Daily Papers

We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.

In-line with the success of deep learning on traditional recognition problem, several end-to-end deep models for zero-shot recognition have been proposed in the literature. These models are successful to predict a single unseen label given an input image, but does not scale to cases where multiple unseen objects are present. In this paper, we model this problem within the framework of Multiple Instance Learning (MIL). To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first end-to-end trainable deep MIL framework for the multi-label zero-shot tagging problem. Due to its novel design, the proposed framework has several interesting features: (1) Unlike previous deep MIL models, it does not use any off-line procedure (e.g., Selective Search or EdgeBoxes) for bag generation. (2) During test time, it can process any number of unseen labels given their semantic embedding vectors. (3) Using only seen labels per image as weak annotation, it can produce a bounding box for each predicted labels. We experiment with the NUS-WIDE dataset and achieve superior performance across conventional, zero-shot and generalized zero-shot tagging tasks.

The manifold hypothesis posits that high-dimensional data often lies on a lower-dimensional manifold and that utilizing this manifold as the target space yields more efficient representations. While numerous traditional manifold-based techniques exist for dimensionality reduction, their application in self-supervised learning has witnessed slow progress. The recent MSimCLR method combines manifold encoding with SimCLR but requires extremely low target encoding dimensions to outperform SimCLR, limiting its applicability. This paper introduces a novel learning paradigm using an unbalanced atlas (UA), capable of surpassing state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches. We investigated and engineered the DeepInfomax with an unbalanced atlas (DIM-UA) method by adapting the Spatiotemporal DeepInfomax (ST-DIM) framework to align with our proposed UA paradigm. The efficacy of DIM-UA is demonstrated through training and evaluation on the Atari Annotated RAM Interface (AtariARI) benchmark, a modified version of the Atari 2600 framework that produces annotated image samples for representation learning. The UA paradigm improves existing algorithms significantly as the number of target encoding dimensions grows. For instance, the mean F1 score averaged over categories of DIM-UA is ~75% compared to ~70% of ST-DIM when using 16384 hidden units.

An open-source C++ framework for discovering fast matrix multiplication schemes using the flip graph approach is presented. The framework supports multiple coefficient rings -- binary (Z_2), modular ternary (Z_3) and integer ternary (Z_T = {-1,0,1}) -- and implements both fixed-dimension and meta-dimensional search operators. Using efficient bit-level encoding of coefficient vectors and OpenMP parallelism, the tools enable large-scale exploration on commodity hardware. The study covers 680 schemes ranging from (2 times 2 times 2) to (16 times 16 times 16), with 276 schemes now in Z_T coefficients and 117 in integer coefficients. With this framework, the multiplicative complexity (rank) is improved for 79 matrix multiplication schemes. Notably, a new 4 times 4 times 10 scheme requiring only 115 multiplications is discovered, achieving ωapprox 2.80478 and beating Strassen's exponent for this specific size. Additionally, 93 schemes are rediscovered in ternary coefficients that were previously known only over rationals or integers, and 68 schemes in integer coefficients that previously required fractions. All tools and discovered schemes are made publicly available to enable reproducible research.

Large scale Vision-Language (VL) models have shown tremendous success in aligning representations between visual and text modalities. This enables remarkable progress in zero-shot recognition, image generation & editing, and many other exciting tasks. However, VL models tend to over-represent objects while paying much less attention to verbs, and require additional tuning on video data for best zero-shot action recognition performance. While previous work relied on large-scale, fully-annotated data, in this work we propose an unsupervised approach. We adapt a VL model for zero-shot and few-shot action recognition using a collection of unlabeled videos and an unpaired action dictionary. Based on that, we leverage Large Language Models and VL models to build a text bag for each unlabeled video via matching, text expansion and captioning. We use those bags in a Multiple Instance Learning setup to adapt an image-text backbone to video data. Although finetuned on unlabeled video data, our resulting models demonstrate high transferability to numerous unseen zero-shot downstream tasks, improving the base VL model performance by up to 14\%, and even comparing favorably to fully-supervised baselines in both zero-shot and few-shot video recognition transfer. The code will be released later at https://github.com/wlin-at/MAXI.

Quantum optimization holds promise for addressing classically intractable combinatorial problems, yet a standardized framework for benchmarking its performance, particularly in terms of solution quality, computational speed, and scalability is still lacking. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive benchmarking framework designed to systematically evaluate a range of quantum optimization techniques against well-established NP-hard combinatorial problems. Our framework focuses on key problem classes, including the Multi-Dimensional Knapsack Problem (MDKP), Maximum Independent Set (MIS), Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), and Market Share Problem (MSP). Our study evaluates gate-based quantum approaches, including the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) and its CVaR-enhanced variant, alongside advanced quantum algorithms such as the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and its extensions. To address resource constraints, we incorporate qubit compression techniques like Pauli Correlation Encoding (PCE) and Quantum Random Access Optimization (QRAO). Experimental results, obtained from simulated quantum environments and classical solvers, provide key insights into feasibility, optimality gaps, and scalability. Our findings highlight both the promise and current limitations of quantum optimization, offering a structured pathway for future research and practical applications in quantum-enhanced decision-making.

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated impressive capability in visual tasks, but their fine-tuning often suffers from bias in class-imbalanced scene. Recent works have introduced large language models (LLMs) to enhance VLM fine-tuning with supplementing semantic information. However, they often overlook inherent class imbalance in VLMs' pre-training, which may lead to bias accumulation in downstream tasks. To address this problem, this paper proposes a Multi-dimensional Dynamic Prompt Routing (MDPR) framework. MDPR constructs a comprehensive knowledge base for classes, spanning five visual-semantic dimensions. During fine-tuning, the dynamic routing mechanism aligns global visual classes, retrieves optimal prompts, and balances fine-grained semantics, yielding stable predictions through logits fusion. Extensive experiments on long-tailed benchmarks, including CIFAR-LT, ImageNet-LT, and Places-LT, demonstrate that MDPR achieves comparable results with current SOTA methods. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of our semantic library for tail classes, and show that our dynamic routing incurs minimal computational overhead, making MDPR a flexible and efficient enhancement for VLM fine-tuning under data imbalance.

We present a bag of tricks framework for few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL), which is a challenging form of continual learning that involves continuous adaptation to new tasks with limited samples. FSCIL requires both stability and adaptability, i.e., preserving proficiency in previously learned tasks while learning new ones. Our proposed bag of tricks brings together eight key and highly influential techniques that improve stability, adaptability, and overall performance under a unified framework for FSCIL. We organize these tricks into three categories: stability tricks, adaptability tricks, and training tricks. Stability tricks aim to mitigate the forgetting of previously learned classes by enhancing the separation between the embeddings of learned classes and minimizing interference when learning new ones. On the other hand, adaptability tricks focus on the effective learning of new classes. Finally, training tricks improve the overall performance without compromising stability or adaptability. We perform extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, CIFAR-100, CUB-200, and miniIMageNet, to evaluate the impact of our proposed framework. Our detailed analysis shows that our approach substantially improves both stability and adaptability, establishing a new state-of-the-art by outperforming prior works in the area. We believe our method provides a go-to solution and establishes a robust baseline for future research in this area.

Motivation: The gut microbiota has recently emerged as a key factor that underpins certain connections between diet and human health. A tremendous amount of knowledge has been amassed from experimental studies on diet, human metabolism and microbiome. However, this evidence remains mostly buried in scientific publications, and biomedical literature mining in this domain remains scarce. We developed DiMB-RE, a comprehensive corpus annotated with 15 entity types (e.g., Nutrient, Microorganism) and 13 relation types (e.g., increases, improves) capturing diet-microbiome associations. We also trained and evaluated state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models for named entity, trigger, and relation extraction as well as factuality detection using DiMB-RE. Results: DiMB-RE consists of 14,450 entities and 4,206 relationships from 165 articles. While NLP models performed reasonably well for named entity recognition (0.760 F_{1}), end-to-end relation extraction performance was modest (0.356 F_{1}), partly due to missed entities and triggers as well as cross-sentence relations. Conclusions: To our knowledge, DiMB-RE is largest and most diverse dataset focusing on diet-microbiome interactions. It can serve as a benchmark corpus for biomedical literature mining. Availability: DiMB-RE and the NLP models are available at https://github.com/ScienceNLP-Lab/DiMB-RE.

We present LLaVA-OneVision-1.5, a novel family of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) that achieve state-of-the-art performance with significantly reduced computational and financial costs. Different from the existing works, LLaVA-OneVision-1.5 provides an open, efficient, and reproducible framework for building high-quality vision-language models entirely from scratch. The LLaVA-OneVision-1.5 release comprises three primary components: (1) Large-Scale Curated Datasets: We construct an 85M concept-balanced pretraining dataset LLaVA-OneVision-1.5-Mid-Traning and a meticulously curated 26M instruction dataset LLaVA-OneVision-1.5-Instruct, collectively encompassing 64B compressed multimodal tokens. (2) Efficient Training Framework: We develop a complete end-to-end efficient training framework leveraging an offline parallel data packing strategy to facilitate the training of LLaVA-OneVision-1.5 within a $16,000 budget. (3) State-of-the-art Performance: Experimental results demonstrate that LLaVA-OneVision1.5 yields exceptionally competitive performance across a broad range of downstream tasks. Specifically, LLaVA-OneVision-1.5-8B outperforms Qwen2.5-VL-7B on 18 of 27 benchmarks, and LLaVA-OneVision-1.5-4B surpasses Qwen2.5-VL-3B on all 27 benchmarks. We anticipate releasing LLaVA-OneVision-1.5-RL shortly and encourage the community to await further updates.

Learning from label proportions (LLP) is a promising weakly supervised learning problem. In LLP, a set of instances (bag) has label proportions, but no instance-level labels are given. LLP aims to train an instance-level classifier by using the label proportions of the bag. In this paper, we propose a bag-level data augmentation method for LLP called MixBag, based on the key observation from our preliminary experiments; that the instance-level classification accuracy improves as the number of labeled bags increases even though the total number of instances is fixed. We also propose a confidence interval loss designed based on statistical theory to use the augmented bags effectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose bag-level data augmentation for LLP. The advantage of MixBag is that it can be applied to instance-level data augmentation techniques and any LLP method that uses the proportion loss. Experimental results demonstrate this advantage and the effectiveness of our method.

Vision-Language Models have made significant progress on many perception-focused tasks, however, their progress on reasoning-focused tasks seem to be limited due to the lack of high-quality and diverse training data. In this work, we aim to address the scarcity issue of reasoning-focused multimodal datasets. We propose VisualWebInstruct - a novel approach that leverages search engine to create a diverse, and high-quality dataset spanning multiple disciplines like math, physics, finance, chemistry, etc. Starting with meticulously selected 30,000 seed images, we employ Google Image search to identify websites containing similar images. We collect and process the HTMLs from over 700K unique URL sources. Through a pipeline of content extraction, filtering and synthesis, we build a dataset of approximately 900K question-answer pairs, with 40% being visual QA pairs and the rest as text QA pairs. Models fine-tuned on VisualWebInstruct demonstrate significant performance gains: (1) training from Llava-OV-mid shows 10-20% absolute point gains across benchmarks, (2) training from MAmmoTH-VL shows 5% absoluate gain. Our best model MAmmoTH-VL2 shows state-of-the-art performance within the 10B parameter class on MMMU-Pro-std (40.7%), MathVerse (42.6%), and DynaMath (55.7%). These remarkable results highlight the effectiveness of our dataset in enhancing VLMs' reasoning capabilities for complex multimodal tasks.

In recent years, integrating multimodal understanding and generation into a single unified model has emerged as a promising paradigm. While this approach achieves strong results in text-to-image (T2I) generation, it still struggles with precise image editing. We attribute this limitation to an imbalanced division of responsibilities. The understanding module primarily functions as a translator that encodes user instructions into semantic conditions, while the generation module must simultaneously act as designer and painter, inferring the original layout, identifying the target editing region, and rendering the new content. This imbalance is counterintuitive because the understanding module is typically trained with several times more data on complex reasoning tasks than the generation module. To address this issue, we introduce Draw-In-Mind (DIM), a dataset comprising two complementary subsets: (i) DIM-T2I, containing 14M long-context image-text pairs to enhance complex instruction comprehension; and (ii) DIM-Edit, consisting of 233K chain-of-thought imaginations generated by GPT-4o, serving as explicit design blueprints for image edits. We connect a frozen Qwen2.5-VL-3B with a trainable SANA1.5-1.6B via a lightweight two-layer MLP, and train it on the proposed DIM dataset, resulting in DIM-4.6B-T2I/Edit. Despite its modest parameter scale, DIM-4.6B-Edit achieves SOTA or competitive performance on the ImgEdit and GEdit-Bench benchmarks, outperforming much larger models such as UniWorld-V1 and Step1X-Edit. These findings demonstrate that explicitly assigning the design responsibility to the understanding module provides significant benefits for image editing. Our dataset and models will be available at https://github.com/showlab/DIM.

The zero-shot performance of existing vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP is limited by the availability of large-scale, aligned image and text datasets in specific domains. In this work, we leverage two complementary sources of information -- descriptions of categories generated by large language models (LLMs) and abundant, fine-grained image classification datasets -- to improve the zero-shot classification performance of VLMs across fine-grained domains. On the technical side, we develop methods to train VLMs with this "bag-level" image-text supervision. We find that simply using these attributes at test-time does not improve performance, but our training strategy, for example, on the iNaturalist dataset, leads to an average improvement of 4-5% in zero-shot classification accuracy for novel categories of birds and flowers. Similar improvements are observed in domains where a subset of the categories was used to fine-tune the model. By prompting LLMs in various ways, we generate descriptions that capture visual appearance, habitat, and geographic regions and pair them with existing attributes such as the taxonomic structure of the categories. We systematically evaluate their ability to improve zero-shot categorization in natural domains. Our findings suggest that geographic priors can be just as effective and are complementary to visual appearance. Our method also outperforms prior work on prompt-based tuning of VLMs. We release the benchmark, consisting of 14 datasets at https://github.com/cvl-umass/AdaptCLIPZS , which will contribute to future research in zero-shot recognition.

As deep learning models grow, sparsity is becoming an increasingly critical component of deep neural networks, enabling improved performance and reduced storage. However, existing frameworks offer poor support for sparsity. Specialized sparsity engines focus exclusively on sparse inference, while general frameworks primarily focus on sparse tensors in classical formats and neglect the broader sparsification pipeline necessary for using sparse models, especially during training. Further, existing frameworks are not easily extensible: adding a new sparse tensor format or operator is challenging and time-consuming. To address this, we propose STen, a sparsity programming model and interface for PyTorch, which incorporates sparsity layouts, operators, and sparsifiers, in an efficient, customizable, and extensible framework that supports virtually all sparsification methods. We demonstrate this by developing a high-performance grouped n:m sparsity layout for CPU inference at moderate sparsity. STen brings high performance and ease of use to the ML community, making sparsity easily accessible.

We present VLMEvalKit: an open-source toolkit for evaluating large multi-modality models based on PyTorch. The toolkit aims to provide a user-friendly and comprehensive framework for researchers and developers to evaluate existing multi-modality models and publish reproducible evaluation results. In VLMEvalKit, we implement over 70 different large multi-modality models, including both proprietary APIs and open-source models, as well as more than 20 different multi-modal benchmarks. By implementing a single interface, new models can be easily added to the toolkit, while the toolkit automatically handles the remaining workloads, including data preparation, distributed inference, prediction post-processing, and metric calculation. Although the toolkit is currently mainly used for evaluating large vision-language models, its design is compatible with future updates that incorporate additional modalities, such as audio and video. Based on the evaluation results obtained with the toolkit, we host OpenVLM Leaderboard, a comprehensive leaderboard to track the progress of multi-modality learning research. The toolkit is released at https://github.com/open-compass/VLMEvalKit and is actively maintained.

Text autoencoders are often used for unsupervised conditional text generation by applying mappings in the latent space to change attributes to the desired values. Recently, Mai et al. (2020) proposed Emb2Emb, a method to learn these mappings in the embedding space of an autoencoder. However, their method is restricted to autoencoders with a single-vector embedding, which limits how much information can be retained. We address this issue by extending their method to Bag-of-Vectors Autoencoders (BoV-AEs), which encode the text into a variable-size bag of vectors that grows with the size of the text, as in attention-based models. This allows to encode and reconstruct much longer texts than standard autoencoders. Analogous to conventional autoencoders, we propose regularization techniques that facilitate learning meaningful operations in the latent space. Finally, we adapt Emb2Emb for a training scheme that learns to map an input bag to an output bag, including a novel loss function and neural architecture. Our empirical evaluations on unsupervised sentiment transfer show that our method performs substantially better than a standard autoencoder.

Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) give a way to represent a complex object as a single fixed-length vector, so that similar objects have similar vector representations. These vector representations then become easy to use for machine learning or nearest-neighbor search. We review a previously proposed VSA method, MBAT (Matrix Binding of Additive Terms), which uses multiplication by random matrices for binding related terms. However, multiplying by such matrices introduces instabilities which can harm performance. Making the random matrices be orthogonal matrices provably fixes this problem. With respect to larger scale applications, we see how to apply MBAT vector representations for any data expressed in JSON. JSON is used in numerous programming languages to express complex data, but its native format appears highly unsuited for machine learning. Expressing JSON as a fixed-length vector makes it readily usable for machine learning and nearest-neighbor search. Creating such JSON vectors also shows that a VSA needs to employ binding operations that are non-commutative. VSAs are now ready to try with full-scale practical applications, including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and genomics. Keywords: MBAT (Matrix Binding of Additive Terms), VSA (Vector Symbolic Architecture), HDC (Hyperdimensional Computing), Distributed Representations, Binding, Orthogonal Matrices, Recurrent Connections, Machine Learning, Search, JSON, VSA Applications

This paper presents innovative enhancements to diffusion models by integrating a novel multi-resolution network and time-dependent layer normalization. Diffusion models have gained prominence for their effectiveness in high-fidelity image generation. While conventional approaches rely on convolutional U-Net architectures, recent Transformer-based designs have demonstrated superior performance and scalability. However, Transformer architectures, which tokenize input data (via "patchification"), face a trade-off between visual fidelity and computational complexity due to the quadratic nature of self-attention operations concerning token length. While larger patch sizes enable attention computation efficiency, they struggle to capture fine-grained visual details, leading to image distortions. To address this challenge, we propose augmenting the Diffusion model with the Multi-Resolution network (DiMR), a framework that refines features across multiple resolutions, progressively enhancing detail from low to high resolution. Additionally, we introduce Time-Dependent Layer Normalization (TD-LN), a parameter-efficient approach that incorporates time-dependent parameters into layer normalization to inject time information and achieve superior performance. Our method's efficacy is demonstrated on the class-conditional ImageNet generation benchmark, where DiMR-XL variants outperform prior diffusion models, setting new state-of-the-art FID scores of 1.70 on ImageNet 256 x 256 and 2.89 on ImageNet 512 x 512. Project page: https://qihao067.github.io/projects/DiMR

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in textual reasoning, they struggle with mathematical domains like geometry that intrinsically rely on visual aids. Existing approaches to Visual Chain-of-Thought (VCoT) are often limited by rigid external tools or fail to generate the high-fidelity, strategically-timed diagrams necessary for complex problem-solving. To bridge this gap, we introduce MathCanvas, a comprehensive framework designed to endow unified Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with intrinsic VCoT capabilities for mathematics. Our approach consists of two phases. First, a Visual Manipulation stage pre-trains the model on a novel 15.2M-pair corpus, comprising 10M caption-to-diagram pairs (MathCanvas-Imagen) and 5.2M step-by-step editing trajectories (MathCanvas-Edit), to master diagram generation and editing. Second, a Strategic Visual-Aided Reasoning stage fine-tunes the model on MathCanvas-Instruct, a new 219K-example dataset of interleaved visual-textual reasoning paths, teaching it when and how to leverage visual aids. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce MathCanvas-Bench, a challenging benchmark with 3K problems that require models to produce interleaved visual-textual solutions. Our model, BAGEL-Canvas, trained under this framework, achieves an 86% relative improvement over strong LMM baselines on MathCanvas-Bench, demonstrating excellent generalization to other public math benchmarks. Our work provides a complete toolkit-framework, datasets, and benchmark-to unlock complex, human-like visual-aided reasoning in LMMs. Project Page: https://mathcanvas.github.io/

In this work, we propose Dimple, the first Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Model (DMLLM). We observe that training with a purely discrete diffusion approach leads to significant training instability, suboptimal performance, and severe length bias issues. To address these challenges, we design a novel training paradigm that combines an initial autoregressive phase with a subsequent diffusion phase. This approach yields the Dimple-7B model, trained on the same dataset and using a similar training pipeline as LLaVA-NEXT. Dimple-7B ultimately surpasses LLaVA-NEXT in performance by 3.9%, demonstrating that DMLLM can achieve performance comparable to that of autoregressive models. To improve inference efficiency, we propose a decoding strategy termed confident decoding, which dynamically adjusts the number of tokens generated at each step, significantly reducing the number of generation iterations. In autoregressive models, the number of forward iterations during generation equals the response length. With confident decoding, however, the number of iterations needed by Dimple is even only text{response length}{3}. We also re-implement the prefilling technique in autoregressive models and demonstrate that it does not significantly impact performance on most benchmark evaluations, while offering a speedup of 1.5x to 7x. Additionally, we explore Dimple's capability to precisely control its response using structure priors. These priors enable structured responses in a manner distinct from instruction-based or chain-of-thought prompting, and allow fine-grained control over response format and length, which is difficult to achieve in autoregressive models. Overall, this work validates the feasibility and advantages of DMLLM and enhances its inference efficiency and controllability. Code and models are available at https://github.com/yu-rp/Dimple.

The advancement of remote sensing technology has improved the spatial resolution of satellite imagery, facilitating more detailed visual representations for diverse interpretations. However, existing methods exhibit limited generalization capabilities across varied applications. While some contemporary foundation models demonstrate potential, they are hindered by insufficient cross-task adaptability and primarily process low-resolution imagery of restricted sizes, thus failing to fully exploit high-resolution data or leverage comprehensive large-scene semantics. Crucially, remote sensing imagery differs fundamentally from natural images, as key foreground targets (eg., maritime objects, artificial structures) often occupy minimal spatial proportions (~1%) and exhibit sparse distributions. Efficiently modeling cross-task generalizable knowledge from lengthy 2D tokens (~100,000) poses a significant challenge yet remains critical for remote sensing image understanding. Motivated by the selective attention mechanisms inherent to the human visual system, we propose DynamicVis, a dynamic visual perception foundation model for remote sensing imagery. The framework integrates a novel dynamic region perception backbone based on the selective state space model, which strategically balances localized detail extraction with global contextual integration, enabling computationally efficient encoding of large-scale data while maintaining architectural scalability. To enhance cross-task knowledge transferring, we introduce a multi-instance learning paradigm utilizing meta-embedding representations, trained on million-scale region-level annotations. Evaluations across nine downstream tasks demonstrate the model's versatility. DynamicVis achieves multi-level feature modeling with exceptional efficiency, processing (2048x2048) pixels with 97 ms latency (6% of ViT's) and 833 MB GPU memory (3% of ViT's).

Low-precision number formats are widely used in modern machine learning systems due to their efficiency. Accurate direction representation is key to the accuracy of vector operations. This work precisely explores the extent to which the direction of a vector can be represented by selecting its scalar elements from a common finite alphabet of a given size. This is standard practice in machine learning, where low-precision significands may be narrow-width floating-point or integer values. A geometric framework is introduced for analyzing the directional coverage of such product-structured codes. This work analytically quantifies the suboptimality gap between such product-structured codes and spherical codes for the vector as a whole, in both low and asymptotically high dimensions. Furthermore, within the product code class, it is proven that the standard formats of two's complement, fixed-point, and floating-point are suboptimal, again with quantified gap, pointing to the potential to develop new scalar number formats. Such scalar alphabets are numerically optimized across multiple block dimensions for directional coverage, including the dimension used in NVIDIA's NVFP4 format. Experimental results are presented comparing the performance of standard formats and the optimized alphabet. We find that for four bits, NVIDIA's choice of E2M1 closely approximates the optimized alphabet, providing a geometric explanation for its strong performance in low-precision machine learning workloads and an analytical understanding of the link between that superiority and block size. We provide open-source formal proofs in Lean for the theorems in this work, along with the experimental code and the optimized alphabets obtained.

Diffusion models have achieved great success in image generation, with the backbone evolving from U-Net to Vision Transformers. However, the computational cost of Transformers is quadratic to the number of tokens, leading to significant challenges when dealing with high-resolution images. In this work, we propose Diffusion Mamba (DiM), which combines the efficiency of Mamba, a sequence model based on State Space Models (SSM), with the expressive power of diffusion models for efficient high-resolution image synthesis. To address the challenge that Mamba cannot generalize to 2D signals, we make several architecture designs including multi-directional scans, learnable padding tokens at the end of each row and column, and lightweight local feature enhancement. Our DiM architecture achieves inference-time efficiency for high-resolution images. In addition, to further improve training efficiency for high-resolution image generation with DiM, we investigate ``weak-to-strong'' training strategy that pretrains DiM on low-resolution images (256times 256) and then finetune it on high-resolution images (512 times 512). We further explore training-free upsampling strategies to enable the model to generate higher-resolution images (e.g., 1024times 1024 and 1536times 1536) without further fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our DiM.

The deployment of efficient long-context LLMs in applications like autonomous agents, long-chain reasoning, and creative writing is fundamentally bottlenecked by the linear growth of KV cache memory. Existing compression and eviction methods often struggle to balance accuracy, compression ratio, and hardware efficiency. We propose DeltaKV, a residual-based KV cache compression framework motivated by two empirical findings: long-range inter-token similarity and highly shared latent components in KV representations. Instead of discarding tokens, DeltaKV encodes semantic residuals relative to retrieved historical references, preserving fidelity while substantially reducing storage. To translate compression gains into real system speedups, we further introduce Sparse-vLLM, a high-performance inference engine with decoupled memory management and kernels optimized for sparse and irregular KV layouts. Experiments show that DeltaKV reduces KV cache memory to 29\% of the original while maintaining near-lossless accuracy on LongBench, SCBench, and AIME. When integrated with Sparse-vLLM, it achieves up to 2times throughput improvement over vLLM in long-context scenarios, demonstrating a practical path toward scalable long-context LLM deployment. Code, model checkpoints, and datasets are available at https://github.com/CURRENTF/Sparse-vLLM.

Constraint handling remains a key bottleneck in quantum combinatorial optimization. While slack-variable-based encodings are straightforward, they significantly increase qubit counts and circuit depth, challenging the scalability of quantum solvers. In this work, we investigate a suite of Lagrangian-based optimization techniques including dual ascent, bundle methods, cutting plane approaches, and augmented Lagrangian formulations for solving constrained combinatorial problems on quantum simulators and hardware. Our framework is applied to three representative NP-hard problems: the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), the Multi-Dimensional Knapsack Problem (MDKP), and the Maximum Independent Set (MIS). We demonstrate that MDKP and TSP, with their inequality-based or degree-constrained structures, allow for slack-free reformulations, leading to significant qubit savings without compromising performance. In contrast, MIS does not inherently benefit from slack elimination but still gains in feasibility and objective quality from principled Lagrangian updates. We benchmark these methods across classically hard instances, analyzing trade-offs in qubit usage, feasibility, and optimality gaps. Our results highlight the flexibility of Lagrangian formulations as a scalable alternative to naive QUBO penalization, even when qubit savings are not always achievable. This work provides practical insights for deploying constraint-aware quantum optimization pipelines, with applications in logistics, network design, and resource allocation.

With advances in foundational and vision-language models, and effective fine-tuning techniques, a large number of both general and special-purpose models have been developed for a variety of visual tasks. Despite the flexibility and accessibility of these models, no single model is able to handle all tasks and/or applications that may be envisioned by potential users. Recent approaches, such as visual programming and multimodal LLMs with integrated tools aim to tackle complex visual tasks, by way of program synthesis. However, such approaches overlook user constraints (e.g., performance / computational needs), produce test-time sample-specific solutions that are difficult to deploy, and, sometimes, require low-level instructions that maybe beyond the abilities of a naive user. To address these limitations, we introduce MMFactory, a universal framework that includes model and metrics routing components, acting like a solution search engine across various available models. Based on a task description and few sample input-output pairs and (optionally) resource and/or performance constraints, MMFactory can suggest a diverse pool of programmatic solutions by instantiating and combining visio-lingual tools from its model repository. In addition to synthesizing these solutions, MMFactory also proposes metrics and benchmarks performance / resource characteristics, allowing users to pick a solution that meets their unique design constraints. From the technical perspective, we also introduced a committee-based solution proposer that leverages multi-agent LLM conversation to generate executable, diverse, universal, and robust solutions for the user. Experimental results show that MMFactory outperforms existing methods by delivering state-of-the-art solutions tailored to user problem specifications. Project page is available at https://davidhalladay.github.io/mmfactory_demo.

Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), with Mamba as a prime example, have shown great promise for long-range dependency modeling with linear complexity. Then, Vision Mamba and the subsequent architectures are presented successively, and they perform well on visual tasks. The crucial step of applying Mamba to visual tasks is to construct 2D visual features in sequential manners. To effectively organize and construct visual features within the 2D image space through 1D selective scan, we propose a novel Multi-Head Scan (MHS) module. The embeddings extracted from the preceding layer are projected into multiple lower-dimensional subspaces. Subsequently, within each subspace, the selective scan is performed along distinct scan routes. The resulting sub-embeddings, obtained from the multi-head scan process, are then integrated and ultimately projected back into the high-dimensional space. Moreover, we incorporate a Scan Route Attention (SRA) mechanism to enhance the module's capability to discern complex structures. To validate the efficacy of our module, we exclusively substitute the 2D-Selective-Scan (SS2D) block in VM-UNet with our proposed module, and we train our models from scratch without using any pre-trained weights. The results indicate a significant improvement in performance while reducing the parameters of the original VM-UNet. The code for this study is publicly available at https://github.com/PixDeep/MHS-VM.

This survey explores the synergistic potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vector Databases (VecDBs), a burgeoning but rapidly evolving research area. With the proliferation of LLMs comes a host of challenges, including hallucinations, outdated knowledge, prohibitive commercial application costs, and memory issues. VecDBs emerge as a compelling solution to these issues by offering an efficient means to store, retrieve, and manage the high-dimensional vector representations intrinsic to LLM operations. Through this nuanced review, we delineate the foundational principles of LLMs and VecDBs and critically analyze their integration's impact on enhancing LLM functionalities. This discourse extends into a discussion on the speculative future developments in this domain, aiming to catalyze further research into optimizing the confluence of LLMs and VecDBs for advanced data handling and knowledge extraction capabilities.

Data visualization (DV) systems are increasingly recognized for their profound capability to uncover insights from vast datasets, gaining attention across both industry and academia. Crafting data queries is an essential process within certain declarative visualization languages (DVLs, e.g., Vega-Lite, EChart.). The evolution of natural language processing (NLP) technologies has streamlined the use of natural language interfaces to visualize tabular data, offering a more accessible and intuitive user experience. However, current methods for converting natural language questions into data visualization queries, such as Seq2Vis, ncNet, and RGVisNet, despite utilizing complex neural network architectures, still fall short of expectations and have great room for improvement. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, have established new benchmarks in a variety of NLP tasks, fundamentally altering the landscape of the field. Inspired by these advancements, we introduce a novel framework, Prompt4Vis, leveraging LLMs and in-context learning to enhance the performance of generating data visualization from natural language. Prompt4Vis comprises two key components: (1) a multi-objective example mining module, designed to find out the truly effective examples that strengthen the LLM's in-context learning capabilities for text-to-vis; (2) a schema filtering module, which is proposed to simplify the schema of the database. Extensive experiments through 5-fold cross-validation on the NVBench dataset demonstrate the superiority of Prompt4Vis, which notably surpasses the state-of-the-art (SOTA) RGVisNet by approximately 35.9% and 71.3% on dev and test sets, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, Prompt4Vis is the first work that introduces in-context learning into the text-to-vis for generating data visualization queries.

The advent of pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly transformed Continual Learning (CL), mainly due to their zero-shot classification abilities. Such proficiency makes VLMs well-suited for real-world applications, enabling robust performance on novel unseen classes without requiring adaptation. However, fine-tuning remains essential when downstream tasks deviate significantly from the pre-training domain. Prior CL approaches primarily focus on preserving the zero-shot capabilities of VLMs during incremental fine-tuning on a downstream task. We take a step further by devising an approach that transforms preservation into enhancement of the zero-shot capabilities of VLMs. Our approach, named MoDular Embedding Recomposition (MoDER), introduces a modular framework that trains multiple textual experts, each specialized in a single seen class, and stores them in a foundational hub. At inference time, for each unseen class, we query the hub and compose the retrieved experts to synthesize a refined prototype that improves classification. We show the effectiveness of our method across two popular zero-shot incremental protocols, Class-IL and MTIL, comprising a total of 14 datasets. The codebase is available at https://github.com/aimagelab/mammoth.

Large Language Models for code generation frequently produce hallucinations in Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) tasks -- plausible but incorrect completions such as invented API methods, invalid parameters, undefined variables, or non-existent imports. These failures pass superficial review yet introduce runtime errors. We introduce Delulu, a verified multi-lingual benchmark of 1,951 FIM samples across 7 languages and 4 hallucination types. Samples are curated through an adversarial pipeline: a frontier LLM generates plausible hallucinations, four diverse judge models evaluate them, embedding-based clustering mines progressively harder examples, self-contained Docker containers verify that golden completions compile while hallucinated variants produce the expected runtime error, and a final human-expert review removes any remaining biased or trivially decidable samples. We evaluate 11 open-weight FIM models from five families spanning 0.5B-32B parameters: a six-point Qwen2.5-Coder scaling slate, plus a cross-family slate (CodeLlama, DeepSeek-Coder-V2, StarCoder2). The strongest model reaches only 84.5% pass@1, no family exceeds 0.77 Edit Similarity, and every family produces hallucination-aligned completions on a non-trivial share of samples, confirming that the difficulty exposed by Delulu is task-intrinsic rather than family-specific. We release the benchmark, containers, and evaluation framework at https://github.com/microsoft/delulu.

The advances of large foundation models necessitate wide-coverage, low-cost, and zero-contamination benchmarks. Despite continuous exploration of language model evaluations, comprehensive studies on the evaluation of Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) remain limited. In this work, we introduce LMMS-EVAL, a unified and standardized multimodal benchmark framework with over 50 tasks and more than 10 models to promote transparent and reproducible evaluations. Although LMMS-EVAL offers comprehensive coverage, we find it still falls short in achieving low cost and zero contamination. To approach this evaluation trilemma, we further introduce LMMS-EVAL LITE, a pruned evaluation toolkit that emphasizes both coverage and efficiency. Additionally, we present Multimodal LIVEBENCH that utilizes continuously updating news and online forums to assess models' generalization abilities in the wild, featuring a low-cost and zero-contamination evaluation approach. In summary, our work highlights the importance of considering the evaluation trilemma and provides practical solutions to navigate the trade-offs in evaluating large multi-modal models, paving the way for more effective and reliable benchmarking of LMMs. We opensource our codebase and maintain leaderboard of LIVEBENCH at https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/lmms-eval and https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmms-lab/LiveBench.

Morphing attacks are an emerging threat to state-of-the-art Face Recognition (FR) systems, which aim to create a single image that contains the biometric information of multiple identities. Diffusion Morphs (DiM) are a recently proposed morphing attack that has achieved state-of-the-art performance for representation-based morphing attacks. However, none of the existing research on DiMs have leveraged the iterative nature of DiMs and left the DiM model as a black box, treating it no differently than one would a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) or Varational AutoEncoder (VAE). We propose a greedy strategy on the iterative sampling process of DiM models which searches for an optimal step guided by an identity-based heuristic function. We compare our proposed algorithm against ten other state-of-the-art morphing algorithms using the open-source SYN-MAD 2022 competition dataset. We find that our proposed algorithm is unreasonably effective, fooling all of the tested FR systems with an MMPMR of 100%, outperforming all other morphing algorithms compared.

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) are often constrained by the pre-training of their visual generation components, which typically relies on inefficient paradigms and scarce, high-quality text-image paired data. In this paper, we systematically analyze pre-training recipes for UMM visual generation and identify these two issues as the major bottlenecks. To address them, we propose Image-Only Training for UMMs (IOMM), a data-efficient two-stage training framework. The first stage pre-trains the visual generative component exclusively using abundant unlabeled image-only data, thereby removing the dependency on paired data for this costly phase. The second stage fine-tunes the model using a mixture of unlabeled images and a small curated set of text-image pairs, leading to improved instruction alignment and generative quality. Extensive experiments show that IOMM not only improves training efficiency but also achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. For example, our IOMM-B (3.6B) model was trained from scratch using only sim 1050 H800 GPU hours (with the vast majority, 1000 hours, dedicated to the efficient image-only pre-training stage). It achieves 0.89 on GenEval and 0.55 on WISE--surpassing strong baselines such as BAGEL-7B (0.82 & 0.55) and BLIP3-o-4B (0.84 & 0.50). Code is available https://github.com/LINs-lab/IOMM{https://github.com/LINs-lab/IOMM}.

We propose to replace vector quantization (VQ) in the latent representation of VQ-VAEs with a simple scheme termed finite scalar quantization (FSQ), where we project the VAE representation down to a few dimensions (typically less than 10). Each dimension is quantized to a small set of fixed values, leading to an (implicit) codebook given by the product of these sets. By appropriately choosing the number of dimensions and values each dimension can take, we obtain the same codebook size as in VQ. On top of such discrete representations, we can train the same models that have been trained on VQ-VAE representations. For example, autoregressive and masked transformer models for image generation, multimodal generation, and dense prediction computer vision tasks. Concretely, we employ FSQ with MaskGIT for image generation, and with UViM for depth estimation, colorization, and panoptic segmentation. Despite the much simpler design of FSQ, we obtain competitive performance in all these tasks. We emphasize that FSQ does not suffer from codebook collapse and does not need the complex machinery employed in VQ (commitment losses, codebook reseeding, code splitting, entropy penalties, etc.) to learn expressive discrete representations.

Modern single-image super-resolution (SISR) models deliver photo-realistic results at the scale factors on which they are trained, but collapse when asked to magnify far beyond that regime. We address this scalability bottleneck with Chain-of-Zoom (CoZ), a model-agnostic framework that factorizes SISR into an autoregressive chain of intermediate scale-states with multi-scale-aware prompts. CoZ repeatedly re-uses a backbone SR model, decomposing the conditional probability into tractable sub-problems to achieve extreme resolutions without additional training. Because visual cues diminish at high magnifications, we augment each zoom step with multi-scale-aware text prompts generated by a vision-language model (VLM). The prompt extractor itself is fine-tuned using Generalized Reward Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a critic VLM, aligning text guidance towards human preference. Experiments show that a standard 4x diffusion SR model wrapped in CoZ attains beyond 256x enlargement with high perceptual quality and fidelity. Project Page: https://bryanswkim.github.io/chain-of-zoom/ .

Due to the rise of privacy concerns, in many practical applications the training data is aggregated before being shared with the learner, in order to protect privacy of users' sensitive responses. In an aggregate learning framework, the dataset is grouped into bags of samples, where each bag is available only with an aggregate response, providing a summary of individuals' responses in that bag. In this paper, we study two natural loss functions for learning from aggregate responses: bag-level loss and the instance-level loss. In the former, the model is learnt by minimizing a loss between aggregate responses and aggregate model predictions, while in the latter the model aims to fit individual predictions to the aggregate responses. In this work, we show that the instance-level loss can be perceived as a regularized form of the bag-level loss. This observation lets us compare the two approaches with respect to bias and variance of the resulting estimators, and introduce a novel interpolating estimator which combines the two approaches. For linear regression tasks, we provide a precise characterization of the risk of the interpolating estimator in an asymptotic regime where the size of the training set grows in proportion to the features dimension. Our analysis allows us to theoretically understand the effect of different factors, such as bag size on the model prediction risk. In addition, we propose a mechanism for differentially private learning from aggregate responses and derive the optimal bag size in terms of prediction risk-privacy trade-off. We also carry out thorough experiments to corroborate our theory and show the efficacy of the interpolating estimator.

Recent advancements in Mamba have shown promising results in image restoration. These methods typically flatten 2D images into multiple distinct 1D sequences along rows and columns, process each sequence independently using selective scan operation, and recombine them to form the outputs. However, such a paradigm overlooks two vital aspects: i) the local relationships and spatial continuity inherent in natural images, and ii) the discrepancies among sequences unfolded through totally different ways. To overcome the drawbacks, we explore two problems in Mamba-based restoration methods: i) how to design a scanning strategy preserving both locality and continuity while facilitating restoration, and ii) how to aggregate the distinct sequences unfolded in totally different ways. To address these problems, we propose a novel Mamba-based Image Restoration model (MaIR), which consists of Nested S-shaped Scanning strategy (NSS) and Sequence Shuffle Attention block (SSA). Specifically, NSS preserves locality and continuity of the input images through the stripe-based scanning region and the S-shaped scanning path, respectively. SSA aggregates sequences through calculating attention weights within the corresponding channels of different sequences. Thanks to NSS and SSA, MaIR surpasses 40 baselines across 14 challenging datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the tasks of image super-resolution, denoising, deblurring and dehazing. The code is available at https://github.com/XLearning-SCU/2025-CVPR-MaIR.

Predicting real-world events from live market signals demands systems that fuse qualitative news with quantitative order-book dynamics under strict temporal discipline -- a challenge existing benchmarks fail to capture. We present PolyBench, a multimodal benchmark derived from Polymarket that records point-in-time cross-sections of 38,666 binary prediction markets spanning 4,997 events, synchronously coupling each snapshot with a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) state and a real-time news stream. Using PolyBench, we evaluate seven state-of-the-art Large Language Models -- spanning open- and closed-source families -- generating 36,165 predictions under identical, timestamp-locked market states collected between February 6 and 12, 2026. Our multidimensional framework assesses directional accuracy, our proposed Confidence-Weighted Return (CWR), Annualized Percentage Yield (APY), and Sharpe ratio via realistic order-book execution simulation. The results reveal a pronounced performance divergence: only two of seven models achieve positive financial returns -- MiMo-V2-Flash at 17.6% CWR and Gemini-3-Flash at 6.2% CWR -- while the remaining five incur losses despite uniformly high stated confidence. These findings highlight the gap between surface-level language fluency and genuine probabilistic reasoning under live market uncertainty, and establish PolyBench as a contamination-proof, financially-grounded evaluation standard for future LLM research. Our dataset and code available at \href{https://github.com/PolyBench/PolyBench{https://github.com/PolyBench/PolyBench}}.

With the advent of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), datasets used for visual question answering (VQA) and referring expression comprehension have seen a resurgence. However, the most popular datasets used to evaluate MLLMs are some of the earliest ones created, and they have many known problems, including extreme bias, spurious correlations, and an inability to permit fine-grained analysis. In this paper, we pioneer evaluating recent MLLMs (LLaVA 1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, BLIP2, InstructBLIP, GPT-4V, and GPT-4o) on datasets designed to address weaknesses in earlier ones. We assess three VQA datasets: 1) TDIUC, which permits fine-grained analysis on 12 question types; 2) TallyQA, which has simple and complex counting questions; and 3) DVQA, which requires optical character recognition for chart understanding. We also study VQDv1, a dataset that requires identifying all image regions that satisfy a given query. Our experiments reveal the weaknesses of many MLLMs that have not previously been reported. Our code is integrated into the widely used LAVIS framework for MLLM evaluation, enabling the rapid assessment of future MLLMs. Project webpage: https://kevinlujian.github.io/MLLM_Evaluations/

Open time-series forecasting (TSF) benchmarks cover retail, energy, weather, and traffic, but supply-chain logistics remains underserved. We introduce ISOMORPH, the first public digital twin of a multi-echelon logistics network with fully interpretable, user-configurable parameters and modular topology, demand process, and control rules. The simulator advances a directed routing graph in discrete time: demand arrives at the destination, is served from stock or recorded as backlog, and triggers replenishment through the network. The state vector tracks per-node on-hand inventory with outstanding orders, in-transit shipments, and a smoothed demand estimate, so the dynamics close as a Markov chain on a tractable state space whose transition kernel acts linearly on the empirical distribution of the state. The released data reproduces the bullwhip effect at empirically consistent magnitudes, and three conservation laws encoded in the Markov chain serve as verification tools when users extend the simulator. We release datasets at two catalogue scales (C=50 and C=200) with six scenario sweeps producing 30 additional rollouts and 20 Latin-hypercube perturbations, exhibiting dynamics absent from fixed TSF benchmarks: variance amplification, cascading bottlenecks, regime shifts, and cross-channel coupling through shared macro shocks. Zero-shot evaluation of four foundation models (Chronos, Moirai, TimesFM, Lag-Llama) shows MASE values exceeding public GIFT-Eval references at low-to-moderate horizons, supporting incorporation into existing benchmarks. The same pairing produces forecast confidence bands via Latin-hypercube perturbation of demand-side knobs, forward UQ from parameter uncertainty unavailable on standard TSF datasets, demonstrating that foundation models can serve as fast surrogates for the digital twin's forward UQ. Code (MIT): https://github.com/tuhinsahai/ISOMORPH.

Learning compact discrete representations of data is a key task on its own or for facilitating subsequent processing of data. In this paper we present a model that produces Discrete InfoMax Codes (DIMCO); we learn a probabilistic encoder that yields k-way d-dimensional codes associated with input data. Our model's learning objective is to maximize the mutual information between codes and labels with a regularization, which enforces entries of a codeword to be as independent as possible. We show that the infomax principle also justifies previous loss functions (e.g., cross-entropy) as its special cases. Our analysis also shows that using shorter codes, as DIMCO does, reduces overfitting in the context of few-shot classification. Through experiments in various domains, we observe this implicit meta-regularization effect of DIMCO. Furthermore, we show that the codes learned by DIMCO are efficient in terms of both memory and retrieval time compared to previous methods.

pySLAM is an open-source Python framework for Visual SLAM, supporting monocular, stereo, and RGB-D cameras. It provides a flexible interface for integrating both classical and modern local features, making it adaptable to various SLAM tasks. The framework includes different loop closure methods, a volumetric reconstruction pipeline, and support for depth prediction models. Additionally, it offers a suite of tools for visual odometry and SLAM applications. Designed for both beginners and experienced researchers, pySLAM encourages community contributions, fostering collaborative development in the field of Visual SLAM.

Bilevel optimization has shown its utility across various machine learning settings, yet most algorithms in practice require second-order information, making it challenging to scale them up. Only recently, a paradigm of first-order algorithms has emerged in the theoretical literature, capable of effectively addressing bilevel optimization problems. Nevertheless, the practical efficiency of this paradigm remains unverified, particularly in the context of large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces the first scalable instantiation of this paradigm called ScaleBiO, focusing on bilevel optimization for large-scale LLM data reweighting. By combining with a recently proposed memory-efficient training technique called LISA, our novel algorithm allows the paradigm to scale to sim30B-sized LLMs on 8timesH100 GPUs, marking the first successful application of bilevel optimization under practical scenarios for large-sized LLMs. Empirically, extensive experiments on data reweighting verify the effectiveness of ScaleBiO for different-scaled models, including Llama-3-8B, Gemma-2-9B, Qwen-2-7B, and Qwen-2.5-32B, where bilevel optimization succeeds in instruction-following and math reasoning tasks, outperforming several popular baselines, including uniform sampling, influence-aware data filtering, and reference-model-based sampling methods. Theoretically, ScaleBiO ensures the optimality of the learned data weights, along with a convergence guarantee matching the conventional first-order bilevel optimization paradigm on smooth and strongly convex objectives.

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is a biologically-inspired framework which represents symbols with high-dimensional vectors, and uses vector operations to manipulate them. The ensemble of a particular vector space and a prescribed set of vector operations (including one addition-like for "bundling" and one outer-product-like for "binding") form a *vector symbolic architecture* (VSA). While VSAs have been employed in numerous applications and have been studied empirically, many theoretical questions about VSAs remain open. We analyze the *representation capacities* of four common VSAs: MAP-I, MAP-B, and two VSAs based on sparse binary vectors. "Representation capacity' here refers to bounds on the dimensions of the VSA vectors required to perform certain symbolic tasks, such as testing for set membership i in S and estimating set intersection sizes |X cap Y| for two sets of symbols X and Y, to a given degree of accuracy. We also analyze the ability of a novel variant of a Hopfield network (a simple model of associative memory) to perform some of the same tasks that are typically asked of VSAs. In addition to providing new bounds on VSA capacities, our analyses establish and leverage connections between VSAs, "sketching" (dimensionality reduction) algorithms, and Bloom filters.

Reliably generating structured outputs has become a critical capability for modern language model (LM) applications. Constrained decoding has emerged as the dominant technology across sectors for enforcing structured outputs during generation. Despite its growing adoption, little has been done with the systematic evaluation of the behaviors and performance of constrained decoding. Constrained decoding frameworks have standardized around JSON Schema as a structured data format, with most uses guaranteeing constraint compliance given a schema. However, there is poor understanding of the effectiveness of the methods in practice. We present an evaluation framework to assess constrained decoding approaches across three critical dimensions: efficiency in generating constraint-compliant outputs, coverage of diverse constraint types, and quality of the generated outputs. To facilitate this evaluation, we introduce JSONSchemaBench, a benchmark for constrained decoding comprising 10K real-world JSON schemas that encompass a wide range of constraints with varying complexity. We pair the benchmark with the existing official JSON Schema Test Suite and evaluate six state-of-the-art constrained decoding frameworks, including Guidance, Outlines, Llamacpp, XGrammar, OpenAI, and Gemini. Through extensive experiments, we gain insights into the capabilities and limitations of constrained decoding on structured generation with real-world JSON schemas. Our work provides actionable insights for improving constrained decoding frameworks and structured generation tasks, setting a new standard for evaluating constrained decoding and structured generation. We release JSONSchemaBench at https://github.com/guidance-ai/jsonschemabench

With the rapid development of large vision language models (LVLMs), these models have shown excellent results in various multimodal tasks. Since LVLMs are prone to hallucinations and there are currently few datasets and evaluation methods specifically designed for remote sensing, their performance is typically poor when applied to remote sensing tasks. To address these issues, this paper introduces a high quality remote sensing LVLMs dataset, DDFAV, created using data augmentation and data mixing strategies. Next, a training instruction set is produced based on some high-quality remote sensing images selected from the proposed dataset. Finally, we develop a remote sensing LVLMs hallucination evaluation method RSPOPE based on the proposed dataset and evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of different LVLMs. Our proposed dataset, instruction set, and evaluation method files are available at https://github.com/HaodongLi2024/rspope.

We develop a unified theoretical framework for sparse knowledge distillation based on probability-domain softening operators. While the equivalence p^{1/T} propto softmax(z/T) is well known, our contribution is an operator-level analytical framework built on this foundation rather than the equivalence itself. The framework comprises four core components: (i) operator-agnostic bias--variance decompositions that characterize when sparse students outperform dense teachers, (ii) a homotopy path formalization of multi-stage pruning in function space explaining why iterative compression succeeds where one-shot pruning fails, (iii) convergence guarantees establishing O(1/n) rates for n-stage distillation with explicit parameter dependence, and (iv) equivalence class characterizations identifying distinct probability-domain operators that yield identical student models under capacity constraints. We introduce an axiomatic definition of probability-domain softening operators based on ranking preservation, continuity, entropy monotonicity, identity, and boundary behavior, and show that multiple non-equivalent operator families satisfy these axioms. All learning-theoretic guarantees are shown to hold uniformly across this operator class, independent of implementation details. These results provide theoretical grounding for black-box teacher distillation, partial-access settings such as top-k truncation and text-only outputs, and privacy-preserving model compression.

Large language model (LLM) routing assigns each query to the most suitable model from an ensemble. We introduce LLMRouterBench, a large-scale benchmark and unified framework for LLM routing. It comprises over 400K instances from 21 datasets and 33 models. Moreover, it provides comprehensive metrics for both performance-oriented routing and performance-cost trade-off routing, and integrates 10 representative routing baselines. Using LLMRouterBench, we systematically re-evaluate the field. While confirming strong model complementarity-the central premise of LLM routing-we find that many routing methods exhibit similar performance under unified evaluation, and several recent approaches, including commercial routers, fail to reliably outperform a simple baseline. Meanwhile, a substantial gap remains to the Oracle, driven primarily by persistent model-recall failures. We further show that backbone embedding models have limited impact, that larger ensembles exhibit diminishing returns compared to careful model curation, and that the benchmark also enables latency-aware analysis. All code and data are available at https://github.com/ynulihao/LLMRouterBench.

In recent developments, the Mamba architecture, known for its selective state space approach, has shown potential in the efficient modeling of long sequences. However, its application in image generation remains underexplored. Traditional diffusion transformers (DiT), which utilize self-attention blocks, are effective but their computational complexity scales quadratically with the input length, limiting their use for high-resolution images. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel diffusion architecture, Diffusion Mamba (DiM), which foregoes traditional attention mechanisms in favor of a scalable alternative. By harnessing the inherent efficiency of the Mamba architecture, DiM achieves rapid inference times and reduced computational load, maintaining linear complexity with respect to sequence length. Our architecture not only scales effectively but also outperforms existing diffusion transformers in both image and video generation tasks. The results affirm the scalability and efficiency of DiM, establishing a new benchmark for image and video generation techniques. This work advances the field of generative models and paves the way for further applications of scalable architectures.

Recent advances in foundation models have shown great promise in domains such as natural language processing and computer vision, and similar efforts are now emerging in the Earth Observation community. These models aim to generalize across tasks with limited supervision, reducing the need for training separate models for each task. However, current strategies, which largely focus on scaling model size and dataset volume, require prohibitive computational and data resources, limiting accessibility to only a few large institutions. Moreover, this paradigm of ever-larger models stands in stark contrast with the principles of sustainable and environmentally responsible AI, as it leads to immense carbon footprints and resource inefficiency. In this work, we present a novel and efficient alternative: an Ensemble-of-Specialists framework for building Remote Sensing Foundation Models (RSFMs). Our method decomposes the training process into lightweight, task-specific ConvNeXtV2 specialists that can be frozen and reused. This modular approach offers strong advantages in efficiency, interpretability, and extensibility. Moreover, it naturally supports federated training, pruning, and continuous specialist integration, making it particularly well-suited for collaborative and resource-constrained settings. Our framework sets a new direction for building scalable and efficient RSFMs. All codes and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/pierreadorni/EoS-FM.

Diffusion Morphs (DiM) are a recent state-of-the-art method for creating high quality face morphs; however, they require a high number of network function evaluations (NFE) to create the morphs. We propose a new DiM pipeline, Fast-DiM, which can create morphs of a similar quality but with fewer NFE. We investigate the ODE solvers used to solve the Probability Flow ODE and the impact they have on the the creation of face morphs. Additionally, we employ an alternative method for encoding images into the latent space of the Diffusion model by solving the Probability Flow ODE as time runs forwards. Our experiments show that we can reduce the NFE by upwards of 85% in the encoding process while experiencing only 1.6\% reduction in Mated Morph Presentation Match Rate (MMPMR). Likewise, we showed we could cut NFE, in the sampling process, in half with only a maximal reduction of 0.23% in MMPMR.

Vector Quantization (VQ) is a widely used method for converting continuous representations into discrete codes, which has become fundamental in unsupervised representation learning and latent generative models. However, VQ models are often hindered by the problem of representation collapse in the latent space, which leads to low codebook utilization and limits the scalability of the codebook for large-scale training. Existing methods designed to mitigate representation collapse typically reduce the dimensionality of latent space at the expense of model capacity, which do not fully resolve the core issue. In this study, we conduct a theoretical analysis of representation collapse in VQ models and identify its primary cause as the disjoint optimization of the codebook, where only a small subset of code vectors are updated through gradient descent. To address this issue, we propose SimVQ, a novel method which reparameterizes the code vectors through a linear transformation layer based on a learnable latent basis. This transformation optimizes the entire linear space spanned by the codebook, rather than merely updating the code vector selected by the nearest-neighbor search in vanilla VQ models. Although it is commonly understood that the multiplication of two linear matrices is equivalent to applying a single linear layer, our approach works surprisingly well in resolving the collapse issue in VQ models with just one linear layer. We validate the efficacy of SimVQ through extensive experiments across various modalities, including image and audio data with different model architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/youngsheen/SimVQ.

The field of vision-language models (VLMs), which take images and texts as inputs and output texts, is rapidly evolving and has yet to reach consensus on several key aspects of the development pipeline, including data, architecture, and training methods. This paper can be seen as a tutorial for building a VLM. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each, addressing the major challenges in the field, and suggesting promising research directions for underexplored areas. We then walk through the practical steps to build Idefics3-8B, a powerful VLM that significantly outperforms its predecessor Idefics2-8B, while being trained efficiently, exclusively on open datasets, and using a straightforward pipeline. These steps include the creation of Docmatix, a dataset for improving document understanding capabilities, which is 240 times larger than previously available datasets. We release the model along with the datasets created for its training.

The problem of designing NLP solvers for math word problems (MWP) has seen sustained research activity and steady gains in the test accuracy. Since existing solvers achieve high performance on the benchmark datasets for elementary level MWPs containing one-unknown arithmetic word problems, such problems are often considered "solved" with the bulk of research attention moving to more complex MWPs. In this paper, we restrict our attention to English MWPs taught in grades four and lower. We provide strong evidence that the existing MWP solvers rely on shallow heuristics to achieve high performance on the benchmark datasets. To this end, we show that MWP solvers that do not have access to the question asked in the MWP can still solve a large fraction of MWPs. Similarly, models that treat MWPs as bag-of-words can also achieve surprisingly high accuracy. Further, we introduce a challenge dataset, SVAMP, created by applying carefully chosen variations over examples sampled from existing datasets. The best accuracy achieved by state-of-the-art models is substantially lower on SVAMP, thus showing that much remains to be done even for the simplest of the MWPs.

We propose a distributed bundle adjustment (DBA) method using the exact Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm for super large-scale datasets. Most of the existing methods partition the global map to small ones and conduct bundle adjustment in the submaps. In order to fit the parallel framework, they use approximate solutions instead of the LM algorithm. However, those methods often give sub-optimal results. Different from them, we utilize the exact LM algorithm to conduct global bundle adjustment where the formation of the reduced camera system (RCS) is actually parallelized and executed in a distributed way. To store the large RCS, we compress it with a block-based sparse matrix compression format (BSMC), which fully exploits its block feature. The BSMC format also enables the distributed storage and updating of the global RCS. The proposed method is extensively evaluated and compared with the state-of-the-art pipelines using both synthetic and real datasets. Preliminary results demonstrate the efficient memory usage and vast scalability of the proposed method compared with the baselines. For the first time, we conducted parallel bundle adjustment using LM algorithm on a real datasets with 1.18 million images and a synthetic dataset with 10 million images (about 500 times that of the state-of-the-art LM-based BA) on a distributed computing system.

Multi-constraint planning involves identifying, evaluating, and refining candidate plans while satisfying multiple, potentially conflicting constraints. Existing large language model (LLM) approaches face fundamental limitations in this domain. Pure reasoning paradigms, which rely on long natural language chains, are prone to inconsistency, error accumulation, and prohibitive cost as constraints compound. Conversely, LLMs combined with coding- or solver-based strategies lack flexibility: they often generate problem-specific code from scratch or depend on fixed solvers, failing to capture generalizable logic across diverse problems. To address these challenges, we introduce the Scalable COde Planning Engine (SCOPE), a framework that disentangles query-specific reasoning from generic code execution. By separating reasoning from execution, SCOPE produces solver functions that are consistent, deterministic, and reusable across queries while requiring only minimal changes to input parameters. SCOPE achieves state-of-the-art performance while lowering cost and latency. For example, with GPT-4o, it reaches 93.1% success on TravelPlanner, a 61.6% gain over the best baseline (CoT) while cutting inference cost by 1.4x and time by ~4.67x. Code is available at https://github.com/DerrickGXD/SCOPE.

Convolutions (Convs) and multi-head self-attentions (MHSAs) are typically considered alternatives to each other for building vision backbones. Although some works try to integrate both, they apply the two operators simultaneously at the finest pixel granularity. With Convs responsible for per-pixel feature extraction already, the question is whether we still need to include the heavy MHSAs at such a fine-grained level. In fact, this is the root cause of the scalability issue w.r.t. the input resolution for vision transformers. To address this important problem, we propose in this work to use MSHAs and Convs in parallel at different granularity levels instead. Specifically, in each layer, we use two different ways to represent an image: a fine-grained regular grid and a coarse-grained set of semantic slots. We apply different operations to these two representations: Convs to the grid for local features, and MHSAs to the slots for global features. A pair of fully differentiable soft clustering and dispatching modules is introduced to bridge the grid and set representations, thus enabling local-global fusion. Through extensive experiments on various vision tasks, we empirically verify the potential of the proposed integration scheme, named GLMix: by offloading the burden of fine-grained features to light-weight Convs, it is sufficient to use MHSAs in a few (e.g., 64) semantic slots to match the performance of recent state-of-the-art backbones, while being more efficient. Our visualization results also demonstrate that the soft clustering module produces a meaningful semantic grouping effect with only IN1k classification supervision, which may induce better interpretability and inspire new weakly-supervised semantic segmentation approaches. Code will be available at https://github.com/rayleizhu/GLMix.

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has become an essential method for building foundational visual models in remote sensing (RS). However, the limitations in size and diversity of existing RS datasets restrict the ability of MIM methods to learn generalizable representations. Additionally, conventional MIM techniques, which require reconstructing all tokens, introduce unnecessary computational overhead. To address these issues, we present a new pre-training pipeline for RS models, featuring the creation of a large-scale RS dataset and an efficient MIM approach. We curated a high-quality dataset named OpticalRS-13M by collecting publicly available RS datasets and processing them through exclusion, slicing, and deduplication. OpticalRS-13M comprises 13 million optical images covering various RS tasks, such as object detection and pixel segmentation. To enhance efficiency, we propose SelectiveMAE, a pre-training method that dynamically encodes and reconstructs semantically rich patch tokens, thereby reducing the inefficiencies of traditional MIM models caused by redundant background pixels in RS images. Extensive experiments show that OpticalRS-13M significantly improves classification, detection, and segmentation performance, while SelectiveMAE increases training efficiency over 2times times. This highlights the effectiveness and scalability of our pipeline in developing RS foundational models. The dataset, source code, and trained models will be released at https://github.com/MiliLab/SelectiveMAE.

State Space Models (SSMs) are emerging as a compelling alternative to Transformers because of their consistent memory usage and high performance. Despite this, scaling up SSMs on cloud services or limited-resource devices is challenging due to their storage requirements and computational power. To overcome this, quantizing SSMs with low bit-width data formats can reduce model size and benefit from hardware acceleration. As SSMs are prone to quantization-induced errors, recent efforts have focused on optimizing a particular model or bit-width for efficiency without sacrificing performance. However, distinct bit-width configurations are essential for different scenarios, like W4A8 for boosting large-batch decoding speed, and W4A16 for enhancing generation speed in short prompt applications for a single user. To this end, we present Quamba2, compatible with W8A8, W4A8, and W4A16 for both Mamba1 and Mamba2 backbones, addressing the growing demand for SSM deployment on various platforms. Based on the channel order preserving and activation persistence of SSMs, we propose an offline approach to quantize inputs of a linear recurrence in 8-bit by sorting and clustering for input x, combined with a per-state-group quantization for input-dependent parameters B and C. To ensure compute-invariance in the SSM output, we rearrange weights offline according to the clustering sequence. The experiments show that Quamba2-8B outperforms several state-of-the-art SSM quantization methods and delivers 1.3times and 3times speed-ups in the pre-filling and generation stages, respectively, while offering 4times memory reduction with only a 1.6% average accuracy drop. The evaluation on MMLU shows the generalizability and robustness of our framework. The code and quantized models will be released at: https://github.com/enyac-group/Quamba.

The application of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for analyzing images and videos is an exciting and rapidly evolving field. In recent years, we've seen significant growth in high-quality image-text datasets for fine-tuning image understanding, but there is still a lack of comparable datasets for videos. Additionally, many VideoLLMs are extensions of single-image VLMs, which may not efficiently handle the complexities of longer videos. In this study, we introduce a large-scale synthetic dataset created from proprietary models, using carefully designed prompts to tackle a wide range of questions. We also explore a dynamic visual token compression architecture that strikes a balance between computational efficiency and performance. Our proposed achieves state-of-the-art results across various video tasks and shows impressive generalization, setting new baselines in multi-image understanding. Notably, delivers an absolute improvement of 2.7\% over LLaVA-OneVision on VideoMME and 10.7\% on MuirBench. Codes are available at https://github.com/Hon-Wong/ByteVideoLLM

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) is crucial in computational science, engineering, and machine learning. Despite substantial efforts to improve SpMV performance on GPUs through various techniques, issues related to data locality, hardware utilization, and load balancing persist, leaving room for further optimization. This paper presents CB-SpMV, a cache-friendly SpMV optimization algorithm, using a novel data convergent and adaptable 2D blocking structure. The matrix in CB-SpMV is divided into independent sub-blocks, with virtual pointers aggregating different types of intra-block data for better cache-level data locality. To enhance hardware utilization, a block-aware column aggregation strategy and the selection of sub-block formats are proposed to accelerate computation and adapt to varying sparse matrices. Finally, an inter-block load-balancing algorithm is designed to ensure efficient workload distribution across thread blocks. Experimental evaluations on 2,843 matrices from the SuiteSparse Collection show that CB-SpMV significantly improves cache hit rates and achieves average speedups of up to 3.95x over state-of-the-art methods like cuSPARSE-BSR, TileSpMV, and DASP on NVIDIA A100 and RTX 4090 GPUs. The implementation is available at: https://github.com/xing-cong/CB-Sparse.

Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) methods achieve state-of-the-art results in sparse neural network training, matching the generalization of dense models while enabling sparse training and inference. Although the resulting models are highly sparse and theoretically less computationally expensive, achieving speedups with unstructured sparsity on real-world hardware is challenging. In this work, we propose a sparse-to-sparse DST method, Structured RigL (SRigL), to learn a variant of fine-grained structured N:M sparsity by imposing a constant fan-in constraint. Using our empirical analysis of existing DST methods at high sparsity, we additionally employ a neuron ablation method which enables SRigL to achieve state-of-the-art sparse-to-sparse structured DST performance on a variety of Neural Network (NN) architectures. We demonstrate reduced real-world timings on CPU for online inference -- 3.6x/2x faster at 90% sparsity than equivalent dense/unstructured sparse layers, respectively. Our source code is available at https://github.com/calgaryml/condensed-sparsity

One-hot vectors, a common method for representing discrete/categorical data, in machine learning are widely used because of their simplicity and intuitiveness. However, one-hot vectors suffer from a linear increase in dimensionality, posing computational and memory challenges, especially when dealing with datasets containing numerous categories. In this paper, we focus on tabular data generation, and reveal the multinomial diffusion faces the mode collapse phenomenon when the cardinality is high. Moreover, due to the limitations of one-hot vectors, the training phase takes time longer in such a situation. To address these issues, we propose Residual Bit Vectors (ResBit), a technique for densely representing categorical data. ResBit is an extension of analog bits and overcomes limitations of analog bits when applied to tabular data generation. Our experiments demonstrate that ResBit not only accelerates training but also maintains performance when compared with the situations before applying ResBit. Furthermore, our results indicate that many existing methods struggle with high-cardinality data, underscoring the need for lower-dimensional representations, such as ResBit and latent vectors.

In this work, we introduce Mini-Gemini, a simple and effective framework enhancing multi-modality Vision Language Models (VLMs). Despite the advancements in VLMs facilitating basic visual dialog and reasoning, a performance gap persists compared to advanced models like GPT-4 and Gemini. We try to narrow the gap by mining the potential of VLMs for better performance and any-to-any workflow from three aspects, i.e., high-resolution visual tokens, high-quality data, and VLM-guided generation. To enhance visual tokens, we propose to utilize an additional visual encoder for high-resolution refinement without increasing the visual token count. We further construct a high-quality dataset that promotes precise image comprehension and reasoning-based generation, expanding the operational scope of current VLMs. In general, Mini-Gemini further mines the potential of VLMs and empowers current frameworks with image understanding, reasoning, and generation simultaneously. Mini-Gemini supports a series of dense and MoE Large Language Models (LLMs) from 2B to 34B. It is demonstrated to achieve leading performance in several zero-shot benchmarks and even surpasses the developed private models. Code and models are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/MiniGemini.

We introduce BM25S, an efficient Python-based implementation of BM25 that only depends on Numpy and Scipy. BM25S achieves up to a 500x speedup compared to the most popular Python-based framework by eagerly computing BM25 scores during indexing and storing them into sparse matrices. It also achieves considerable speedups compared to highly optimized Java-based implementations, which are used by popular commercial products. Finally, BM25S reproduces the exact implementation of five BM25 variants based on Kamphuis et al. (2020) by extending eager scoring to non-sparse variants using a novel score shifting method. The code can be found at https://github.com/xhluca/bm25s

Mixed-precision quantization is a promising approach for compressing large language models under tight memory budgets. However, existing mixed-precision methods typically suffer from one of two limitations: they either rely on expensive discrete optimization to determine precision allocation, or introduce hardware inefficiencies due to irregular memory layouts. We propose SFMP, a search-free and hardware-friendly mixed-precision quantization framework for large language models. The framework is built upon four novel ideas: Fractional bit-width, which extends integer bit-width for weight matrix to fractional value and transforms discrete precision allocation as a continuous problem; 2)Block-wise mixed-precision, enabling fine-grained precision within weight matrices while remaining hardware-friendly; 3)Row-column weight reordering, which aggregates salient weights via row and column reordering, incurring only a small activation reordering overhead during inference; 4)Unified GEMM kernel, which supports mixed-precision GEMM at arbitrary average bit-width. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFMP outperforms state-of-the-art layer-wise mixed-precision methods under the same memory constraints, while significantly reducing quantization cost and improving inference efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Nkniexin/SFMP

The lightweight "local-match-global" matching introduced by SRe2L successfully creates a distilled dataset with comprehensive information on the full 224x224 ImageNet-1k. However, this one-sided approach is limited to a particular backbone, layer, and statistics, which limits the improvement of the generalization of a distilled dataset. We suggest that sufficient and various "local-match-global" matching are more precise and effective than a single one and has the ability to create a distilled dataset with richer information and better generalization. We call this perspective "generalized matching" and propose Generalized Various Backbone and Statistical Matching (G-VBSM) in this work, which aims to create a synthetic dataset with densities, ensuring consistency with the complete dataset across various backbones, layers, and statistics. As experimentally demonstrated, G-VBSM is the first algorithm to obtain strong performance across both small-scale and large-scale datasets. Specifically, G-VBSM achieves a performance of 38.7% on CIFAR-100 with 128-width ConvNet, 47.6% on Tiny-ImageNet with ResNet18, and 31.4% on the full 224x224 ImageNet-1k with ResNet18, under images per class (IPC) 10, 50, and 10, respectively. These results surpass all SOTA methods by margins of 3.9%, 6.5%, and 10.1%, respectively.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are fundamentally constrained by the quadratic computational cost of self-attention and the "Lost in the Middle" phenomenon, where reasoning capabilities degrade as context windows expand. Existing solutions, primarily "Flat RAG" architectures relying on vector databases, treat memory as an unstructured bag of embeddings, failing to capture the hierarchical and temporal structure of long-horizon interactions. This paper presents Aeon, a Neuro-Symbolic Cognitive Operating System that redefines memory as a managed OS resource. Aeon structures memory into a Memory Palace (a spatial index implemented via Atlas, a SIMD-accelerated Page-Clustered Vector Index) and a Trace (a neuro-symbolic episodic graph). This architecture introduces three advances: (1) Symmetric INT8 Scalar Quantization, achieving 3.1x spatial compression and 5.6x math acceleration via NEON SDOT intrinsics; (2) a decoupled Write-Ahead Log (WAL) ensuring crash-recoverability with statistically negligible overhead (<1%); and (3) a Sidecar Blob Arena eliminating the prior 440-character text ceiling via an append-only mmap-backed blob file with generational garbage collection. The Semantic Lookaside Buffer (SLB) exploits conversational locality to achieve sub-5us retrieval latencies, with INT8 vectors dequantized to FP32 on cache insertion to preserve L1-resident lookup performance. Benchmarks on Apple M4 Max demonstrate that the combined architecture achieves 4.70ns INT8 dot product latency, 3.09us tree traversal at 100K nodes (3.4x over FP32), and P99 read latency of 750ns under hostile 16-thread contention via epoch-based reclamation.

Modern model hubs, such as Hugging Face, store tens of petabytes of LLMs, with fine-tuned variants vastly outnumbering base models and dominating storage consumption. Existing storage reduction techniques -- such as deduplication and compression -- are either LLM-oblivious or not compatible with each other, limiting data reduction effectiveness. Our large-scale characterization study across all publicly available Hugging Face LLM repositories reveals several key insights: (1) fine-tuned models within the same family exhibit highly structured, sparse parameter differences suitable for delta compression; (2) bitwise similarity enables LLM family clustering; and (3) tensor-level deduplication is better aligned with model storage workloads, achieving high data reduction with low metadata overhead. Building on these insights, we design BitX, an effective, fast, lossless delta compression algorithm that compresses XORed difference between fine-tuned and base LLMs. We build ZipLLM, a model storage reduction pipeline that unifies tensor-level deduplication and lossless BitX compression. By synergizing deduplication and compression around LLM family clustering, ZipLLM reduces model storage consumption by 54%, over 20% higher than state-of-the-art deduplication and compression approaches.

Current object detectors are limited in vocabulary size due to the small scale of detection datasets. Image classifiers, on the other hand, reason about much larger vocabularies, as their datasets are larger and easier to collect. We propose Detic, which simply trains the classifiers of a detector on image classification data and thus expands the vocabulary of detectors to tens of thousands of concepts. Unlike prior work, Detic does not need complex assignment schemes to assign image labels to boxes based on model predictions, making it much easier to implement and compatible with a range of detection architectures and backbones. Our results show that Detic yields excellent detectors even for classes without box annotations. It outperforms prior work on both open-vocabulary and long-tail detection benchmarks. Detic provides a gain of 2.4 mAP for all classes and 8.3 mAP for novel classes on the open-vocabulary LVIS benchmark. On the standard LVIS benchmark, Detic obtains 41.7 mAP when evaluated on all classes, or only rare classes, hence closing the gap in performance for object categories with few samples. For the first time, we train a detector with all the twenty-one-thousand classes of the ImageNet dataset and show that it generalizes to new datasets without finetuning. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/Detic.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently achieved promising zero-shot accuracy on visual question answering (VQA) -- a fundamental task affecting various downstream applications and domains. Given the great potential for the broad use of these models, it is important to investigate their limitations in dealing with different image and question properties. In this work, we investigate whether MLLMs can perceive details as well as larger components in images. In particular, we show that their zero-shot accuracy in answering visual questions is very sensitive to the size of the visual subject related to the question, declining up to 45.91% with size. Furthermore, we show that this effect is causal by observing that human visual cropping can significantly mitigate their sensitivity to size. To scale up the usefulness of human cropping, we propose ViCrop, a general framework that utilizes automatic visual cropping to enhance zero-shot VQA of MLLMs. We construct five variants of ViCrop leveraging either external localization models or the decision process of the given MLLM itself. Our results show that ViCrop improves MLLMs' zero-shot accuracy across different VQA datasets, for example, enhances BLIP2-T5's performance by 32.23% on the TextVQA test set. To facilitate further investigation of MLLMs' behaviors, our code is publicly released.

This paper proposes an efficient multi-camera to Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) view transformation method for 3D perception, dubbed MatrixVT. Existing view transformers either suffer from poor transformation efficiency or rely on device-specific operators, hindering the broad application of BEV models. In contrast, our method generates BEV features efficiently with only convolutions and matrix multiplications (MatMul). Specifically, we propose describing the BEV feature as the MatMul of image feature and a sparse Feature Transporting Matrix (FTM). A Prime Extraction module is then introduced to compress the dimension of image features and reduce FTM's sparsity. Moreover, we propose the Ring \& Ray Decomposition to replace the FTM with two matrices and reformulate our pipeline to reduce calculation further. Compared to existing methods, MatrixVT enjoys a faster speed and less memory footprint while remaining deploy-friendly. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that our method is highly efficient but obtains results on par with the SOTA method in object detection and map segmentation tasks

The Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB) is a powerful framework for solving generative modeling tasks such as unpaired domain translation. Most SB-related research focuses on continuous data space R^{D} and leaves open theoretical and algorithmic questions about applying SB methods to discrete data, e.g, on finite spaces S^{D}. Notable examples of such sets S are codebooks of vector-quantized (VQ) representations of modern autoencoders, tokens in texts, categories of atoms in molecules, etc. In this paper, we provide a theoretical and algorithmic foundation for solving SB in discrete spaces using the recently introduced Iterative Markovian Fitting (IMF) procedure. Specifically, we theoretically justify the convergence of discrete-time IMF (D-IMF) to SB in discrete spaces. This enables us to develop a practical computational algorithm for SB which we call Categorical Schr\"odinger Bridge Matching (CSBM). We show the performance of CSBM via a series of experiments with synthetic data and VQ representations of images.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in vision-language answering tasks. Despite their strengths, these models often encounter challenges in achieving complex reasoning tasks such as mathematical problem-solving. Previous works have focused on fine-tuning on specialized mathematical datasets. However, these datasets are typically distilled directly from teacher models, which capture only static reasoning patterns and leaving substantial gaps compared to student models. This reliance on fixed teacher-derived datasets not only restricts the model's ability to adapt to novel or more intricate questions that extend beyond the confines of the training data, but also lacks the iterative depth needed for robust generalization. To overcome these limitations, we propose \method, a Mathematical Self-Evolving framework for MLLMs. In contrast to traditional one-shot fine-tuning paradigms, \method iteratively refines the model through cycles of inference, reflection, and reward-based feedback. Specifically, we leverage iterative fine-tuning by incorporating correct reasoning paths derived from previous-stage inference and integrating reflections from a specialized Outcome Reward Model (ORM). To verify the effectiveness of \method, we evaluate it on a suite of challenging benchmarks, demonstrating significant performance gains over backbone models. Notably, our experimental results on MathVL-test surpass the leading open-source multimodal mathematical reasoning model QVQ. Our code and models are available at https://zheny2751\allowbreak-dotcom.github.io/\allowbreak MathSE.github.io/.

Vision-language foundation models (VLMs) show promise for diverse imaging tasks but often underperform on medical benchmarks. Prior efforts to improve performance include model finetuning, which requires large domain-specific datasets and significant compute, or manual prompt engineering, which is hard to generalize and often inaccessible to medical institutions seeking to deploy these tools. These challenges motivate interest in approaches that draw on a model's embedded knowledge while abstracting away dependence on human-designed prompts to enable scalable, weight-agnostic performance improvements. To explore this, we adapt the Declarative Self-improving Python (DSPy) framework for structured automated prompt optimization in medical vision-language systems through a comprehensive, formal evaluation. We implement prompting pipelines for five medical imaging tasks across radiology, gastroenterology, and dermatology, evaluating 10 open-source VLMs with four prompt optimization techniques. Optimized pipelines achieved a median relative improvement of 53% over zero-shot prompting baselines, with the largest gains ranging from 300% to 3,400% on tasks where zero-shot performance is low. These results highlight the substantial potential of applying automated prompt optimization to medical AI systems, demonstrating significant gains for vision-based applications requiring accurate clinical image interpretation. By reducing dependence on prompt design to elicit intended outputs, these techniques allow clinicians to focus on patient care and clinical decision-making. Furthermore, our experiments offer scalability and preserve data privacy, demonstrating performance improvement on open-source VLMs. We publicly release our evaluation pipelines to support reproducible research on specialized medical tasks, available at https://github.com/DaneshjouLab/prompt-triage-lab.

Large Language Model (LLM) routing is a pivotal technique for navigating a diverse landscape of LLMs, aiming to select the best-performing LLMs tailored to the domains of user queries, while managing computational resources. However, current routing approaches often face limitations in scalability when dealing with a large pool of specialized LLMs, or in their adaptability to extending model scope and evolving capability domains. To overcome those challenges, we propose InferenceDynamics, a flexible and scalable multi-dimensional routing framework by modeling the capability and knowledge of models. We operate it on our comprehensive dataset RouteMix, and demonstrate its effectiveness and generalizability in group-level routing using modern benchmarks including MMLU-Pro, GPQA, BigGenBench, and LiveBench, showcasing its ability to identify and leverage top-performing models for given tasks, leading to superior outcomes with efficient resource utilization. The broader adoption of Inference Dynamics can empower users to harness the full specialized potential of the LLM ecosystem, and our code will be made publicly available to encourage further research.

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) addresses problems where supervision is available at the level of bags of instances and has been successfully applied in fields ranging from computational pathology to satellite imagery. Nevertheless, existing algorithms struggle in the low-label regime that characterizes many real-world applications. Flexible models overfit and rigid ones fail to adapt to the task at hand. We show that pretraining an in-context learner with a Perceiver-style architecture on synthetic data yields a model that can solve new tasks from a handful of labeled bags. At inference time, classification happens in a single forward pass and requires no gradient updates. We propose and investigate different synthetic data generators for bag-structured data and find that they capture complementary inductive biases. A model pretrained on a mixture of these generators inherits their per-task strengths and achieves the best average performance across twelve MIL benchmarks, outperforming supervised baselines that require task-specific training.

The DEtection TRansformer (DETR) is a powerful end-to-end object detector, yet its one-to-one matching strategy suffers from slow convergence and low recall. A common approach to address this issue is to use one-to-many label assignment to provide more positive samples. However, existing methods that use one-to-many matching as an auxiliary objective lead to increased training costs, with their auxiliary decoders discarded during inference. To address this limitation, we propose MDS-DETR, which leverages both one-to-one and one-to-many supervision within a single decoder. Specifically, we introduce a Masked Duplicate Suppressor (MDS) that injects asymmetry into self-attention via confidence-based causal masking. MDS filters out the duplicates generated by the one-to-many supervised layer, enables explainable, duplicate-free predictions in a fully end-to-end framework. MDS-DETR outperforms existing one-to-many DETR variants such as MS-DETR, MR.DETR and Relation-DETR, without relying on any additional queries or auxiliary decoders. Under a 12-epoch training schedule on MS COCO with a ResNet-50 backbone, MDS-DETR achieves a +2.8 mAP improvement over Deformable-DETR with only a 5\% increase in training time, and outperforms the state-of-the-art MR.DETR by +0.3 mAP while being even 20\% faster in training. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/dcholee/mds-detr{https://github.com/DChoLee/MDS-DETR}.

Recently, Visual Autoregressive (VAR) Models introduced a groundbreaking advancement in the field of image generation, offering a scalable approach through a coarse-to-fine "next-scale prediction" paradigm. However, the state-of-the-art algorithm of VAR models in [Tian, Jiang, Yuan, Peng and Wang, NeurIPS 2024] takes O(n^4) time, which is computationally inefficient. In this work, we analyze the computational limits and efficiency criteria of VAR Models through a fine-grained complexity lens. Our key contribution is identifying the conditions under which VAR computations can achieve sub-quadratic time complexity. Specifically, we establish a critical threshold for the norm of input matrices used in VAR attention mechanisms. Above this threshold, assuming the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) from fine-grained complexity theory, a sub-quartic time algorithm for VAR models is impossible. To substantiate our theoretical findings, we present efficient constructions leveraging low-rank approximations that align with the derived criteria. This work initiates the study of the computational efficiency of the VAR model from a theoretical perspective. Our technique will shed light on advancing scalable and efficient image generation in VAR frameworks.

Currently, high-definition (HD) map construction leans towards a lightweight online generation tendency, which aims to preserve timely and reliable road scene information. However, map elements contain strong shape priors. Subtle and sparse annotations make current detection-based frameworks ambiguous in locating relevant feature scopes and cause the loss of detailed structures in prediction. To alleviate these problems, we propose MGMap, a mask-guided approach that effectively highlights the informative regions and achieves precise map element localization by introducing the learned masks. Specifically, MGMap employs learned masks based on the enhanced multi-scale BEV features from two perspectives. At the instance level, we propose the Mask-activated instance (MAI) decoder, which incorporates global instance and structural information into instance queries by the activation of instance masks. At the point level, a novel position-guided mask patch refinement (PG-MPR) module is designed to refine point locations from a finer-grained perspective, enabling the extraction of point-specific patch information. Compared to the baselines, our proposed MGMap achieves a notable improvement of around 10 mAP for different input modalities. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that our approach showcases strong robustness and generalization capabilities. Our code can be found at https://github.com/xiaolul2/MGMap.

Enterprise data lakes often suffer from substantial amounts of duplicate and redundant data, with data volumes ranging from terabytes to petabytes. This leads to both increased storage costs and unnecessarily high maintenance costs for these datasets. In this work, we focus on identifying and reducing redundancy in enterprise data lakes by addressing the problem of 'dataset containment'. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works that addresses table-level containment at a large scale. We propose R2D2: a three-step hierarchical pipeline that efficiently identifies almost all instances of containment by progressively reducing the search space in the data lake. It first builds (i) a schema containment graph, followed by (ii) statistical min-max pruning, and finally, (iii) content level pruning. We further propose minimizing the total storage and access costs by optimally identifying redundant datasets that can be deleted (and reconstructed on demand) while respecting latency constraints. We implement our system on Azure Databricks clusters using Apache Spark for enterprise data stored in ADLS Gen2, and on AWS clusters for open-source data. In contrast to existing modified baselines that are inaccurate or take several days to run, our pipeline can process an enterprise customer data lake at the TB scale in approximately 5 hours with high accuracy. We present theoretical results as well as extensive empirical validation on both enterprise (scale of TBs) and open-source datasets (scale of MBs - GBs), which showcase the effectiveness of our pipeline.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently emerged as a significant focus in academia and industry. Despite their proficiency in general multi-modal scenarios, the mathematical problem-solving capabilities in visual contexts remain insufficiently explored. We identify three key areas within MLLMs that need to be improved: visual encoding of math diagrams, diagram-language alignment, and mathematical reasoning skills. This draws forth an urgent demand for large-scale, high-quality data and training pipelines in visual mathematics. In this paper, we propose MAVIS, the first MAthematical VISual instruction tuning paradigm for MLLMs, involving a series of mathematical visual datasets and specialized MLLMs. Targeting the three issues, MAVIS contains three progressive training stages from scratch. First, we curate MAVIS-Caption, consisting of 558K diagram-caption pairs, to fine-tune a math-specific vision encoder (CLIP-Math) through contrastive learning, tailored for improved diagram visual encoding. Second, we utilize MAVIS-Caption to align the CLIP-Math with a large language model (LLM) by a projection layer, enhancing vision-language alignment in mathematical domains. Third, we introduce MAVIS-Instruct, including 900K meticulously collected and annotated visual math problems, which is adopted to finally instruct-tune the MLLM for robust mathematical reasoning skills. In MAVIS-Instruct, we incorporate complete chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales for each problem, and minimize textual redundancy, thereby concentrating the model towards the visual elements. Data and Models are released at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/MAVIS

In this paper, we introduce SAIL-VL (ScAlable Vision Language Model TraIning via High QuaLity Data Curation), an open-source vision language model (VLM) of state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with 2B parameters. We introduce three key improvements that contribute to SAIL-VL's leading performance: (1) Scalable high-quality visual understanding data construction: We implement a visual understanding data construction pipeline, which enables hundred-million-scale high-quality recaption data annotation. Equipped with this pipeline, we curate SAIL-Caption, a large-scale caption dataset with large quantity and the highest data quality compared with opensource caption datasets. (2) Scalable Pretraining with High-Quality Visual Understanding Data: We scale SAIL-VL's pretraining budget up to 131B tokens and show that even a 2B VLM benefits from scaled up training data sizes, exhibiting expected data size scaling laws in visual understanding and instruction following performance. (3) Scalable SFT via quantity and quality scaling: We introduce general guidance for instruction data curation to scale up instruction data continuously, allowing us to construct a large SFT dataset with the highest quality. To further improve SAIL-VL's performance, we propose quality scaling, a multi-stage training recipe with curriculum learning, to improve model performance scaling curves w.r.t. data sizes from logarithmic to be near-linear. SAIL-VL obtains the highest average score in 19 commonly used benchmarks in our evaluation and achieves top1 performance among VLMs of comparable sizes on OpenCompass (https://rank.opencompass.org.cn/leaderboard-multimodal). We release our SAIL-VL-2B model at HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/BytedanceDouyinContent/SAIL-VL-2B).

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across multimodal tasks such as visual perception and reasoning, leading to good performance on various multimodal evaluation benchmarks. However, these benchmarks keep a static nature and overlap with the pre-training data, resulting in fixed complexity constraints and data contamination issues. This raises the concern regarding the validity of the evaluation. To address these two challenges, we introduce a dynamic multimodal evaluation protocol called Vision-Language Bootstrapping (VLB). VLB provides a robust and comprehensive assessment for LVLMs with reduced data contamination and flexible complexity. To this end, VLB dynamically generates new visual question-answering samples through a multimodal bootstrapping module that modifies both images and language, while ensuring that newly generated samples remain consistent with the original ones by a judge module. By composing various bootstrapping strategies, VLB offers dynamic variants of existing benchmarks with diverse complexities, enabling the evaluation to co-evolve with the ever-evolving capabilities of LVLMs. Extensive experimental results across multiple benchmarks, including SEEDBench, MMBench, and MME, show that VLB significantly reduces data contamination and exposes performance limitations of LVLMs.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) have become integral in modern image rendering applications due to their infinite scalability in resolution, versatile usability, and editing capabilities. SVGs are particularly popular in the fields of web development and graphic design. Existing approaches for SVG modeling using deep learning often struggle with generating complex SVGs and are restricted to simpler ones that require extensive processing and simplification. This paper introduces StarVector, a multimodal SVG generation model that effectively integrates Code Generation Large Language Models (CodeLLMs) and vision models. Our approach utilizes a CLIP image encoder to extract visual representations from pixel-based images, which are then transformed into visual tokens via an adapter module. These visual tokens are pre-pended to the SVG token embeddings, and the sequence is modeled by the StarCoder model using next-token prediction, effectively learning to align the visual and code tokens. This enables StarVector to generate unrestricted SVGs that accurately represent pixel images. To evaluate StarVector's performance, we present SVG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating SVG methods across multiple datasets and relevant metrics. Within this benchmark, we introduce novel datasets including SVG-Stack, a large-scale dataset of real-world SVG examples, and use it to pre-train StarVector as a large foundation model for SVGs. Our results demonstrate significant enhancements in visual quality and complexity handling over current methods, marking a notable advancement in SVG generation technology. Code and models: https://github.com/joanrod/star-vector

We present the TinyLLaVA framework that provides a unified perspective in designing and analyzing the small-scale Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). We empirically study the effects of different vision encoders, connection modules, language models, training data and training recipes. Our extensive experiments showed that better quality of data combined with better training recipes, smaller LMMs can consistently achieve on-par performances compared to bigger LMMs. Under our framework, we train a family of small-scale LMMs. Our best model, TinyLLaVA-3.1B, achieves better overall performance against existing 7B models such as LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen-VL. We hope our findings can serve as baselines for future research in terms of data scaling, training setups and model selections. Our model weights and codes will be made public.

Closed-loop simulation is a core component of autonomous vehicle (AV) development, enabling scalable testing, training, and safety validation before real-world deployment. Neural scene reconstruction converts driving logs into interactive 3D environments for simulation, but it does not produce complete 3D object assets required for agent manipulation and large-viewpoint novel-view synthesis. To address this challenge, we present Asset Harvester, an image-to-3D model and end-to-end pipeline that converts sparse, in-the-wild object observations from real driving logs into complete, simulation-ready assets. Rather than relying on a single model component, we developed a system-level design for real-world AV data that combines large-scale curation of object-centric training tuples, geometry-aware preprocessing across heterogeneous sensors, and a robust training recipe that couples sparse-view-conditioned multiview generation with 3D Gaussian lifting. Within this system, SparseViewDiT is explicitly designed to address limited-angle views and other real-world data challenges. Together with hybrid data curation, augmentation, and self-distillation, this system enables scalable conversion of sparse AV object observations into reusable 3D assets.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that integrate visual and textual reasoning leverage chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to tackle complex visual tasks, yet continue to exhibit visual hallucinations and an over-reliance on textual priors. We present a systematic diagnosis of state-of-the-art vision-language models using a three-stage evaluation framework, uncovering key failure modes. To address these, we propose an agent-based architecture that combines LLM reasoning with lightweight visual modules, enabling fine-grained analysis and iterative refinement of reasoning chains. Our results highlight future visual reasoning models should focus on integrating a broader set of specialized tools for analyzing visual content. Our system achieves significant gains (+10.3 on MMMU, +6.0 on MathVista over a 7B baseline), matching or surpassing much larger models. We will release our framework and evaluation suite to facilitate future research.

Multi-vector visual retrievers (e.g., ColPali-style late interaction models) deliver strong accuracy, but scale poorly because each page yields thousands of vectors, making indexing and search increasingly expensive. We present Visual RAG Toolkit, a practical system for scaling visual multi-vector retrieval with training-free, model-aware pooling and multi-stage retrieval. Motivated by Matryoshka Embeddings, our method performs static spatial pooling - including a lightweight sliding-window averaging variant - over patch embeddings to produce compact tile-level and global representations for fast candidate generation, followed by exact MaxSim reranking using full multi-vector embeddings. Our design yields a quadratic reduction in vector-to-vector comparisons by reducing stored vectors per page from thousands to dozens, notably without requiring post-training, adapters, or distillation. Across experiments with interaction-style models such as ColPali and ColSmol-500M, we observe that over the limited ViDoRe v2 benchmark corpus 2-stage retrieval typically preserves NDCG and Recall @ 5/10 with minimal degradation, while substantially improving throughput (approximately 4x QPS); with sensitivity mainly at very large k. The toolkit additionally provides robust preprocessing - high resolution PDF to image conversion, optional margin/empty-region cropping and token hygiene (indexing only visual tokens) - and a reproducible evaluation pipeline, enabling rapid exploration of two-, three-, and cascaded retrieval variants. By emphasizing efficiency at common cutoffs (e.g., k <= 10), the toolkit lowers hardware barriers and makes state-of-the-art visual retrieval more accessible in practice.

In this article, we introduce a new parameterized family of topological invariants, taking the form of candidate decompositions, for multi-parameter persistence modules. We prove that our candidate decompositions are controllable approximations: when restricting to modules that can be decomposed into interval summands, we establish theoretical results about the approximation error between our candidate decompositions and the true underlying module in terms of the standard interleaving and bottleneck distances. Moreover, even when the underlying module does not admit such a decomposition, our candidate decompositions are nonetheless stable invariants; small perturbations in the underlying module lead to small perturbations in the candidate decomposition. Then, we introduce MMA (Multipersistence Module Approximation): an algorithm for computing stable instances of such invariants, which is based on fibered barcodes and exact matchings, two constructions that stem from the theory of single-parameter persistence. By design, MMA can handle an arbitrary number of filtrations, and has bounded complexity and running time. Finally, we present empirical evidence validating the generalization capabilities and running time speed-ups of MMA on several data sets.

The ability to extract value from historical data is essential for enterprise decision-making. However, much of this information remains inaccessible within large legacy file systems that lack structured organization and semantic indexing, making retrieval and analysis inefficient and error-prone. We introduce SPAR (Session-based Pipeline for Adaptive Retrieval), a conceptual framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) into a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture specifically designed for legacy enterprise environments. Unlike conventional RAG pipelines, which require costly construction and maintenance of full-scale vector databases that mirror the entire file system, SPAR employs a lightweight two-stage process: a semantic Metadata Index is first created, after which session-specific vector databases are dynamically generated on demand. This design reduces computational overhead while improving transparency, controllability, and relevance in retrieval. We provide a theoretical complexity analysis comparing SPAR with standard LLM-based RAG pipelines, demonstrating its computational advantages. To validate the framework, we apply SPAR to a synthesized enterprise-scale file system containing a large corpus of biomedical literature, showing improvements in both retrieval effectiveness and downstream model accuracy. Finally, we discuss design trade-offs and outline open challenges for deploying SPAR across diverse enterprise settings.

We study the problem of learning a neural sampler to generate samples from discrete state spaces where the target probability mass function piproptoe^{-U} is known up to a normalizing constant, which is an important task in fields such as statistical physics, machine learning, combinatorial optimization, etc. To better address this challenging task when the state space has a large cardinality and the distribution is multi-modal, we propose Masked Diffusion Neural Sampler (MDNS), a novel framework for training discrete neural samplers by aligning two path measures through a family of learning objectives, theoretically grounded in the stochastic optimal control of the continuous-time Markov chains. We validate the efficiency and scalability of MDNS through extensive experiments on various distributions with distinct statistical properties, where MDNS learns to accurately sample from the target distributions despite the extremely high problem dimensions and outperforms other learning-based baselines by a large margin. A comprehensive study of ablations and extensions is also provided to demonstrate the efficacy and potential of the proposed framework.

Object detection via inaccurate bounding boxes supervision has boosted a broad interest due to the expensive high-quality annotation data or the occasional inevitability of low annotation quality (\eg tiny objects). The previous works usually utilize multiple instance learning (MIL), which highly depends on category information, to select and refine a low-quality box. Those methods suffer from object drift, group prediction and part domination problems without exploring spatial information. In this paper, we heuristically propose a Spatial Self-Distillation based Object Detector (SSD-Det) to mine spatial information to refine the inaccurate box in a self-distillation fashion. SSD-Det utilizes a Spatial Position Self-Distillation (SPSD) module to exploit spatial information and an interactive structure to combine spatial information and category information, thus constructing a high-quality proposal bag. To further improve the selection procedure, a Spatial Identity Self-Distillation (SISD) module is introduced in SSD-Det to obtain spatial confidence to help select the best proposals. Experiments on MS-COCO and VOC datasets with noisy box annotation verify our method's effectiveness and achieve state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/ucas-vg/PointTinyBenchmark/tree/SSD-Det.

Recent sparse detectors with multiple, e.g. six, decoder layers achieve promising performance but much inference time due to complex heads. Previous works have explored using dense priors as initialization and built one-decoder-layer detectors. Although they gain remarkable acceleration, their performance still lags behind their six-decoder-layer counterparts by a large margin. In this work, we aim to bridge this performance gap while retaining fast speed. We find that the architecture discrepancy between dense and sparse detectors leads to feature conflict, hampering the performance of one-decoder-layer detectors. Thus we propose Adaptive Sparse Anchor Generator (ASAG) which predicts dynamic anchors on patches rather than grids in a sparse way so that it alleviates the feature conflict problem. For each image, ASAG dynamically selects which feature maps and which locations to predict, forming a fully adaptive way to generate image-specific anchors. Further, a simple and effective Query Weighting method eases the training instability from adaptiveness. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms dense-initialized ones and achieves a better speed-accuracy trade-off. The code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/ASAG.

The reproduction of state-of-the-art multimodal LLM pre-training faces barriers at every stage of the pipeline, including high-quality data filtering, multimodal data mixture strategies, sequence packing techniques, and training frameworks. We introduce Open-Qwen2VL, a fully open-source 2B-parameter Multimodal Large Language Model pre-trained efficiently on 29M image-text pairs using only 442 A100-40G GPU hours. Our approach employs low-to-high dynamic image resolution and multimodal sequence packing to significantly enhance pre-training efficiency. The training dataset was carefully curated using both MLLM-based filtering techniques (e.g., MLM-Filter) and conventional CLIP-based filtering methods, substantially improving data quality and training efficiency. The Open-Qwen2VL pre-training is conducted on academic level 8xA100-40G GPUs at UCSB on 5B packed multimodal tokens, which is 0.36\% of 1.4T multimodal pre-training tokens of Qwen2-VL. The final instruction-tuned Open-Qwen2VL outperforms partially-open state-of-the-art MLLM Qwen2-VL-2B on various multimodal benchmarks of MMBench, SEEDBench, MMstar, and MathVista, indicating the remarkable training efficiency of Open-Qwen2VL. We open-source all aspects of our work, including compute-efficient and data-efficient training details, data filtering methods, sequence packing scripts, pre-training data in WebDataset format, FSDP-based training codebase, and both base and instruction-tuned model checkpoints. We redefine "fully open" for multimodal LLMs as the complete release of: 1) the training codebase, 2) detailed data filtering techniques, and 3) all pre-training and supervised fine-tuning data used to develop the model.

Vector Quantisation (VQ) is experiencing a comeback in machine learning, where it is increasingly used in representation learning. However, optimizing the codevectors in existing VQ-VAE is not entirely trivial. A problem is codebook collapse, where only a small subset of codevectors receive gradients useful for their optimisation, whereas a majority of them simply ``dies off'' and is never updated or used. This limits the effectiveness of VQ for learning larger codebooks in complex computer vision tasks that require high-capacity representations. In this paper, we present a simple alternative method for online codebook learning, Clustering VQ-VAE (CVQ-VAE). Our approach selects encoded features as anchors to update the ``dead'' codevectors, while optimising the codebooks which are alive via the original loss. This strategy brings unused codevectors closer in distribution to the encoded features, increasing the likelihood of being chosen and optimized. We extensively validate the generalization capability of our quantiser on various datasets, tasks (e.g. reconstruction and generation), and architectures (e.g. VQ-VAE, VQGAN, LDM). Our CVQ-VAE can be easily integrated into the existing models with just a few lines of code.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold great promise for automating complex financial analysis. To comprehensively evaluate their capabilities, we introduce VisFinEval, the first large-scale Chinese benchmark that spans the full front-middle-back office lifecycle of financial tasks. VisFinEval comprises 15,848 annotated question-answer pairs drawn from eight common financial image modalities (e.g., K-line charts, financial statements, official seals), organized into three hierarchical scenario depths: Financial Knowledge & Data Analysis, Financial Analysis & Decision Support, and Financial Risk Control & Asset Optimization. We evaluate 21 state-of-the-art MLLMs in a zero-shot setting. The top model, Qwen-VL-max, achieves an overall accuracy of 76.3%, outperforming non-expert humans but trailing financial experts by over 14 percentage points. Our error analysis uncovers six recurring failure modes-including cross-modal misalignment, hallucinations, and lapses in business-process reasoning-that highlight critical avenues for future research. VisFinEval aims to accelerate the development of robust, domain-tailored MLLMs capable of seamlessly integrating textual and visual financial information. The data and the code are available at https://github.com/SUFE-AIFLM-Lab/VisFinEval.

ProSper is a python library containing probabilistic algorithms to learn dictionaries. Given a set of data points, the implemented algorithms seek to learn the elementary components that have generated the data. The library widens the scope of dictionary learning approaches beyond implementations of standard approaches such as ICA, NMF or standard L1 sparse coding. The implemented algorithms are especially well-suited in cases when data consist of components that combine non-linearly and/or for data requiring flexible prior distributions. Furthermore, the implemented algorithms go beyond standard approaches by inferring prior and noise parameters of the data, and they provide rich a-posteriori approximations for inference. The library is designed to be extendable and it currently includes: Binary Sparse Coding (BSC), Ternary Sparse Coding (TSC), Discrete Sparse Coding (DSC), Maximal Causes Analysis (MCA), Maximum Magnitude Causes Analysis (MMCA), and Gaussian Sparse Coding (GSC, a recent spike-and-slab sparse coding approach). The algorithms are scalable due to a combination of variational approximations and parallelization. Implementations of all algorithms allow for parallel execution on multiple CPUs and multiple machines for medium to large-scale applications. Typical large-scale runs of the algorithms can use hundreds of CPUs to learn hundreds of dictionary elements from data with tens of millions of floating-point numbers such that models with several hundred thousand parameters can be optimized. The library is designed to have minimal dependencies and to be easy to use. It targets users of dictionary learning algorithms and Machine Learning researchers.

Deep ensemble methods often improve predictive performance, yet they suffer from three practical limitations: redundancy among base models that inflates computational cost and degrades conditioning, unstable weighting under multicollinearity, and overfitting in meta-learning pipelines. We propose a regularized meta-learning framework that addresses these challenges through a four-stage pipeline combining redundancy-aware projection, statistical meta-feature augmentation, and cross-validated regularized meta-models (Ridge, Lasso, and ElasticNet). Our multi-metric de-duplication strategy removes near-collinear predictors using correlation and MSE thresholds (τ_{corr}=0.95), reducing the effective condition number of the meta-design matrix while preserving predictive diversity. Engineered ensemble statistics and interaction terms recover higher-order structure unavailable to raw prediction columns. A final inverse-RMSE blending stage mitigates regularizer-selection variance. On the Playground Series S6E1 benchmark (100K samples, 72 base models), the proposed framework achieves an out-of-fold RMSE of 8.582, improving over simple averaging (8.894) and conventional Ridge stacking (8.627), while matching greedy hill climbing (8.603) with substantially lower runtime (4 times faster). Conditioning analysis shows a 53.7\% reduction in effective matrix condition number after redundancy projection. Comprehensive ablations demonstrate consistent contributions from de-duplication, statistical meta-features, and meta-ensemble blending. These results position regularized meta-learning as a stable and deployment-efficient stacking strategy for high-dimensional ensemble systems.

Although diffusion language models (DLMs) are evolving quickly, many recent models converge on a set of shared components. These components, however, are distributed across ad-hoc research codebases or lack transparent implementations, making them difficult to reproduce or extend. As the field accelerates, there is a clear need for a unified framework that standardizes these common components while remaining flexible enough to support new methods and architectures. To address this gap, we introduce dLLM, an open-source framework that unifies the core components of diffusion language modeling -- training, inference, and evaluation -- and makes them easy to customize for new designs. With dLLM, users can reproduce, finetune, deploy, and evaluate open-source large DLMs such as LLaDA and Dream through a standardized pipeline. The framework also provides minimal, reproducible recipes for building small DLMs from scratch with accessible compute, including converting any BERT-style encoder or autoregressive LM into a DLM. We also release the checkpoints of these small DLMs to make DLMs more accessible and accelerate future research.

Video anomaly detection (VAD) methods are mostly CNN-based or Transformer-based, achieving impressive results, but the focus on detection accuracy often comes at the expense of inference speed. The emergence of state space models in computer vision, exemplified by the Mamba model, demonstrates improved computational efficiency through selective scans and showcases the great potential for long-range modeling. Our study pioneers the application of Mamba to VAD, dubbed VADMamba, which is based on multi-task learning for frame prediction and optical flow reconstruction. Specifically, we propose the VQ-Mamba Unet (VQ-MaU) framework, which incorporates a Vector Quantization (VQ) layer and Mamba-based Non-negative Visual State Space (NVSS) block. Furthermore, two individual VQ-MaU networks separately predict frames and reconstruct corresponding optical flows, further boosting accuracy through a clip-level fusion evaluation strategy. Experimental results validate the efficacy of the proposed VADMamba across three benchmark datasets, demonstrating superior performance in inference speed compared to previous work. Code is available at https://github.com/jLooo/VADMamba.

Serving many task-specialized LLM variants is often limited by the large size of fine-tuned checkpoints and the resulting cold-start latency. Since fine-tuned weights differ from their base model by relatively small structured residuals, a natural approach is to represent them as compressed deltas. We propose a simple 1-bit delta scheme that stores only the sign of the weight difference together with lightweight per-axis (row/column) FP16 scaling factors, learned from a small calibration set. This design preserves the compactness of 1-bit deltas while more accurately capturing variation across weight dimensions, leading to improved reconstruction quality over scalar alternatives. From a systems perspective, a streamlined loader that transfers packed deltas in a single operation per module reduces cold-start latency and storage overhead, with artifacts several times smaller than a full FP16 checkpoint. The method is drop-in, requires minimal calibration data, and maintains inference efficiency by avoiding dense reconstruction. Our experimental setup and source code are available at https://github.com/kuiumdjiev/Per-Axis-Weight-Deltas-for-Frequent-Model-Updates.

AlayaDB is a cutting-edge vector database system natively architected for efficient and effective long-context inference for Large Language Models (LLMs) at AlayaDB AI. Specifically, it decouples the KV cache and attention computation from the LLM inference systems, and encapsulates them into a novel vector database system. For the Model as a Service providers (MaaS), AlayaDB consumes fewer hardware resources and offers higher generation quality for various workloads with different kinds of Service Level Objectives (SLOs), when comparing with the existing alternative solutions (e.g., KV cache disaggregation, retrieval-based sparse attention). The crux of AlayaDB is that it abstracts the attention computation and cache management for LLM inference into a query processing procedure, and optimizes the performance via a native query optimizer. In this work, we demonstrate the effectiveness of AlayaDB via (i) three use cases from our industry partners, and (ii) extensive experimental results on LLM inference benchmarks.

We introduce a novel state-space architecture for diffusion models, effectively harnessing spatial and frequency information to enhance the inductive bias towards local features in input images for image generation tasks. While state-space networks, including Mamba, a revolutionary advancement in recurrent neural networks, typically scan input sequences from left to right, they face difficulties in designing effective scanning strategies, especially in the processing of image data. Our method demonstrates that integrating wavelet transformation into Mamba enhances the local structure awareness of visual inputs and better captures long-range relations of frequencies by disentangling them into wavelet subbands, representing both low- and high-frequency components. These wavelet-based outputs are then processed and seamlessly fused with the original Mamba outputs through a cross-attention fusion layer, combining both spatial and frequency information to optimize the order awareness of state-space models which is essential for the details and overall quality of image generation. Besides, we introduce a globally-shared transformer to supercharge the performance of Mamba, harnessing its exceptional power to capture global relationships. Through extensive experiments on standard benchmarks, our method demonstrates superior results compared to DiT and DIFFUSSM, achieving faster training convergence and delivering high-quality outputs. The codes and pretrained models are released at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/DiMSUM.git.

While Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated exceptional quality, their protracted training duration remains a limitation. Generalizable and MVS-based NeRFs, although capable of mitigating training time, often incur tradeoffs in quality. This paper presents a novel approach called BoostMVSNeRFs to enhance the rendering quality of MVS-based NeRFs in large-scale scenes. We first identify limitations in MVS-based NeRF methods, such as restricted viewport coverage and artifacts due to limited input views. Then, we address these limitations by proposing a new method that selects and combines multiple cost volumes during volume rendering. Our method does not require training and can adapt to any MVS-based NeRF methods in a feed-forward fashion to improve rendering quality. Furthermore, our approach is also end-to-end trainable, allowing fine-tuning on specific scenes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through experiments on large-scale datasets, showing significant rendering quality improvements in large-scale scenes and unbounded outdoor scenarios. We release the source code of BoostMVSNeRFs at https://su-terry.github.io/BoostMVSNeRFs/.

Structural neural network pruning aims to remove the redundant channels in the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by pruning the filters of less importance to the final output accuracy. To reduce the degradation of performance after pruning, many methods utilize the loss with sparse regularization to produce structured sparsity. In this paper, we analyze these sparsity-training-based methods and find that the regularization of unpruned channels is unnecessary. Moreover, it restricts the network's capacity, which leads to under-fitting. To solve this problem, we propose a novel pruning method, named MaskSparsity, with pruning-aware sparse regularization. MaskSparsity imposes the fine-grained sparse regularization on the specific filters selected by a pruning mask, rather than all the filters of the model. Before the fine-grained sparse regularization of MaskSparity, we can use many methods to get the pruning mask, such as running the global sparse regularization. MaskSparsity achieves 63.03%-FLOPs reduction on ResNet-110 by removing 60.34% of the parameters, with no top-1 accuracy loss on CIFAR-10. On ILSVRC-2012, MaskSparsity reduces more than 51.07% FLOPs on ResNet-50, with only a loss of 0.76% in the top-1 accuracy. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/MaskSparsity. Moreover, we have integrated the code of MaskSparity into a PyTorch pruning toolkit, EasyPruner, at https://gitee.com/casia_iva_engineer/easypruner.

We introduce the Discrete Min-Max Violation (DMMV) as a general optimization problem which seeks an assignment of discrete values to variables that minimizes the largest constraint violation. This context-free mathematical formulation is applicable to a wide range of use cases that have worst-case performance requirements. After defining the DMMV problem mathematically, we explore its properties to establish a foundational understanding. To tackle DMMV instance sizes of practical relevance, we develop a GPU-accelerated heuristic that takes advantage of the mathematical properties of DMMV for speeding up the solution process. We demonstrate the versatile applicability of our heuristic by solving three optimization problems as use cases: (1) post-training quantization of language models, (2) discrete tomography, and (3) Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter design. In quantization without outlier separation, our heuristic achieves 14% improvement on average over existing methods. In discrete tomography, it reduces reconstruction error by 16% under uniform noise and accelerates computations by a factor of 6 on GPU. For FIR filter design, it nearly achieves 50% ripple reduction compared to using the commercial integer optimization solver, Gurobi. Our comparative results point to the benefits of studying DMMV as a context-free optimization problem and the advantages that our proposed heuristic offers on three distinct problems. Our GPU-accelerated heuristic will be made open-source to further stimulate research on DMMV and its other applications. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AMVM-5F3E/

The Combined Algorithm Selection and Hyperparameters optimization (CASH) problem is one of the fundamental problems in Automated Machine Learning (AutoML). Motivated by the success of ensemble learning, recent AutoML systems build post-hoc ensembles to output the final predictions instead of using the best single learner. However, while most CASH methods focus on searching for a single learner with the best performance, they neglect the diversity among base learners (i.e., they may suggest similar configurations to previously evaluated ones), which is also a crucial consideration when building an ensemble. To tackle this issue and further enhance the ensemble performance, we propose DivBO, a diversity-aware framework to inject explicit search of diversity into the CASH problems. In the framework, we propose to use a diversity surrogate to predict the pair-wise diversity of two unseen configurations. Furthermore, we introduce a temporary pool and a weighted acquisition function to guide the search of both performance and diversity based on Bayesian optimization. Empirical results on 15 public datasets show that DivBO achieves the best average ranks (1.82 and 1.73) on both validation and test errors among 10 compared methods, including post-hoc designs in recent AutoML systems and state-of-the-art baselines for ensemble learning on CASH problems.

Recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated substantial success in self-supervised representation learning for vision tasks. However, effectively adapting VLMs to downstream applications remains challenging, as their accuracy often depends on time-intensive and expertise-demanding prompt engineering, while full model fine-tuning is costly. This is particularly true for biomedical images, which, unlike natural images, typically suffer from limited annotated datasets, unintuitive image contrasts, and nuanced visual features. Recent prompt learning techniques, such as Context Optimization (CoOp) intend to tackle these issues, but still fall short in generalizability. Meanwhile, explorations in prompt learning for biomedical image analysis are still highly limited. In this work, we propose BiomedCoOp, a novel prompt learning framework that enables efficient adaptation of BiomedCLIP for accurate and highly generalizable few-shot biomedical image classification. Our approach achieves effective prompt context learning by leveraging semantic consistency with average prompt ensembles from Large Language Models (LLMs) and knowledge distillation with a statistics-based prompt selection strategy. We conducted comprehensive validation of our proposed framework on 11 medical datasets across 9 modalities and 10 organs against existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating significant improvements in both accuracy and generalizability. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/BiomedCoOp.

The scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) drives interest in matrix-based optimizers (e.g., Shampoo, Muon, SOAP) for their convergence efficiency; yet their requirement for holistic updates conflicts with the tensor fragmentation in distributed frameworks like Megatron. Existing solutions are suboptimal: synchronous approaches suffer from computational redundancy, while layer-wise partitioning fails to reconcile this conflict without violating the geometric constraints of efficient communication primitives. To bridge this gap, we propose Canzona, a Unified, Asynchronous, and Load-Balanced framework that decouples logical optimizer assignment from physical parameter distribution. For Data Parallelism, we introduce an alpha-Balanced Static Partitioning strategy that respects atomicity while neutralizing the load imbalance. For Tensor Parallelism, we design an Asynchronous Compute pipeline utilizing Micro-Group Scheduling to batch fragmented updates and hide reconstruction overhead. Extensive evaluations on the Qwen3 model family (up to 32B parameters) on 256 GPUs demonstrate that our approach preserves the efficiency of established parallel architectures, achieving a 1.57x speedup in end-to-end iteration time and reducing optimizer step latency by 5.8x compared to the baseline.

Large-scale pre-trained Vision Language Models (VLMs) have proven effective for zero-shot classification. Despite the success, most traditional VLMs-based methods are restricted by the assumption of partial source supervision or ideal vocabularies, which rarely satisfy the open-world scenario. In this paper, we aim at a more challenging setting, Realistic Zero-Shot Classification, which assumes no annotation but instead a broad vocabulary. To address this challenge, we propose the Self Structural Semantic Alignment (S^3A) framework, which extracts the structural semantic information from unlabeled data while simultaneously self-learning. Our S^3A framework adopts a unique Cluster-Vote-Prompt-Realign (CVPR) algorithm, which iteratively groups unlabeled data to derive structural semantics for pseudo-supervision. Our CVPR process includes iterative clustering on images, voting within each cluster to identify initial class candidates from the vocabulary, generating discriminative prompts with large language models to discern confusing candidates, and realigning images and the vocabulary as structural semantic alignment. Finally, we propose to self-learn the CLIP image encoder with both individual and structural semantic alignment through a teacher-student learning strategy. Our comprehensive experiments across various generic and fine-grained benchmarks demonstrate that the S^3A method offers substantial improvements over existing VLMs-based approaches, achieving a more than 15% accuracy improvement over CLIP on average. Our codes, models, and prompts are publicly released at https://github.com/sheng-eatamath/S3A.

The Mini-SiTian (MST) project is a pathfinder for China's next-generation large-scale time-domain survey, SiTian, aimed at discovering variable stars, transients, and explosive events. MST generates hundreds of thousands of transient alerts every night, approximately 99\% of which are false alarms, posing a significant challenge to its scientific goals. To mitigate the impact of false positives, we propose a deep learning-based solution and systematically evaluate thirteen convolutional neural networks. The results show that ResNet achieves exceptional specificity (99.70\%), EfficientNet achieves the highest recall rate (98.68\%), and DenseNet provides balanced performance with a recall rate of 94.55\% and specificity of 98.66\%. Leveraging these complementary strengths, we developed a bagging-based ensemble classifier that integrates ResNet18, DenseNet121, and EfficientNet\_B0 using a soft voting strategy. This classifier achieved the best AUC value (0.9961) among all models, with a recall rate of 95.37\% and specificity of 99.25\%. It has now been successfully deployed in the MST real-time data processing pipeline. Validation using 5,000 practically processed samples with a classification threshold of 0.798 showed that the classifier achieved 88.31\% accuracy, 91.89\% recall rate, and 99.82\% specificity, confirming its effectiveness and robustness under real application conditions.

The open-source model ecosystem now contains hundreds of thousands of pretrained models, yet picking the best model for a new dataset is increasingly infeasible: new models and unbenchmarked datasets emerge continuously, leaving practitioners with no prior records on either side. Existing approaches handle only fragments of this in-the-wild setting: AutoML and transferability estimation select models from small predefined pools or require expensive per-model forward passes on the target dataset, while model routing presupposes a given candidate pool. We introduce ModelLens, a unified framework for model recommendation in the wild. Our key insight is that public leaderboard interactions, though scattered and noisy, collectively trace out an implicit atlas of model capabilities across heterogeneous evaluation settings, a signal rich enough to learn from directly. By learning a performance-aware latent space over model--dataset--metric tuples, ModelLens ranks unseen models on unseen datasets without running candidates on the target dataset. On a new benchmark of 1.62M evaluation records spanning 47K models and 9.6K datasets, ModelLens surpasses baselines that either rely on metadata alone or require running each candidate on the target dataset. Its recommended Top-K pools further improve multiple representative routing methods by up to 81% across diverse QA benchmarks. Case studies on recently released benchmarks further confirm generalization to both text and vision-language tasks.

Numeric format proliferation in machine learning hardware -- FP8 (E4M3 and E5M2), BF16, MXFP4, microscaling block formats, and dozens of research variants -- has outpaced the availability of vendor-neutral, bit-exact reference material. Engineers porting models across accelerators encounter silent divergences that are difficult to diagnose without a shared ruler. This paper describes a catalog of 84 numeric formats spanning 13 families, a suite of six bit-exact conformance packs covering GF16, MXFP4 element, BF16, FP8 E4M3, FP8 E5M2, and E8M0 block scale, and an IEEE P3109 v3.2.0 cross-walk that maps each pack to its corresponding standards-track configured format. Each pack is a self-contained JSON document with a SHA-256 fingerprint, a shared row schema, and an anchor vector that encodes 3.0 -- the identity phi^2 + 1/phi^2 = 3 -- as a cross-pack sanity check. Packs are cross-validated against ml_dtypes 0.5.4 (Google/JAX); any divergence is documented explicitly and interpreted as a spec-permitted interpretation gap rather than hidden. The work is framed as registry filling: it does not propose new formats, make model-accuracy claims, or assert superiority over any vendor's implementation. All artifacts are publicly available at https://github.com/gHashTag/t27 under an open license.

Effective recommendation systems rely on capturing user preferences, often requiring incorporating numerous features such as universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) of entities. However, the exceptionally high cardinality of UUIDs poses a significant challenge in terms of model degradation and increased model size due to sparsity. This paper presents two innovative techniques to address the challenge of high cardinality in recommendation systems. Specifically, we propose a bag-of-words approach, combined with layer sharing, to substantially decrease the model size while improving performance. Our techniques were evaluated through offline and online experiments on Uber use cases, resulting in promising results demonstrating our approach's effectiveness in optimizing recommendation systems and enhancing their overall performance.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet heterogeneity in architecture, alignment strategies, and efficiency means that no single model is uniformly superior across tasks. In practical deployments, workloads span lightweight OCR to complex multimodal reasoning; using one MLLM for all queries either over-provisions compute on easy instances or sacrifices accuracy on hard ones. Query-level model selection (routing) addresses this tension, but extending routing from text-only LLMs to MLLMs is nontrivial due to modality fusion, wide variation in computational cost across models, and the absence of a standardized, budget-aware evaluation. We present MMR-Bench, a unified benchmark that isolates the multimodal routing problem and enables comparison under fixed candidate sets and cost models. MMR-Bench provides (i) a controlled environment with modality-aware inputs and variable compute budgets, (ii) a broad suite of vision-language tasks covering OCR, general VQA, and multimodal math reasoning, and (iii) strong single-model reference, oracle upper bounds, and representative routing policies. Using MMR-Bench, we show that incorporating multimodal signals improves routing quality. Empirically, these cues improve the cost-accuracy frontier and enable the routed system to exceed the strongest single model's accuracy at roughly 33% of its cost. Furthermore, policies trained on a subset of models and tasks generalize zero-shot to new datasets and text-only benchmarks without retuning, establishing MMR-Bench as a foundation for studying adaptive multimodal model selection and efficient MLLM deployment. The code will be available at: https://github.com/Hunter-Wrynn/MMR-Bench.

Hyperbolic embeddings offer excellent quality with few dimensions when embedding hierarchical data structures like synonym or type hierarchies. Given a tree, we give a combinatorial construction that embeds the tree in hyperbolic space with arbitrarily low distortion without using optimization. On WordNet, our combinatorial embedding obtains a mean-average-precision of 0.989 with only two dimensions, while Nickel et al.'s recent construction obtains 0.87 using 200 dimensions. We provide upper and lower bounds that allow us to characterize the precision-dimensionality tradeoff inherent in any hyperbolic embedding. To embed general metric spaces, we propose a hyperbolic generalization of multidimensional scaling (h-MDS). We show how to perform exact recovery of hyperbolic points from distances, provide a perturbation analysis, and give a recovery result that allows us to reduce dimensionality. The h-MDS approach offers consistently low distortion even with few dimensions across several datasets. Finally, we extract lessons from the algorithms and theory above to design a PyTorch-based implementation that can handle incomplete information and is scalable.

Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP), also known as ZeRO, is widely used for training large-scale models, featuring its flexibility and minimal intrusion on model code. However, current FSDP systems struggle with structure-aware training methods (e.g., block-wise quantized training) and with non-element-wise optimizers (e.g., Shampoo and Muon) used in cutting-edge models (e.g., Gemini, Kimi K2). FSDP's fixed element- or row-wise sharding formats conflict with the block-structured computations. In addition, today's implementations fall short in communication and memory efficiency, limiting scaling to tens of thousands of GPUs. We introduce veScale-FSDP, a redesigned FSDP system that couples a flexible sharding format, RaggedShard, with a structure-aware planning algorithm to deliver both flexibility and performance at scale. veScale-FSDP natively supports efficient data placement required by FSDP, empowering block-wise quantization and non-element-wise optimizers. As a result, veScale-FSDP achieves 5~66% higher throughput and 16~30% lower memory usage than existing FSDP systems, while scaling efficiently to tens of thousands of GPUs.