pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improving the Diffusability of Autoencoders
Authors: Ivan Skorokhodov, Sharath Girish, Benran Hu, Willi Menapace, Yanyu Li, Rameen Abdal, Sergey Tulyakov, Aliaksandr Siarohin
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Generation, Video Generation

Latent diffusion models have emerged as the leading approach for generating high-quality images and videos, utilizing compressed latent representations to reduce the computational burden of the diffusion process. While recent advancements have primarily focused on scaling diffusion backbones and improving autoencoder reconstruction quality, the interaction between these components has received comparatively less attention. In this work, we perform a spectral analysis of modern autoencoders and identify inordinate high-frequency components in their latent spaces, which are especially pronounced in the autoencoders with a large bottleneck channel size. We hypothesize that this high-frequency component interferes with the coarse-to-fine nature of the diffusion synthesis process and hinders the generation quality. To mitigate the issue, we propose scale equivariance: a simple regularization strategy that aligns latent and RGB spaces across frequencies by enforcing scale equivariance in the decoder. It requires minimal code changes and only up to 20K autoencoder fine-tuning steps, yet significantly improves generation quality, reducing FID by 19% for image generation on ImageNet-1K 256x256 and FVD by at least 44% for video generation on Kinetics-700 17x256x256.
Time Travel: A Comprehensive Benchmark to Evaluate LMMs on Historical and Cultural Artifacts
Authors: Sara Ghaboura, Ketan More, Ritesh Thawkar, Wafa Alghallabi, Omkar Thawakar, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Hisham Cholakkal, Salman Khan, Rao Muhammad Anwer
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00

Understanding historical and cultural artifacts demands human expertise and advanced computational techniques, yet the process remains complex and time-intensive. While large multimodal models offer promising support, their evaluation and improvement require a standardized benchmark. To address this, we introduce TimeTravel, a benchmark of 10,250 expert-verified samples spanning 266 distinct cultures across 10 major historical regions. Designed for AI-driven analysis of manuscripts, artworks, inscriptions, and archaeological discoveries, TimeTravel provides a structured dataset and robust evaluation framework to assess AI models' capabilities in classification, interpretation, and historical comprehension. By integrating AI with historical research, TimeTravel fosters AI-powered tools for historians, archaeologists, researchers, and cultural tourists to extract valuable insights while ensuring technology contributes meaningfully to historical discovery and cultural heritage preservation. We evaluate contemporary AI models on TimeTravel, highlighting their strengths and identifying areas for improvement. Our goal is to establish AI as a reliable partner in preserving cultural heritage, ensuring that technological advancements contribute meaningfully to historical discovery. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/TimeTravel}.
Linear Diffusion Networks
Authors: Jacob Fein-Ashley
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00

We present Linear Diffusion Networks (LDNs), a novel architecture that reinterprets sequential data processing as a unified diffusion process. Our model integrates adaptive diffusion modules with localized nonlinear updates and a diffusion-inspired attention mechanism. This design enables efficient global information propagation while preserving fine-grained temporal details. LDN overcomes the limitations of conventional recurrent and transformer models by allowing full parallelization across time steps and supporting robust multi-scale temporal representations. Experiments on benchmark sequence modeling tasks demonstrate that LDN delivers competitive performance across ImageNet and LRA tasks.
Contextual Linear Bandits with Delay as Payoff
Authors: Mengxiao Zhang, Yingfei Wang, Haipeng Luo
Date: 2025-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits

A recent work by Schlisselberg et al. (2024) studies a delay-as-payoff model for stochastic multi-armed bandits, where the payoff (either loss or reward) is delayed for a period that is proportional to the payoff itself. While this captures many real-world applications, the simple multi-armed bandit setting limits the practicality of their results. In this paper, we address this limitation by studying the delay-as-payoff model for contextual linear bandits. Specifically, we start from the case with a fixed action set and propose an efficient algorithm whose regret overhead compared to the standard no-delay case is at most $D\Delta_{\max}\log T$, where $T$ is the total horizon, $D$ is the maximum delay, and $\Delta_{\max}$ is the maximum suboptimality gap. When payoff is loss, we also show further improvement of the bound, demonstrating a separation between reward and loss similar to Schlisselberg et al. (2024). Contrary to standard linear bandit algorithms that construct least squares estimator and confidence ellipsoid, the main novelty of our algorithm is to apply a phased arm elimination procedure by only picking actions in a volumetric spanner of the action set, which addresses challenges arising from both payoff-dependent delays and large action sets. We further extend our results to the case with varying action sets by adopting the reduction from Hanna et al. (2023). Finally, we implement our algorithm and showcase its effectiveness and superior performance in experiments.
Triad: Vision Foundation Model for 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Authors: Shansong Wang, Mojtaba Safari, Qiang Li, Chih-Wei Chang, Richard LJ Qiu, Justin Roper, David S. Yu, Xiaofeng Yang
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Cancer Classification, Computed Tomography (CT), Image Registration, Medical Image Registration, Tumor Segmentation

Vision foundation models (VFMs) are pre-trained on extensive image datasets to learn general representations for diverse types of data. These models can subsequently be fine-tuned for specific downstream tasks, significantly boosting performance across a broad range of applications. However, existing vision foundation models that claim to be applicable to various radiology tasks are mostly pre-trained on 3D computed tomography (CT), which benefits from the availability of extensive 3D CT databases. Significant differences between CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in imaging principles, signal characteristics, and data distribution may hinder their practical performance and versatility in MRI-specific applications. Here, we propose Triad, a vision foundation model for 3D MRI. Triad adopts a widely used autoencoder architecture to learn robust representations from 131,170 3D MRI volumes and uses organ-independent imaging descriptions to constrain the semantic distribution of the visual modality. The above pre-training dataset is called Triad-131K, which is currently the largest 3D MRI pre-training dataset. We evaluate Triad across three tasks, namely, organ/tumor segmentation, organ/cancer classification, and medical image registration, in two data modalities (within-domain and out-of-domain) settings using 25 downstream datasets. By initializing models with Triad's pre-trained weights, nnUNet-Triad improves segmentation performance by 6.88% compared to nnUNet-Scratch across 17 datasets. Swin-B-Triad achieves a 3.97% improvement over Swin-B-Scratch in classification tasks across five datasets. SwinUNETR-Triad improves by 4.00% compared to SwinUNETR-Scratch in registration tasks across two datasets. Our study demonstrates that pre-training can maximize performance when the data modalities and organs of upstream and downstream tasks are consistent.
DiffExp: Efficient Exploration in Reward Fine-tuning for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Daewon Chae, June Suk Choi, Jinkyu Kim, Kimin Lee
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Efficient Exploration

Fine-tuning text-to-image diffusion models to maximize rewards has proven effective for enhancing model performance. However, reward fine-tuning methods often suffer from slow convergence due to online sample generation. Therefore, obtaining diverse samples with strong reward signals is crucial for improving sample efficiency and overall performance. In this work, we introduce DiffExp, a simple yet effective exploration strategy for reward fine-tuning of text-to-image models. Our approach employs two key strategies: (a) dynamically adjusting the scale of classifier-free guidance to enhance sample diversity, and (b) randomly weighting phrases of the text prompt to exploit high-quality reward signals. We demonstrate that these strategies significantly enhance exploration during online sample generation, improving the sample efficiency of recent reward fine-tuning methods, such as DDPO and AlignProp.
Regression in EO: Are VLMs Up to the Challenge?
Authors: Xizhe Xue, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Earth Observation, regression

Earth Observation (EO) data encompass a vast range of remotely sensed information, featuring multi-sensor and multi-temporal, playing an indispensable role in understanding our planet's dynamics. Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in perception and reasoning tasks, bringing new insights and opportunities to the EO field. However, the potential for EO applications, especially for scientific regression related applications remains largely unexplored. This paper bridges that gap by systematically examining the challenges and opportunities of adapting VLMs for EO regression tasks. The discussion first contrasts the distinctive properties of EO data with conventional computer vision datasets, then identifies four core obstacles in applying VLMs to EO regression: 1) the absence of dedicated benchmarks, 2) the discrete-versus-continuous representation mismatch, 3) cumulative error accumulation, and 4) the suboptimal nature of text-centric training objectives for numerical tasks. Next, a series of methodological insights and potential subtle pitfalls are explored. Lastly, we offer some promising future directions for designing robust, domain-aware solutions. Our findings highlight the promise of VLMs for scientific regression in EO, setting the stage for more precise and interpretable modeling of critical environmental processes.
Point Cloud Geometry Scalable Coding Using a Resolution and Quality-conditioned Latents Probability Estimator
Authors: Daniele Mari, André F. R. Guarda, Nuno M. M. Rodrigues, Simone Milani, Fernando Pereira
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00

In the current age, users consume multimedia content in very heterogeneous scenarios in terms of network, hardware, and display capabilities. A naive solution to this problem is to encode multiple independent streams, each covering a different possible requirement for the clients, with an obvious negative impact in both storage and computational requirements. These drawbacks can be avoided by using codecs that enable scalability, i.e., the ability to generate a progressive bitstream, containing a base layer followed by multiple enhancement layers, that allow decoding the same bitstream serving multiple reconstructions and visualization specifications. While scalable coding is a well-known and addressed feature in conventional image and video codecs, this paper focuses on a new and very different problem, notably the development of scalable coding solutions for deep learning-based Point Cloud (PC) coding. The peculiarities of this 3D representation make it hard to implement flexible solutions that do not compromise the other functionalities of the codec. This paper proposes a joint quality and resolution scalability scheme, named Scalable Resolution and Quality Hyperprior (SRQH), that, contrary to previous solutions, can model the relationship between latents obtained with models trained for different RD tradeoffs and/or at different resolutions. Experimental results obtained by integrating SRQH in the emerging JPEG Pleno learning-based PC coding standard show that SRQH allows decoding the PC at different qualities and resolutions with a single bitstream while incurring only in a limited RD penalty and increment in complexity w.r.t. non-scalable JPEG PCC that would require one bitstream per coding configuration.
Object-centric Binding in Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining
Authors: Rim Assouel, Pietro Astolfi, Florian Bordes, Michal Drozdzal, Adriana Romero-Soriano
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-text matching, Object, Text Matching

Recent advances in vision language models (VLM) have been driven by contrastive models such as CLIP, which learn to associate visual information with their corresponding text descriptions. However, these models have limitations in understanding complex compositional scenes involving multiple objects and their spatial relationships. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that diverges from commonly used strategies, which rely on the design of hard-negative augmentations. Instead, our work focuses on integrating inductive biases into pre-trained CLIP-like models to improve their compositional understanding without using any additional hard-negatives. To that end, we introduce a binding module that connects a scene graph, derived from a text description, with a slot-structured image representation, facilitating a structured similarity assessment between the two modalities. We also leverage relationships as text-conditioned visual constraints, thereby capturing the intricate interactions between objects and their contextual relationships more effectively. Our resulting model not only enhances the performance of CLIP-based models in multi-object compositional understanding but also paves the way towards more accurate and sample-efficient image-text matching of complex scenes.
Modular Prompt Learning Improves Vision-Language Models
Authors: Zhenhan Huang, Tejaswini Pedapati, Pin-Yu Chen, Jianxi Gao
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Learning

Pre-trained vision-language models are able to interpret visual concepts and language semantics. Prompt learning, a method of constructing prompts for text encoders or image encoders, elicits the potentials of pre-trained models and readily adapts them to new scenarios. Compared to fine-tuning, prompt learning enables the model to achieve comparable or better performance using fewer trainable parameters. Besides, prompt learning freezes the pre-trained model and avoids the catastrophic forgetting issue in the fine-tuning. Continuous prompts inserted into the input of every transformer layer (i.e. deep prompts) can improve the performances of pre-trained models on downstream tasks. For i-th transformer layer, the inserted prompts replace previously inserted prompts in the $(i-1)$-th layer. Although the self-attention mechanism contextualizes newly inserted prompts for the current layer and embeddings from the previous layer's output, removing all inserted prompts from the previous layer inevitably loses information contained in the continuous prompts. In this work, we propose Modular Prompt Learning (MPL) that is designed to promote the preservation of information contained in the inserted prompts. We evaluate the proposed method on base-to-new generalization and cross-dataset tasks. On average of 11 datasets, our method achieves 0.7% performance gain on the base-to-new generalization task compared to the state-of-the-art method. The largest improvement on the individual dataset is 10.7% (EuroSAT dataset).
GlossGau: Efficient Inverse Rendering for Glossy Surface with Anisotropic Spherical Gaussian
Authors: Bang Du, Runfa Blark Li, Chen Du, Truong Nguyen
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Inverse Rendering, NeRF

The reconstruction of 3D objects from calibrated photographs represents a fundamental yet intricate challenge in the domains of computer graphics and vision. Although neural reconstruction approaches based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown remarkable capabilities, their processing costs remain substantial. Recently, the advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) largely improves the training efficiency and facilitates to generate realistic rendering in real-time. However, due to the limited ability of Spherical Harmonics (SH) to represent high-frequency information, 3D-GS falls short in reconstructing glossy objects. Researchers have turned to enhance the specular expressiveness of 3D-GS through inverse rendering. Yet these methods often struggle to maintain the training and rendering efficiency, undermining the benefits of Gaussian Splatting techniques. In this paper, we introduce GlossGau, an efficient inverse rendering framework that reconstructs scenes with glossy surfaces while maintaining training and rendering speeds comparable to vanilla 3D-GS. Specifically, we explicitly model the surface normals, Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) parameters, as well as incident lights and use Anisotropic Spherical Gaussian (ASG) to approximate the per-Gaussian Normal Distribution Function under the microfacet model. We utilize 2D Gaussian Splatting (2D-GS) as foundational primitives and apply regularization to significantly alleviate the normal estimation challenge encountered in related works. Experiments demonstrate that GlossGau achieves competitive or superior reconstruction on datasets with glossy surfaces. Compared with previous GS-based works that address the specular surface, our optimization time is considerably less.
Token Adaptation via Side Graph Convolution for Temporally and Spatially Efficient Fine-tuning of 3D Point Cloud Transformers
Authors: Takahiko Furuya
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Point Cloud Classification

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of pre-trained 3D point cloud Transformers has emerged as a promising technique for 3D point cloud analysis. While existing PEFT methods attempt to minimize the number of tunable parameters, they still suffer from high temporal and spatial computational costs during fine-tuning. This paper proposes a novel PEFT algorithm for 3D point cloud Transformers, called Side Token Adaptation on a neighborhood Graph (STAG), to achieve superior temporal and spatial efficiency. STAG employs a graph convolutional side network that operates in parallel with a frozen backbone Transformer to adapt tokens to downstream tasks. STAG's side network realizes high efficiency through three key components: connection with the backbone that enables reduced gradient computation, parameter sharing framework, and efficient graph convolution. Furthermore, we present Point Cloud Classification 13 (PCC13), a new benchmark comprising diverse publicly available 3D point cloud datasets, enabling comprehensive evaluation of PEFT methods. Extensive experiments using multiple pre-trained models and PCC13 demonstrates the effectiveness of STAG. Specifically, STAG maintains classification accuracy comparable to existing methods while reducing tunable parameters to only 0.43M and achieving significant reductions in both computational time and memory consumption for fine-tuning. Code and benchmark will be available at: https://github.com/takahikof/STAG
PitVQA++: Vector Matrix-Low-Rank Adaptation for Open-Ended Visual Question Answering in Pituitary Surgery
Authors: Runlong He, Danyal Z. Khan, Evangelos B. Mazomenos, Hani J. Marcus, Danail Stoyanov, Matthew J. Clarkson, Mobarakol Islam
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in visual question answering (VQA) offer a unique opportunity to enhance intra-operative decision-making, promote intuitive interactions, and significantly advancing surgical education. However, the development of VLMs for surgical VQA is challenging due to limited datasets and the risk of overfitting and catastrophic forgetting during full fine-tuning of pretrained weights. While parameter-efficient techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Matrix of Rank Adaptation (MoRA) address adaptation challenges, their uniform parameter distribution overlooks the feature hierarchy in deep networks, where earlier layers, that learn general features, require more parameters than later ones. This work introduces PitVQA++ with an open-ended PitVQA dataset and vector matrix-low-rank adaptation (Vector-MoLoRA), an innovative VLM fine-tuning approach for adapting GPT-2 to pituitary surgery. Open-Ended PitVQA comprises around 101,803 frames from 25 procedural videos with 745,972 question-answer sentence pairs, covering key surgical elements such as phase and step recognition, context understanding, tool detection, localization, and interactions recognition. Vector-MoLoRA incorporates the principles of LoRA and MoRA to develop a matrix-low-rank adaptation strategy that employs vector ranking to allocate more parameters to earlier layers, gradually reducing them in the later layers. Our approach, validated on the Open-Ended PitVQA and EndoVis18-VQA datasets, effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting while significantly enhancing performance over recent baselines. Furthermore, our risk-coverage analysis highlights its enhanced reliability and trustworthiness in handling uncertain predictions. Our source code and dataset is available at~\url{https://github.com/HRL-Mike/PitVQA-Plus}.
Mixed Signals: A Diverse Point Cloud Dataset for Heterogeneous LiDAR V2X Collaboration
Authors: Katie Z Luo, Minh-Quan Dao, Zhenzhen Liu, Mark Campbell, Wei-Lun Chao, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Ezio Malis, Vincent Fremont, Bharath Hariharan, Mao Shan, Stewart Worrall, Julie Stephany Berrio Perez
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Diversity

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) collaborative perception has emerged as a promising solution to address the limitations of single-vehicle perception systems. However, existing V2X datasets are limited in scope, diversity, and quality. To address these gaps, we present Mixed Signals, a comprehensive V2X dataset featuring 45.1k point clouds and 240.6k bounding boxes collected from three connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) equipped with two different types of LiDAR sensors, plus a roadside unit with dual LiDARs. Our dataset provides precisely aligned point clouds and bounding box annotations across 10 classes, ensuring reliable data for perception training. We provide detailed statistical analysis on the quality of our dataset and extensively benchmark existing V2X methods on it. Mixed Signals V2X Dataset is one of the highest quality, large-scale datasets publicly available for V2X perception research. Details on the website https://mixedsignalsdataset.cs.cornell.edu/.