pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Fast Isotropic Median Filtering
Authors: Ben Weiss
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: All, image smoothing

Median filtering is a cornerstone of computational image processing. It provides an effective means of image smoothing, with minimal blurring or softening of edges, invariance to monotonic transformations such as gamma adjustment, and robustness to noise and outliers. However, known algorithms have all suffered from practical limitations: the bit depth of the image data, the size of the filter kernel, or the kernel shape itself. Square-kernel implementations tend to produce streaky cross-hatching artifacts, and nearly all known efficient algorithms are in practice limited to square kernels. We present for the first time a method that overcomes all of these limitations. Our method operates efficiently on arbitrary bit-depth data, arbitrary kernel sizes, and arbitrary convex kernel shapes, including circular shapes.
AutoGPS: Automated Geometry Problem Solving via Multimodal Formalization and Deductive Reasoning
Authors: Bowen Ping, Minnan Luo, Zhuohang Dang, Chenxi Wang, Chengyou Jia
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Geometry Problem Solving, Mathematical Reasoning

Geometry problem solving presents distinctive challenges in artificial intelligence, requiring exceptional multimodal comprehension and rigorous mathematical reasoning capabilities. Existing approaches typically fall into two categories: neural-based and symbolic-based methods, both of which exhibit limitations in reliability and interpretability. To address this challenge, we propose AutoGPS, a neuro-symbolic collaborative framework that solves geometry problems with concise, reliable, and human-interpretable reasoning processes. Specifically, AutoGPS employs a Multimodal Problem Formalizer (MPF) and a Deductive Symbolic Reasoner (DSR). The MPF utilizes neural cross-modal comprehension to translate geometry problems into structured formal language representations, with feedback from DSR collaboratively. The DSR takes the formalization as input and formulates geometry problem solving as a hypergraph expansion task, executing mathematically rigorous and reliable derivation to produce minimal and human-readable stepwise solutions. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that AutoGPS achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. Furthermore, human stepwise-reasoning evaluation confirms AutoGPS's impressive reliability and interpretability, with 99\% stepwise logical coherence. The project homepage is at https://jayce-ping.github.io/AutoGPS-homepage.
VIGNETTE: Socially Grounded Bias Evaluation for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Chahat Raj, Bowen Wei, Aylin Caliskan, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Ziwei Zhu
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

While bias in large language models (LLMs) is well-studied, similar concerns in vision-language models (VLMs) have received comparatively less attention. Existing VLM bias studies often focus on portrait-style images and gender-occupation associations, overlooking broader and more complex social stereotypes and their implied harm. This work introduces VIGNETTE, a large-scale VQA benchmark with 30M+ images for evaluating bias in VLMs through a question-answering framework spanning four directions: factuality, perception, stereotyping, and decision making. Beyond narrowly-centered studies, we assess how VLMs interpret identities in contextualized settings, revealing how models make trait and capability assumptions and exhibit patterns of discrimination. Drawing from social psychology, we examine how VLMs connect visual identity cues to trait and role-based inferences, encoding social hierarchies, through biased selections. Our findings uncover subtle, multifaceted, and surprising stereotypical patterns, offering insights into how VLMs construct social meaning from inputs.
TextRegion: Text-Aligned Region Tokens from Frozen Image-Text Models
Authors: Yao Xiao, Qiqian Fu, Heyi Tao, Yuqun Wu, Zhen Zhu, Derek Hoiem
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Referring Expression, Referring Expression Comprehension, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation with Language-image Pre-training

Image-text models excel at image-level tasks but struggle with detailed visual understanding. While these models provide strong visual-language alignment, segmentation models like SAM2 offer precise spatial boundaries for objects. To this end, we propose TextRegion, a simple, effective, and training-free framework that combines the strengths of image-text models and SAM2 to generate powerful text-aligned region tokens. These tokens enable detailed visual understanding while preserving open-vocabulary capabilities. They can be directly applied to various downstream tasks, including open-world semantic segmentation, referring expression comprehension, and grounding. We conduct extensive evaluations and consistently achieve superior or competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art training-free methods. Additionally, our framework is compatible with many image-text models, making it highly practical and easily extensible as stronger models emerge. Code is available at: https://github.com/avaxiao/TextRegion.
HyperMotion: DiT-Based Pose-Guided Human Image Animation of Complex Motions
Authors: Shuolin Xu, Siming Zheng, Ziyi Wang, HC Yu, Jinwei Chen, Huaqi Zhang, Bo Li, Peng-Tao Jiang
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Animation, Video Generation

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved conditional video generation, particularly in the pose-guided human image animation task. Although existing methods are capable of generating high-fidelity and time-consistent animation sequences in regular motions and static scenes, there are still obvious limitations when facing complex human body motions (Hypermotion) that contain highly dynamic, non-standard motions, and the lack of a high-quality benchmark for evaluation of complex human motion animations. To address this challenge, we introduce the \textbf{Open-HyperMotionX Dataset} and \textbf{HyperMotionX Bench}, which provide high-quality human pose annotations and curated video clips for evaluating and improving pose-guided human image animation models under complex human motion conditions. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet powerful DiT-based video generation baseline and design spatial low-frequency enhanced RoPE, a novel module that selectively enhances low-frequency spatial feature modeling by introducing learnable frequency scaling. Our method significantly improves structural stability and appearance consistency in highly dynamic human motion sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset and proposed approach in advancing the generation quality of complex human motion image animations. Code and dataset will be made publicly available.
Towards Objective Fine-tuning: How LLMs' Prior Knowledge Causes Potential Poor Calibration?
Authors: ZiMing Wang, Zeyu Shi, Haoyi Zhou, Shiqi Gao, Qingyun Sun, JianXin Li
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00

Fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) often demonstrate poor calibration, with their confidence scores misaligned with actual performance. While calibration has been extensively studied in models trained from scratch, the impact of LLMs' prior knowledge on calibration during fine-tuning remains understudied. Our research reveals that LLMs' prior knowledge causes potential poor calibration due to the ubiquitous presence of known data in real-world fine-tuning, which appears harmful for calibration. Specifically, data aligned with LLMs' prior knowledge would induce overconfidence, while new knowledge improves calibration. Our findings expose a tension: LLMs' encyclopedic knowledge, while enabling task versatility, undermines calibration through unavoidable knowledge overlaps. To address this, we propose CogCalib, a cognition-aware framework that applies targeted learning strategies according to the model's prior knowledge. Experiments across 7 tasks using 3 LLM families prove that CogCalib significantly improves calibration while maintaining performance, achieving an average 57\% reduction in ECE compared to standard fine-tuning in Llama3-8B. These improvements generalize well to out-of-domain tasks, enhancing the objectivity and reliability of domain-specific LLMs, and making them more trustworthy for critical human-AI interaction applications.
Causal-PIK: Causality-based Physical Reasoning with a Physics-Informed Kernel
Authors: Carlota Parés-Morlans, Michelle Yi, Claire Chen, Sarah A. Wu, Rika Antonova, Tobias Gerstenberg, Jeannette Bohg
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

Tasks that involve complex interactions between objects with unknown dynamics make planning before execution difficult. These tasks require agents to iteratively improve their actions after actively exploring causes and effects in the environment. For these type of tasks, we propose Causal-PIK, a method that leverages Bayesian optimization to reason about causal interactions via a Physics-Informed Kernel to help guide efficient search for the best next action. Experimental results on Virtual Tools and PHYRE physical reasoning benchmarks show that Causal-PIK outperforms state-of-the-art results, requiring fewer actions to reach the goal. We also compare Causal-PIK to human studies, including results from a new user study we conducted on the PHYRE benchmark. We find that Causal-PIK remains competitive on tasks that are very challenging, even for human problem-solvers.
ZPressor: Bottleneck-Aware Compression for Scalable Feed-Forward 3DGS
Authors: Weijie Wang, Donny Y. Chen, Zeyu Zhang, Duochao Shi, Akide Liu, Bohan Zhuang
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, GPU, Novel View Synthesis

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models have recently emerged as a promising solution for novel view synthesis, enabling one-pass inference without the need for per-scene 3DGS optimization. However, their scalability is fundamentally constrained by the limited capacity of their encoders, leading to degraded performance or excessive memory consumption as the number of input views increases. In this work, we analyze feed-forward 3DGS frameworks through the lens of the Information Bottleneck principle and introduce ZPressor, a lightweight architecture-agnostic module that enables efficient compression of multi-view inputs into a compact latent state $Z$ that retains essential scene information while discarding redundancy. Concretely, ZPressor enables existing feed-forward 3DGS models to scale to over 100 input views at 480P resolution on an 80GB GPU, by partitioning the views into anchor and support sets and using cross attention to compress the information from the support views into anchor views, forming the compressed latent state $Z$. We show that integrating ZPressor into several state-of-the-art feed-forward 3DGS models consistently improves performance under moderate input views and enhances robustness under dense view settings on two large-scale benchmarks DL3DV-10K and RealEstate10K. The video results, code and trained models are available on our project page: https://lhmd.top/zpressor.
LADA: Scalable Label-Specific CLIP Adapter for Continual Learning
Authors: Mao-Lin Luo, Zi-Hao Zhou, Tong Wei, Min-Ling Zhang
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Continual learning with vision-language models like CLIP offers a pathway toward scalable machine learning systems by leveraging its transferable representations. Existing CLIP-based methods adapt the pre-trained image encoder by adding multiple sets of learnable parameters, with each task using a partial set of parameters. This requires selecting the expected parameters for input images during inference, which is prone to error that degrades performance. To address this problem, we introduce LADA (Label-specific ADApter). Instead of partitioning parameters across tasks, LADA appends lightweight, label-specific memory units to the frozen CLIP image encoder, enabling discriminative feature generation by aggregating task-agnostic knowledge. To prevent catastrophic forgetting, LADA employs feature distillation for seen classes, preventing their features from being interfered with by new classes. Positioned after the image encoder, LADA prevents gradient flow to the frozen CLIP parameters, ensuring efficient training. Extensive results show that LADA achieves state-of-the-art performance in continual learning settings. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/MaolinLuo/LADA.
ComfyMind: Toward General-Purpose Generation via Tree-Based Planning and Reactive Feedback
Authors: Litao Guo, Xinli Xu, Luozhou Wang, Jiantao Lin, Jinsong Zhou, Zixin Zhang, Bolan Su, Ying-Cong Chen
Date: 2025-05-23 00:00:00

With the rapid advancement of generative models, general-purpose generation has gained increasing attention as a promising approach to unify diverse tasks across modalities within a single system. Despite this progress, existing open-source frameworks often remain fragile and struggle to support complex real-world applications due to the lack of structured workflow planning and execution-level feedback. To address these limitations, we present ComfyMind, a collaborative AI system designed to enable robust and scalable general-purpose generation, built on the ComfyUI platform. ComfyMind introduces two core innovations: Semantic Workflow Interface (SWI) that abstracts low-level node graphs into callable functional modules described in natural language, enabling high-level composition and reducing structural errors; Search Tree Planning mechanism with localized feedback execution, which models generation as a hierarchical decision process and allows adaptive correction at each stage. Together, these components improve the stability and flexibility of complex generative workflows. We evaluate ComfyMind on three public benchmarks: ComfyBench, GenEval, and Reason-Edit, which span generation, editing, and reasoning tasks. Results show that ComfyMind consistently outperforms existing open-source baselines and achieves performance comparable to GPT-Image-1. ComfyMind paves a promising path for the development of open-source general-purpose generative AI systems. Project page: https://github.com/LitaoGuo/ComfyMind
Distributional Consequences of Political Freedom: Inequality in Transition Countries
Authors: Monika Wesołowska, Sławomir Kuźmar, Bartosz Totleben, Dawid Piątek
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00

This article addresses the origins of income inequality in post-socialist countries from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, from 1991 to 2016. The aim is to analyze the relationship between democracy and income inequality. In previous studies, this topic has led to ambiguous findings, especially in the context of the group of countries we are focusing on. We examine whether the process of democratization cooccurred with changes in income distribution over the entire period under study, and its impact on individual income deciles to determine who benefited most from the new system. The obtained results allowed us to confirm that the actual relationship between democratization and income inequality did not exist, or at most was illusory in the 1990s, but it was present, relevant, and had a proequality character between 2001 and 2016. During that period, the development of the democratic system benefited at least 80\% of the lower part of the income distribution, at the expense especially of the top deciles share of total income. Those results confirmed that democratization positively affected the shares of lower income deciles in postsocialist countries.
Cleaning Noisy Labels by Negative Ensemble Learning for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Waqar Ahmed, Pietro Morerio, Vittorio Murino
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2022 2
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Ensemble Learning, Pseudo Label, Source-Free Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Conventional Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) methods presume source and target domain data to be simultaneously available during training. Such an assumption may not hold in practice, as source data is often inaccessible (e.g., due to privacy reasons). On the contrary, a pre-trained source model is usually available, which performs poorly on target due to the well-known domain shift problem. This translates into a significant amount of misclassifications, which can be interpreted as structured noise affecting the inferred target pseudo-labels. In this work, we cast UDA as a pseudo-label refinery problem in the challenging source-free scenario. We propose Negative Ensemble Learning (NEL) technique, a unified method for adaptive noise filtering and progressive pseudo-label refinement. NEL is devised to tackle noisy pseudo-labels by enhancing diversity in ensemble members with different stochastic (i) input augmentation and (ii) feedback. The latter is achieved by leveraging the novel concept of Disjoint Residual Labels, which allow propagating diverse information to the different members. Eventually, a single model is trained with the refined pseudo-labels, which leads to a robust performance on the target domain. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on major UDA benchmarks, such as Digit5, PACS, Visda-C, and DomainNet, without using source data samples at all.
Self-Correcting Code Generation Using Small Language Models
Authors: Jeonghun Cho, Deokhyung Kang, Hyounghun Kim, Gary Geunbae Lee
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, HumanEval, mbpp

Self-correction has demonstrated potential in code generation by allowing language models to revise and improve their outputs through successive refinement. Recent studies have explored prompting-based strategies that incorporate verification or feedback loops using proprietary models, as well as training-based methods that leverage their strong reasoning capabilities. However, whether smaller models possess the capacity to effectively guide their outputs through self-reflection remains unexplored. Our findings reveal that smaller models struggle to exhibit reflective revision behavior across both self-correction paradigms. In response, we introduce CoCoS, an approach designed to enhance the ability of small language models for multi-turn code correction. Specifically, we propose an online reinforcement learning objective that trains the model to confidently maintain correct outputs while progressively correcting incorrect outputs as turns proceed. Our approach features an accumulated reward function that aggregates rewards across the entire trajectory and a fine-grained reward better suited to multi-turn correction scenarios. This facilitates the model in enhancing initial response quality while achieving substantial improvements through self-correction. With 1B-scale models, CoCoS achieves improvements of 35.8% on the MBPP and 27.7% on HumanEval compared to the baselines.
Supervised Graph Contrastive Learning for Gene Regulatory Network
Authors: Sho Oshima, Yuji Okamoto, Taisei Tosaki, Ryosuke Kojima, Yasushi Okuno
Date: 2025-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Graph representation learning is effective for obtaining a meaningful latent space utilizing the structure of graph data and is widely applied, including biological networks. In particular, Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a powerful self-supervised method that relies on applying perturbations to graphs for data augmentation. However, when applying existing GCL methods to biological networks such as Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs), they overlooked meaningful biologically relevant perturbations, e.g., gene knockdowns. In this study, we introduce SupGCL (Supervised Graph Contrastive Learning), a novel GCL method for GRNs that directly incorporates biological perturbations derived from gene knockdown experiments as the supervision. SupGCL mathematically extends existing GCL methods that utilize non-biological perturbations to probabilistic models that introduce actual biological gene perturbation utilizing gene knockdown data. Using the GRN representation obtained by our proposed method, our aim is to improve the performance of biological downstream tasks such as patient hazard prediction and disease subtype classification (graph-level task), and gene function classification (node-level task). We applied SupGCL on real GRN datasets derived from patients with multiple types of cancer, and in all experiments SupGCL achieves better performance than state-of-the-art baselines.
A Self-Supervised Method for Attenuating Seismic Random and Tracewise Coherent Noise under the Non-Pixelwise Independence Assumption
Authors: Chuangji Meng; Jinghuai Gao; Wenting Shang; Yajun Tian
Date: 2025-05-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 2025 5
Tasks: Denoising, Geophysics

The attenuation of seismic field noise using self-supervised deep learning has gained attention due to its label-free training process. However, common self-supervised methods are limited by the pixelwise independence assumption, which does not align with field seismic noise characteristics, and suffer from signal leakage due to receptive fields containing inherent blind spots or traces. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised random noise attenuation method based on the non-pixelwise independence assumption. By considering the spatial correlation map of field noise, we extend the blind spot to a generalized blind neighborhood, ensuring that the prediction pixel is not influenced by neighboring pixels with noise correlation greater than zero. The blind neighborhood size controls how much spatial correlation is disrupted, allowing our method to handle random noise with varying spatial correlation. Since larger blind neighborhoods may lead to signal loss, we introduce an automatic trade-off between noise correlation disruption and signal preservation during training. Experiments on real seismic noise attenuation (including random and tracewise coherent noise) demonstrate the superiority of our method in destroying the spatial coherence of noise and preventing useful signal leakage.
A Self-Supervised Method for Attenuating Seismic Random and Tracewise Coherent Noise under the Non-Pixelwise Independence Assumption
Authors: Chuangji Meng, Jinghuai Gao, Wenting Shang, Yajun Tian
Date: 2025-05-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 2025 5

The attenuation of seismic field noise using self-supervised deep learning has gained attention due to its label-free training process. However, common self-supervised methods are limited by the pixelwise independence assumption, which does not align with field seismic noise characteristics, and suffer from signal leakage due to receptive fields containing inherent blind spots or traces. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised random noise attenuation method based on the non-pixelwise independence assumption. By considering the spatial correlation map of field noise, we extend the blind spot to a generalized blind neighborhood, ensuring that the prediction pixel is not influenced by neighboring pixels with noise correlation greater than zero. The blind neighborhood size controls how much spatial correlation is disrupted, allowing our method to handle random noise with varying spatial correlation. Since larger blind neighborhoods may lead to signal loss, we introduce an automatic trade-off between noise correlation disruption and signal preservation during training. Experiments on real seismic noise attenuation (including random and tracewise coherent noise) demonstrate the superiority of our method in destroying the spatial coherence of noise and preventing useful signal leakage.