pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PacGDC: Label-Efficient Generalizable Depth Completion with Projection Ambiguity and Consistency
Authors: Haotian Wang, Aoran Xiao, Xiaoqin Zhang, Meng Yang, Shijian Lu
Date: 2025-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Completion

Generalizable depth completion enables the acquisition of dense metric depth maps for unseen environments, offering robust perception capabilities for various downstream tasks. However, training such models typically requires large-scale datasets with metric depth labels, which are often labor-intensive to collect. This paper presents PacGDC, a label-efficient technique that enhances data diversity with minimal annotation effort for generalizable depth completion. PacGDC builds on novel insights into inherent ambiguities and consistencies in object shapes and positions during 2D-to-3D projection, allowing the synthesis of numerous pseudo geometries for the same visual scene. This process greatly broadens available geometries by manipulating scene scales of the corresponding depth maps. To leverage this property, we propose a new data synthesis pipeline that uses multiple depth foundation models as scale manipulators. These models robustly provide pseudo depth labels with varied scene scales, affecting both local objects and global layouts, while ensuring projection consistency that supports generalization. To further diversify geometries, we incorporate interpolation and relocation strategies, as well as unlabeled images, extending the data coverage beyond the individual use of foundation models. Extensive experiments show that PacGDC achieves remarkable generalizability across multiple benchmarks, excelling in diverse scene semantics/scales and depth sparsity/patterns under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Code: https://github.com/Wang-xjtu/PacGDC.
Goal-Oriented Sequential Bayesian Experimental Design for Causal Learning
Authors: Zheyu Zhang, Jiayuan Dong, Jie Liu, Xun Huan
Date: 2025-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design

We present GO-CBED, a goal-oriented Bayesian framework for sequential causal experimental design. Unlike conventional approaches that select interventions aimed at inferring the full causal model, GO-CBED directly maximizes the expected information gain (EIG) on user-specified causal quantities of interest, enabling more targeted and efficient experimentation. The framework is both non-myopic, optimizing over entire intervention sequences, and goal-oriented, targeting only model aspects relevant to the causal query. To address the intractability of exact EIG computation, we introduce a variational lower bound estimator, optimized jointly through a transformer-based policy network and normalizing flow-based variational posteriors. The resulting policy enables real-time decision-making via an amortized network. We demonstrate that GO-CBED consistently outperforms existing baselines across various causal reasoning and discovery tasks-including synthetic structural causal models and semi-synthetic gene regulatory networks-particularly in settings with limited experimental budgets and complex causal mechanisms. Our results highlight the benefits of aligning experimental design objectives with specific research goals and of forward-looking sequential planning.
SAMO: A Lightweight Sharpness-Aware Approach for Multi-Task Optimization with Joint Global-Local Perturbation
Authors: Hao Ban, Gokul Ram Subramani, Kaiyi Ji
Date: 2025-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) enables a joint model to capture commonalities across multiple tasks, reducing computation costs and improving data efficiency. However, a major challenge in MTL optimization is task conflicts, where the task gradients differ in direction or magnitude, limiting model performance compared to single-task counterparts. Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) minimizes task loss while simultaneously reducing the sharpness of the loss landscape. Our empirical observations show that SAM effectively mitigates task conflicts in MTL. Motivated by these findings, we explore integrating SAM into MTL but face two key challenges. While both the average loss gradient and individual task gradients-referred to as global and local information-contribute to SAM, how to combine them remains unclear. Moreover, directly computing each task gradient introduces significant computational and memory overheads. To address these challenges, we propose SAMO, a lightweight \textbf{S}harpness-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{M}ulti-task \textbf{O}ptimization approach, that leverages a joint global-local perturbation. The local perturbations are approximated using only forward passes and are layerwise normalized to improve efficiency. Extensive experiments on a suite of multi-task benchmarks demonstrate both the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/OptMN-Lab/SAMO.
Colors See Colors Ignore: Clothes Changing ReID with Color Disentanglement (ICCV-25 🥳)
Authors: Priyank Pathak, Yogesh S Rawat
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Person Re-Identification

Clothes-Changing Re-Identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals across different locations and times, irrespective of clothing. Existing methods often rely on additional models or annotations to learn robust, clothing-invariant features, making them resource-intensive. In contrast, we explore the use of color—specifically foreground and background colors—as a lightweight, annotation-free proxy for mitigating appearance bias in ReID models. We propose Colors See, Colors Ignore (CSCI), an RGB-only method that leverages color information directly from raw images or video frames. CSCI efficiently captures color-related appearance bias (‘Color See’) while disentangling it from identity-relevant ReID features (‘Color Ignore’). To achieve this, we introduce S2A self-attention, a novel self-attention to prevent information leak between color and identity cues within the feature space. Our analysis shows a strong correspondence between learned color embeddings and clothing attributes, validating color as an effective proxy when explicit clothing labels are unavailable. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CSCI on both image and video ReID with extensive experiments on four CC-ReID datasets. We improve the baseline by Top-1 2.9% on LTCC and 5.0% on PRCC for image-based ReID, and 1.0% on CCVID and 2.5% on MeVID for video-based ReID without relying on additional supervision. Our results highlight the potential of color as a cost-effective solution for addressing appearance bias in CC-ReID.
OST-Bench: Evaluating the Capabilities of MLLMs in Online Spatio-temporal Scene Understanding
Authors: Jingli Lin, Chenming Zhu, Runsen Xu, Xiaohan Mao, Xihui Liu, Tai Wang, Jiangmiao Pang
Date: 2025-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Understanding, Spatial Reasoning

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in integrating vision and language for complex reasoning. While most existing benchmarks evaluate models under offline settings with a fixed set of pre-recorded inputs, we introduce OST-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate Online Spatio-Temporal understanding from the perspective of an agent actively exploring a scene. The Online aspect emphasizes the need to process and reason over incrementally acquired observations, while the Spatio-Temporal component requires integrating current visual inputs with historical memory to support dynamic spatial reasoning. OST-Bench better reflects the challenges of real-world embodied perception. Built on an efficient data collection pipeline, OST-Bench consists of 1.4k scenes and 10k question-answer pairs collected from ScanNet, Matterport3D, and ARKitScenes. We evaluate several leading MLLMs on OST-Bench and observe that they fall short on tasks requiring complex spatio-temporal reasoning. Under the online setting, their accuracy declines as the exploration horizon extends and the memory grows. Through further experimental analysis, we identify common error patterns across models and find that both complex clue-based spatial reasoning demands and long-term memory retrieval requirements significantly drop model performance along two separate axes, highlighting the core challenges that must be addressed to improve online embodied reasoning. To foster further research and development in the field, our codes, dataset, and benchmark are available. Our project page is: https://rbler1234.github.io/OSTBench.github.io/
Objectomaly: Objectness-Aware Refinement for OoD Segmentation with Structural Consistency and Boundary Precision
Authors: Jeonghoon Song, Sunghun Kim, Jaegyun Im, Byeongjoon Noh
Date: 2025-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Out-of-Distribution (OoD) segmentation is critical for safety-sensitive applications like autonomous driving. However, existing mask-based methods often suffer from boundary imprecision, inconsistent anomaly scores within objects, and false positives from background noise. We propose \textbf{\textit{Objectomaly}}, an objectness-aware refinement framework that incorporates object-level priors. Objectomaly consists of three stages: (1) Coarse Anomaly Scoring (CAS) using an existing OoD backbone, (2) Objectness-Aware Score Calibration (OASC) leveraging SAM-generated instance masks for object-level score normalization, and (3) Meticulous Boundary Precision (MBP) applying Laplacian filtering and Gaussian smoothing for contour refinement. Objectomaly achieves state-of-the-art performance on key OoD segmentation benchmarks, including SMIYC AnomalyTrack/ObstacleTrack and RoadAnomaly, improving both pixel-level (AuPRC up to 96.99, FPR$_{95}$ down to 0.07) and component-level (F1$-$score up to 83.44) metrics. Ablation studies and qualitative results on real-world driving videos further validate the robustness and generalizability of our method. Code will be released upon publication.
Rethinking Query-based Transformer for Continual Image Segmentation
Authors: Yuchen Zhu, Cheng Shi, Dingyou Wang, Jiajin Tang, Zhengxuan Wei, Yu Wu, Guanbin Li, Sibei Yang
Date: 2025-07-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Continual Learning, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Class-incremental/Continual image segmentation (CIS) aims to train an image segmenter in stages, where the set of available categories differs at each stage. To leverage the built-in objectness of query-based transformers, which mitigates catastrophic forgetting of mask proposals, current methods often decouple mask generation from the continual learning process. This study, however, identifies two key issues with decoupled frameworks: loss of plasticity and heavy reliance on input data order. To address these, we conduct an in-depth investigation of the built-in objectness and find that highly aggregated image features provide a shortcut for queries to generate masks through simple feature alignment. Based on this, we propose SimCIS, a simple yet powerful baseline for CIS. Its core idea is to directly select image features for query assignment, ensuring "perfect alignment" to preserve objectness, while simultaneously allowing queries to select new classes to promote plasticity. To further combat catastrophic forgetting of categories, we introduce cross-stage consistency in selection and an innovative "visual query"-based replay mechanism. Experiments demonstrate that SimCIS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various segmentation tasks, settings, splits, and input data orders. All models and codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/SooLab/SimCIS.
MVNet: Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Image Classification Based on Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Vision Backbone Architecture
Authors: Guandong Li, Mengxia Ye
Date: 2025-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Hyperspectral Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Mamba, Remote Sensing Image Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification faces challenges such as high-dimensional data, limited training samples, and spectral redundancy, which often lead to overfitting and insufficient generalization capability. This paper proposes a novel MVNet network architecture that integrates 3D-CNN's local feature extraction, Transformer's global modeling, and Mamba's linear complexity sequence modeling capabilities, achieving efficient spatial-spectral feature extraction and fusion. MVNet features a redesigned dual-branch Mamba module, including a State Space Model (SSM) branch and a non-SSM branch employing 1D convolution with SiLU activation, enhancing modeling of both short-range and long-range dependencies while reducing computational latency in traditional Mamba. The optimized HSI-MambaVision Mixer module overcomes the unidirectional limitation of causal convolution, capturing bidirectional spatial-spectral dependencies in a single forward pass through decoupled attention that focuses on high-value features, alleviating parameter redundancy and the curse of dimensionality. On IN, UP, and KSC datasets, MVNet outperforms mainstream hyperspectral image classification methods in both classification accuracy and computational efficiency, demonstrating robust capability in processing complex HSI data.
MUVOD: A Novel Multi-view Video Object Segmentation Dataset and A Benchmark for 3D Segmentation
Authors: Bangning Wei, Joshua Maraval, Meriem Outtas, Kidiyo Kpalma, Nicolas Ramin, Lu Zhang
Date: 2025-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Object, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

The application of methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D GS) have steadily gained popularity in the field of 3D object segmentation in static scenes. These approaches demonstrate efficacy in a range of 3D scene understanding and editing tasks. Nevertheless, the 4D object segmentation of dynamic scenes remains an underexplored field due to the absence of a sufficiently extensive and accurately labelled multi-view video dataset. In this paper, we present MUVOD, a new multi-view video dataset for training and evaluating object segmentation in reconstructed real-world scenarios. The 17 selected scenes, describing various indoor or outdoor activities, are collected from different sources of datasets originating from various types of camera rigs. Each scene contains a minimum of 9 views and a maximum of 46 views. We provide 7830 RGB images (30 frames per video) with their corresponding segmentation mask in 4D motion, meaning that any object of interest in the scene could be tracked across temporal frames of a given view or across different views belonging to the same camera rig. This dataset, which contains 459 instances of 73 categories, is intended as a basic benchmark for the evaluation of multi-view video segmentation methods. We also present an evaluation metric and a baseline segmentation approach to encourage and evaluate progress in this evolving field. Additionally, we propose a new benchmark for 3D object segmentation task with a subset of annotated multi-view images selected from our MUVOD dataset. This subset contains 50 objects of different conditions in different scenarios, providing a more comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art 3D object segmentation methods. Our proposed MUVOD dataset is available at https://volumetric-repository.labs.b-com.com/#/muvod.
USD: A User-Intent-Driven Sampling and Dual-Debiasing Framework for Large-Scale Homepage Recommendations
Authors: Jiaqi Zheng, Cheng Guo, Yi Cao, Chaoqun Hou, Tong Liu, Bo Zheng
Date: 2025-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

Large-scale homepage recommendations face critical challenges from pseudo-negative samples caused by exposure bias, where non-clicks may indicate inattention rather than disinterest. Existing work lacks thorough analysis of invalid exposures and typically addresses isolated aspects (e.g., sampling strategies), overlooking the critical impact of pseudo-positive samples - such as homepage clicks merely to visit marketing portals. We propose a unified framework for large-scale homepage recommendation sampling and debiasing. Our framework consists of two key components: (1) a user intent-aware negative sampling module to filter invalid exposure samples, and (2) an intent-driven dual-debiasing module that jointly corrects exposure bias and click bias. Extensive online experiments on Taobao demonstrate the efficacy of our framework, achieving significant improvements in user click-through rates (UCTR) by 35.4% and 14.5% in two variants of the marketing block on the Taobao homepage, Baiyibutie and Taobaomiaosha.
Open Source Planning & Control System with Language Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery
Authors: Licong Xu, Milind Sarkar, Anto I. Lonappan, Íñigo Zubeldia, Pablo Villanueva-Domingo, Santiago Casas, Christian Fidler, Chetana Amancharla, Ujjwal Tiwari, Adrian Bayer, Chadi Ait Ekiou, Miles Cranmer, Adrian Dimitrov, James Fergusson, Kahaan Gandhi, Sven Krippendorf, Andrew Laverick, Julien Lesgourgues, Antony Lewis, Thomas Meier, Blake Sherwin, Kristen Surrao, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, Chi Wang, Xueqing Xu, Boris Bolliet
Date: 2025-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, scientific discovery

We present a multi-agent system for automation of scientific research tasks, cmbagent. The system is formed by about 30 Large Language Model (LLM) agents and implements a Planning & Control strategy to orchestrate the agentic workflow, with no human-in-the-loop at any point. Each agent specializes in a different task (performing retrieval on scientific papers and codebases, writing code, interpreting results, critiquing the output of other agents) and the system is able to execute code locally. We successfully apply cmbagent to carry out a PhD level cosmology task (the measurement of cosmological parameters using supernova data) and evaluate its performance on two benchmark sets, finding superior performance over state-of-the-art LLMs. The source code is available on GitHub, demonstration videos are also available, and the system is deployed on HuggingFace and will be available on the cloud.
Towards Interpretable Time Series Foundation Models
Authors: Matthieu Boileau, Philippe Helluy, Jeremy Pawlus, Svitlana Vyetrenko
Date: 2025-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

In this paper, we investigate the distillation of time series reasoning capabilities into small, instruction-tuned language models as a step toward building interpretable time series foundation models. Leveraging a synthetic dataset of mean-reverting time series with systematically varied trends and noise levels, we generate natural language annotations using a large multimodal model and use these to supervise the fine-tuning of compact Qwen models. We introduce evaluation metrics that assess the quality of the distilled reasoning - focusing on trend direction, noise intensity, and extremum localization - and show that the post-trained models acquire meaningful interpretive capabilities. Our results highlight the feasibility of compressing time series understanding into lightweight, language-capable models suitable for on-device or privacy-sensitive deployment. This work contributes a concrete foundation toward developing small, interpretable models that explain temporal patterns in natural language.
Growing Transformers: Modular Composition and Layer-wise Expansion on a Frozen Substrate
Authors: A. Bochkov
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Mixture-of-Experts, MMLU

The prevailing paradigm for scaling large language models (LLMs) involves monolithic, end-to-end training, a resource-intensive process that lacks flexibility. This paper explores an alternative, constructive approach to model development, built upon the foundation of non-trainable, deterministic input embeddings. In prior [1], we established that high-level semantic reasoning can emerge in Transformers using frozen embeddings derived from the visual structure of Unicode glyphs. Here, we demonstrate that this fixed representational substrate acts as a universal "docking port," enabling two powerful and efficient scaling paradigms: seamless modular composition and progressive layer-wise growth. First, we show that specialist models trained on disparate datasets (e.g., Russian and Chinese text) can be merged into a single, more capable Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, post-training, with zero architectural modification. This is achieved by simply averaging their output logits. The resulting MoE model exhibits immediate performance improvements on reasoning benchmarks like MMLU, surpassing its constituent experts without catastrophic forgetting. Second, we introduce a layer-wise constructive training methodology, where a deep Transformer is "grown" by progressively stacking and training one layer at a time. This method demonstrates stable convergence and a clear correlation between model depth and the emergence of complex reasoning abilities, such as those required for SQuAD. Our findings suggest a paradigm shift from monolithic optimization towards a more biological or constructive model of AI development, where complexity is built incrementally and modules can be composed freely. This opens new avenues for resource-efficient scaling, continual learning, and a more democratized ecosystem for building powerful AI systems. We release all code and models to facilitate further research.
Uncertainty Quantification for Motor Imagery BCI -- Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning
Authors: Joris Suurmeijer, Ivo Pascal de Jong, Matias Valdenegro-Toro, Andreea Ioana Sburlea
Date: 2025-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Motor Imagery, Uncertainty Quantification

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) turn brain signals into functionally useful output, but they are not always accurate. A good Machine Learning classifier should be able to indicate how confident it is about a given classification, by giving a probability for its classification. Standard classifiers for Motor Imagery BCIs do give such probabilities, but research on uncertainty quantification has been limited to Deep Learning. We compare the uncertainty quantification ability of established BCI classifiers using Common Spatial Patterns (CSP-LDA) and Riemannian Geometry (MDRM) to specialized methods in Deep Learning (Deep Ensembles and Direct Uncertainty Quantification) as well as standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We found that the overconfidence typically seen in Deep Learning is not a problem in CSP-LDA and MDRM. We found that MDRM is underconfident, which we solved by adding Temperature Scaling (MDRM-T). CSP-LDA and MDRM-T give the best uncertainty estimates, but Deep Ensembles and standard CNNs give the best classifications. We show that all models are able to separate between easy and difficult estimates, so that we can increase the accuracy of a Motor Imagery BCI by rejecting samples that are ambiguous.