Daily Papers

We introduce SeePhys Pro, a fine-grained modality transfer benchmark that studies whether models preserve the same reasoning capability when critical information is progressively transferred from text to image. Unlike standard vision-essential benchmarks that evaluate a single input form, SeePhys Pro features four semantically aligned variants for each problem with progressively increasing visual elements. Our evaluation shows that current frontier models are far from representation-invariant reasoners: performance degrades on average as information moves from language to diagrams, with visual variable grounding as the most critical bottleneck. Motivated by this inference-time fragility, we further develop large training corpora for multimodal RLVR and use blind training as a diagnostic control, finding that RL with all training images masked can still improve performance on unmasked validation sets. To analyze this effect, text-deletion, image-mask-rate, and format-saturation controls suggest that such gains can arise from residual textual and distributional cues rather than valid visual evidence. Our results highlight the need to evaluate multimodal reasoning not only by final-answer accuracy, but also by robustness under modality transfer and by diagnostics that test whether improvements rely on task-critical visual evidence.

Multimodal language models now integrate text, audio, and video for unified reasoning. Yet existing RL post-training pipelines treat all input signals as equally relevant, ignoring which modalities each task actually requires. This modality-blind training inflates policy-gradient variance, slows convergence, and degrades robustness to real-world distribution shifts where signals may be missing, added, or reweighted. We introduce MAPLE, a complete modality-aware post-training and learning ecosystem comprising: (1) MAPLE-bench, the first benchmark explicitly annotating minimal signal combinations required per task; (2) MAPO, a modality-aware policy optimization framework that stratifies batches by modality requirement to reduce gradient variance from heterogeneous group advantages; (3) Adaptive weighting and curriculum scheduling that balances and prioritizes harder signal combinations. Systematic analysis across loss aggregation, clipping, sampling, and curriculum design establishes MAPO's optimal training strategy. Adaptive weighting and curriculum focused learning further boost performance across signal combinations. MAPLE narrows uni/multi-modal accuracy gaps by 30.24%, converges 3.18x faster, and maintains stability across all modality combinations under realistic reduced signal access. MAPLE constitutes a complete recipe for deployment-ready multimodal RL post-training.

Blind face restoration is an important task in computer vision and has gained significant attention due to its wide-range applications. In this work, we delve into the potential of leveraging the pretrained Stable Diffusion for blind face restoration. We propose BFRffusion which is thoughtfully designed to effectively extract features from low-quality face images and could restore realistic and faithful facial details with the generative prior of the pretrained Stable Diffusion. In addition, we build a privacy-preserving face dataset called PFHQ with balanced attributes like race, gender, and age. This dataset can serve as a viable alternative for training blind face restoration methods, effectively addressing privacy and bias concerns usually associated with the real face datasets. Through an extensive series of experiments, we demonstrate that our BFRffusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world public testing datasets for blind face restoration and our PFHQ dataset is an available resource for training blind face restoration networks. The codes, pretrained models, and dataset are released at https://github.com/chenxx89/BFRffusion.

We propose to address quadrupedal locomotion tasks using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a Transformer-based model that learns to combine proprioceptive information and high-dimensional depth sensor inputs. While learning-based locomotion has made great advances using RL, most methods still rely on domain randomization for training blind agents that generalize to challenging terrains. Our key insight is that proprioceptive states only offer contact measurements for immediate reaction, whereas an agent equipped with visual sensory observations can learn to proactively maneuver environments with obstacles and uneven terrain by anticipating changes in the environment many steps ahead. In this paper, we introduce LocoTransformer, an end-to-end RL method that leverages both proprioceptive states and visual observations for locomotion control. We evaluate our method in challenging simulated environments with different obstacles and uneven terrain. We transfer our learned policy from simulation to a real robot by running it indoors and in the wild with unseen obstacles and terrain. Our method not only significantly improves over baselines, but also achieves far better generalization performance, especially when transferred to the real robot. Our project page with videos is at https://rchalyang.github.io/LocoTransformer/ .

Blind inpainting is a task to automatically complete visual contents without specifying masks for missing areas in an image. Previous works assume missing region patterns are known, limiting its application scope. In this paper, we relax the assumption by defining a new blind inpainting setting, making training a blind inpainting neural system robust against various unknown missing region patterns. Specifically, we propose a two-stage visual consistency network (VCN), meant to estimate where to fill (via masks) and generate what to fill. In this procedure, the unavoidable potential mask prediction errors lead to severe artifacts in the subsequent repairing. To address it, our VCN predicts semantically inconsistent regions first, making mask prediction more tractable. Then it repairs these estimated missing regions using a new spatial normalization, enabling VCN to be robust to the mask prediction errors. In this way, semantically convincing and visually compelling content is thus generated. Extensive experiments are conducted, showing our method is effective and robust in blind image inpainting. And our VCN allows for a wide spectrum of applications.

As Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) scale up and reinforcement learning (RL) methods mature, LMMs have made notable progress in complex reasoning and decision making. Yet training still relies on static data and fixed recipes, making it difficult to diagnose capability blind spots or provide dynamic, targeted reinforcement. Motivated by findings that test driven error exposure and feedback based correction outperform repetitive practice, we propose Diagnostic-driven Progressive Evolution (DPE), a spiral loop where diagnosis steers data generation and reinforcement, and each iteration re-diagnoses the updated model to drive the next round of targeted improvement. DPE has two key components. First, multiple agents annotate and quality control massive unlabeled multimodal data, using tools such as web search and image editing to produce diverse, realistic samples. Second, DPE attributes failures to specific weaknesses, dynamically adjusts the data mixture, and guides agents to generate weakness focused data for targeted reinforcement. Experiments on Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct show stable, continual gains across eleven benchmarks, indicating DPE as a scalable paradigm for continual LMM training under open task distributions. Our code, models, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/hongruijia/DPE.

Though many attempts have been made in blind super-resolution to restore low-resolution images with unknown and complex degradations, they are still far from addressing general real-world degraded images. In this work, we extend the powerful ESRGAN to a practical restoration application (namely, Real-ESRGAN), which is trained with pure synthetic data. Specifically, a high-order degradation modeling process is introduced to better simulate complex real-world degradations. We also consider the common ringing and overshoot artifacts in the synthesis process. In addition, we employ a U-Net discriminator with spectral normalization to increase discriminator capability and stabilize the training dynamics. Extensive comparisons have shown its superior visual performance than prior works on various real datasets. We also provide efficient implementations to synthesize training pairs on the fly.

General-purpose audio representations aim to map acoustically variable instances of the same event to nearby points, resolving content identity in a zero-shot setting. Unlike supervised classification benchmarks that measure adaptability via parameter updates, we introduce VocSim, a training-free benchmark probing the intrinsic geometric alignment of frozen embeddings. VocSim aggregates 125k single-source clips from 19 corpora spanning human speech, animal vocalizations, and environmental sounds. By restricting to single-source audio, we isolate content representation from the confound of source separation. We evaluate embeddings using Precision@k for local purity and the Global Separation Rate (GSR) for point-wise class separation. To calibrate GSR, we report lift over an empirical permutation baseline. Across diverse foundation models, a simple pipeline, frozen Whisper encoder features, time-frequency pooling, and label-free PCA, yields strong zero-shot performance. However, VocSim also uncovers a consistent generalization gap. On blind, low-resource speech, local retrieval drops sharply. While performance remains statistically distinguishable from chance, the absolute geometric structure collapses, indicating a failure to generalize to unseen phonotactics. As external validation, our top embeddings predict avian perceptual similarity, improve bioacoustic classification, and achieve state-of-the-art results on the HEAR benchmark. We posit that the intrinsic geometric quality measured here proxies utility in unlisted downstream applications. We release data, code, and a public leaderboard to standardize the evaluation of intrinsic audio geometry.

Training a single deep blind model to handle different quality factors for JPEG image artifacts removal has been attracting considerable attention due to its convenience for practical usage. However, existing deep blind methods usually directly reconstruct the image without predicting the quality factor, thus lacking the flexibility to control the output as the non-blind methods. To remedy this problem, in this paper, we propose a flexible blind convolutional neural network, namely FBCNN, that can predict the adjustable quality factor to control the trade-off between artifacts removal and details preservation. Specifically, FBCNN decouples the quality factor from the JPEG image via a decoupler module and then embeds the predicted quality factor into the subsequent reconstructor module through a quality factor attention block for flexible control. Besides, we find existing methods are prone to fail on non-aligned double JPEG images even with only a one-pixel shift, and we thus propose a double JPEG degradation model to augment the training data. Extensive experiments on single JPEG images, more general double JPEG images, and real-world JPEG images demonstrate that our proposed FBCNN achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality.

Recent work has explored how to train machine learning models which do not discriminate against any subgroup of the population as determined by sensitive attributes such as gender or race. To avoid disparate treatment, sensitive attributes should not be considered. On the other hand, in order to avoid disparate impact, sensitive attributes must be examined, e.g., in order to learn a fair model, or to check if a given model is fair. We introduce methods from secure multi-party computation which allow us to avoid both. By encrypting sensitive attributes, we show how an outcome-based fair model may be learned, checked, or have its outputs verified and held to account, without users revealing their sensitive attributes.

PGD adversarial training, the standard robustness method, can reduce Jacobian Frobenius norm yet worsen clean-input geometry (e.g., TDI 1.336 vs. ERM 1.093). We show this is not an implementation artifact but a theorem-level consequence of supervised learning. We prove that any encoder minimizing supervised loss must retain non-zero sensitivity along directions correlated with training labels, including directions that are nuisance at test time. This holds across proper scoring rules, architectures, and dataset sizes. We call this the geometric blind spot of supervised learning. This theorem unifies four empirical phenomena often treated separately: non-robust features, texture bias, corruption fragility, and the robustness-accuracy tradeoff. It also explains why suppressing sensitivity in one adversarial direction can redistribute sensitivity elsewhere. We introduce Trajectory Deviation Index (TDI), a diagnostic of geometric isotropy. Unlike CKA, intrinsic dimension, or Jacobian Frobenius norm alone, TDI captures the failure mode above. In our experiments, PGD attains low Frobenius norm but high TDI, while PMH attains the lowest TDI with one additional training term and no architectural changes. Across seven tasks, BERT/SST-2, and ImageNet ViT-B/16 (backbone family underlying CLIP/DINO/SAM), the blind spot is measurable and repairable. It appears at foundation-model scale, worsens with model scale and task-specific fine-tuning, and is substantially reduced by PMH. PMH also leads on non-Gaussian corruption types (blur/brightness/contrast) without corruption-specific training.

Universal Speech Enhancement (USE) aims to restore speech quality under diverse degradation conditions while preserving signal fidelity. Despite recent progress, key challenges in training target selection, the distortion--perception tradeoff, and data curation remain unresolved. In this work, we systematically address these three overlooked problems. First, we revisit the conventional practice of using early-reflected speech as the dereverberation target and show that it can degrade perceptual quality and downstream ASR performance. We instead demonstrate that time-shifted anechoic clean speech provides a superior learning target. Second, guided by the distortion--perception tradeoff theory, we propose a simple two-stage framework that achieves minimal distortion under a given level of perceptual quality. Third, we analyze the trade-off between training data scale and quality for USE, revealing that training on large uncurated corpora imposes a performance ceiling, as models struggle to remove subtle artifacts. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the URGENT 2025 non-blind test set and exhibits strong language-agnostic generalization, making it effective for improving TTS training data. Code and models will be released upon acceptance.

While deep learning-based methods for blind face restoration have achieved unprecedented success, they still suffer from two major limitations. First, most of them deteriorate when facing complex degradations out of their training data. Second, these methods require multiple constraints, e.g., fidelity, perceptual, and adversarial losses, which require laborious hyper-parameter tuning to stabilize and balance their influences. In this work, we propose a novel method named DifFace that is capable of coping with unseen and complex degradations more gracefully without complicated loss designs. The key of our method is to establish a posterior distribution from the observed low-quality (LQ) image to its high-quality (HQ) counterpart. In particular, we design a transition distribution from the LQ image to the intermediate state of a pre-trained diffusion model and then gradually transmit from this intermediate state to the HQ target by recursively applying a pre-trained diffusion model. The transition distribution only relies on a restoration backbone that is trained with L_2 loss on some synthetic data, which favorably avoids the cumbersome training process in existing methods. Moreover, the transition distribution can contract the error of the restoration backbone and thus makes our method more robust to unknown degradations. Comprehensive experiments show that DifFace is superior to current state-of-the-art methods, especially in cases with severe degradations. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/zsyOAOA/DifFace.

Multimodal Language Models (MMLMs) typically undergo post-training alignment to prevent harmful content generation. However, these alignment stages focus primarily on the assistant role, leaving the user role unaligned, and stick to a fixed input prompt structure of special tokens, leaving the model vulnerable when inputs deviate from these expectations. We introduce Role-Modality Attacks (RMA), a novel class of adversarial attacks that exploit role confusion between the user and assistant and alter the position of the image token to elicit harmful outputs. Unlike existing attacks that modify query content, RMAs manipulate the input structure without altering the query itself. We systematically evaluate these attacks across multiple Vision Language Models (VLMs) on eight distinct settings, showing that they can be composed to create stronger adversarial prompts, as also evidenced by their increased projection in the negative refusal direction in the residual stream, a property observed in prior successful attacks. Finally, for mitigation, we propose an adversarial training approach that makes the model robust against input prompt perturbations. By training the model on a range of harmful and benign prompts all perturbed with different RMA settings, it loses its sensitivity to Role Confusion and Modality Manipulation attacks and is trained to only pay attention to the content of the query in the input prompt structure, effectively reducing Attack Success Rate (ASR) while preserving the model's general utility.

In the blind single image super-resolution (SISR) task, existing works have been successful in restoring image-level unknown degradations. However, when a single video frame becomes the input, these works usually fail to address degradations caused by video compression, such as mosquito noise, ringing, blockiness, and staircase noise. In this work, we for the first time, present a video compression-based degradation model to synthesize low-resolution image data in the blind SISR task. Our proposed image synthesizing method is widely applicable to existing image datasets, so that a single degraded image can contain distortions caused by the lossy video compression algorithms. This overcomes the leak of feature diversity in video data and thus retains the training efficiency. By introducing video coding artifacts to SISR degradation models, neural networks can super-resolve images with the ability to restore video compression degradations, and achieve better results on restoring generic distortions caused by image compression as well. Our proposed approach achieves superior performance in SOTA no-reference Image Quality Assessment, and shows better visual quality on various datasets. In addition, we evaluate the SISR neural network trained with our degradation model on video super-resolution (VSR) datasets. Compared to architectures specifically designed for the VSR purpose, our method exhibits similar or better performance, evidencing that the presented strategy on infusing video-based degradation is generalizable to address more complicated compression artifacts even without temporal cues.

Reliable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems depend fundamentally on the retriever's ability to find relevant information. We show that neural retrievers used in RAG systems have blind spots, which we define as the failure to retrieve entities that are relevant to the query, but have low similarity to the query embedding. We investigate the training-induced biases that cause such blind spot entities to be mapped to inaccessible parts of the embedding space, resulting in low retrievability. Using a large-scale dataset constructed from Wikidata relations and first paragraphs of Wikipedia, and our proposed Retrieval Probability Score (RPS), we show that blind spot risk in standard retrievers (e.g., CONTRIEVER, REASONIR) can be predicted pre-index from entity embedding geometry, avoiding expensive retrieval evaluations. To address these blind spots, we introduce ARGUS, a pipeline that enables the retrievability of high-risk (low-RPS) entities through targeted document augmentation from a knowledge base (KB), first paragraphs of Wikipedia, in our case. Extensive experiments on BRIGHT, IMPLIRET, and RAR-B show that ARGUS achieves consistent improvements across all evaluated retrievers (averaging +3.4 nDCG@5 and +4.5 nDCG@10 absolute points), with substantially larger gains in challenging subsets. These results establish that preemptively remedying blind spots is critical for building robust and trustworthy RAG systems (Code and Data).

We introduce the AIM 2024 UHD-IQA Challenge, a competition to advance the No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) task for modern, high-resolution photos. The challenge is based on the recently released UHD-IQA Benchmark Database, which comprises 6,073 UHD-1 (4K) images annotated with perceptual quality ratings from expert raters. Unlike previous NR-IQA datasets, UHD-IQA focuses on highly aesthetic photos of superior technical quality, reflecting the ever-increasing standards of digital photography. This challenge aims to develop efficient and effective NR-IQA models. Participants are tasked with creating novel architectures and training strategies to achieve high predictive performance on UHD-1 images within a computational budget of 50G MACs. This enables model deployment on edge devices and scalable processing of extensive image collections. Winners are determined based on a combination of performance metrics, including correlation measures (SRCC, PLCC, KRCC), absolute error metrics (MAE, RMSE), and computational efficiency (G MACs). To excel in this challenge, participants leverage techniques like knowledge distillation, low-precision inference, and multi-scale training. By pushing the boundaries of NR-IQA for high-resolution photos, the UHD-IQA Challenge aims to stimulate the development of practical models that can keep pace with the rapidly evolving landscape of digital photography. The innovative solutions emerging from this competition will have implications for various applications, from photo curation and enhancement to image compression.

Blind super-resolution methods based on stable diffusion showcase formidable generative capabilities in reconstructing clear high-resolution images with intricate details from low-resolution inputs. However, their practical applicability is often hampered by poor efficiency, stemming from the requirement of thousands or hundreds of sampling steps. Inspired by the efficient adversarial diffusion distillation (ADD), we design~\name~to address this issue by incorporating the ideas of both distillation and ControlNet. Specifically, we first propose a prediction-based self-refinement strategy to provide high-frequency information in the student model output with marginal additional time cost. Furthermore, we refine the training process by employing HR images, rather than LR images, to regulate the teacher model, providing a more robust constraint for distillation. Second, we introduce a timestep-adaptive ADD to address the perception-distortion imbalance problem introduced by original ADD. Extensive experiments demonstrate our~\name~generates better restoration results, while achieving faster speed than previous SD-based state-of-the-art models (e.g., 7times faster than SeeSR).

Blind face restoration usually synthesizes degraded low-quality data with a pre-defined degradation model for training, while more complex cases could happen in the real world. This gap between the assumed and actual degradation hurts the restoration performance where artifacts are often observed in the output. However, it is expensive and infeasible to include every type of degradation to cover real-world cases in the training data. To tackle this robustness issue, we propose Diffusion-based Robust Degradation Remover (DR2) to first transform the degraded image to a coarse but degradation-invariant prediction, then employ an enhancement module to restore the coarse prediction to a high-quality image. By leveraging a well-performing denoising diffusion probabilistic model, our DR2 diffuses input images to a noisy status where various types of degradation give way to Gaussian noise, and then captures semantic information through iterative denoising steps. As a result, DR2 is robust against common degradation (e.g. blur, resize, noise and compression) and compatible with different designs of enhancement modules. Experiments in various settings show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on heavily degraded synthetic and real-world datasets.

Under low-light environment, handheld photography suffers from severe camera shake under long exposure settings. Although existing deblurring algorithms have shown promising performance on well-exposed blurry images, they still cannot cope with low-light snapshots. Sophisticated noise and saturation regions are two dominating challenges in practical low-light deblurring. In this work, we propose a novel non-blind deblurring method dubbed image and feature space Wiener deconvolution network (INFWIDE) to tackle these problems systematically. In terms of algorithm design, INFWIDE proposes a two-branch architecture, which explicitly removes noise and hallucinates saturated regions in the image space and suppresses ringing artifacts in the feature space, and integrates the two complementary outputs with a subtle multi-scale fusion network for high quality night photograph deblurring. For effective network training, we design a set of loss functions integrating a forward imaging model and backward reconstruction to form a close-loop regularization to secure good convergence of the deep neural network. Further, to optimize INFWIDE's applicability in real low-light conditions, a physical-process-based low-light noise model is employed to synthesize realistic noisy night photographs for model training. Taking advantage of the traditional Wiener deconvolution algorithm's physically driven characteristics and arisen deep neural network's representation ability, INFWIDE can recover fine details while suppressing the unpleasant artifacts during deblurring. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and real data demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in integrating visual and textual information for vision-centric tasks, but their handling of inconsistencies between modalities is underexplored. We investigate VLMs' modality preferences when faced with visual data and varied textual inputs in vision-centered settings. By introducing textual variations to four vision-centric tasks and evaluating ten Vision-Language Models (VLMs), we discover a ``blind faith in text'' phenomenon: VLMs disproportionately trust textual data over visual data when inconsistencies arise, leading to significant performance drops under corrupted text and raising safety concerns. We analyze factors influencing this text bias, including instruction prompts, language model size, text relevance, token order, and the interplay between visual and textual certainty. While certain factors, such as scaling up the language model size, slightly mitigate text bias, others like token order can exacerbate it due to positional biases inherited from language models. To address this issue, we explore supervised fine-tuning with text augmentation and demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing text bias. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis suggesting that the blind faith in text phenomenon may stem from an imbalance of pure text and multi-modal data during training. Our findings highlight the need for balanced training and careful consideration of modality interactions in VLMs to enhance their robustness and reliability in handling multi-modal data inconsistencies.

Blind all-in-one image restoration models aim to recover a high-quality image from an input degraded with unknown distortions. However, these models require all the possible degradation types to be defined during the training stage while showing limited generalization to unseen degradations, which limits their practical application in complex cases. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective adaptive blind all-in-one restoration (ABAIR) model, which can address multiple degradations, generalizes well to unseen degradations, and efficiently incorporate new degradations by training a small fraction of parameters. First, we train our baseline model on a large dataset of natural images with multiple synthetic degradations, augmented with a segmentation head to estimate per-pixel degradation types, resulting in a powerful backbone able to generalize to a wide range of degradations. Second, we adapt our baseline model to varying image restoration tasks using independent low-rank adapters. Third, we learn to adaptively combine adapters to versatile images via a flexible and lightweight degradation estimator. Our model is both powerful in handling specific distortions and flexible in adapting to complex tasks, it not only outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin on five- and three-task IR setups, but also shows improved generalization to unseen degradations and also composite distortions.

All-in-one image restoration aims to handle multiple degradation types using one model. This paper proposes a simple pipeline for all-in-one blind image restoration to Restore Anything with Masks (RAM). We focus on the image content by utilizing Mask Image Modeling to extract intrinsic image information rather than distinguishing degradation types like other methods. Our pipeline consists of two stages: masked image pre-training and fine-tuning with mask attribute conductance. We design a straightforward masking pre-training approach specifically tailored for all-in-one image restoration. This approach enhances networks to prioritize the extraction of image content priors from various degradations, resulting in a more balanced performance across different restoration tasks and achieving stronger overall results. To bridge the gap of input integrity while preserving learned image priors as much as possible, we selectively fine-tuned a small portion of the layers. Specifically, the importance of each layer is ranked by the proposed Mask Attribute Conductance (MAC), and the layers with higher contributions are selected for finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code and model will be released at https://github.com/Dragonisss/RAM{https://github.com/Dragonisss/RAM}.

This paper introduces a dataset for improving real-time object recognition systems to aid blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals in navigation tasks. The dataset comprises 21 videos of BLV individuals navigating outdoor spaces, and a taxonomy of 90 objects crucial for BLV navigation, refined through a focus group study. We also provide object labeling for the 90 objects across 31 video segments created from the 21 videos. A deeper analysis reveals that most contemporary datasets used in training computer vision models contain only a small subset of the taxonomy in our dataset. Preliminary evaluation of state-of-the-art computer vision models on our dataset highlights shortcomings in accurately detecting key objects relevant to BLV navigation, emphasizing the need for specialized datasets. We make our dataset publicly available, offering valuable resources for developing more inclusive navigation systems for BLV individuals.

Image restoration involves recovering a high-quality clean image from its degraded version. Deep learning-based methods have significantly improved image restoration performance, however, they have limited generalization ability to different degradation types and levels. This restricts their real-world application since it requires training individual models for each specific degradation and knowing the input degradation type to apply the relevant model. We present a prompt-based learning approach, PromptIR, for All-In-One image restoration that can effectively restore images from various types and levels of degradation. In particular, our method uses prompts to encode degradation-specific information, which is then used to dynamically guide the restoration network. This allows our method to generalize to different degradation types and levels, while still achieving state-of-the-art results on image denoising, deraining, and dehazing. Overall, PromptIR offers a generic and efficient plugin module with few lightweight prompts that can be used to restore images of various types and levels of degradation with no prior information on the corruptions present in the image. Our code and pretrained models are available here: https://github.com/va1shn9v/PromptIR

In MRI, images of the same contrast (e.g., T_1) from the same subject can exhibit noticeable differences when acquired using different hardware, sequences, or scan parameters. These differences in images create a domain gap that needs to be bridged by a step called image harmonization, to process the images successfully using conventional or deep learning-based image analysis (e.g., segmentation). Several methods, including deep learning-based approaches, have been proposed to achieve image harmonization. However, they often require datasets from multiple domains for deep learning training and may still be unsuccessful when applied to images from unseen domains. To address this limitation, we propose a novel concept called `Blind Harmonization', which utilizes only target domain data for training but still has the capability to harmonize images from unseen domains. For the implementation of blind harmonization, we developed BlindHarmony using an unconditional flow model trained on target domain data. The harmonized image is optimized to have a correlation with the input source domain image while ensuring that the latent vector of the flow model is close to the center of the Gaussian distribution. BlindHarmony was evaluated on both simulated and real datasets and compared to conventional methods. BlindHarmony demonstrated noticeable performance on both datasets, highlighting its potential for future use in clinical settings. The source code is available at: https://github.com/SNU-LIST/BlindHarmony

Blind face restoration aims at recovering high-quality face images from those with unknown degradations. Current algorithms mainly introduce priors to complement high-quality details and achieve impressive progress. However, most of these algorithms ignore abundant contextual information in the face and its interplay with the priors, leading to sub-optimal performance. Moreover, they pay less attention to the gap between the synthetic and real-world scenarios, limiting the robustness and generalization to real-world applications. In this work, we propose RestoreFormer++, which on the one hand introduces fully-spatial attention mechanisms to model the contextual information and the interplay with the priors, and on the other hand, explores an extending degrading model to help generate more realistic degraded face images to alleviate the synthetic-to-real-world gap. Compared with current algorithms, RestoreFormer++ has several crucial benefits. First, instead of using a multi-head self-attention mechanism like the traditional visual transformer, we introduce multi-head cross-attention over multi-scale features to fully explore spatial interactions between corrupted information and high-quality priors. In this way, it can facilitate RestoreFormer++ to restore face images with higher realness and fidelity. Second, in contrast to the recognition-oriented dictionary, we learn a reconstruction-oriented dictionary as priors, which contains more diverse high-quality facial details and better accords with the restoration target. Third, we introduce an extending degrading model that contains more realistic degraded scenarios for training data synthesizing, and thus helps to enhance the robustness and generalization of our RestoreFormer++ model. Extensive experiments show that RestoreFormer++ outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Although large language models (LLMs) have become transformative, they still make mistakes and can explore unproductive reasoning paths. Self-correction is an important capability for a trustworthy LLM, particularly an autoregressive LLM. While LLMs can identify error in user input, they exhibit a systematic 'Self-Correction Blind Spot' - failing to correct identical error in their own outputs. To systematically study this phenomenon, we introduce Self-Correction Bench, a systematic framework to measure this phenomenon through controlled error injection at three complexity levels. Testing 14 models, we find an average 64.5% blind spot rate. We find multiple evidences that this limitation relates to training data composition: human training demonstrations predominantly show error-free responses rather than error-correction sequences, unlike RL-trained models that learn error correction through outcome feedback. Remarkably, simply appending "Wait" reduces blind spots by 89.3%, suggesting that the capability exists but requires activation. Our work highlights a critical limitation in current LLMs and offers potential avenues for improving their reliability and trustworthiness.

Class-agnostic counting methods enumerate objects of an arbitrary class, providing tremendous utility in many fields. Prior works have limited usefulness as they require either a set of examples of the type to be counted or that the query image contains only a single type of object. A significant factor in these shortcomings is the lack of a dataset to properly address counting in settings with more than one kind of object present. To address these issues, we propose the first Multi-class, Class-Agnostic Counting dataset (MCAC) and A Blind Counter (ABC123), a method that can count multiple types of objects simultaneously without using examples of type during training or inference. ABC123 introduces a new paradigm where instead of requiring exemplars to guide the enumeration, examples are found after the counting stage to help a user understand the generated outputs. We show that ABC123 outperforms contemporary methods on MCAC without needing human in-the-loop annotations. We also show that this performance transfers to FSC-147, the standard class-agnostic counting dataset. MCAC is available at MCAC.active.vision and ABC123 is available at ABC123.active.vision.

While deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved impressive success in image denoising with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), their performance remains limited on real-world noisy photographs. The main reason is that their learned models are easy to overfit on the simplified AWGN model which deviates severely from the complicated real-world noise model. In order to improve the generalization ability of deep CNN denoisers, we suggest training a convolutional blind denoising network (CBDNet) with more realistic noise model and real-world noisy-clean image pairs. On the one hand, both signal-dependent noise and in-camera signal processing pipeline is considered to synthesize realistic noisy images. On the other hand, real-world noisy photographs and their nearly noise-free counterparts are also included to train our CBDNet. To further provide an interactive strategy to rectify denoising result conveniently, a noise estimation subnetwork with asymmetric learning to suppress under-estimation of noise level is embedded into CBDNet. Extensive experimental results on three datasets of real-world noisy photographs clearly demonstrate the superior performance of CBDNet over state-of-the-arts in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality. The code has been made available at https://github.com/GuoShi28/CBDNet.

The recent success of LLMs has been predominantly driven by curating the training dataset composition, scaling of model architectures and dataset sizes and advancements in pretraining objectives, leaving tokenizer influence as a blind spot. Shedding light on this underexplored area, we conduct a comprehensive study on the influence of tokenizer choice on LLM downstream performance by training 24 mono- and multilingual LLMs at a 2.6B parameter scale, ablating different tokenizer algorithms and parameterizations. Our studies highlight that the tokenizer choice can significantly impact the model's downstream performance, training and inference costs. In particular, we find that the common tokenizer evaluation metrics fertility and parity are not always predictive of model downstream performance, rendering these metrics a questionable proxy for the model's downstream performance. Furthermore, we show that multilingual tokenizers trained on the five most frequent European languages require vocabulary size increases of factor three in comparison to English. While English-only tokenizers have been applied to the training of multi-lingual LLMs, we find that this approach results in a severe downstream performance degradation and additional training costs of up to 68%, due to an inefficient tokenization vocabulary.

Diffusion priors have been used for blind face restoration (BFR) by fine-tuning diffusion models (DMs) on restoration datasets to recover low-quality images. However, the naive application of DMs presents several key limitations. (i) The diffusion prior has inferior semantic consistency (e.g., ID, structure and color.), increasing the difficulty of optimizing the BFR model; (ii) reliance on hundreds of denoising iterations, preventing the effective cooperation with perceptual losses, which is crucial for faithful restoration. Observing that the latent consistency model (LCM) learns consistency noise-to-data mappings on the ODE-trajectory and therefore shows more semantic consistency in the subject identity, structural information and color preservation, we propose InterLCM to leverage the LCM for its superior semantic consistency and efficiency to counter the above issues. Treating low-quality images as the intermediate state of LCM, InterLCM achieves a balance between fidelity and quality by starting from earlier LCM steps. LCM also allows the integration of perceptual loss during training, leading to improved restoration quality, particularly in real-world scenarios. To mitigate structural and semantic uncertainties, InterLCM incorporates a Visual Module to extract visual features and a Spatial Encoder to capture spatial details, enhancing the fidelity of restored images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InterLCM outperforms existing approaches in both synthetic and real-world datasets while also achieving faster inference speed.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly being deployed as automated content moderators. Within this landscape, we uncover a critical threat: Adversarial Smuggling Attacks. Unlike adversarial perturbations (for misclassification) and adversarial jailbreaks (for harmful output generation), adversarial smuggling exploits the Human-AI capability gap. It encodes harmful content into human-readable visual formats that remain AI-unreadable, thereby evading automated detection and enabling the dissemination of harmful content. We classify smuggling attacks into two pathways: (1) Perceptual Blindness, disrupting text recognition; and (2) Reasoning Blockade, inhibiting semantic understanding despite successful text recognition. To evaluate this threat, we constructed SmuggleBench, the first comprehensive benchmark comprising 1,700 adversarial smuggling attack instances. Evaluations on SmuggleBench reveal that both proprietary (e.g., GPT-5) and open-source (e.g., Qwen3-VL) state-of-the-art models are vulnerable to this threat, producing Attack Success Rates (ASR) exceeding 90%. By analyzing the vulnerability through the lenses of perception and reasoning, we identify three root causes: the limited capabilities of vision encoders, the robustness gap in OCR, and the scarcity of domain-specific adversarial examples. We conduct a preliminary exploration of mitigation strategies, investigating the potential of test-time scaling (via CoT) and adversarial training (via SFT) to mitigate this threat. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhihengli-casia/smugglebench.

Despite significant progress in generative modelling, existing diffusion models often struggle to produce anatomically precise female pelvic images, limiting their application in gynaecological imaging, where data scarcity and patient privacy concerns are critical. To overcome these barriers, we introduce a novel diffusion-based framework for uterine MRI synthesis, integrating both unconditional and conditioned Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) and Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) in 2D and 3D. Our approach generates anatomically coherent, high fidelity synthetic images that closely mimic real scans and provide valuable resources for training robust diagnostic models. We evaluate generative quality using advanced perceptual and distributional metrics, benchmarking against standard reconstruction methods, and demonstrate substantial gains in diagnostic accuracy on a key classification task. A blinded expert evaluation further validates the clinical realism of our synthetic images. We release our models with privacy safeguards and a comprehensive synthetic uterine MRI dataset to support reproducible research and advance equitable AI in gynaecology.

Blind face restoration from low-quality (LQ) images is a challenging task that requires not only high-fidelity image reconstruction but also the preservation of facial identity. While diffusion models like Stable Diffusion have shown promise in generating high-quality (HQ) images, their VAE modules are typically trained only on HQ data, resulting in semantic misalignment when encoding LQ inputs. This mismatch significantly weakens the effectiveness of LQ conditions during the denoising process. Existing approaches often tackle this issue by retraining the VAE encoder, which is computationally expensive and memory-intensive. To address this limitation efficiently, we propose LAFR (Latent Alignment for Face Restoration), a novel codebook-based latent space adapter that aligns the latent distribution of LQ images with that of HQ counterparts, enabling semantically consistent diffusion sampling without altering the original VAE. To further enhance identity preservation, we introduce a multi-level restoration loss that combines constraints from identity embeddings and facial structural priors. Additionally, by leveraging the inherent structural regularity of facial images, we show that lightweight finetuning of diffusion prior on just 0.9% of FFHQ dataset is sufficient to achieve results comparable to state-of-the-art methods, reduce training time by 70%. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world face restoration benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of LAFR, achieving high-quality, identity-preserving face reconstruction from severely degraded inputs.

While the design of blind image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms has improved significantly, the distribution shift between the training and testing scenarios often leads to a poor performance of these methods at inference time. This motivates the study of test time adaptation (TTA) techniques to improve their performance at inference time. Existing auxiliary tasks and loss functions used for TTA may not be relevant for quality-aware adaptation of the pre-trained model. In this work, we introduce two novel quality-relevant auxiliary tasks at the batch and sample levels to enable TTA for blind IQA. In particular, we introduce a group contrastive loss at the batch level and a relative rank loss at the sample level to make the model quality aware and adapt to the target data. Our experiments reveal that even using a small batch of images from the test distribution helps achieve significant improvement in performance by updating the batch normalization statistics of the source model.

There have been many image denoisers using deep neural networks, which outperform conventional model-based methods by large margins. Recently, self-supervised methods have attracted attention because constructing a large real noise dataset for supervised training is an enormous burden. The most representative self-supervised denoisers are based on blind-spot networks, which exclude the receptive field's center pixel. However, excluding any input pixel is abandoning some information, especially when the input pixel at the corresponding output position is excluded. In addition, a standard blind-spot network fails to reduce real camera noise due to the pixel-wise correlation of noise, though it successfully removes independently distributed synthetic noise. Hence, to realize a more practical denoiser, we propose a novel self-supervised training framework that can remove real noise. For this, we derive the theoretic upper bound of a supervised loss where the network is guided by the downsampled blinded output. Also, we design a conditional blind-spot network (C-BSN), which selectively controls the blindness of the network to use the center pixel information. Furthermore, we exploit a random subsampler to decorrelate noise spatially, making the C-BSN free of visual artifacts that were often seen in downsample-based methods. Extensive experiments show that the proposed C-BSN achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world datasets as a self-supervised denoiser and shows qualitatively pleasing results without any post-processing or refinement.

Blind face restoration (BFR) from severely degraded face images in the wild is a very challenging problem. Due to the high illness of the problem and the complex unknown degradation, directly training a deep neural network (DNN) usually cannot lead to acceptable results. Existing generative adversarial network (GAN) based methods can produce better results but tend to generate over-smoothed restorations. In this work, we propose a new method by first learning a GAN for high-quality face image generation and embedding it into a U-shaped DNN as a prior decoder, then fine-tuning the GAN prior embedded DNN with a set of synthesized low-quality face images. The GAN blocks are designed to ensure that the latent code and noise input to the GAN can be respectively generated from the deep and shallow features of the DNN, controlling the global face structure, local face details and background of the reconstructed image. The proposed GAN prior embedded network (GPEN) is easy-to-implement, and it can generate visually photo-realistic results. Our experiments demonstrated that the proposed GPEN achieves significantly superior results to state-of-the-art BFR methods both quantitatively and qualitatively, especially for the restoration of severely degraded face images in the wild. The source code and models can be found at https://github.com/yangxy/GPEN.

Computational sensing strategies often suffer from calibration errors in the physical implementation of their ideal sensing models. Such uncertainties are typically addressed by using multiple, accurately chosen training signals to recover the missing information on the sensing model, an approach that can be resource-consuming and cumbersome. Conversely, blind calibration does not employ any training signal, but corresponds to a bilinear inverse problem whose algorithmic solution is an open issue. We here address blind calibration as a non-convex problem for linear random sensing models, in which we aim to recover an unknown signal from its projections on sub-Gaussian random vectors, each subject to an unknown positive multiplicative factor (or gain). To solve this optimisation problem we resort to projected gradient descent starting from a suitable, carefully chosen initialisation point. An analysis of this algorithm allows us to show that it converges to the exact solution provided a sample complexity requirement is met, i.e., relating convergence to the amount of information collected during the sensing process. Interestingly, we show that this requirement grows linearly (up to log factors) in the number of unknowns of the problem. This sample complexity is found both in absence of prior information, as well as when subspace priors are available for both the signal and gains, allowing a further reduction of the number of observations required for our recovery guarantees to hold. Moreover, in the presence of noise we show how our descent algorithm yields a solution whose accuracy degrades gracefully with the amount of noise affecting the measurements. Finally, we present some numerical experiments in an imaging context, where our algorithm allows for a simple solution to blind calibration of the gains in a sensor array.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used to interact with and execute tasks in dynamic environments. However, a critical yet overlooked limitation of these agents is that they, by default, assume a stationary context, failing to account for the real-world time elapsed between messages. We refer to this as "temporal blindness". This limitation hinders decisions about when to invoke tools, leading agents to either over-rely on stale context and skip needed tool calls, or under-rely on it and redundantly repeat tool calls. To study this challenge, we constructed TicToc, a diverse dataset of multi-turn user-agent message trajectories across 76 scenarios, spanning dynamic environments with high, medium, and low time sensitivity. We collected human preferences between "calling a tool" and "directly answering" on each sample, and evaluated how well LLM tool-calling decisions align with human preferences under varying amounts of elapsed time. Our analysis reveals that existing models display poor alignment with human temporal perception, with no model achieving a normalized alignment rate better than 65% when given time stamp information. We also show that naive, prompt-based alignment techniques have limited effectiveness for most models, but specific post-training alignment can be a viable way to align multi-turn LLM tool use with human temporal perception. Our data and findings provide a first step toward understanding and mitigating temporal blindness, offering insights to foster the development of more time-aware and human-aligned agents.

Despite recent efforts in Large Language Models (LLMs) safety and alignment, current adversarial attacks on frontier LLMs are still able to force harmful generations consistently. Although adversarial training has been widely studied and shown to significantly improve the robustness of traditional machine learning models, its strengths and weaknesses in the context of LLMs are less understood. Specifically, while existing discrete adversarial attacks are effective at producing harmful content, training LLMs with concrete adversarial prompts is often computationally expensive, leading to reliance on continuous relaxations. As these relaxations do not correspond to discrete input tokens, such latent training methods often leave models vulnerable to a diverse set of discrete attacks. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by introducing MixAT, a novel method that combines stronger discrete and faster continuous attacks during training. We rigorously evaluate MixAT across a wide spectrum of state-of-the-art attacks, proposing the At Least One Attack Success Rate (ALO-ASR) metric to capture the worst-case vulnerability of models. We show MixAT achieves substantially better robustness (ALO-ASR < 20%) compared to prior defenses (ALO-ASR > 50%), while maintaining a runtime comparable to methods based on continuous relaxations. We further analyze MixAT in realistic deployment settings, exploring how chat templates, quantization, low-rank adapters, and temperature affect both adversarial training and evaluation, revealing additional blind spots in current methodologies. Our results demonstrate that MixAT's discrete-continuous defense offers a principled and superior robustness-accuracy tradeoff with minimal computational overhead, highlighting its promise for building safer LLMs. We provide our code and models at https://github.com/insait-institute/MixAT.

Recently, textual prompt tuning has shown inspirational performance in adapting Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models to natural image quality assessment. However, such uni-modal prompt learning method only tunes the language branch of CLIP models. This is not enough for adapting CLIP models to AI generated image quality assessment (AGIQA) since AGIs visually differ from natural images. In addition, the consistency between AGIs and user input text prompts, which correlates with the perceptual quality of AGIs, is not investigated to guide AGIQA. In this letter, we propose vision-language consistency guided multi-modal prompt learning for blind AGIQA, dubbed CLIP-AGIQA. Specifically, we introduce learnable textual and visual prompts in language and vision branches of CLIP models, respectively. Moreover, we design a text-to-image alignment quality prediction task, whose learned vision-language consistency knowledge is used to guide the optimization of the above multi-modal prompts. Experimental results on two public AGIQA datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art quality assessment models. The source code is available at https://github.com/JunFu1995/CLIP-AGIQA.

Developing blind video deflickering (BVD) algorithms to enhance video temporal consistency, is gaining importance amid the flourish of image processing and video generation. However, the intricate nature of video data complicates the training of deep learning methods, leading to high resource consumption and instability, notably under severe lighting flicker. This underscores the critical need for a compact representation beyond pixel values to advance BVD research and applications. Inspired by the classic scale-time equalization (STE), our work introduces the histogram-assisted solution, called BlazeBVD, for high-fidelity and rapid BVD. Compared with STE, which directly corrects pixel values by temporally smoothing color histograms, BlazeBVD leverages smoothed illumination histograms within STE filtering to ease the challenge of learning temporal data using neural networks. In technique, BlazeBVD begins by condensing pixel values into illumination histograms that precisely capture flickering and local exposure variations. These histograms are then smoothed to produce singular frames set, filtered illumination maps, and exposure maps. Resorting to these deflickering priors, BlazeBVD utilizes a 2D network to restore faithful and consistent texture impacted by lighting changes or localized exposure issues. BlazeBVD also incorporates a lightweight 3D network to amend slight temporal inconsistencies, avoiding the resource consumption issue. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic, real-world and generated videos, showcase the superior qualitative and quantitative results of BlazeBVD, achieving inference speeds up to 10x faster than state-of-the-arts.

Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are an increasingly deployed class of agents that take actions on GUIs to accomplish user goals. In this paper, we show that CUAs consistently exhibit Blind Goal-Directedness (BGD): a bias to pursue goals regardless of feasibility, safety, reliability, or context. We characterize three prevalent patterns of BGD: (i) lack of contextual reasoning, (ii) assumptions and decisions under ambiguity, and (iii) contradictory or infeasible goals. We develop BLIND-ACT, a benchmark of 90 tasks capturing these three patterns. Built on OSWorld, BLIND-ACT provides realistic environments and employs LLM-based judges to evaluate agent behavior, achieving 93.75% agreement with human annotations. We use BLIND-ACT to evaluate nine frontier models, including Claude Sonnet and Opus 4, Computer-Use-Preview, and GPT-5, observing high average BGD rates (80.8%) across them. We show that BGD exposes subtle risks that arise even when inputs are not directly harmful. While prompting-based interventions lower BGD levels, substantial risk persists, highlighting the need for stronger training- or inference-time interventions. Qualitative analysis reveals observed failure modes: execution-first bias (focusing on how to act over whether to act), thought-action disconnect (execution diverging from reasoning), and request-primacy (justifying actions due to user request). Identifying BGD and introducing BLIND-ACT establishes a foundation for future research on studying and mitigating this fundamental risk and ensuring safe CUA deployment.

The demand for safe, high-energy-density batteries has spotlighted halide solid-state electrolytes, which offer the potential for enhanced ionic mobility, electrochemical stability, and interfacial deformability. Accelerating their discovery requires extensive molecular dynamics, which has been increasingly enabled by universal machine learning interatomic potentials trained on foundational datasets. However, the dynamic softness of halides poses a stringent test of whether general-purpose models can reliably replace first-principles calculations under the highly distorted, elevated-temperature regimes necessary to probe ion transport. Here, we present AQVolt26, a dataset of 322,656 r^2SCAN single-point calculations for lithium halides, generated via high-temperature configurational sampling across sim5K structures. We demonstrate that foundational datasets provide a strong baseline for stable halide chemistries and transfer local forces well, however absolute energy predictions degrade in distorted higher-temperature regimes. Co-training with AQVolt26 resolves this blind spot. Furthermore, incorporating Materials Project relaxation data improves near-equilibrium performance but degrades extreme-strain robustness without enhancing high-temperature force accuracy. These results demonstrate that domain-specific configurational sampling is essential for the reliable dynamic screening of halide electrolytes. Furthermore, our findings suggest that while foundational models provide a robust base, they are most effective for dynamically soft solid-state chemistries when augmented with targeted, high-temperature data. Finally, we show that near-equilibrium relaxation data serves as a task-specific complement rather than a universally beneficial addition.

Discrete flow matching generates text by iteratively transforming noise tokens into coherent language, but may require hundreds of forward passes. Distillation uses the multi-step trajectory to train a student to reproduce the process in a few steps. When the student underperforms, the usual explanation is insufficient capacity. We argue the opposite: the trajectory is the bottleneck, not the student. Each training trajectory is built through a chain of blind stochastic jumps with no evaluation of sequence quality; a single bad decision at an early midpoint propagates through subsequent steps, yet the student must imitate the result. Trajectory-Shaped Discrete Flow Matching (TS-DFM) replaces these blind jumps with guided navigation: a lightweight energy compass evaluates candidate continuations at each midpoint, selecting the most coherent. All shaping is training-only; inference cost is unchanged. On 170M-parameter language modeling, the shaped student at 8 steps achieves 32% lower perplexity than the 1,024-step teacher while being 128x faster, with gains consistent across source distributions and three evaluators of increasing scale. TS-DFM achieves the best perplexity of any discrete-generation baseline we compare against, including methods trained on 6x more data or using 5x larger models.

Training machine learning models requires the storage of large datasets, which often contain sensitive or private data. Storing data is associated with a number of potential risks which increase over time, such as database breaches and malicious adversaries. Machine unlearning is the study of methods to efficiently remove the influence of training data subsets from previously-trained models. Existing unlearning methods typically require direct access to the "forget set" -- the data to be forgotten-and organisations must retain this data for unlearning rather than deleting it immediately upon request, increasing risks associated with the forget set. We introduce partially-blind unlearning -- utilizing auxiliary information to unlearn without explicit access to the forget set. We also propose a practical framework Reload, a partially-blind method based on gradient optimization and structured weight sparsification to operationalize partially-blind unlearning. We show that Reload efficiently unlearns, approximating models retrained from scratch, and outperforms several forget set-dependent approaches. On language models, Reload unlearns entities using <0.025% of the retain set and <7% of model weights in <8 minutes on Llama2-7B. In the corrective case, Reload achieves unlearning even when only 10% of corrupted data is identified.

Standard single-image super-resolution creates paired training data from high-resolution images through fixed downsampling kernels. However, real-world super-resolution (RWSR) faces unknown degradations in the low-resolution inputs, all the while lacking paired training data. Existing methods approach this problem by learning blind general models through complex synthetic augmentations on training inputs; they sacrifice the performance on specific degradation for broader generalization to many possible ones. We address the unsupervised RWSR for a targeted real-world degradation. We study from a distillation perspective and introduce a novel pairwise distance distillation framework. Through our framework, a model specialized in synthetic degradation adapts to target real-world degradations by distilling intra- and inter-model distances across the specialized model and an auxiliary generalized model. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that our method significantly enhances fidelity and perceptual quality, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches in RWSR. The source code is available at https://github.com/Yuehan717/PDD.

Vocal recordings on consumer devices commonly suffer from multiple concurrent degradations: noise, reverberation, band-limiting, and clipping. We present Smule Renaissance Small (SRS), a compact single-stage model that performs end-to-end vocal restoration directly in the complex STFT domain. By incorporating phase-aware losses, SRS enables large analysis windows for improved frequency resolution while achieving 10.5x real-time inference on iPhone 12 CPU at 48 kHz. On the DNS 5 Challenge blind set, despite no speech training, SRS outperforms a strong GAN baseline and closely matches a computationally expensive flow-matching system. To enable evaluation under realistic multi-degradation scenarios, we introduce the Extreme Degradation Bench (EDB): 87 singing and speech recordings captured under severe acoustic conditions. On EDB, SRS surpasses all open-source baselines on singing and matches commercial systems, while remaining competitive on speech despite no speech-specific training. We release both SRS and EDB under the MIT License.

Inverse problems in image reconstruction are fundamentally complicated by unknown noise properties. Classical iterative deconvolution approaches amplify noise and require careful parameter selection for an optimal trade-off between sharpness and grain. Deep learning methods allow for flexible parametrization of the noise and learning its properties directly from the data. Recently, self-supervised blind-spot neural networks were successfully adopted for image deconvolution by including a known point-spread function in the end-to-end training. However, their practical application has been limited to 2D images in the biomedical domain because it implies large kernels that are poorly optimized. We tackle this problem with Fast Fourier Transform convolutions that provide training speed-up in 3D microscopy deconvolution tasks. Further, we propose to adopt a Siamese invariance loss for deconvolution and empirically identify its optimal position in the neural network between blind-spot and full image branches. The experimental results show that our improved framework outperforms the previous state-of-the-art deconvolution methods with a known point spread function.

In recent years, self-supervised denoising methods have gained significant success and become critically important in the field of image restoration. Among them, the blind spot network based methods are the most typical type and have attracted the attentions of a large number of researchers. Although the introduction of blind spot operations can prevent identity mapping from noise to noise, it imposes stringent requirements on the receptive fields in the network design, thereby limiting overall performance. To address this challenge, we propose a single mask scheme for self-supervised denoising training, which eliminates the need for blind spot operation and thereby removes constraints on the network structure design. Furthermore, to achieve denoising across entire image during inference, we propose a multi-mask scheme. Our method, featuring the asymmetric mask scheme in training and inference, achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing real noisy image datasets. All the source code will be made available to the public.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images based on a hybrid query comprising a reference image and a modification text. Early dual-tower Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with cross-modality compositional reasoning required for this task. While adapting generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for retrieval offers a promising direction, we identify that this strategy overlooks a fundamental issue: compressing a generative MLLM into a single-embedding discriminative retriever triggers a paradigm conflict, which leads to Capability Degradation - the deterioration of native fine-grained reasoning after retrieval adaptation. To address this challenge, we propose ReCALL, a model-agnostic framework that follows a diagnose-generate-refine pipeline: First, we diagnose cognitive blind spots of the retriever via self-guided informative instance mining. Next, we generate corrective instructions and triplets by prompting the foundation MLLM and conduct quality control with VQA-based consistency filtering. Finally, we refine the retriever through continual training on these triplets with a grouped contrastive scheme, thereby internalizing fine-grained visual-semantic distinctions and realigning the discriminative embedding space of retriever with intrinsic compositional reasoning within the MLLM. Extensive experiments on CIRR and FashionIQ show that ReCALL consistently recalibrates degraded capabilities and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/RemRico/Recall.

The Deep Learning Track is a new track for TREC 2019, with the goal of studying ad hoc ranking in a large data regime. It is the first track with large human-labeled training sets, introducing two sets corresponding to two tasks, each with rigorous TREC-style blind evaluation and reusable test sets. The document retrieval task has a corpus of 3.2 million documents with 367 thousand training queries, for which we generate a reusable test set of 43 queries. The passage retrieval task has a corpus of 8.8 million passages with 503 thousand training queries, for which we generate a reusable test set of 43 queries. This year 15 groups submitted a total of 75 runs, using various combinations of deep learning, transfer learning and traditional IR ranking methods. Deep learning runs significantly outperformed traditional IR runs. Possible explanations for this result are that we introduced large training data and we included deep models trained on such data in our judging pools, whereas some past studies did not have such training data or pooling.

Human beings naturally utilize multiple reasoning modalities to learn and solve logical problems, i.e., different representational formats such as natural language, code, and symbolic logic. In contrast, most existing LLM-based approaches operate with a single reasoning modality during training, typically natural language. Although some methods explored modality selection or augmentation at inference time, the training process remains modality-blind, limiting synergy among modalities. To fill in this gap, we propose Mixture-of-Thought (MoT), a framework that enables LLMs to reason across three complementary modalities: natural language, code, and a newly introduced symbolic modality, truth-table, which systematically enumerates logical cases and partially mitigates key failure modes in natural language reasoning. MoT adopts a two-phase design: (1) self-evolving MoT training, which jointly learns from filtered, self-generated rationales across modalities; and (2) MoT inference, which fully leverages the synergy of three modalities to produce better predictions. Experiments on logical reasoning benchmarks including FOLIO and ProofWriter demonstrate that our MoT framework consistently and significantly outperforms strong LLM baselines with single-modality chain-of-thought approaches, achieving up to +11.7pp average accuracy gain. Further analyses show that our MoT framework benefits both training and inference stages; that it is particularly effective on harder logical reasoning problems; and that different modalities contribute complementary strengths, with truth-table reasoning helping to overcome key bottlenecks in natural language inference.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often show reduced performance, cultural alignment, and safety robustness in non-English languages, partly because English dominates both pre-training data and human preference alignment datasets. Training methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) require human preference data, which remains scarce and largely non-public for many languages beyond English. To address this gap, we introduce compar:IA, an open-source digital public service developed inside the French government and designed to collect large-scale human preference data from a predominantly French-speaking general audience. The platform uses a blind pairwise comparison interface to capture unconstrained, real-world prompts and user judgments across a diverse set of language models, while maintaining low participation friction and privacy-preserving automated filtering. As of 2026-02-07, compar:IA has collected over 600,000 free-form prompts and 250,000 preference votes, with approximately 89% of the data in French. We release three complementary datasets -- conversations, votes, and reactions -- under open licenses, and present initial analyses, including a French-language model leaderboard and user interaction patterns. Beyond the French context, compar:IA is evolving toward an international digital public good, offering reusable infrastructure for multilingual model training, evaluation, and the study of human-AI interaction.

Process Reward Models (PRMs) are rapidly becoming the backbone of LLM reasoning pipelines, yet we demonstrate that state-of-the-art PRMs are systematically exploitable under adversarial optimization pressure. To address this, we introduce a three-tiered diagnostic framework that applies increasing adversarial pressure to quantify these vulnerabilities. Static perturbation analysis uncovers a fluency-logic dissociation: high invariance to surface-level style changes reward changes <0.1, yet inconsistent detection of logically-corrupted reasoning, with different models failing on different attack types. Adversarial optimization demonstrates that gradient-based attacks inflate rewards on invalid trajectories, with reward landscapes exhibiting wide, exploitable peaks. RL-induced reward hacking exposes the critical failure mode: policies trained on AIME problems achieve near-perfect PRM rewards (>0.9), while ground-truth accuracy remains low (below 4%), with 43% of reward gains attributable to stylistic shortcuts. These findings reveal that current PRMs function as fluency detectors rather than reasoning verifiers, creating systematic blind spots that undermine their use as training signals. We release PRM-BiasBench and a diagnostic toolkit to enable robustness evaluation before deployment. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SqueezeAILab/reward-under-attack.

Ask a frontier model how to taper six milligrams of alprazolam (psychiatrist retired, ten days of pills left, abrupt cessation causes seizures) and it tells her to call the psychiatrist she just explained does not exist. Change one word ("I'm a psychiatrist; a patient presents with...") and the same model, same weights, same inference pass produces a textbook Ashton Manual taper with diazepam equivalence, anticonvulsant coverage, and monitoring thresholds. The knowledge was there; the model withheld it. IatroBench measures this gap. Sixty pre-registered clinical scenarios, six frontier models, 3,600 responses, scored on two axes (commission harm, CH 0-3; omission harm, OH 0-4) through a structured-evaluation pipeline validated against physician scoring (kappa_w = 0.571, within-1 agreement 96%). The central finding is identity-contingent withholding: match the same clinical question in physician vs. layperson framing and all five testable models provide better guidance to the physician (decoupling gap +0.38, p = 0.003; binary hit rates on safety-colliding actions drop 13.1 percentage points in layperson framing, p < 0.0001, while non-colliding actions show no change). The gap is widest for the model with the heaviest safety investment (Opus, +0.65). Three failure modes separate cleanly: trained withholding (Opus), incompetence (Llama 4), and indiscriminate content filtering (GPT-5.2, whose post-generation filter strips physician responses at 9x the layperson rate because they contain denser pharmacological tokens). The standard LLM judge assigns OH = 0 to 73% of responses a physician scores OH >= 1 (kappa = 0.045); the evaluation apparatus has the same blind spot as the training apparatus. Every scenario targets someone who has already exhausted the standard referrals.

Recently, significant progress has been made in protein-ligand docking, especially in modern deep learning methods, and some benchmarks were proposed, e.g., PoseBench, Plinder. However, these benchmarks suffer from less practical evaluation setups (e.g., blind docking, self docking), or heavy framework that involves training, raising challenges to assess docking methods efficiently. To fill this gap, we proposed PoseX, an open-source benchmark focusing on self-docking and cross-docking, to evaluate the algorithmic advances practically and comprehensively. Specifically, first, we curate a new evaluation dataset with 718 entries for self docking and 1,312 for cross docking; second, we incorporate 22 docking methods across three methodological categories, including (1) traditional physics-based methods (e.g., Schr\"odinger Glide), (2) AI docking methods (e.g., DiffDock), (3) AI co-folding methods (e.g., AlphaFold3); third, we design a relaxation method as post-processing to minimize conformation energy and refine binding pose; fourth, we released a leaderboard to rank submitted models in real time. We draw some key insights via extensive experiments: (1) AI-based approaches have already surpassed traditional physics-based approaches in overall docking accuracy (RMSD). The longstanding generalization issues that have plagued AI molecular docking have been significantly alleviated in the latest models. (2) The stereochemical deficiencies of AI-based approaches can be greatly alleviated with post-processing relaxation. Combining AI docking methods with the enhanced relaxation method achieves the best performance to date. (3) AI co-folding methods commonly face ligand chirality issues, which cannot be resolved by relaxation. The code, curated dataset and leaderboard are released at https://github.com/CataAI/PoseX.

Transfer learning has gained significant attention in recent deep learning research due to its ability to accelerate convergence and enhance performance on new tasks. However, its success is often contingent on the similarity between source and target data, and training on numerous datasets can be costly, leading to blind selection of pretrained models with limited insight into their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce D2NWG, a diffusion-based neural network weights generation technique that efficiently produces high-performing weights for transfer learning, conditioned on the target dataset. Our method extends generative hyper-representation learning to recast the latent diffusion paradigm for neural network weights generation, learning the weight distributions of models pretrained on various datasets. This allows for automatic generation of weights that generalize well across both seen and unseen tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art meta-learning methods and pretrained models. Moreover, our approach is scalable to large architectures such as large language models (LLMs), overcoming the limitations of current parameter generation techniques that rely on task-specific model collections or access to original training data. By modeling the parameter distribution of LLMs, D2NWG enables task-specific parameter generation without requiring additional fine-tuning or large collections of model variants. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently enhances the performance of diverse base models, regardless of their size or complexity, positioning it as a robust solution for scalable transfer learning.

Most generative models of audio directly generate samples in one of two domains: time or frequency. While sufficient to express any signal, these representations are inefficient, as they do not utilize existing knowledge of how sound is generated and perceived. A third approach (vocoders/synthesizers) successfully incorporates strong domain knowledge of signal processing and perception, but has been less actively researched due to limited expressivity and difficulty integrating with modern auto-differentiation-based machine learning methods. In this paper, we introduce the Differentiable Digital Signal Processing (DDSP) library, which enables direct integration of classic signal processing elements with deep learning methods. Focusing on audio synthesis, we achieve high-fidelity generation without the need for large autoregressive models or adversarial losses, demonstrating that DDSP enables utilizing strong inductive biases without losing the expressive power of neural networks. Further, we show that combining interpretable modules permits manipulation of each separate model component, with applications such as independent control of pitch and loudness, realistic extrapolation to pitches not seen during training, blind dereverberation of room acoustics, transfer of extracted room acoustics to new environments, and transformation of timbre between disparate sources. In short, DDSP enables an interpretable and modular approach to generative modeling, without sacrificing the benefits of deep learning. The library is publicly available at https://github.com/magenta/ddsp and we welcome further contributions from the community and domain experts.

We demonstrate that language models pre-trained on codified (discretely-encoded) music audio learn representations that are useful for downstream MIR tasks. Specifically, we explore representations from Jukebox (Dhariwal et al. 2020): a music generation system containing a language model trained on codified audio from 1M songs. To determine if Jukebox's representations contain useful information for MIR, we use them as input features to train shallow models on several MIR tasks. Relative to representations from conventional MIR models which are pre-trained on tagging, we find that using representations from Jukebox as input features yields 30% stronger performance on average across four MIR tasks: tagging, genre classification, emotion recognition, and key detection. For key detection, we observe that representations from Jukebox are considerably stronger than those from models pre-trained on tagging, suggesting that pre-training via codified audio language modeling may address blind spots in conventional approaches. We interpret the strength of Jukebox's representations as evidence that modeling audio instead of tags provides richer representations for MIR.

Often, the needs and visual abilities differ between the annotator group and the end user group. Generating detailed diagram descriptions for blind and low-vision (BLV) users is one such challenging domain. Sighted annotators could describe visuals with ease, but existing studies have shown that direct generations by them are costly, bias-prone, and somewhat lacking by BLV standards. In this study, we ask sighted individuals to assess -- rather than produce -- diagram descriptions generated by vision-language models (VLM) that have been guided with latent supervision via a multi-pass inference. The sighted assessments prove effective and useful to professional educators who are themselves BLV and teach visually impaired learners. We release Sightation, a collection of diagram description datasets spanning 5k diagrams and 137k samples for completion, preference, retrieval, question answering, and reasoning training purposes and demonstrate their fine-tuning potential in various downstream tasks.

In recent years, advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have revolutionized the field of accessibility and exclusivity of testing, particularly for visually impaired students (VIS). CBT has shown in years back its relevance in terms of administering exams electronically, making the test process easier, providing quicker and more accurate results, and offering greater flexibility and accessibility for candidates. Yet, its relevance was not felt by the visually impaired students as they cannot access printed documents. Hence, in this paper, we present an NLP-driven Computer-Based Test guide for visually impaired students. It employs a speech technology pre-trained methods to provide real-time assistance and support to visually impaired students. The system utilizes NLP technologies to convert the text-based questions and the associated options in a machine-readable format. Subsequently, the speech technology pre-trained model processes the converted text enabling the VIS to comprehend and analyze the content. Furthermore, we validated that this pre-trained model is not perverse by testing for accuracy using sample audio datasets labels (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) to compare with the voice recordings obtained from 20 VIS which is been predicted by the system to attain values for precision, recall, and F1-scores. These metrics are used to assess the performance of the pre-trained model and have indicated that it is proficient enough to give its better performance to the evaluated system. The methodology adopted for this system is Object Oriented Analysis and Design Methodology (OOADM) where Objects are discussed and built by modeling real-world instances.

Visually impaired people are a large group who can only use braille for reading and writing. However, the lack of special educational resources is the bottleneck for educating them. Educational equity is a reflection of the level of social civilization, cultural equality, and individual dignity. Facilitating and improving lifelong learning channels for the visually impaired is of great significance. Their written braille homework or exam papers cannot be understood by sighted teachers, because of the lack of a highly accurate braille translation system, especially in Chinese which has tone marks. braille writers often omit tone marks to save space, leading to confusion when braille with the same consonants and vowels is translated into Chinese. Previous algorithms were insufficient in extracting contextual information, resulting in low accuracy of braille translations into Chinese. This project informatively fine-tuned the mT5 model with an Encoder-decoder architecture for braille to Chinese character conversion. This research created a training set of braille and corresponding Chinese text from the Leipzig Corpora. This project significantly reduced the confusion in braille, achieving 62.4 and 62.3 BLEU scores in the validation and test sets, with a curriculum learning fine-tuning method. By incorporating the braille recognition algorithm, this project is the first publicly available braille translation system and can benefit lots of visually impaired students and families who are preparing for the Chinese College Test and help to propel their college dreams in the future. There is a demo on our homepage\url{https://vision-braille.com/}.

Despite the rapid success of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), a persistent challenge is their tendency to generate hallucinated content, undermining reliability in real-world use. Existing training-free methods address hallucinations but face two limitations: (i) they rely on narrow assumptions about hallucination sources, and (ii) their effectiveness declines toward the end of generation, where hallucinations are most likely to occur. A common strategy is to build hallucinated models by completely or partially removing visual tokens and contrasting them with the original model. Yet, this alone proves insufficient, since visual information still propagates into generated text. Building on this insight, we propose a novel hallucinated model that captures hallucination effects by selectively removing key text tokens. We further introduce Generalized Contrastive Decoding, which integrates multiple hallucinated models to represent diverse hallucination sources. Together, these ideas form CRoPS, a training-free hallucination mitigation framework that improves CHAIR scores by 20% and achieves consistent gains across six benchmarks and three LVLM families, outperforming state-of-the-art training-free methods.

Typically, children start to learn their first words between 6 and 9 months, linking spoken utterances to their visual referents. Without prior knowledge, a word encountered for the first time can be interpreted in countless ways; it might refer to any of the objects in the environment, their components, or attributes. Using longitudinal, egocentric, and ecologically valid data from the experience of one child, in this work, we propose a self-supervised and biologically plausible strategy to learn strong visual representations. Our masked autoencoder-based visual backbone incorporates knowledge about the blind spot in human eyes to define a novel masking strategy. This mask and reconstruct approach attempts to mimic the way the human brain fills the gaps in the eyes' field of view. This represents a significant shift from standard random masking strategies, which are difficult to justify from a biological perspective. The pretrained encoder is utilized in a contrastive learning-based video-text model capable of acquiring word-referent mappings. Extensive evaluation suggests that the proposed biologically plausible masking strategy is at least as effective as random masking for learning word-referent mappings from cross-situational and temporally extended episodes.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often suffer from multimodal hallucinations, wherein they may create content that is not present in the visual inputs. In this paper, we explore a new angle of this issue: overly detailed training data hinders the model's ability to timely terminate generation, leading to continued outputs beyond visual perception limits. By investigating how the model decides to terminate generation with EOS, the special end-of-sentence token, we find that the model assesses the completeness of the entire sequence by comparing the generated text with the image. This observation suggests that the model possesses an inherent potential of making proper EOS decisions based on its visual perception to avoid overly lengthy outputs. To take advantage of such potential, we explore two methods to mitigate multimodal hallucinations: a training objective that enables the model to reduce hallucinations by learning from regular instruction data, and a data filtering strategy to prevent harmful training data from exacerbating model hallucinations. Both methods significantly improve the hallucination performance of LMMs, without requiring any additional data or knowledge.

Navigation and mobility are some of the major problems faced by visually impaired people in their daily lives. Advances in computer vision led to the proposal of some navigation systems. However, most of them require expensive and/or heavy hardware. In this paper we propose the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN), transfer learning, and semi-supervised learning (SSL) to build a framework aimed at the visually impaired aid. It has low computational costs and, therefore, may be implemented on current smartphones, without relying on any additional equipment. The smartphone camera can be used to automatically take pictures of the path ahead. Then, they will be immediately classified, providing almost instantaneous feedback to the user. We also propose a dataset to train the classifiers, including indoor and outdoor situations with different types of light, floor, and obstacles. Many different CNN architectures are evaluated as feature extractors and classifiers, by fine-tuning weights pre-trained on a much larger dataset. The graph-based SSL method, known as particle competition and cooperation, is also used for classification, allowing feedback from the user to be incorporated without retraining the underlying network. 92\% and 80\% classification accuracy is achieved in the proposed dataset in the best supervised and SSL scenarios, respectively.

People who are visually impaired face a lot of difficulties while studying. One of the major causes to this is lack of available text in Bharti Braille script. In this paper, we have suggested a scheme to convert text in major Indian languages into Bharti Braille. The system uses a hybrid approach where at first the text in Indian language is given to a rule based system and in case if there is any ambiguity then it is resolved by applying a LSTM based model. The developed model has also been tested and found to have produced near accurate results.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in deep learning-based pansharpening. Thus far, research has mainly focused on architectures. Nonetheless, model training is an equally important issue. A first problem is the absence of ground truths, unavoidable in pansharpening. This is often addressed by training networks in a reduced resolution domain and using the original data as ground truth, relying on an implicit scale invariance assumption. However, on full resolution images results are often disappointing, suggesting such invariance not to hold. A further problem is the scarcity of training data, which causes a limited generalization ability and a poor performance on off-training test images. In this paper, we propose a full-resolution training framework for deep learning-based pansharpening. The framework is fully general and can be used for any deep learning-based pansharpening model. Training takes place in the high-resolution domain, relying only on the original data, thus avoiding any loss of information. To ensure spectral and spatial fidelity, a suitable two-component loss is defined. The spectral component enforces consistency between the pansharpened output and the low-resolution multispectral input. The spatial component, computed at high-resolution, maximizes the local correlation between each pansharpened band and the panchromatic input. At testing time, the target-adaptive operating modality is adopted, achieving good generalization with a limited computational overhead. Experiments carried out on WorldView-3, WorldView-2, and GeoEye-1 images show that methods trained with the proposed framework guarantee a pretty good performance in terms of both full-resolution numerical indexes and visual quality.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing assistive technologies. It offers innovative solutions to enhance the quality of life for individuals with visual impairments. This review examines the development, applications, and impact of AI-powered tools in key domains, such as computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), and wearable devices. Specific advancements include object recognition for identifying everyday items, scene description for understanding surroundings, and NLP-driven text-to-speech systems for accessing digital information. Assistive technologies like smart glasses, smartphone applications, and AI-enabled navigation aids are discussed, demonstrating their ability to support independent travel, facilitate social interaction, and increase access to education and employment opportunities. The integration of deep learning models, multimodal interfaces, and real-time data processing has transformed the functionality and usability of these tools, fostering inclusivity and empowerment. This article also addresses critical challenges, including ethical considerations, affordability, and adaptability in diverse environments. Future directions highlight the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to refine these technologies, ensuring equitable access and sustainable innovation. By providing a comprehensive overview, this review underscores AI's transformative potential in promoting independence, enhancing accessibility, and fostering social inclusion for visually impaired individuals.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) enable the joint processing of text and images. However, the inclusion of vision data significantly expands the prompt length. Along with the quadratic complexity of the attention computation, this results in a longer prefill duration. An approach to mitigate this bottleneck is to leverage the inherent sparsity in the attention computation. In our analysis of attention patterns in VLMs, we observe that a substantial portion of layers exhibit minimal cross-image attention, except through attention-sink tokens per image. These sparse attention patterns fall into distinct categories: sink-only, document mask and a hybrid document-sink mask. Based on this, we propose BlindSight: a training-free approach to optimize VLM inference using a input template-aware attention sparsity mask. We utilize samples from a dataset to derive a prompt-agnostic sparsity categorization for every attention head. We evaluate the proposed technique using VLMs such as Qwen2-VL, Qwen2.5-VL and Gemma-3. BlindSight results in a 32%-41% reduction in FLOPs on average with -2%-+2% accuracy compared to the original model in most evaluated multi-image understanding benchmarks.

Blind and low vision (BLV) creators use images to communicate with sighted audiences. However, creating or retrieving images is challenging for BLV creators as it is difficult to use authoring tools or assess image search results. Thus, creators limit the types of images they create or recruit sighted collaborators. While text-to-image generation models let creators generate high-fidelity images based on a text description (i.e. prompt), it is difficult to assess the content and quality of generated images. We present GenAssist, a system to make text-to-image generation accessible. Using our interface, creators can verify whether generated image candidates followed the prompt, access additional details in the image not specified in the prompt, and skim a summary of similarities and differences between image candidates. To power the interface, GenAssist uses a large language model to generate visual questions, vision-language models to extract answers, and a large language model to summarize the results. Our study with 12 BLV creators demonstrated that GenAssist enables and simplifies the process of image selection and generation, making visual authoring more accessible to all.

Text-to-speech (TTS) models have achieved remarkable naturalness in recent years, yet like most deep neural models, they have more parameters than necessary. Sparse TTS models can improve on dense models via pruning and extra retraining, or converge faster than dense models with some performance loss. Thus, we propose training TTS models using decaying sparsity, i.e. a high initial sparsity to accelerate training first, followed by a progressive rate reduction to obtain better eventual performance. This decremental approach differs from current methods of incrementing sparsity to a desired target, which costs significantly more time than dense training. We call our method SNIPER training: Single-shot Initialization Pruning Evolving-Rate training. Our experiments on FastSpeech2 show that we were able to obtain better losses in the first few training epochs with SNIPER, and that the final SNIPER-trained models outperformed constant-sparsity models and edged out dense models, with negligible difference in training time.

Omnimodal Large Language Models (OLLMs) have shown significant progress in integrating vision and text, but still struggle with integrating vision and audio, often exhibiting suboptimal performance when processing audio queries compared to text queries. This disparity is primarily due to insufficient alignment between vision and audio modalities during training, leading to inadequate attention to visual information when using audio queries. To mitigate this issue, we propose a Self-Knowledge Distillation (Self-KD) training method where the vision-text component of the OLLM serves as the teacher and the vision-audio component as the student. This enables the model to process audio in a manner analogous to its text processing. Our experimental results demonstrate that Self-KD is an effective method for enhancing the vision-audio capabilities of OLLMs by learning from the vision-text components, which subsequently improves the interaction between audio and images and results in improved performance on multimodal tasks.

Suppose Alice trains an open-weight language model and Bob uses a blackbox derivative of Alice's model to produce text. Can Alice prove that Bob is using her model, either by querying Bob's derivative model (query setting) or from the text alone (observational setting)? We formulate this question as an independence testing problem--in which the null hypothesis is that Bob's model or text is independent of Alice's randomized training run--and investigate it through the lens of palimpsestic memorization in language models: models are more likely to memorize data seen later in training, so we can test whether Bob is using Alice's model using test statistics that capture correlation between Bob's model or text and the ordering of training examples in Alice's training run. If Alice has randomly shuffled her training data, then any significant correlation amounts to exactly quantifiable statistical evidence against the null hypothesis, regardless of the composition of Alice's training data. In the query setting, we directly estimate (via prompting) the likelihood Bob's model gives to Alice's training examples and order; we correlate the likelihoods of over 40 fine-tunes of various Pythia and OLMo base models ranging from 1B to 12B parameters with the base model's training data order, achieving a p-value on the order of at most 1e-8 in all but six cases. In the observational setting, we try two approaches based on estimating 1) the likelihood of Bob's text overlapping with spans of Alice's training examples and 2) the likelihood of Bob's text with respect to different versions of Alice's model we obtain by repeating the last phase (e.g., 1%) of her training run on reshuffled data. The second approach can reliably distinguish Bob's text from as little as a few hundred tokens; the first does not involve any retraining but requires many more tokens (several hundred thousand) to achieve high power.

Video descriptions are crucial for blind and low vision (BLV) users to access visual content. However, current artificial intelligence models for generating descriptions often fall short due to limitations in the quality of human annotations within training datasets, resulting in descriptions that do not fully meet BLV users' needs. To address this gap, we introduce VideoA11y, an approach that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and video accessibility guidelines to generate descriptions tailored for BLV individuals. Using this method, we have curated VideoA11y-40K, the largest and most comprehensive dataset of 40,000 videos described for BLV users. Rigorous experiments across 15 video categories, involving 347 sighted participants, 40 BLV participants, and seven professional describers, showed that VideoA11y descriptions outperform novice human annotations and are comparable to trained human annotations in clarity, accuracy, objectivity, descriptiveness, and user satisfaction. We evaluated models on VideoA11y-40K using both standard and custom metrics, demonstrating that MLLMs fine-tuned on this dataset produce high-quality accessible descriptions. Code and dataset are available at https://people-robots.github.io/VideoA11y.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold immense promise as assistive technologies for the blind and visually impaired (BVI) community. However, we identify a critical failure mode that undermines their trustworthiness in real-world applications. We introduce the Escalator Problem -- the inability of state-of-the-art models to perceive an escalator's direction of travel -- as a canonical example of a deeper limitation we term Implicit Motion Blindness. This blindness stems from the dominant frame-sampling paradigm in video understanding, which, by treating videos as discrete sequences of static images, fundamentally struggles to perceive continuous, low-signal motion. As a position paper, our contribution is not a new model but rather to: (I) formally articulate this blind spot, (II) analyze its implications for user trust, and (III) issue a call to action. We advocate for a paradigm shift from purely semantic recognition towards robust physical perception and urge the development of new, human-centered benchmarks that prioritize safety, reliability, and the genuine needs of users in dynamic environments.

As scaling up training data has significantly improved the general multimodal capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), they still suffer from the hallucination issue, generating text that is inconsistent with the visual input. This phenomenon motivates us to systematically investigate the role of training data in hallucination. We introduce a new benchmark, POPEv2, which consists of counterfactual images collected from the training data of LVLMs with certain objects masked. Through comprehensive evaluation on POPEv2, we find that current LVLMs suffer from training bias: they fail to fully leverage their training data and hallucinate more frequently on images seen during training. Specifically, they perform poorly on counterfactual images, often incorrectly answering ``Yes'' to questions about masked objects. To understand this issue, we conduct probing experiments on the models' internal components, revealing that this training bias is primarily located in the language modeling (LM) head. Based on these findings, we propose Obliviate, an efficient and lightweight unlearning method designed to mitigate object hallucination via training bias unlearning. Obliviate identifies the discrepancy between ground-truth labels and model outputs on the training data as a proxy for bias and adopts a parameter- and data-efficient fine-tuning strategy that only updates the LM head. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. While only reusing the training data and updating approximately 2\% of the parameters, Obliviate significantly reduces hallucination across both discriminative and generative tasks. Furthermore, it demonstrates strong scalability with respect to both model size (2B to 72B) and training data volume, and exhibits promising generalization to hallucination types beyond object-level hallucination. Our code and data will be publicly released.

Prompting and steering techniques are well established in general-purpose generative AI, yet assistive visual question answering (VQA) tools for blind users still follow rigid interaction patterns with limited opportunities for customization. User control can be helpful when system responses are misaligned with their goals and contexts, a gap that becomes especially consequential for blind users that may rely on these systems for access. We invite 11 blind users to customize their interactions with a real-world conversational VQA system. Drawing on 418 interactions, reflections, and post-study interviews, we analyze prompting-based techniques participants adopted, including those introduced in the study and those developed independently in real-world settings. VQA interactions were often lengthy: participants averaged 3 turns, sometimes up to 21, with input text typically tenfold shorter than the responses they heard. Built on state-of-the-art LLMs, the system lacked verbosity controls, was limited in estimating distance in space and time, relied on inaccessible image framing, and offered little to no camera guidance. We discuss how customization techniques such as prompt engineering can help participants work around these limitations. Alongside a new publicly available dataset, we offer insights for interaction design at both query and system levels.

While an important problem in the vision community is to design algorithms that can automatically caption images, few publicly-available datasets for algorithm development directly address the interests of real users. Observing that people who are blind have relied on (human-based) image captioning services to learn about images they take for nearly a decade, we introduce the first image captioning dataset to represent this real use case. This new dataset, which we call VizWiz-Captions, consists of over 39,000 images originating from people who are blind that are each paired with five captions. We analyze this dataset to (1) characterize the typical captions, (2) characterize the diversity of content found in the images, and (3) compare its content to that found in eight popular vision datasets. We also analyze modern image captioning algorithms to identify what makes this new dataset challenging for the vision community. We publicly-share the dataset with captioning challenge instructions at https://vizwiz.org

With the introduction of data protection and privacy regulations, it has become crucial to remove the lineage of data on demand from a machine learning (ML) model. In the last few years, there have been notable developments in machine unlearning to remove the information of certain training data efficiently and effectively from ML models. In this work, we explore unlearning for the regression problem, particularly in deep learning models. Unlearning in classification and simple linear regression has been considerably investigated. However, unlearning in deep regression models largely remains an untouched problem till now. In this work, we introduce deep regression unlearning methods that generalize well and are robust to privacy attacks. We propose the Blindspot unlearning method which uses a novel weight optimization process. A randomly initialized model, partially exposed to the retain samples and a copy of the original model are used together to selectively imprint knowledge about the data that we wish to keep and scrub off the information of the data we wish to forget. We also propose a Gaussian fine tuning method for regression unlearning. The existing unlearning metrics for classification are not directly applicable to regression unlearning. Therefore, we adapt these metrics for the regression setting. We conduct regression unlearning experiments for computer vision, natural language processing and forecasting applications. Our methods show excellent performance for all these datasets across all the metrics. Source code: https://github.com/ayu987/deep-regression-unlearning

This paper describes the University of Sydney& JD's joint submission of the IWSLT 2021 low resource speech translation task. We participated in the Swahili-English direction and got the best scareBLEU (25.3) score among all the participants. Our constrained system is based on a pipeline framework, i.e. ASR and NMT. We trained our models with the officially provided ASR and MT datasets. The ASR system is based on the open-sourced tool Kaldi and this work mainly explores how to make the most of the NMT models. To reduce the punctuation errors generated by the ASR model, we employ our previous work SlotRefine to train a punctuation correction model. To achieve better translation performance, we explored the most recent effective strategies, including back translation, knowledge distillation, multi-feature reranking and transductive finetuning. For model structure, we tried auto-regressive and non-autoregressive models, respectively. In addition, we proposed two novel pre-train approaches, i.e. de-noising training and bidirectional training to fully exploit the data. Extensive experiments show that adding the above techniques consistently improves the BLEU scores, and the final submission system outperforms the baseline (Transformer ensemble model trained with the original parallel data) by approximately 10.8 BLEU score, achieving the SOTA performance.

In recent decades, several assistive technologies have been developed for visually impaired and blind (VIB) individuals to improve their ability to navigate independently and safely. At the same time, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) techniques have become sufficiently robust and efficient to be adopted in the development of these assistive technologies. In this paper, we first report the results of an anonymous worldwide survey conducted with VIB people to understand their experiences, needs, and challenges in navigation, differentiating our approach from prior work that often has a limited geographic scope and focuses on specific challenges. We then present a systematic literature review of recent studies on SLAM-based solutions for VIB people. This review explores various SLAM techniques employed in this context. We discuss the advantages and limitations of these techniques for VIB navigation. Moreover, we examined a range of challenging situations addressed in the studies included in this review. We explain how SLAM-based solutions offer potential to improve the ability of visually impaired individuals to navigate effectively. Finally, we present future opportunities and challenges in this domain.

Visually Impaired Assistance (VIA) aims to automatically help the visually impaired (VI) handle daily activities. The advancement of VIA primarily depends on developments in Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), both of which exhibit cutting-edge paradigms with large models (LMs). Furthermore, LMs have shown exceptional multimodal abilities to tackle challenging physically-grounded tasks such as embodied robots. To investigate the potential and limitations of state-of-the-art (SOTA) LMs' capabilities in VIA applications, we present an extensive study for the task of VIA with LMs (VIALM). In this task, given an image illustrating the physical environments and a linguistic request from a VI user, VIALM aims to output step-by-step guidance to assist the VI user in fulfilling the request grounded in the environment. The study consists of a survey reviewing recent LM research and benchmark experiments examining selected LMs' capabilities in VIA. The results indicate that while LMs can potentially benefit VIA, their output cannot be well environment-grounded (i.e., 25.7% GPT-4's responses) and lacks fine-grained guidance (i.e., 32.1% GPT-4's responses).

Visual impairment affects the ability of people to live a life like normal people. Such people face challenges in performing activities of daily living, such as reading, writing, traveling and participating in social gatherings. Many traditional approaches are available to help visually impaired people; however, these are limited in obtaining contextually rich environmental information necessary for independent living. In order to overcome this limitation, this paper introduces a novel wearable vision assistance system that has a hat-mounted camera connected to a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (8GB RAM) with artificial intelligence (AI) technology to deliver real-time feedback to a user through a sound beep mechanism. The key features of this system include a user-friendly procedure for the recognition of new people or objects through a one-click process that allows users to add data on new individuals and objects for later detection, enhancing the accuracy of the recognition over time. The system provides detailed descriptions of objects in the user's environment using a large vision language model (LVLM). In addition, it incorporates a distance sensor that activates a beeping sound using a buzzer as soon as the user is about to collide with an object, helping to ensure safety while navigating their environment. A comprehensive evaluation is carried out to evaluate the proposed AI-based solution against traditional support techniques. Comparative analysis shows that the proposed solution with its innovative combination of hardware and AI (including LVLMs with IoT), is a significant advancement in assistive technology that aims to solve the major issues faced by the community of visually impaired people

This paper explores the in-context learning capabilities of masked language models, challenging the common view that this ability does not 'emerge' in them. We present an embarrassingly simple inference technique that enables DeBERTa to operate as a generative model without any additional training. Our findings demonstrate that DeBERTa can match and even surpass GPT-3, its contemporary that famously introduced the paradigm of in-context learning. The comparative analysis reveals that the masked and causal language models behave very differently, as they clearly outperform each other on different categories of tasks. This suggests that there is great potential for a hybrid training approach that takes advantage of the strengths of both training objectives.

This paper provides a simplification on OpenVision's architecture and loss design for enhancing its training efficiency. Following the prior vision-language pretraining works CapPa and AIMv2, as well as modern multimodal designs like LLaVA, our changes are straightforward: we remove the text encoder (and therefore the contrastive loss), retaining only the captioning loss as a purely generative training signal. We name this new version OpenVision 2. The initial results are promising: despite this simplification, OpenVision 2 competitively matches the original model's performance on a broad set of multimodal benchmarks while substantially cutting both training time and memory consumption. For example, with ViT-L/14, it reduces training time by about 1.5x (from 83h to 57h), and memory usage by about 1.8x (from 24.5GB to 13.8GB, equivalently allowing the maximum batch size to grow from 2k to 8k). This superior training efficiency also allows us to scale far beyond the largest vision encoder used in OpenVision, reaching more than 1 billion parameters. We hold a strong belief that this lightweight, generative-only paradigm is compelling for future vision encoder development in multimodal foundation models.

Mobility remains a significant challenge for the 2.2 billion people worldwide affected by blindness and low vision (BLV), with 7% of visually impaired individuals experiencing falls at least once a month. While recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer promising opportunities for BLV assistance, their development has been hindered by limited datasets. This limitation stems from the fact that BLV-aware annotation requires specialized domain knowledge and intensive labor. To address this gap, we introduce GuideDog, a novel accessibility-aware guide dataset containing 22K image-description pairs (including 2K human-annotated pairs) that capture diverse real-world scenes from a pedestrian's viewpoint. Our approach shifts the annotation burden from generation to verification through a collaborative human-AI framework grounded in established accessibility standards, significantly improving efficiency while maintaining high-quality annotations. We also develop GuideDogQA, a subset of 818 samples featuring multiple-choice questions designed to evaluate fine-grained visual perception capabilities, specifically object recognition and relative depth perception. Our experimental results highlight the importance of accurate spatial understanding for effective BLV guidance. GuideDog and GuideDogQA will advance research in MLLM-based assistive technologies for BLV individuals while contributing to broader applications in understanding egocentric scenes for robotics and augmented reality. The code and dataset will be publicly available.

Presenters commonly use slides as visual aids for informative talks. When presenters fail to verbally describe the content on their slides, blind and visually impaired audience members lose access to necessary content, making the presentation difficult to follow. Our analysis of 90 presentation videos revealed that 72% of 610 visual elements (e.g., images, text) were insufficiently described. To help presenters create accessible presentations, we introduce Presentation A11y, a system that provides real-time and post-presentation accessibility feedback. Our system analyzes visual elements on the slide and the transcript of the verbal presentation to provide element-level feedback on what visual content needs to be further described or even removed. Presenters using our system with their own slide-based presentations described more of the content on their slides, and identified 3.26 times more accessibility problems to fix after the talk than when using a traditional slide-based presentation interface. Integrating accessibility feedback into content creation tools will improve the accessibility of informational content for all.

This study addresses the issue observed in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs), where excessive attention on a few image tokens, referred to as blind tokens, leads to hallucinatory responses in tasks requiring fine-grained understanding of visual objects. We found that tokens receiving lower attention weights often hold essential information for identifying nuanced object details -- ranging from merely recognizing object existence to identifying their attributes (color, position, etc.) and understanding their relationships. To counteract the over-emphasis on blind tokens and to accurately respond to user queries, we introduce a technique called Attentional Vision Calibration (AVC). During the decoding phase, AVC identifies blind tokens by analyzing the image-related attention distribution. It then dynamically adjusts the logits for the next token prediction by contrasting the logits conditioned on the original visual tokens with those conditioned on the blind tokens. This effectively lowers the dependency on blind tokens and promotes a more balanced consideration of all tokens. We validate AVC on benchmarks such as POPE, MME, and AMBER, where it consistently outperforms existing decoding techniques in mitigating object hallucinations in LVLMs.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly deployed across various industries, concerns regarding their reliability, particularly due to hallucinations-outputs that are factually inaccurate or irrelevant to user input-have grown. Our research investigates the relationship between the training process and the emergence of hallucinations to address a key gap in existing research that focuses primarily on post hoc detection and mitigation strategies. Using models from the Pythia suite (70M-12B parameters) and several hallucination detection metrics, we analyze hallucination trends throughout training and explore LLM internal dynamics. We introduce SEnsitive Neuron Dropout (SeND), a novel training protocol designed to mitigate hallucinations by reducing variance during training. SeND achieves this by deterministically dropping neurons with significant variability on a dataset, referred to as Sensitive Neurons. In addition, we develop an unsupervised hallucination detection metric, Efficient EigenScore (EES), which approximates the traditional EigenScore in 2x speed. This efficient metric is integrated into our protocol, allowing SeND to be both computationally scalable and effective at reducing hallucinations. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach improves LLM reliability at test time by up to 40% compared to normal training while also providing an efficient method to improve factual accuracy when adapting LLMs to domains such as Wikipedia and Medical datasets.

Neural networks often suffer from catastrophic interference (CI): performance on previously learned tasks drops off significantly when learning a new task. This contrasts strongly with humans, who can sequentially learn new tasks without appreciably forgetting previous tasks. Prior work has explored various techniques for mitigating CI such as regularization, rehearsal, generative replay, and distillation methods. The current work takes a different approach, one guided by cognitive science research showing that in naturalistic environments, the probability of encountering a task decreases as a power-law of the time since it was last performed. We argue that a realistic evaluation of techniques for the mitigation of CI should be performed in simulated naturalistic learning environments. Thus, we evaluate the extent of mitigation of CI when training simple rehearsal-based methods in power-law environments similar to the ones humans face. Our work explores this novel rehearsal-based approach for a domain-incremental task: learning permutations in the MNIST task. We compare our rehearsal environment with other baselines to show its efficacy in promoting continual learning. Additionally, we investigate whether this environment shows forward facilitation, i.e., faster learning of later tasks. Next, we explore the robustness of our learning environment to the number of tasks, model size, and amount of data rehearsed after each task. Notably, our results show that the performance is comparable or superior to that of models trained using popular regularization methods and also to rehearsals in non-power-law environments. The benefits of this training paradigm include simplicity and the lack of a need for extra neural circuitry. In addition, because our method is orthogonal to other methods, future research can combine training in power-law environments with other continual learning mechanisms.

Though advanced in understanding visual information with human languages, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) still suffer from multimodal hallucinations. A natural concern is that during multimodal interaction, the generated hallucinations could influence the LVLMs' subsequent generation. Thus, we raise a question: When presented with a query relevant to the previously generated hallucination, will LVLMs be misled and respond incorrectly, even though the ground visual information exists? To answer this, we propose a framework called MMHalSnowball to evaluate LVLMs' behaviors when encountering generated hallucinations, where LVLMs are required to answer specific visual questions within a curated hallucinatory conversation. Crucially, our experiment shows that the performance of open-source LVLMs drops by at least 31%, indicating that LVLMs are prone to accept the generated hallucinations and make false claims that they would not have supported without distractions. We term this phenomenon Multimodal Hallucination Snowballing. To mitigate this, we further propose a training-free method called Residual Visual Decoding, where we revise the output distribution of LVLMs with the one derived from the residual visual input, providing models with direct access to the visual information. Experiments show that our method can mitigate more than 24% of the snowballed multimodal hallucination while maintaining capabilities.

Visual search is a ubiquitous and often challenging daily task, exemplified by looking for the car keys at home or a friend in a crowd. An intriguing property of some classical search tasks is an asymmetry such that finding a target A among distractors B can be easier than finding B among A. To elucidate the mechanisms responsible for asymmetry in visual search, we propose a computational model that takes a target and a search image as inputs and produces a sequence of eye movements until the target is found. The model integrates eccentricity-dependent visual recognition with target-dependent top-down cues. We compared the model against human behavior in six paradigmatic search tasks that show asymmetry in humans. Without prior exposure to the stimuli or task-specific training, the model provides a plausible mechanism for search asymmetry. We hypothesized that the polarity of search asymmetry arises from experience with the natural environment. We tested this hypothesis by training the model on augmented versions of ImageNet where the biases of natural images were either removed or reversed. The polarity of search asymmetry disappeared or was altered depending on the training protocol. This study highlights how classical perceptual properties can emerge in neural network models, without the need for task-specific training, but rather as a consequence of the statistical properties of the developmental diet fed to the model. All source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/kreimanlab/VisualSearchAsymmetry.

The recent success of reinforcement learning (RL) in large reasoning models has inspired the growing adoption of RL for post-training Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance their visual reasoning capabilities. Although many studies have reported improved performance, it remains unclear whether RL training truly enables models to learn from visual information. In this work, we propose the Hallucination-as-Cue Framework, an analytical framework designed to investigate the effects of RL-based post-training on multimodal reasoning models from the perspective of model hallucination. Specifically, we introduce hallucination-inductive, modality-specific corruptions that remove or replace essential information required to derive correct answers, thereby forcing the model to reason by hallucination. By applying these corruptions during both training and evaluation, our framework provides a unique perspective for diagnosing RL training dynamics and understanding the intrinsic properties of datasets. Through extensive experiments and analyses across multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks, we reveal that the role of model hallucination for RL-training is more significant than previously recognized. For instance, we find that RL post-training under purely hallucination-inductive settings can still significantly improve models' reasoning performance, and in some cases even outperform standard training. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about MLLM reasoning training and motivate the development of more modality-aware RL-based training designs.

In this paper, we introduce HEADS-UP, the first egocentric dataset collected from head-mounted cameras, designed specifically for trajectory prediction in blind assistance systems. With the growing population of blind and visually impaired individuals, the need for intelligent assistive tools that provide real-time warnings about potential collisions with dynamic obstacles is becoming critical. These systems rely on algorithms capable of predicting the trajectories of moving objects, such as pedestrians, to issue timely hazard alerts. However, existing datasets fail to capture the necessary information from the perspective of a blind individual. To address this gap, HEADS-UP offers a novel dataset focused on trajectory prediction in this context. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a semi-local trajectory prediction approach to assess collision risks between blind individuals and pedestrians in dynamic environments. Unlike conventional methods that separately predict the trajectories of both the blind individual (ego agent) and pedestrians, our approach operates within a semi-local coordinate system, a rotated version of the camera's coordinate system, facilitating the prediction process. We validate our method on the HEADS-UP dataset and implement the proposed solution in ROS, performing real-time tests on an NVIDIA Jetson GPU through a user study. Results from both dataset evaluations and live tests demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our approach.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable performance on many visual-language tasks. However, these models still suffer from multimodal hallucination, which means the generation of objects or content that violates the images. Many existing work detects hallucination by directly judging whether an object exists in an image, overlooking the association between the object and semantics. To address this issue, we propose Hierarchical Feedback Learning with Vision-enhanced Penalty Decoding (HELPD). This framework incorporates hallucination feedback at both object and sentence semantic levels. Remarkably, even with a marginal degree of training, this approach can alleviate over 15% of hallucination. Simultaneously, HELPD penalizes the output logits according to the image attention window to avoid being overly affected by generated text. HELPD can be seamlessly integrated with any LVLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework yields favorable results across multiple hallucination benchmarks. It effectively mitigates hallucination for different LVLMs and concurrently improves their text generation quality.

In this paper, we have shown the improvement of English to Bharti Braille machine translation system. We have shown how we can improve a baseline NMT model by adding some linguistic knowledge to it. This was done for five language pairs where English sentences were translated into five Indian languages and then subsequently to corresponding Bharti Braille. This has been demonstrated by adding a sub-module for translating multi-word expressions. The approach shows promising results as across language pairs, we could see improvement in the quality of NMT outputs. The least improvement was observed in English-Nepali language pair with 22.08% and the most improvement was observed in the English-Hindi language pair with 23.30%.

Recent interest in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for practical applications is moderated by the significant challenge of hallucination or the inconsistency between the factual information and the generated text. In this paper, we first perform an in-depth analysis of hallucinations and discover several novel insights about how and when LVLMs hallucinate. From our analysis, we show that: (1) The community's efforts have been primarily targeted towards reducing hallucinations related to visual recognition (VR) prompts (e.g., prompts that only require describing the image), thereby ignoring hallucinations for cognitive prompts (e.g., prompts that require additional skills like reasoning on contents of the image). (2) LVLMs lack visual perception, i.e., they can see but not necessarily understand or perceive the input image. We analyze responses to cognitive prompts and show that LVLMs hallucinate due to a perception gap: although LVLMs accurately recognize visual elements in the input image and possess sufficient cognitive skills, they struggle to respond accurately and hallucinate. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose Visual Description Grounded Decoding (VDGD), a simple, robust, and training-free method for alleviating hallucinations. Specifically, we first describe the image and add it as a prefix to the instruction. Next, during auto-regressive decoding, we sample from the plausible candidates according to their KL-Divergence (KLD) to the description, where lower KLD is given higher preference. Experimental results on several benchmarks and LVLMs show that VDGD improves significantly over other baselines in reducing hallucinations. We also propose VaLLu, a benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of the cognitive capabilities of LVLMs.

Pre-trained LLMs that are further trained with image data perform well on vision-language tasks. While adding images during a second training phase effectively unlocks this capability, it is unclear how much of a gain or loss this two-step pipeline gives over VLMs which integrate images earlier into the training process. To investigate this, we train models spanning various datasets, scales, image-text ratios, and amount of pre-training done before introducing vision tokens. We then fine-tune these models and evaluate their downstream performance on a suite of vision-language and text-only tasks. We find that pre-training with a mixture of image and text data allows models to perform better on vision-language tasks while maintaining strong performance on text-only evaluations. On an average of 6 diverse tasks, we find that for a 1B model, introducing visual tokens 80% of the way through pre-training results in a 2% average improvement over introducing visual tokens to a fully pre-trained model.

Machine unlearning is a promising paradigm for removing unwanted data samples from a trained model, towards ensuring compliance with privacy regulations and limiting harmful biases. Although unlearning has been shown in, e.g., classification and recommendation systems, its potential in medical image-to-image translation, specifically in image recon-struction, has not been thoroughly investigated. This paper shows that machine unlearning is possible in MRI tasks and has the potential to benefit for bias removal. We set up a protocol to study how much shared knowledge exists between datasets of different organs, allowing us to effectively quantify the effect of unlearning. Our study reveals that combining training data can lead to hallucinations and reduced image quality in the reconstructed data. We use unlearning to remove hallucinations as a proxy exemplar of undesired data removal. Indeed, we show that machine unlearning is possible without full retraining. Furthermore, our observations indicate that maintaining high performance is feasible even when using only a subset of retain data. We have made our code publicly accessible.

This work introduces the first framework for reconstructing surgical dialogue from unstructured real-world recordings, which is crucial for characterizing teaching tasks. In surgical training, the formative verbal feedback that trainers provide to trainees during live surgeries is crucial for ensuring safety, correcting behavior immediately, and facilitating long-term skill acquisition. However, analyzing and quantifying this feedback is challenging due to its unstructured and specialized nature. Automated systems are essential to manage these complexities at scale, allowing for the creation of structured datasets that enhance feedback analysis and improve surgical education. Our framework integrates voice activity detection, speaker diarization, and automated speech recaognition, with a novel enhancement that 1) removes hallucinations (non-existent utterances generated during speech recognition fueled by noise in the operating room) and 2) separates speech from trainers and trainees using few-shot voice samples. These aspects are vital for reconstructing accurate surgical dialogues and understanding the roles of operating room participants. Using data from 33 real-world surgeries, we demonstrated the system's capability to reconstruct surgical teaching dialogues and detect feedback instances effectively (F1 score of 0.79+/-0.07). Moreover, our hallucination removal step improves feedback detection performance by ~14%. Evaluation on downstream clinically relevant tasks of predicting Behavioral Adjustment of trainees and classifying Technical feedback, showed performances comparable to manual annotations with F1 scores of 0.82+/0.03 and 0.81+/0.03 respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of our framework in supporting clinically relevant tasks and improving over manual methods.

We aim to improve the performance of regressing hand keypoints and segmenting pixel-level hand masks under new imaging conditions (e.g., outdoors) when we only have labeled images taken under very different conditions (e.g., indoors). In the real world, it is important that the model trained for both tasks works under various imaging conditions. However, their variation covered by existing labeled hand datasets is limited. Thus, it is necessary to adapt the model trained on the labeled images (source) to unlabeled images (target) with unseen imaging conditions. While self-training domain adaptation methods (i.e., learning from the unlabeled target images in a self-supervised manner) have been developed for both tasks, their training may degrade performance when the predictions on the target images are noisy. To avoid this, it is crucial to assign a low importance (confidence) weight to the noisy predictions during self-training. In this paper, we propose to utilize the divergence of two predictions to estimate the confidence of the target image for both tasks. These predictions are given from two separate networks, and their divergence helps identify the noisy predictions. To integrate our proposed confidence estimation into self-training, we propose a teacher-student framework where the two networks (teachers) provide supervision to a network (student) for self-training, and the teachers are learned from the student by knowledge distillation. Our experiments show its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in adaptation settings with different lighting, grasping objects, backgrounds, and camera viewpoints. Our method improves by 4% the multi-task score on HO3D compared to the latest adversarial adaptation method. We also validate our method on Ego4D, egocentric videos with rapid changes in imaging conditions outdoors.

Machine unlearning, the ability for a machine learning model to forget, is becoming increasingly important to comply with data privacy regulations, as well as to remove harmful, manipulated, or outdated information. The key challenge lies in forgetting specific information while protecting model performance on the remaining data. While current state-of-the-art methods perform well, they typically require some level of retraining over the retained data, in order to protect or restore model performance. This adds computational overhead and mandates that the training data remain available and accessible, which may not be feasible. In contrast, other methods employ a retrain-free paradigm, however, these approaches are prohibitively computationally expensive and do not perform on par with their retrain-based counterparts. We present Selective Synaptic Dampening (SSD), a novel two-step, post hoc, retrain-free approach to machine unlearning which is fast, performant, and does not require long-term storage of the training data. First, SSD uses the Fisher information matrix of the training and forgetting data to select parameters that are disproportionately important to the forget set. Second, SSD induces forgetting by dampening these parameters proportional to their relative importance to the forget set with respect to the wider training data. We evaluate our method against several existing unlearning methods in a range of experiments using ResNet18 and Vision Transformer. Results show that the performance of SSD is competitive with retrain-based post hoc methods, demonstrating the viability of retrain-free post hoc unlearning approaches.

Currently, vision encoder models like Vision Transformers (ViTs) typically excel at image recognition tasks but cannot simultaneously support text recognition like human visual recognition. To address this limitation, we propose UNIT, a novel training framework aimed at UNifying Image and Text recognition within a single model. Starting with a vision encoder pre-trained with image recognition tasks, UNIT introduces a lightweight language decoder for predicting text outputs and a lightweight vision decoder to prevent catastrophic forgetting of the original image encoding capabilities. The training process comprises two stages: intra-scale pretraining and inter-scale finetuning. During intra-scale pretraining, UNIT learns unified representations from multi-scale inputs, where images and documents are at their commonly used resolution, to enable fundamental recognition capability. In the inter-scale finetuning stage, the model introduces scale-exchanged data, featuring images and documents at resolutions different from the most commonly used ones, to enhance its scale robustness. Notably, UNIT retains the original vision encoder architecture, making it cost-free in terms of inference and deployment. Experiments across multiple benchmarks confirm that our method significantly outperforms existing methods on document-related tasks (e.g., OCR and DocQA) while maintaining the performances on natural images, demonstrating its ability to substantially enhance text recognition without compromising its core image recognition capabilities.

For blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals, digital math communication is uniquely difficult due to the lack of accessible tools. Currently, the state of the art is either code-based, like LaTeX, or WYSIWYG, like visual editors. However, both paradigms view math communication as primarily a visual typesetting problem, and may be accessible but difficult to use. In this paper, we present an equation editor that is built from the ground up with BLV accessibility in mind. Specifically, we notice that two of the biggest barriers with current technology are the high cognitive load and the lack of spatial relationships. Thus, we build an editor that uses spatial audio cues, muscle memory, tones, and more intuitive navigation to properly contextualize math equations. We discuss how this new paradigm can enable new levels of math communication, engagement, and literacy. Finally, we discuss natural next steps.

Masked image modeling (MIM) has shown great promise for self-supervised learning (SSL) yet been criticized for learning inefficiency. We believe the insufficient utilization of training signals should be responsible. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a conceptually simple yet learning-efficient MIM training scheme, termed Disjoint Masking with Joint Distillation (DMJD). For disjoint masking (DM), we sequentially sample multiple masked views per image in a mini-batch with the disjoint regulation to raise the usage of tokens for reconstruction in each image while keeping the masking rate of each view. For joint distillation (JD), we adopt a dual branch architecture to respectively predict invisible (masked) and visible (unmasked) tokens with superior learning targets. Rooting in orthogonal perspectives for training efficiency improvement, DM and JD cooperatively accelerate the training convergence yet not sacrificing the model generalization ability. Concretely, DM can train ViT with half of the effective training epochs (3.7 times less time-consuming) to report competitive performance. With JD, our DMJD clearly improves the linear probing classification accuracy over ConvMAE by 5.8%. On fine-grained downstream tasks like semantic segmentation, object detection, etc., our DMJD also presents superior generalization compared with state-of-the-art SSL methods. The code and model will be made public at https://github.com/mx-mark/DMJD.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have made substantial progress in integrating large language models (LLMs) with visual inputs, enabling advanced multimodal reasoning. Despite their success, a persistent challenge is hallucination-where generated text fails to accurately reflect visual content-undermining both accuracy and reliability. Existing methods focus on alignment training or decoding refinements but primarily address symptoms at the generation stage without probing the underlying causes. In this work, we investigate the internal mechanisms driving hallucination in LVLMs, with an emphasis on the multi-head attention module. Specifically, we introduce Vision-aware Head Divergence (VHD), a metric that quantifies the sensitivity of attention head outputs to visual context. Based on this, our findings reveal the presence of vision-aware attention heads that are more attuned to visual information; however, the model's overreliance on its prior language patterns is closely related to hallucinations. Building on these insights, we propose Vision-aware Head Reinforcement (VHR), a training-free approach to mitigate hallucination by enhancing the role of vision-aware attention heads. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in mitigating hallucinations, while maintaining high efficiency with negligible additional time overhead.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been shown to be blind, often underutilizing their visual inputs even on tasks that require visual reasoning. In this work, we demonstrate that VLMs are selectively blind. They modulate the amount of attention applied to visual inputs based on linguistic framing even when alternative framings demand identical visual reasoning. Using visual attention as a probe, we quantify how framing alters both the amount and distribution of attention over the image. Constrained framings, such as multiple choice and yes/no, induce substantially lower attention to image context compared to open-ended, reduce focus on task-relevant regions, and shift attention towards uninformative tokens. We further demonstrate that this attention misallocation is the principal cause of degraded accuracy and cross-framing inconsistency. Building on this mechanistic insight, we introduce a lightweight prompt-tuning method using learnable tokens that encourages the robust, visually grounded attention patterns observed in open-ended settings, improving visual grounding and improving performance across framings.

The goal of dynamic scene deblurring is to remove the motion blur in a given image. Typical learning-based approaches implement their solutions by minimizing the L1 or L2 distance between the output and the reference sharp image. Recent attempts adopt visual recognition features in training to improve the perceptual quality. However, those features are primarily designed to capture high-level contexts rather than low-level structures such as blurriness. Instead, we propose a more direct way to make images sharper by exploiting the inverse task of deblurring, namely, reblurring. Reblurring amplifies the remaining blur to rebuild the original blur, however, a well-deblurred clean image with zero-magnitude blur is hard to reblur. Thus, we design two types of reblurring loss functions for better deblurring. The supervised reblurring loss at training stage compares the amplified blur between the deblurred and the sharp images. The self-supervised reblurring loss at inference stage inspects if there noticeable blur remains in the deblurred. Our experimental results on large-scale benchmarks and real images demonstrate the effectiveness of the reblurring losses in improving the perceptual quality of the deblurred images in terms of NIQE and LPIPS scores as well as visual sharpness.

Zero-shot image captioning (IC) without well-paired image-text data can be divided into two categories, training-free and text-only-training. Generally, these two types of methods realize zero-shot IC by integrating pretrained vision-language models like CLIP for image-text similarity evaluation and a pre-trained language model (LM) for caption generation. The main difference between them is whether using a textual corpus to train the LM. Though achieving attractive performance w.r.t. some metrics, existing methods often exhibit some common drawbacks. Training-free methods tend to produce hallucinations, while text-only-training often lose generalization capability. To move forward, in this paper, we propose a novel Memory-Augmented zero-shot image Captioning framework (MeaCap). Specifically, equipped with a textual memory, we introduce a retrieve-then-filter module to get key concepts that are highly related to the image. By deploying our proposed memory-augmented visual-related fusion score in a keywords-to-sentence LM, MeaCap can generate concept-centered captions that keep high consistency with the image with fewer hallucinations and more world-knowledge. The framework of MeaCap achieves the state-of-the-art performance on a series of zero-shot IC settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/joeyz0z/MeaCap.

The training of modern large language models (LLMs) takes place in a regime where most training examples are seen only a few times by the model during the course of training. What does a model remember about such examples seen only a few times during training and how long does that memory persist in the face of continuous training with new examples? Here, we investigate these questions through simple recognition, recall, and retention experiments with LLMs. In recognition experiments, we ask if the model can distinguish the seen example from a novel example; in recall experiments, we ask if the model can correctly recall the seen example when cued by a part of it; and in retention experiments, we periodically probe the model's memory for the original examples as the model is trained continuously with new examples. We find that a single exposure is generally sufficient for a model to achieve near perfect accuracy even in very challenging recognition experiments. We estimate that the recognition performance of even small language models easily exceeds human recognition performance reported in similar experiments with humans (Shepard, 1967). Achieving near perfect recall takes more exposures, but most models can do it in just 3 exposures. The flip side of this remarkable capacity for fast learning is that precise memories are quickly overwritten: recall performance for the original examples drops steeply over the first 10 training updates with new examples, followed by a more gradual decline. Even after 100K updates, however, some of the original examples are still recalled near perfectly. A qualitatively similar retention pattern has been observed in human long-term memory retention studies before (Bahrick, 1984). Finally, recognition is much more robust to interference than recall and memory for natural language sentences is generally superior to memory for stimuli without structure.

Machine Translation (MT) is undergoing a paradigm shift, with systems based on fine-tuned large language models (LLM) becoming increasingly competitive with traditional encoder-decoder models trained specifically for translation tasks. However, LLM-based systems are at a higher risk of generating hallucinations, which can severely undermine user's trust and safety. Most prior research on hallucination mitigation focuses on traditional MT models, with solutions that involve post-hoc mitigation - detecting hallucinated translations and re-translating them. While effective, this approach introduces additional complexity in deploying extra tools in production and also increases latency. To address these limitations, we propose a method that intrinsically learns to mitigate hallucinations during the model training phase. Specifically, we introduce a data creation framework to generate hallucination focused preference datasets. Fine-tuning LLMs on these preference datasets reduces the hallucination rate by an average of 96% across five language pairs, while preserving overall translation quality. In a zero-shot setting our approach reduces hallucinations by 89% on an average across three unseen target languages.

As neural networks grow larger and more complex and data-hungry, training costs are skyrocketing. Especially when lifelong learning is necessary, such as in recommender systems or self-driving cars, this might soon become unsustainable. In this study, we present the first optical co-processor able to accelerate the training phase of digitally-implemented neural networks. We rely on direct feedback alignment as an alternative to backpropagation, and perform the error projection step optically. Leveraging the optical random projections delivered by our co-processor, we demonstrate its use to train a neural network for handwritten digits recognition.

In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of pre-training for visuo-motor control tasks. We revisit a simple Learning-from-Scratch (LfS) baseline that incorporates data augmentation and a shallow ConvNet, and find that this baseline is surprisingly competitive with recent approaches (PVR, MVP, R3M) that leverage frozen visual representations trained on large-scale vision datasets -- across a variety of algorithms, task domains, and metrics in simulation and on a real robot. Our results demonstrate that these methods are hindered by a significant domain gap between the pre-training datasets and current benchmarks for visuo-motor control, which is alleviated by finetuning. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for future research in pre-training for control and hope that our simple yet strong baseline will aid in accurately benchmarking progress in this area.

Adversarial training is a practical approach for improving the robustness of deep neural networks against adversarial attacks. Although bringing reliable robustness, the performance toward clean examples is negatively affected after adversarial training, which means a trade-off exists between accuracy and robustness. Recently, some studies have tried to use knowledge distillation methods in adversarial training, achieving competitive performance in improving the robustness but the accuracy for clean samples is still limited. In this paper, to mitigate the accuracy-robustness trade-off, we introduce the Multi-Teacher Adversarial Robustness Distillation (MTARD) to guide the model's adversarial training process by applying a strong clean teacher and a strong robust teacher to handle the clean examples and adversarial examples, respectively. During the optimization process, to ensure that different teachers show similar knowledge scales, we design the Entropy-Based Balance algorithm to adjust the teacher's temperature and keep the teachers' information entropy consistent. Besides, to ensure that the student has a relatively consistent learning speed from multiple teachers, we propose the Normalization Loss Balance algorithm to adjust the learning weights of different types of knowledge. A series of experiments conducted on public datasets demonstrate that MTARD outperforms the state-of-the-art adversarial training and distillation methods against various adversarial attacks.

Recently, multi-modal content generation has attracted lots of attention from researchers by investigating the utilization of visual instruction tuning based on large language models (LLMs). To enhance the performance and generalization ability of such LLMs, the practice of distilling knowledge from pretrained multi-modal models (a.k.a. teachers) to more compact multi-modal LLMs (students) has gained considerable interest. However, the prevailing paradigm of instructiontuning in multi-modal LLMs knowledge distillation is resource-intensive and unidirectional, neglecting the potential for mutual feedback between the student and teacher models. Thus, we propose an innovative Competitive Multi-modal Distillation framework (CoMD), which captures bidirectional feedback between teacher and student models and continually updates the multi-modal capabilities that the student model has learned. It comprises two stages: multi-modal pre-training and multi-modal competitive distillation. The first stage pre-trains the student model on a large number of filtered multi-modal datasets. The second stage facilitates a bidirectional knowledge transfer between the student and teacher models. Our experimental analysis of diverse datasets shows that our knowledge transfer method consistently improves the capabilities of the student model. Finally, the 7B-sized student model after four distillations surpassed the current state-of-the-art model LLaVA-13B on the ScienceQA and LLaVA Test dataset, also outperforms other strong baselines in the zero-shot setting.

Large Multimodal Models (LMM) are built across modalities and the misalignment between two modalities can result in "hallucination", generating textual outputs that are not grounded by the multimodal information in context. To address the multimodal misalignment issue, we adapt the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) from the text domain to the task of vision-language alignment, where human annotators are asked to compare two responses and pinpoint the more hallucinated one, and the vision-language model is trained to maximize the simulated human rewards. We propose a new alignment algorithm called Factually Augmented RLHF that augments the reward model with additional factual information such as image captions and ground-truth multi-choice options, which alleviates the reward hacking phenomenon in RLHF and further improves the performance. We also enhance the GPT-4-generated training data (for vision instruction tuning) with previously available human-written image-text pairs to improve the general capabilities of our model. To evaluate the proposed approach in real-world scenarios, we develop a new evaluation benchmark MMHAL-BENCH with a special focus on penalizing hallucinations. As the first LMM trained with RLHF, our approach achieves remarkable improvement on the LLaVA-Bench dataset with the 94% performance level of the text-only GPT-4 (while previous best methods can only achieve the 87% level), and an improvement by 60% on MMHAL-BENCH over other baselines. We opensource our code, model, data at https://llava-rlhf.github.io.

Indonesia ranks fourth globally in the number of deaf cases. Individuals with hearing impairments often find communication challenging, necessitating the use of sign language. However, there are limited public services that offer such inclusivity. On the other hand, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) present promising solutions to overcome communication barriers faced by the deaf. This study aims to explore the application of AI in developing models for a simplified sign language translation app and dictionary, designed for integration into public service facilities, to facilitate communication for individuals with hearing impairments, thereby enhancing inclusivity in public services. The researchers compared the performance of LSTM and 1D CNN + Transformer (1DCNNTrans) models for sign language recognition. Through rigorous testing and validation, it was found that the LSTM model achieved an accuracy of 94.67%, while the 1DCNNTrans model achieved an accuracy of 96.12%. Model performance evaluation indicated that although the LSTM exhibited lower inference latency, it showed weaknesses in classifying classes with similar keypoints. In contrast, the 1DCNNTrans model demonstrated greater stability and higher F1 scores for classes with varying levels of complexity compared to the LSTM model. Both models showed excellent performance, exceeding 90% validation accuracy and demonstrating rapid classification of 50 sign language gestures.