmark to support more comprehensive, reliable, and scalable evaluations of next-generation multimodal systems. Our code and data will be released at https://github.com/PhoenixZ810/RISEBench.
Concept Lancet: Image Editing with Compositional Representation Transplant
Authors: Jinqi Luo, Tianjiao Ding, Kwan Ho Ryan Chan, Hancheng Min, Chris Callison-Burch, René Vidal
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

Diffusion models are widely used for image editing tasks. Existing editing methods often design a representation manipulation procedure by curating an edit direction in the text embedding or score space. However, such a procedure faces a key challenge: overestimating the edit strength harms visual consistency while underestimating it fails the editing task. Notably, each source image may require a different editing strength, and it is costly to search for an appropriate strength via trial-and-error. To address this challenge, we propose Concept Lancet (CoLan), a zero-shot plug-and-play framework for principled representation manipulation in diffusion-based image editing. At inference time, we decompose the source input in the latent (text embedding or diffusion score) space as a sparse linear combination of the representations of the collected visual concepts. This allows us to accurately estimate the presence of concepts in each image, which informs the edit. Based on the editing task (replace/add/remove), we perform a customized concept transplant process to impose the corresponding editing direction. To sufficiently model the concept space, we curate a conceptual representation dataset, CoLan-150K, which contains diverse descriptions and scenarios of visual terms and phrases for the latent dictionary. Experiments on multiple diffusion-based image editing baselines show that methods equipped with CoLan achieve state-of-the-art performance in editing effectiveness and consistency preservation.
Multivariate Temporal Regression at Scale: A Three-Pillar Framework Combining ML, XAI, and NLP
Authors: Jiztom Kavalakkatt Francis, Matthew J Darr
Date: 2025-04-02 00:00:00

The rapid use of artificial intelligence (AI) in processes such as coding, image processing, and data prediction means it is crucial to understand and validate the data we are working with fully. This paper dives into the hurdles of analyzing high-dimensional data, especially when it gets too complex. Traditional methods in data analysis often look at direct connections between input variables, which can miss out on the more complicated relationships within the data. To address these issues, we explore several tested techniques, such as removing specific variables to see their impact and using statistical analysis to find connections between multiple variables. We also consider the role of synthetic data and how information can sometimes be redundant across different sensors. These analyses are typically very computationally demanding and often require much human effort to make sense of the results. A common approach is to treat the entire dataset as one unit and apply advanced models to handle it. However, this can become problematic with larger, noisier datasets and more complex models. So, we suggest methods to identify overall patterns that can help with tasks like classification or regression based on the idea that more straightforward approaches might be more understandable. Our research looks at two datasets: a real-world dataset and a synthetic one. The goal is to create a methodology that highlights key features on a global scale that lead to predictions, making it easier to validate or quantify the data set. By reducing the dimensionality with this method, we can simplify the models used and thus clarify the insights we gain. Furthermore, our method can reveal unexplored relationships between specific inputs and outcomes, providing a way to validate these new connections further.
Neural Style Transfer for Synthesising a Dataset of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Authors: Lewis Matheson Creed
Date: 2025-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification, Style Transfer

The limited availability of training data for low-resource languages makes applying machine learning techniques challenging. Ancient Egyptian is one such language with few resources. However, innovative applications of data augmentation methods, such as Neural Style Transfer, could overcome these barriers. This paper presents a novel method for generating datasets of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs by applying NST to a digital typeface. Experimental results found that image classification models trained on NST-generated examples and photographs demonstrate equal performance and transferability to real unseen images of hieroglyphs.
LLM-Guided Evolution: An Autonomous Model Optimization for Object Detection
Authors: Yiming Yu, Jason Zutty
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, image-classification, Image Classification, Large Language Model, Model Optimization, Neural Architecture Search, object-detection, Object Detection

In machine learning, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) requires domain knowledge of model design and a large amount of trial-and-error to achieve promising performance. Meanwhile, evolutionary algorithms have traditionally relied on fixed rules and pre-defined building blocks. The Large Language Model (LLM)-Guided Evolution (GE) framework transformed this approach by incorporating LLMs to directly modify model source code for image classification algorithms on CIFAR data and intelligently guide mutations and crossovers. A key element of LLM-GE is the "Evolution of Thought" (EoT) technique, which establishes feedback loops, allowing LLMs to refine their decisions iteratively based on how previous operations performed. In this study, we perform NAS for object detection by improving LLM-GE to modify the architecture of You Only Look Once (YOLO) models to enhance performance on the KITTI dataset. Our approach intelligently adjusts the design and settings of YOLO to find the optimal algorithms against objective such as detection accuracy and speed. We show that LLM-GE produced variants with significant performance improvements, such as an increase in Mean Average Precision from 92.5% to 94.5%. This result highlights the flexibility and effectiveness of LLM-GE on real-world challenges, offering a novel paradigm for automated machine learning that combines LLM-driven reasoning with evolutionary strategies.
Rethinking RL Scaling for Vision Language Models: A Transparent, From-Scratch Framework and Comprehensive Evaluation Scheme
Authors: Yan Ma, Steffi Chern, Xuyang Shen, Yiran Zhong, PengFei Liu
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Visual Reasoning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown strong potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models and is now being actively extended to vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing RL applications in VLMs often rely on heavily engineered frameworks that hinder reproducibility and accessibility, while lacking standardized evaluation protocols, making it difficult to compare results or interpret training dynamics. This work introduces a transparent, from-scratch framework for RL in VLMs, offering a minimal yet functional four-step pipeline validated across multiple models and datasets. In addition, a standardized evaluation scheme is proposed to assess training dynamics and reflective behaviors. Extensive experiments on visual reasoning tasks uncover key empirical findings: response length is sensitive to random seeds, reflection correlates with output length, and RL consistently outperforms supervised fine-tuning (SFT) in generalization, even with high-quality data. These findings, together with the proposed framework, aim to establish a reproducible baseline and support broader engagement in RL-based VLM research.
Efficient Model Editing with Task-Localized Sparse Fine-tuning
Authors: Leonardo Iurada, Marco Ciccone, Tatiana Tommasi
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Model Editing, Negation, Task Arithmetic

Task arithmetic has emerged as a promising approach for editing models by representing task-specific knowledge as composable task vectors. However, existing methods rely on network linearization to derive task vectors, leading to computational bottlenecks during training and inference. Moreover, linearization alone does not ensure weight disentanglement, the key property that enables conflict-free composition of task vectors. To address this, we propose TaLoS which allows to build sparse task vectors with minimal interference without requiring explicit linearization and sharing information across tasks. We find that pre-trained models contain a subset of parameters with consistently low gradient sensitivity across tasks, and that sparsely updating only these parameters allows for promoting weight disentanglement during fine-tuning. Our experiments prove that TaLoS improves training and inference efficiency while outperforming current methods in task addition and negation. By enabling modular parameter editing, our approach fosters practical deployment of adaptable foundation models in real-world applications.
BECAME: BayEsian Continual Learning with Adaptive Model MErging
Authors: Mei Li, Yuxiang Lu, Qinyan Dai, Suizhi Huang, Yue Ding, Hongtao Lu
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, model

Continual Learning (CL) strives to learn incrementally across tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. A key challenge in CL is balancing stability (retaining prior knowledge) and plasticity (learning new tasks). While representative gradient projection methods ensure stability, they often limit plasticity. Model merging techniques offer promising solutions, but prior methods typically rely on empirical assumptions and carefully selected hyperparameters. In this paper, we explore the potential of model merging to enhance the stability-plasticity trade-off, providing theoretical insights that underscore its benefits. Specifically, we reformulate the merging mechanism using Bayesian continual learning principles and derive a closed-form solution for the optimal merging coefficient that adapts to the diverse characteristics of tasks. To validate our approach, we introduce a two-stage framework named BECAME, which synergizes the expertise of gradient projection and adaptive merging. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art CL methods and existing merging strategies.
Spline-based Transformers
Authors: Prashanth Chandran, Agon Serifi, Markus Gross, Moritz Bächer
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00

We introduce Spline-based Transformers, a novel class of Transformer models that eliminate the need for positional encoding. Inspired by workflows using splines in computer animation, our Spline-based Transformers embed an input sequence of elements as a smooth trajectory in latent space. Overcoming drawbacks of positional encoding such as sequence length extrapolation, Spline-based Transformers also provide a novel way for users to interact with transformer latent spaces by directly manipulating the latent control points to create new latent trajectories and sequences. We demonstrate the superior performance of our approach in comparison to conventional positional encoding on a variety of datasets, ranging from synthetic 2D to large-scale real-world datasets of images, 3D shapes, and animations.
CAD: Confidence-Aware Adaptive Displacement for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Wenbo Xiao, Zhihao Xu, Guiping Liang, Yangjun Deng, Yi Xiao
Date: 2025-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation aims to leverage minimal expert annotations, yet remains confronted by challenges in maintaining high-quality consistency learning. Excessive perturbations can degrade alignment and hinder precise decision boundaries, especially in regions with uncertain predictions. In this paper, we introduce Confidence-Aware Adaptive Displacement (CAD), a framework that selectively identifies and replaces the largest low-confidence regions with high-confidence patches. By dynamically adjusting both the maximum allowable replacement size and the confidence threshold throughout training, CAD progressively refines the segmentation quality without overwhelming the learning process. Experimental results on public medical datasets demonstrate that CAD effectively enhances segmentation quality, establishing new state-of-the-art accuracy in this field. The source code will be released after the paper is published.
Expertized Caption Auto-Enhancement for Video-Text Retrieval
Authors: Baoyao Yang, Junxiang Chen, Wanyun Li, Wenbin Yao, Yang Zhou
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Caption Generation, Retrieval, Text Retrieval, Video-Text Retrieval

Video-text retrieval has been stuck in the information mismatch caused by personalized and inadequate textual descriptions of videos. The substantial information gap between the two modalities hinders an effective cross-modal representation alignment, resulting in ambiguous retrieval results. Although text rewriting methods have been proposed to broaden text expressions, the modality gap remains significant, as the text representation space is hardly expanded with insufficient semantic enrichment.Instead, this paper turns to enhancing visual presentation, bridging video expression closer to textual representation via caption generation and thereby facilitating video-text matching.While multimodal large language models (mLLM) have shown a powerful capability to convert video content into text, carefully crafted prompts are essential to ensure the reasonableness and completeness of the generated captions. Therefore, this paper proposes an automatic caption enhancement method that improves expression quality and mitigates empiricism in augmented captions through self-learning.Additionally, an expertized caption selection mechanism is designed and introduced to customize augmented captions for each video, further exploring the utilization potential of caption augmentation.Our method is entirely data-driven, which not only dispenses with heavy data collection and computation workload but also improves self-adaptability by circumventing lexicon dependence and introducing personalized matching. The superiority of our method is validated by state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks, specifically achieving Top-1 recall accuracy of 68.5% on MSR-VTT, 68.1% on MSVD, and 62.0% on DiDeMo. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CaryXiang/ECA4VTR.
MaRI: Material Retrieval Integration across Domains
Authors: Jianhui Wang, Zhifei Yang, Yangfan He, Huixiong Zhang, Yuxuan Chen, Jingwei Huang
Date: 2025-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Diversity, Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Accurate material retrieval is critical for creating realistic 3D assets. Existing methods rely on datasets that capture shape-invariant and lighting-varied representations of materials, which are scarce and face challenges due to limited diversity and inadequate real-world generalization. Most current approaches adopt traditional image search techniques. They fall short in capturing the unique properties of material spaces, leading to suboptimal performance in retrieval tasks. Addressing these challenges, we introduce MaRI, a framework designed to bridge the feature space gap between synthetic and real-world materials. MaRI constructs a shared embedding space that harmonizes visual and material attributes through a contrastive learning strategy by jointly training an image and a material encoder, bringing similar materials and images closer while separating dissimilar pairs within the feature space. To support this, we construct a comprehensive dataset comprising high-quality synthetic materials rendered with controlled shape variations and diverse lighting conditions, along with real-world materials processed and standardized using material transfer techniques. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance, accuracy, and generalization capabilities of MaRI across diverse and complex material retrieval tasks, outperforming existing methods.
Learning and Improving Backgammon Strategy
Authors: Gregory R. Galperin
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00

A novel approach to learning is presented, combining features of on-line and off-line methods to achieve considerable performance in the task of learning a backgammon value function in a process that exploits the processing power of parallel supercomputers. The off-line methods comprise a set of techniques for parallelizing neural network training and $TD(\lambda)$ reinforcement learning; here Monte-Carlo ``Rollouts'' are introduced as a massively parallel on-line policy improvement technique which applies resources to the decision points encountered during the search of the game tree to further augment the learned value function estimate. A level of play roughly as good as, or possibly better than, the current champion human and computer backgammon players has been achieved in a short period of learning.