pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Global and Local Entailment Learning for Natural World Imagery
Authors: Srikumar Sastry, Aayush Dhakal, Eric Xing, Subash Khanal, Nathan Jacobs
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00

Learning the hierarchical structure of data in vision-language models is a significant challenge. Previous works have attempted to address this challenge by employing entailment learning. However, these approaches fail to model the transitive nature of entailment explicitly, which establishes the relationship between order and semantics within a representation space. In this work, we introduce Radial Cross-Modal Embeddings (RCME), a framework that enables the explicit modeling of transitivity-enforced entailment. Our proposed framework optimizes for the partial order of concepts within vision-language models. By leveraging our framework, we develop a hierarchical vision-language foundation model capable of representing the hierarchy in the Tree of Life. Our experiments on hierarchical species classification and hierarchical retrieval tasks demonstrate the enhanced performance of our models compared to the existing state-of-the-art models. Our code and models are open-sourced at https://vishu26.github.io/RCME/index.html.
TITAN: Query-Token based Domain Adaptive Adversarial Learning
Authors: Tajamul Ashraf, Janibul Bashir
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00

We focus on the source-free domain adaptive object detection (SF-DAOD) problem when source data is unavailable during adaptation and the model must adapt to an unlabeled target domain. The majority of approaches for the problem employ a self-supervised approach using a student-teacher (ST) framework where pseudo-labels are generated via a source-pretrained model for further fine-tuning. We observe that the performance of a student model often degrades drastically, due to the collapse of the teacher model, primarily caused by high noise in pseudo-labels, resulting from domain bias, discrepancies, and a significant domain shift across domains. To obtain reliable pseudo-labels, we propose a Target-based Iterative Query-Token Adversarial Network (TITAN), which separates the target images into two subsets: those similar to the source (easy) and those dissimilar (hard). We propose a strategy to estimate variance to partition the target domain. This approach leverages the insight that higher detection variances correspond to higher recall and greater similarity to the source domain. Also, we incorporate query-token-based adversarial modules into a student-teacher baseline framework to reduce the domain gaps between two feature representations. Experiments conducted on four natural imaging datasets and two challenging medical datasets have substantiated the superior performance of TITAN compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methodologies. We report an mAP improvement of +22.7, +22.2, +21.1, and +3.7 percent over the current SOTA on C2F, C2B, S2C, and K2C benchmarks, respectively.
Mitigating Hallucination of Large Vision-Language Models via Dynamic Logits Calibration
Authors: Jiahe Chen, Jiaying He, Qian Shao, Qiyuan Chen, Jiahe Ying, Hongxia Xu, Jintai Chen, Jianwei Zheng, Jian Wu
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Text Generation

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in multimodal understanding, yet they are frequently hampered by hallucination-the generation of text that contradicts visual input. Existing training-free decoding strategies exhibit critical limitations, including the use of static constraints that do not adapt to semantic drift during generation, inefficiency stemming from the need for multiple forward passes, and degradation of detail due to overly rigid intervention rules. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces Dynamic Logits Calibration (DLC), a novel training-free decoding framework designed to dynamically align text generation with visual evidence at inference time. At the decoding phase, DLC step-wise employs CLIP to assess the semantic alignment between the input image and the generated text sequence. Then, the Relative Visual Advantage (RVA) of candidate tokens is evaluated against a dynamically updated contextual baseline, adaptively adjusting output logits to favor tokens that are visually grounded. Furthermore, an adaptive weighting mechanism, informed by a real-time context alignment score, carefully balances the visual guidance while ensuring the overall quality of the textual output. Extensive experiments conducted across diverse benchmarks and various LVLM architectures (such as LLaVA, InstructBLIP, and MiniGPT-4) demonstrate that DLC significantly reduces hallucinations, outperforming current methods while maintaining high inference efficiency by avoiding multiple forward passes. Overall, we present an effective and efficient decoding-time solution to mitigate hallucinations, thereby enhancing the reliability of LVLMs for more practices. Code will be released on Github.
GGTalker: Talking Head Systhesis with Generalizable Gaussian Priors and Identity-Specific Adaptation
Authors: Wentao Hu, Shunkai Li, Ziqiao Peng, Haoxian Zhang, Fan Shi, Xiaoqiang Liu, Pengfei Wan, Di Zhang, Hui Tian
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00

Creating high-quality, generalizable speech-driven 3D talking heads remains a persistent challenge. Previous methods achieve satisfactory results for fixed viewpoints and small-scale audio variations, but they struggle with large head rotations and out-of-distribution (OOD) audio. Moreover, they are constrained by the need for time-consuming, identity-specific training. We believe the core issue lies in the lack of sufficient 3D priors, which limits the extrapolation capabilities of synthesized talking heads. To address this, we propose GGTalker, which synthesizes talking heads through a combination of generalizable priors and identity-specific adaptation. We introduce a two-stage Prior-Adaptation training strategy to learn Gaussian head priors and adapt to individual characteristics. We train Audio-Expression and Expression-Visual priors to capture the universal patterns of lip movements and the general distribution of head textures. During the Customized Adaptation, individual speaking styles and texture details are precisely modeled. Additionally, we introduce a color MLP to generate fine-grained, motion-aligned textures and a Body Inpainter to blend rendered results with the background, producing indistinguishable, photorealistic video frames. Comprehensive experiments show that GGTalker achieves state-of-the-art performance in rendering quality, 3D consistency, lip-sync accuracy, and training efficiency.
G$^{2}$D: Boosting Multimodal Learning with Gradient-Guided Distillation
Authors: Mohammed Rakib, Arunkumar Bagavathi
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Optimization

Multimodal learning aims to leverage information from diverse data modalities to achieve more comprehensive performance. However, conventional multimodal models often suffer from modality imbalance, where one or a few modalities dominate model optimization, leading to suboptimal feature representation and underutilization of weak modalities. To address this challenge, we introduce Gradient-Guided Distillation (G$^{2}$D), a knowledge distillation framework that optimizes the multimodal model with a custom-built loss function that fuses both unimodal and multimodal objectives. G$^{2}$D further incorporates a dynamic sequential modality prioritization (SMP) technique in the learning process to ensure each modality leads the learning process, avoiding the pitfall of stronger modalities overshadowing weaker ones. We validate G$^{2}$D on multiple real-world datasets and show that G$^{2}$D amplifies the significance of weak modalities while training and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in classification and regression tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/rAIson-Lab/G2D.
MADrive: Memory-Augmented Driving Scene Modeling
Authors: Polina Karpikova, Daniil Selikhanovych, Kirill Struminsky, Ruslan Musaev, Maria Golitsyna, Dmitry Baranchuk
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Recent advances in scene reconstruction have pushed toward highly realistic modeling of autonomous driving (AD) environments using 3D Gaussian splatting. However, the resulting reconstructions remain closely tied to the original observations and struggle to support photorealistic synthesis of significantly altered or novel driving scenarios. This work introduces MADrive, a memory-augmented reconstruction framework designed to extend the capabilities of existing scene reconstruction methods by replacing observed vehicles with visually similar 3D assets retrieved from a large-scale external memory bank. Specifically, we release MAD-Cars, a curated dataset of ${\sim}70$K 360{\deg} car videos captured in the wild and present a retrieval module that finds the most similar car instances in the memory bank, reconstructs the corresponding 3D assets from video, and integrates them into the target scene through orientation alignment and relighting. The resulting replacements provide complete multi-view representations of vehicles in the scene, enabling photorealistic synthesis of substantially altered configurations, as demonstrated in our experiments. Project page: https://yandex-research.github.io/madrive/
WAFT: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Optical Flow
Authors: Yihan Wang, Jia Deng
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Zero-shot Generalization

We introduce Warping-Alone Field Transforms (WAFT), a simple and effective method for optical flow. WAFT is similar to RAFT but replaces cost volume with high-resolution warping, achieving better accuracy with lower memory cost. This design challenges the conventional wisdom that constructing cost volumes is necessary for strong performance. WAFT is a simple and flexible meta-architecture with minimal inductive biases and reliance on custom designs. Compared with existing methods, WAFT ranks 1st on Spring and KITTI benchmarks, achieves the best zero-shot generalization on KITTI, while being up to 4.1x faster than methods with similar performance. Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/WAFT.
StruMamba3D: Exploring Structural Mamba for Self-supervised Point Cloud Representation Learning
Authors: Chuxin Wang, Yixin Zha, Wenfei Yang, Tianzhu Zhang
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Mamba, Representation Learning

Recently, Mamba-based methods have demonstrated impressive performance in point cloud representation learning by leveraging State Space Model (SSM) with the efficient context modeling ability and linear complexity. However, these methods still face two key issues that limit the potential of SSM: Destroying the adjacency of 3D points during SSM processing and failing to retain long-sequence memory as the input length increases in downstream tasks. To address these issues, we propose StruMamba3D, a novel paradigm for self-supervised point cloud representation learning. It enjoys several merits. First, we design spatial states and use them as proxies to preserve spatial dependencies among points. Second, we enhance the SSM with a state-wise update strategy and incorporate a lightweight convolution to facilitate interactions between spatial states for efficient structure modeling. Third, our method reduces the sensitivity of pre-trained Mamba-based models to varying input lengths by introducing a sequence length-adaptive strategy. Experimental results across four downstream tasks showcase the superior performance of our method. In addition, our method attains the SOTA 95.1% accuracy on ModelNet40 and 92.75% accuracy on the most challenging split of ScanObjectNN without voting strategy.
DeOcc-1-to-3: 3D De-Occlusion from a Single Image via Self-Supervised Multi-View Diffusion
Authors: Yansong Qu, Shaohui Dai, Xinyang Li, Yuze Wang, You Shen, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Ji
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

Reconstructing 3D objects from a single image is a long-standing challenge, especially under real-world occlusions. While recent diffusion-based view synthesis models can generate consistent novel views from a single RGB image, they generally assume fully visible inputs and fail when parts of the object are occluded. This leads to inconsistent views and degraded 3D reconstruction quality. To overcome this limitation, we propose an end-to-end framework for occlusion-aware multi-view generation. Our method directly synthesizes six structurally consistent novel views from a single partially occluded image, enabling downstream 3D reconstruction without requiring prior inpainting or manual annotations. We construct a self-supervised training pipeline using the Pix2Gestalt dataset, leveraging occluded-unoccluded image pairs and pseudo-ground-truth views to teach the model structure-aware completion and view consistency. Without modifying the original architecture, we fully fine-tune the view synthesis model to jointly learn completion and multi-view generation. Additionally, we introduce the first benchmark for occlusion-aware reconstruction, encompassing diverse occlusion levels, object categories, and mask patterns. This benchmark provides a standardized protocol for evaluating future methods under partial occlusions. Our code is available at https://github.com/Quyans/DeOcc123.
HalluSegBench: Counterfactual Visual Reasoning for Segmentation Hallucination Evaluation
Authors: Xinzhuo Li, Adheesh Juvekar, Xingyou Liu, Muntasir Wahed, Kiet A. Nguyen, Ismini Lourentzou
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Reasoning, Hallucination, Hallucination Evaluation, Segmentation, Vision-Language Segmentation, Visual Grounding, Visual Reasoning

Recent progress in vision-language segmentation has significantly advanced grounded visual understanding. However, these models often exhibit hallucinations by producing segmentation masks for objects not grounded in the image content or by incorrectly labeling irrelevant regions. Existing evaluation protocols for segmentation hallucination primarily focus on label or textual hallucinations without manipulating the visual context, limiting their capacity to diagnose critical failures. In response, we introduce HalluSegBench, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate hallucinations in visual grounding through the lens of counterfactual visual reasoning. Our benchmark consists of a novel dataset of 1340 counterfactual instance pairs spanning 281 unique object classes, and a set of newly introduced metrics that quantify hallucination sensitivity under visually coherent scene edits. Experiments on HalluSegBench with state-of-the-art vision-language segmentation models reveal that vision-driven hallucinations are significantly more prevalent than label-driven ones, with models often persisting in false segmentation, highlighting the need for counterfactual reasoning to diagnose grounding fidelity.
SiM3D: Single-instance Multiview Multimodal and Multisetup 3D Anomaly Detection Benchmark
Authors: Alex Costanzino, Pierluigi Zama Ramirez, Luigi Lella, Matteo Ragaglia, Alessandro Oliva, Giuseppe Lisanti, Luigi Di Stefano
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Anomaly Detection, 3D Anomaly Detection and Segmentation, Anomaly Detection

We propose SiM3D, the first benchmark considering the integration of multiview and multimodal information for comprehensive 3D anomaly detection and segmentation (ADS), where the task is to produce a voxel-based Anomaly Volume. Moreover, SiM3D focuses on a scenario of high interest in manufacturing: single-instance anomaly detection, where only one object, either real or synthetic, is available for training. In this respect, SiM3D stands out as the first ADS benchmark that addresses the challenge of generalising from synthetic training data to real test data. SiM3D includes a novel multimodal multiview dataset acquired using top-tier industrial sensors and robots. The dataset features multiview high-resolution images (12 Mpx) and point clouds (7M points) for 333 instances of eight types of objects, alongside a CAD model for each type. We also provide manually annotated 3D segmentation GTs for anomalous test samples. To establish reference baselines for the proposed multiview 3D ADS task, we adapt prominent singleview methods and assess their performance using novel metrics that operate on Anomaly Volumes.
SharpZO: Hybrid Sharpness-Aware Vision Language Model Prompt Tuning via Forward-Only Passes
Authors: Yifan Yang, Zhen Zhang, Rupak Vignesh Swaminathan, Jing Liu, Nathan Susanj, Zheng Zhang
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Fine-tuning vision language models (VLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various downstream tasks; yet, it requires access to model gradients through backpropagation (BP), making them unsuitable for memory-constrained, inference-only edge devices. To address this limitation, previous work has explored various BP-free fine-tuning methods. However, these approaches often rely on high-variance evolutionary strategies (ES) or zeroth-order (ZO) optimization, and often fail to achieve satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose a hybrid Sharpness-aware Zeroth-order optimization (SharpZO) approach, specifically designed to enhance the performance of ZO VLM fine-tuning via a sharpness-aware warm-up training. SharpZO features a two-stage optimization process: a sharpness-aware ES stage that globally explores and smooths the loss landscape to construct a strong initialization, followed by a fine-grained local search via sparse ZO optimization. The entire optimization relies solely on forward passes. Detailed theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on CLIP models demonstrate that SharpZO significantly improves accuracy and convergence speed, achieving up to 7% average gain over state-of-the-art forward-only methods.
RL-Selector: Reinforcement Learning-Guided Data Selection via Redundancy Assessment
Authors: Suorong Yang, Peijia Li, Furao Shen, Jian Zhao
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Modern deep architectures often rely on large-scale datasets, but training on these datasets incurs high computational and storage overhead. Real-world datasets often contain substantial redundancies, prompting the need for more data-efficient training paradigms. Data selection has shown promise to mitigate redundancy by identifying the most representative samples, thereby reducing training costs without compromising performance. Existing methods typically rely on static scoring metrics or pretrained models, overlooking the combined effect of selected samples and their evolving dynamics during training. We introduce the concept of epsilon-sample cover, which quantifies sample redundancy based on inter-sample relationships, capturing the intrinsic structure of the dataset. Based on this, we reformulate data selection as a reinforcement learning (RL) process and propose RL-Selector, where a lightweight RL agent optimizes the selection policy by leveraging epsilon-sample cover derived from evolving dataset distribution as a reward signal. Extensive experiments across benchmark datasets and diverse architectures demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines. Models trained with our selected datasets show enhanced generalization performance with improved training efficiency.
Personalized Federated Learning via Dual-Prompt Optimization and Cross Fusion
Authors: Yuguang Zhang, Kuangpu Guo, Zhihe Lu, Yunbo Wang, Jian Liang
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Personalized Federated Learning, Prompt Learning

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across decentralized clients without sharing local data, but is challenged by heterogeneity in data, computation, and communication. Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), with their strong generalization and lightweight tuning via prompts, offer a promising solution. However, existing federated prompt-learning methods rely only on text prompts and overlook joint label-domain distribution shifts. In this paper, we propose a personalized FL framework based on dual-prompt learning and cross fusion, termed pFedDC. Specifically, each client maintains both global and local prompts across vision and language modalities: global prompts capture common knowledge shared across the federation, while local prompts encode client-specific semantics and domain characteristics. Meanwhile, a cross-fusion module is designed to adaptively integrate prompts from different levels, enabling the model to generate personalized representations aligned with each client's unique data distribution. Extensive experiments across nine datasets with various types of heterogeneity show that pFedDC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Spatial Mental Modeling from Limited Views
Authors: Baiqiao Yin, Qineng Wang, Pingyue Zhang, Jianshu Zhang, Kangrui Wang, Zihan Wang, Jieyu Zhang, Keshigeyan Chandrasegaran, Han Liu, Ranjay Krishna, Saining Xie, Manling Li, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00

Can Vision Language Models (VLMs) imagine the full scene from just a few views, like humans do? Humans form spatial mental models, internal representations of unseen space, to reason about layout, perspective, and motion. Our new MindCube benchmark with 21,154 questions across 3,268 images exposes this critical gap, where existing VLMs exhibit near-random performance. Using MindCube, we systematically evaluate how well VLMs build robust spatial mental models through representing positions (cognitive mapping), orientations (perspective-taking), and dynamics (mental simulation for "what-if" movements). We then explore three approaches to help VLMs approximate spatial mental models, including unseen intermediate views, natural language reasoning chains, and cognitive maps. The significant improvement comes from a synergistic approach, "map-then-reason", that jointly trains the model to first generate a cognitive map and then reason upon it. By training models to reason over these internal maps, we boosted accuracy from 37.8% to 60.8% (+23.0%). Adding reinforcement learning pushed performance even further to 70.7% (+32.9%). Our key insight is that such scaffolding of spatial mental models, actively constructing and utilizing internal structured spatial representations with flexible reasoning processes, significantly improves understanding of unobservable space.
AnyCalib: On-Manifold Learning for Model-Agnostic Single-View Camera Calibration
Authors: Javier Tirado-Garín, Javier Civera
Date: 2025-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Calibration

We present AnyCalib, a method for calibrating the intrinsic parameters of a camera from a single in-the-wild image, that is agnostic to the camera model. Current methods are predominantly tailored to specific camera models and/or require extrinsic cues, such as the direction of gravity, to be visible in the image. In contrast, we argue that the perspective and distortion cues inherent in images are sufficient for model-agnostic camera calibration. To demonstrate this, we frame the calibration process as the regression of the rays corresponding to each pixel. We show, for the first time, that this intermediate representation allows for a closed-form recovery of the intrinsics for a wide range of camera models, including but not limited to: pinhole, Brown-Conrady and Kannala-Brandt. Our approach also applies to edited -- cropped and stretched -- images. Experimentally, we demonstrate that AnyCalib consistently outperforms alternative methods, including 3D foundation models, despite being trained on orders of magnitude less data. Code is available at https://github.com/javrtg/AnyCalib.