pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Style Customization of Text-to-Vector Generation with Image Diffusion Priors
Authors: Peiying Zhang, Nanxuan Zhao, Jing Liao
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Vector Graphics

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) are highly favored by designers due to their resolution independence and well-organized layer structure. Although existing text-to-vector (T2V) generation methods can create SVGs from text prompts, they often overlook an important need in practical applications: style customization, which is vital for producing a collection of vector graphics with consistent visual appearance and coherent aesthetics. Extending existing T2V methods for style customization poses certain challenges. Optimization-based T2V models can utilize the priors of text-to-image (T2I) models for customization, but struggle with maintaining structural regularity. On the other hand, feed-forward T2V models can ensure structural regularity, yet they encounter difficulties in disentangling content and style due to limited SVG training data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage style customization pipeline for SVG generation, making use of the advantages of both feed-forward T2V models and T2I image priors. In the first stage, we train a T2V diffusion model with a path-level representation to ensure the structural regularity of SVGs while preserving diverse expressive capabilities. In the second stage, we customize the T2V diffusion model to different styles by distilling customized T2I models. By integrating these techniques, our pipeline can generate high-quality and diverse SVGs in custom styles based on text prompts in an efficient feed-forward manner. The effectiveness of our method has been validated through extensive experiments. The project page is https://customsvg.github.io.
Exploring Implicit Visual Misunderstandings in Multimodal Large Language Models through Attention Analysis
Authors: Pengfei Wang, Guohai Xu, Weinong Wang, Junjie Yang, Jie Lou, Yunhua Xue
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00

Recent advancements have enhanced the capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to comprehend multi-image information. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate answer correctness, overlooking whether models genuinely comprehend the visual input. To address this, we define implicit visual misunderstanding (IVM), where MLLMs provide correct answers without fully comprehending the visual input. Through our analysis, we decouple the visual and textual modalities within the causal attention module, revealing that attention distribution increasingly converges on the image associated with the correct answer as the network layers deepen. This insight leads to the introduction of a scale-agnostic metric, \textit{attention accuracy}, and a novel benchmark for quantifying IVMs. Attention accuracy directly evaluates the model's visual understanding via internal mechanisms, remaining robust to positional biases for more reliable assessments. Furthermore, we extend our approach to finer granularities and demonstrate its effectiveness in unimodal scenarios, underscoring its versatility and generalizability.
Enhancing Multi-Image Question Answering via Submodular Subset Selection
Authors: Aaryan Sharma, Shivansh Gupta, Samar Agarwal, Vishak Prasad C., Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Retrieval, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have achieved high performance in vision-language tasks involving single image but they struggle when presented with a collection of multiple images (Multiple Image Question Answering scenario). These tasks, which involve reasoning over large number of images, present issues in scalability (with increasing number of images) and retrieval performance. In this work, we propose an enhancement for retriever framework introduced in MIRAGE model using submodular subset selection techniques. Our method leverages query-aware submodular functions, such as GraphCut, to pre-select a subset of semantically relevant images before main retrieval component. We demonstrate that using anchor-based queries and augmenting the data improves submodular-retriever pipeline effectiveness, particularly in large haystack sizes.
MASSV: Multimodal Adaptation and Self-Data Distillation for Speculative Decoding of Vision-Language Models
Authors: Mugilan Ganesan, Shane Segal, Ankur Aggarwal, Nish Sinnadurai, Sean Lie, Vithursan Thangarasa
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00

Speculative decoding significantly accelerates language model inference by enabling a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens that a larger target model verifies simultaneously. However, applying this technique to vision-language models (VLMs) presents two fundamental challenges: small language models that could serve as efficient drafters lack the architectural components to process visual inputs, and their token predictions fail to match those of VLM target models that consider visual context. We introduce Multimodal Adaptation and Self-Data Distillation for Speculative Decoding of Vision-Language Models (MASSV), which transforms existing small language models into effective multimodal drafters through a two-phase approach. MASSV first connects the target VLM's vision encoder to the draft model via a lightweight trainable projector, then applies self-distilled visual instruction tuning using responses generated by the target VLM to align token predictions. Comprehensive experiments across the Qwen2.5-VL and Gemma3 model families demonstrate that MASSV increases accepted length by up to 30% and delivers end-to-end inference speedups of up to 1.46x on visually-grounded tasks. MASSV provides a scalable, architecture-compatible method for accelerating both current and future VLMs.
MorphGuard: Morph Specific Margin Loss for Enhancing Robustness to Face Morphing Attacks
Authors: Iurii Medvedev, Nuno Goncalves
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, MORPH

Face recognition has evolved significantly with the advancement of deep learning techniques, enabling its widespread adoption in various applications requiring secure authentication. However, this progress has also increased its exposure to presentation attacks, including face morphing, which poses a serious security threat by allowing one identity to impersonate another. Therefore, modern face recognition systems must be robust against such attacks. In this work, we propose a novel approach for training deep networks for face recognition with enhanced robustness to face morphing attacks. Our method modifies the classification task by introducing a dual-branch classification strategy that effectively handles the ambiguity in the labeling of face morphs. This adaptation allows the model to incorporate morph images into the training process, improving its ability to distinguish them from bona fide samples. Our strategy has been validated on public benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing robustness against face morphing attacks. Furthermore, our approach is universally applicable and can be integrated into existing face recognition training pipelines to improve classification-based recognition methods.
CheXGenBench: A Unified Benchmark For Fidelity, Privacy and Utility of Synthetic Chest Radiographs
Authors: Raman Dutt, Pedro Sanchez, Yongchen Yao, Steven McDonagh, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Timothy Hospedales
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Conditional Text-to-Image Synthesis

We introduce CheXGenBench, a rigorous and multifaceted evaluation framework for synthetic chest radiograph generation that simultaneously assesses fidelity, privacy risks, and clinical utility across state-of-the-art text-to-image generative models. Despite rapid advancements in generative AI for real-world imagery, medical domain evaluations have been hindered by methodological inconsistencies, outdated architectural comparisons, and disconnected assessment criteria that rarely address the practical clinical value of synthetic samples. CheXGenBench overcomes these limitations through standardised data partitioning and a unified evaluation protocol comprising over 20 quantitative metrics that systematically analyse generation quality, potential privacy vulnerabilities, and downstream clinical applicability across 11 leading text-to-image architectures. Our results reveal critical inefficiencies in the existing evaluation protocols, particularly in assessing generative fidelity, leading to inconsistent and uninformative comparisons. Our framework establishes a standardised benchmark for the medical AI community, enabling objective and reproducible comparisons while facilitating seamless integration of both existing and future generative models. Additionally, we release a high-quality, synthetic dataset, SynthCheX-75K, comprising 75K radiographs generated by the top-performing model (Sana 0.6B) in our benchmark to support further research in this critical domain. Through CheXGenBench, we establish a new state-of-the-art and release our framework, models, and SynthCheX-75K dataset at https://raman1121.github.io/CheXGenBench/
Multi-contrast laser endoscopy for in vivo gastrointestinal imaging
Authors: Taylor L. Bobrow, Mayank Golhar, Suchapa Arayakarnkul, Anthony A. Song, Saowanee Ngamruengphong, Nicholas J. Durr
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00

White light endoscopy is the clinical gold standard for detecting diseases in the gastrointestinal tract. Most applications involve identifying visual abnormalities in tissue color, texture, and shape. Unfortunately, the contrast of these features is often subtle, causing many clinically relevant cases to go undetected. To overcome this challenge, we introduce Multi-contrast Laser Endoscopy (MLE): a platform for widefield clinical imaging with rapidly tunable spectral, coherent, and directional illumination. We demonstrate three capabilities of MLE: enhancing tissue chromophore contrast with multispectral diffuse reflectance, quantifying blood flow using laser speckle contrast imaging, and characterizing mucosal topography using photometric stereo. We validate MLE with benchtop models, then demonstrate MLE in vivo during clinical colonoscopies. MLE images from 31 polyps demonstrate an approximate three-fold improvement in contrast and a five-fold improvement in color difference compared to white light and narrow band imaging. With the ability to reveal multiple complementary types of tissue contrast while seamlessly integrating into the clinical environment, MLE shows promise as an investigative tool to improve gastrointestinal imaging.
Logos as a Well-Tempered Pre-train for Sign Language Recognition
Authors: Ilya Ovodov, Petr Surovtsev, Karina Kvanchiani, Alexander Kapitanov, Alexander Nagaev
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Sign Language Recognition, Transfer Learning

This paper examines two aspects of the isolated sign language recognition (ISLR) task. First, despite the availability of a number of datasets, the amount of data for most individual sign languages is limited. It poses the challenge of cross-language ISLR model training, including transfer learning. Second, similar signs can have different semantic meanings. It leads to ambiguity in dataset labeling and raises the question of the best policy for annotating such signs. To address these issues, this study presents Logos, a novel Russian Sign Language (RSL) dataset, the most extensive ISLR dataset by the number of signers and one of the largest available datasets while also the largest RSL dataset in size and vocabulary. It is shown that a model, pre-trained on the Logos dataset can be used as a universal encoder for other language SLR tasks, including few-shot learning. We explore cross-language transfer learning approaches and find that joint training using multiple classification heads benefits accuracy for the target lowresource datasets the most. The key feature of the Logos dataset is explicitly annotated visually similar sign groups. We show that explicitly labeling visually similar signs improves trained model quality as a visual encoder for downstream tasks. Based on the proposed contributions, we outperform current state-of-the-art results for the WLASL dataset and get competitive results for the AUTSL dataset, with a single stream model processing solely RGB video. The source code, dataset, and pre-trained models are publicly available.
Consistent Quantity-Quality Control across Scenes for Deployment-Aware Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Fengdi Zhang, Hongkun Cao, Ruqi Huang
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Model Compression, Novel View Synthesis

To reduce storage and computational costs, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) seeks to minimize the number of Gaussians used while preserving high rendering quality, introducing an inherent trade-off between Gaussian quantity and rendering quality. Existing methods strive for better quantity-quality performance, but lack the ability for users to intuitively adjust this trade-off to suit practical needs such as model deployment under diverse hardware and communication constraints. Here, we present ControlGS, a 3DGS optimization method that achieves semantically meaningful and cross-scene consistent quantity-quality control while maintaining strong quantity-quality performance. Through a single training run using a fixed setup and a user-specified hyperparameter reflecting quantity-quality preference, ControlGS can automatically find desirable quantity-quality trade-off points across diverse scenes, from compact objects to large outdoor scenes. It also outperforms baselines by achieving higher rendering quality with fewer Gaussians, and supports a broad adjustment range with stepless control over the trade-off.
HWA-UNETR: Hierarchical Window Aggregate UNETR for 3D Multimodal Gastric Lesion Segmentation
Authors: Jiaming Liang, Lihuan Dai, Xiaoqi Sheng, Xiangguang Chen, Chun Yao, Guihua Tao, Qibin Leng, Hongmin Cai, Xi Zhong
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Mamba, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Multimodal medical image segmentation faces significant challenges in the context of gastric cancer lesion analysis. This clinical context is defined by the scarcity of independent multimodal datasets and the imperative to amalgamate inherently misaligned modalities. As a result, algorithms are constrained to train on approximate data and depend on application migration, leading to substantial resource expenditure and a potential decline in analysis accuracy. To address those challenges, we have made two major contributions: First, we publicly disseminate the GCM 2025 dataset, which serves as the first large-scale, open-source collection of gastric cancer multimodal MRI scans, featuring professionally annotated FS-T2W, CE-T1W, and ADC images from 500 patients. Second, we introduce HWA-UNETR, a novel 3D segmentation framework that employs an original HWA block with learnable window aggregation layers to establish dynamic feature correspondences between different modalities' anatomical structures, and leverages the innovative tri-orientated fusion mamba mechanism for context modeling and capturing long-range spatial dependencies. Extensive experiments on our GCM 2025 dataset and the publicly BraTS 2021 dataset validate the performance of our framework, demonstrating that the new approach surpasses existing methods by up to 1.68\% in the Dice score while maintaining solid robustness. The dataset and code are public via https://github.com/JeMing-creater/HWA-UNETR.
TactileNet: Bridging the Accessibility Gap with AI-Generated Tactile Graphics for Individuals with Vision Impairment
Authors: Adnan Khan, Alireza Choubineh, Mai A. Shaaban, Abbas Akkasi, Majid Komeili
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: SSIM

Tactile graphics are essential for providing access to visual information for the 43 million people globally living with vision loss. Traditional methods for creating these graphics are labor-intensive and cannot meet growing demand. We introduce TactileNet, the first comprehensive dataset and AI-driven framework for generating embossing-ready 2D tactile templates using text-to-image Stable Diffusion (SD) models. By integrating Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and DreamBooth, our method fine-tunes SD models to produce high-fidelity, guideline-compliant graphics while reducing computational costs. Quantitative evaluations with tactile experts show 92.86% adherence to accessibility standards. Structural fidelity analysis revealed near-human design similarity, with an SSIM of 0.538 between generated graphics and expert-designed tactile images. Notably, our method preserves object silhouettes better than human designs (SSIM = 0.259 vs. 0.215 for binary masks), addressing a key limitation of manual tactile abstraction. The framework scales to 32,000 images (7,050 high-quality) across 66 classes, with prompt editing enabling customizable outputs (e.g., adding or removing details). By automating the 2D template generation step-compatible with standard embossing workflows-TactileNet accelerates production while preserving design flexibility. This work demonstrates how AI can augment (not replace) human expertise to bridge the accessibility gap in education and beyond. Code, data, and models will be publicly released to foster further research.
A Unified and Scalable Membership Inference Method for Visual Self-supervised Encoder via Part-aware Capability
Authors: Jie Zhu, Jirong Zha, Ding Li, Leye Wang
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning shows promise in harnessing extensive unlabeled data, but it also confronts significant privacy concerns, especially in vision. In this paper, we perform membership inference on visual self-supervised models in a more realistic setting: self-supervised training method and details are unknown for an adversary when attacking as he usually faces a black-box system in practice. In this setting, considering that self-supervised model could be trained by completely different self-supervised paradigms, e.g., masked image modeling and contrastive learning, with complex training details, we propose a unified membership inference method called PartCrop. It is motivated by the shared part-aware capability among models and stronger part response on the training data. Specifically, PartCrop crops parts of objects in an image to query responses within the image in representation space. We conduct extensive attacks on self-supervised models with different training protocols and structures using three widely used image datasets. The results verify the effectiveness and generalization of PartCrop. Moreover, to defend against PartCrop, we evaluate two common approaches, i.e., early stop and differential privacy, and propose a tailored method called shrinking crop scale range. The defense experiments indicate that all of them are effective. Finally, besides prototype testing on toy visual encoders and small-scale image datasets, we quantitatively study the impacts of scaling from both data and model aspects in a realistic scenario and propose a scalable PartCrop-v2 by introducing two structural improvements to PartCrop. Our code is at https://github.com/JiePKU/PartCrop.
SOS: A Shuffle Order Strategy for Data Augmentation in Industrial Human Activity Recognition
Authors: Anh Tuan Ha, Hoang Khang Phan, Thai Minh Tien Ngo, Anh Phan Truong, Nhat Tan Le
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Data Augmentation, Human Activity Recognition

In the realm of Human Activity Recognition (HAR), obtaining high quality and variance data is still a persistent challenge due to high costs and the inherent variability of real-world activities. This study introduces a generation dataset by deep learning approaches (Attention Autoencoder and conditional Generative Adversarial Networks). Another problem that data heterogeneity is a critical challenge, one of the solutions is to shuffle the data to homogenize the distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that the random sequence strategy significantly improves classification performance, achieving an accuracy of up to 0.70 $\pm$ 0.03 and a macro F1 score of 0.64 $\pm$ 0.01. For that, disrupting temporal dependencies through random sequence reordering compels the model to focus on instantaneous recognition, thereby improving robustness against activity transitions. This approach not only broadens the effective training dataset but also offers promising avenues for enhancing HAR systems in complex, real-world scenarios.
MIPHEI-ViT: Multiplex Immunofluorescence Prediction from H&E Images using ViT Foundation Models
Authors: Guillaume Balezo, Roger Trullo, Albert Pla Planas, Etienne Decenciere, Thomas Walter
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Medical Image Analysis

Histopathological analysis is a cornerstone of cancer diagnosis, with Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining routinely acquired for every patient to visualize cell morphology and tissue architecture. On the other hand, multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) enables more precise cell type identification via proteomic markers, but has yet to achieve widespread clinical adoption due to cost and logistical constraints. To bridge this gap, we introduce MIPHEI (Multiplex Immunofluorescence Prediction from H&E), a U-Net-inspired architecture that integrates state-of-the-art ViT foundation models as encoders to predict mIF signals from H&E images. MIPHEI targets a comprehensive panel of markers spanning nuclear content, immune lineages (T cells, B cells, myeloid), epithelium, stroma, vasculature, and proliferation. We train our model using the publicly available ORION dataset of restained H&E and mIF images from colorectal cancer tissue, and validate it on two independent datasets. MIPHEI achieves accurate cell-type classification from H&E alone, with F1 scores of 0.88 for Pan-CK, 0.57 for CD3e, 0.56 for SMA, 0.36 for CD68, and 0.30 for CD20, substantially outperforming both a state-of-the-art baseline and a random classifier for most markers. Our results indicate that our model effectively captures the complex relationships between nuclear morphologies in their tissue context, as visible in H&E images and molecular markers defining specific cell types. MIPHEI offers a promising step toward enabling cell-type-aware analysis of large-scale H&E datasets, in view of uncovering relationships between spatial cellular organization and patient outcomes.
StoryReasoning Dataset: Using Chain-of-Thought for Scene Understanding and Grounded Story Generation
Authors: Daniel A. P. Oliveira, David Martins de Matos
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Understanding, Story Generation, Visual Storytelling

Visual storytelling systems struggle to maintain character identity across frames and link actions to appropriate subjects, frequently leading to referential hallucinations. These issues can be addressed through grounding of characters, objects, and other entities on the visual elements. We propose StoryReasoning, a dataset containing 4,178 stories derived from 52,016 movie images, with both structured scene analyses and grounded stories. Each story maintains character and object consistency across frames while explicitly modeling multi-frame relationships through structured tabular representations. Our approach features cross-frame object re-identification using visual similarity and face recognition, chain-of-thought reasoning for explicit narrative modeling, and a grounding scheme that links textual elements to visual entities across multiple frames. We establish baseline performance by fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL 7B, creating Qwen Storyteller, which performs end-to-end object detection, re-identification, and landmark detection while maintaining consistent object references throughout the story. Evaluation demonstrates a reduction from 4.06 to 3.56 (-12.3%) hallucinations on average per story when compared to a non-fine-tuned model.