Daily Papers

The OpenAI o1-series models have demonstrated that leveraging long-form Chain of Thought (CoT) can substantially enhance performance. However, the recursive thinking capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remain limited, particularly in the absence of expert-curated data for distillation. In this paper, we propose AvR: Alignment via Refinement, a novel method aimed at unlocking the potential of LLMs for recursive reasoning through long-form CoT. AvR introduces a refinement process that integrates criticism and improvement actions, guided by differentiable learning techniques to optimize refinement-aware rewards. As a result, the synthesized multi-round data can be organized as a long refinement thought, further enabling test-time scaling. Experimental results show that AvR significantly outperforms conventional preference optimization methods. Notably, with only 3k synthetic samples, our method boosts the performance of the LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct model by over 20\% in win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0. Our code is available at Github (https://github.com/Banner-Z/AvR.git).

This paper introduces WaveGrad 2, a non-autoregressive generative model for text-to-speech synthesis. WaveGrad 2 is trained to estimate the gradient of the log conditional density of the waveform given a phoneme sequence. The model takes an input phoneme sequence, and through an iterative refinement process, generates an audio waveform. This contrasts to the original WaveGrad vocoder which conditions on mel-spectrogram features, generated by a separate model. The iterative refinement process starts from Gaussian noise, and through a series of refinement steps (e.g., 50 steps), progressively recovers the audio sequence. WaveGrad 2 offers a natural way to trade-off between inference speed and sample quality, through adjusting the number of refinement steps. Experiments show that the model can generate high fidelity audio, approaching the performance of a state-of-the-art neural TTS system. We also report various ablation studies over different model configurations. Audio samples are available at https://wavegrad.github.io/v2.

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), natural language explanations (NLEs) have become increasingly important for understanding model predictions. However, these explanations often fail to faithfully represent the model's actual reasoning process. While existing work has demonstrated that LLMs can self-critique and refine their initial outputs for various tasks, this capability remains unexplored for improving explanation faithfulness. To address this gap, we introduce Self-critique and Refinement for Natural Language Explanations (SR-NLE), a framework that enables models to improve the faithfulness of their own explanations -- specifically, post-hoc NLEs -- through an iterative critique and refinement process without external supervision. Our framework leverages different feedback mechanisms to guide the refinement process, including natural language self-feedback and, notably, a novel feedback approach based on feature attribution that highlights important input words. Our experiments across three datasets and four state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that SR-NLE significantly reduces unfaithfulness rates, with our best method achieving an average unfaithfulness rate of 36.02%, compared to 54.81% for baseline -- an absolute reduction of 18.79%. These findings reveal that the investigated LLMs can indeed refine their explanations to better reflect their actual reasoning process, requiring only appropriate guidance through feedback without additional training or fine-tuning.

Generating natural language explanations for recommendations has become increasingly important in recommender systems. Traditional approaches typically treat user reviews as ground truth for explanations and focus on improving review prediction accuracy by designing various model architectures. However, due to limitations in data scale and model capability, these explanations often fail to meet key user-centric aspects such as factuality, personalization, and sentiment coherence, significantly reducing their overall helpfulness to users. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm that refines initial explanations generated by existing explainable recommender models during the inference stage to enhance their quality in multiple aspects. Specifically, we introduce a multi-agent collaborative refinement framework based on large language models. To ensure alignment between the refinement process and user demands, we employ a plan-then-refine pattern to perform targeted modifications. To enable continuous improvements, we design a hierarchical reflection mechanism that provides feedback on the refinement process from both strategic and content perspectives. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Large language models have shown surprising performances in understanding instructions and performing natural language tasks. In this paper, we propose iterative translation refinement to leverage the power of large language models for more natural translation and post-editing. We show that by simply involving a large language model in an iterative process, the output quality improves beyond mere translation. Extensive test scenarios with GPT-3.5 reveal that although iterations reduce string-based metric scores, neural metrics indicate comparable if not improved translation quality. Further, human evaluations demonstrate that our method effectively reduces translationese compared to initial GPT translations and even human references, especially for into-English directions. Ablation studies underscore the importance of anchoring the refinement process to the source input and a reasonable initial translation.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common brain disorder in children that can persist into adulthood, affecting social, academic, and career life. Early diagnosis is crucial for managing these impacts on patients and the healthcare system but is often labor-intensive and time-consuming. This paper presents a novel method to improve ADHD diagnosis precision and timeliness by leveraging Deep Learning (DL) approaches and electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. We introduce ADHDeepNet, a DL model that utilizes comprehensive temporal-spatial characterization, attention modules, and explainability techniques optimized for EEG signals. ADHDeepNet integrates feature extraction and refinement processes to enhance ADHD diagnosis. The model was trained and validated on a dataset of 121 participants (61 ADHD, 60 Healthy Controls), employing nested cross-validation for robust performance. The proposed two-stage methodology uses a 10-fold cross-subject validation strategy. Initially, each iteration optimizes the model's hyper-parameters with inner 2-fold cross-validation. Then, Additive Gaussian Noise (AGN) with various standard deviations and magnification levels is applied for data augmentation. ADHDeepNet achieved 100% sensitivity and 99.17% accuracy in classifying ADHD/HC subjects. To clarify model explainability and identify key brain regions and frequency bands for ADHD diagnosis, we analyzed the learned weights and activation patterns of the model's primary layers. Additionally, t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) visualized high-dimensional data, aiding in interpreting the model's decisions. This study highlights the potential of DL and EEG in enhancing ADHD diagnosis accuracy and efficiency.

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in visual and language reasoning tasks, they invariably generate flawed responses. Self-correction that instructs models to refine their outputs presents a promising solution to this issue. Previous studies have mainly concentrated on Large Language Models (LLMs), while the self-correction abilities of VLMs, particularly concerning both visual and linguistic information, remain largely unexamined. This study investigates the self-correction capabilities of VLMs during both inference and fine-tuning stages. We introduce a Self-Correction Learning (SCL) approach that enables VLMs to learn from their self-generated self-correction data through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) without relying on external feedback, facilitating self-improvement. Specifically, we collect preferred and disfavored samples based on the correctness of initial and refined responses, which are obtained by two-turn self-correction with VLMs during the inference stage. Experimental results demonstrate that although VLMs struggle to self-correct effectively during iterative inference without additional fine-tuning and external feedback, they can enhance their performance and avoid previous mistakes through preference fine-tuning when their self-generated self-correction data are categorized into preferred and disfavored samples. This study emphasizes that self-correction is not merely a refinement process; rather, it should enhance the reasoning abilities of models through additional training, enabling them to generate high-quality responses directly without further refinement.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capacity to improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. Two strategies are designed to perform this iterative process: Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompt. Prompt chaining orchestrates the drafting, critiquing, and refining phases through a series of three discrete prompts, while Stepwise prompt integrates these phases within a single prompt. However, the relative effectiveness of the two methods has not been extensively studied. This paper is dedicated to examining and comparing these two methods in the context of text summarization to ascertain which method stands out as the most effective. Experimental results show that the prompt chaining method can produce a more favorable outcome. This might be because stepwise prompt might produce a simulated refinement process according to our various experiments. Since refinement is adaptable to diverse tasks, our conclusions have the potential to be extrapolated to other applications, thereby offering insights that may contribute to the broader development of LLMs.

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination and knowledge staleness in Large Language Models (LLMs), existing frameworks often falter on complex, multi-hop queries that require synthesizing information from disparate sources. Current advanced RAG methods, employing iterative or adaptive strategies, lack a robust mechanism to systematically identify and fill evidence gaps, often propagating noise or failing to gather a comprehensive context. We introduce FAIR-RAG, a novel agentic framework that transforms the standard RAG pipeline into a dynamic, evidence-driven reasoning process. At its core is an Iterative Refinement Cycle governed by a module we term Structured Evidence Assessment (SEA). The SEA acts as an analytical gating mechanism: it deconstructs the initial query into a checklist of required findings and audits the aggregated evidence to identify confirmed facts and, critically, explicit informational gaps. These gaps provide a precise signal to an Adaptive Query Refinement agent, which generates new, targeted sub-queries to retrieve missing information. This cycle repeats until the evidence is verified as sufficient, ensuring a comprehensive context for a final, strictly faithful generation. We conducted experiments on challenging multi-hop QA benchmarks, including HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MusiQue. In a unified experimental setup, FAIR-RAG significantly outperforms strong baselines. On HotpotQA, it achieves an F1-score of 0.453 -- an absolute improvement of 8.3 points over the strongest iterative baseline -- establishing a new state-of-the-art for this class of methods on these benchmarks. Our work demonstrates that a structured, evidence-driven refinement process with explicit gap analysis is crucial for unlocking reliable and accurate reasoning in advanced RAG systems for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities across various language tasks. Inspired by the success of text-to-text translation refinement, this paper investigates how LLMs can improve the performance of speech translation by introducing a joint refinement process. Through the joint refinement of speech translation (ST) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcription via LLMs, the performance of the ST model is significantly improved in both training-free in-context learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning scenarios. Additionally, we explore the effect of document-level context on refinement under the context-aware fine-tuning scenario. Experimental results on the MuST-C and CoVoST 2 datasets, which include seven translation tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach using several popular LLMs including GPT-3.5-turbo, LLaMA3-8B, and Mistral-12B. Further analysis further suggests that jointly refining both transcription and translation yields better performance compared to refining translation alone. Meanwhile, incorporating document-level context significantly enhances refinement performance. We release our code and datasets on GitHub.

Tool learning, which allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to leverage external tools for solving complex user tasks, has emerged as a promising avenue for extending model capabilities. However, current approaches primarily focus on data synthesis for fine-tuning LLMs to invoke tools effectively, largely ignoring how to fully stimulate the potential of the model. In this paper, we propose ToolACE-R, a novel method that introduces adaptive self-refinement for tool invocations. Our approach features a model-aware iterative training procedure that progressively incorporates more training samples based on the model's evolving capabilities. Additionally, it allows LLMs to iteratively refine their tool calls, optimizing performance without requiring external feedback. To further enhance computational efficiency, we integrate an adaptive mechanism when scaling the inference time, enabling the model to autonomously determine when to stop the refinement process. We conduct extensive experiments across several benchmark datasets, showing that ToolACE-R achieves competitive performance compared to advanced API-based models, even without any refinement. Furthermore, its performance can be further improved efficiently through adaptive self-refinement. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which is compatible with base models of various sizes, offering a promising direction for more efficient tool learning.

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, known for its strong quantum correlations and chaotic behavior, serves as a key platform for quantum gravity studies. However, variationally preparing thermal states on near-term quantum processors for large systems (N>12, where N is the number of Majorana fermions) presents a significant challenge due to the rapid growth in the complexity of parameterized quantum circuits. This paper addresses this challenge by integrating reinforcement learning (RL) with convolutional neural networks, employing an iterative approach to optimize the quantum circuit and its parameters. The refinement process is guided by a composite reward signal derived from entropy and the expectation values of the SYK Hamiltonian. This approach reduces the number of CNOT gates by two orders of magnitude for systems Ngeq12 compared to traditional methods like first-order Trotterization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the RL framework in both noiseless and noisy quantum hardware environments, maintaining high accuracy in thermal state preparation. This work advances a scalable, RL-based framework with applications for quantum gravity studies and out-of-time-ordered thermal correlators computation in quantum many-body systems on near-term quantum hardware. The code is available at https://github.com/Aqasch/solving_SYK_model_with_RL.

Human motion, inherently continuous and dynamic, presents significant challenges for generative models. Despite their dominance, discrete quantization methods, such as VQ-VAEs, suffer from inherent limitations, including restricted expressiveness and frame-wise noise artifacts. Continuous approaches, while producing smoother and more natural motions, often falter due to high-dimensional complexity and limited training data. To resolve this "discord" between discrete and continuous representations, we introduce DisCoRD: Discrete Tokens to Continuous Motion via Rectified Flow Decoding, a novel method that decodes discrete motion tokens into continuous motion through rectified flow. By employing an iterative refinement process in the continuous space, DisCoRD captures fine-grained dynamics and ensures smoother and more natural motions. Compatible with any discrete-based framework, our method enhances naturalness without compromising faithfulness to the conditioning signals. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that DisCoRD achieves state-of-the-art performance, with FID of 0.032 on HumanML3D and 0.169 on KIT-ML. These results solidify DisCoRD as a robust solution for bridging the divide between discrete efficiency and continuous realism. Our project page is available at: https://whwjdqls.github.io/discord.github.io/.

Creating high-quality 3D models of clothed humans from single images for real-world applications is crucial. Despite recent advancements, accurately reconstructing humans in complex poses or with loose clothing from in-the-wild images, along with predicting textures for unseen areas, remains a significant challenge. A key limitation of previous methods is their insufficient prior guidance in transitioning from 2D to 3D and in texture prediction. In response, we introduce SIFU (Side-view Conditioned Implicit Function for Real-world Usable Clothed Human Reconstruction), a novel approach combining a Side-view Decoupling Transformer with a 3D Consistent Texture Refinement pipeline.SIFU employs a cross-attention mechanism within the transformer, using SMPL-X normals as queries to effectively decouple side-view features in the process of mapping 2D features to 3D. This method not only improves the precision of the 3D models but also their robustness, especially when SMPL-X estimates are not perfect. Our texture refinement process leverages text-to-image diffusion-based prior to generate realistic and consistent textures for invisible views. Through extensive experiments, SIFU surpasses SOTA methods in both geometry and texture reconstruction, showcasing enhanced robustness in complex scenarios and achieving an unprecedented Chamfer and P2S measurement. Our approach extends to practical applications such as 3D printing and scene building, demonstrating its broad utility in real-world scenarios. Project page https://river-zhang.github.io/SIFU-projectpage/ .

The dominance of proprietary LLMs has led to restricted access and raised information privacy concerns. High-performing open-source alternatives are crucial for information-sensitive and high-volume applications but often lag behind in performance. To address this gap, we propose (1) A untargeted variant of iterative self-critique and self-refinement devoid of external influence. (2) A novel ranking metric - Performance, Refinement, and Inference Cost Score (PeRFICS) - to find the optimal model for a given task considering refined performance and cost. Our experiments show that SoTA open source models of varying sizes from 7B - 65B, on average, improve 8.2% from their baseline performance. Strikingly, even models with extremely small memory footprints, such as Vicuna-7B, show a 11.74% improvement overall and up to a 25.39% improvement in high-creativity, open ended tasks on the Vicuna benchmark. Vicuna-13B takes it a step further and outperforms ChatGPT post-refinement. This work has profound implications for resource-constrained and information-sensitive environments seeking to leverage LLMs without incurring prohibitive costs, compromising on performance and privacy. The domain-agnostic self-refinement process coupled with our novel ranking metric facilitates informed decision-making in model selection, thereby reducing costs and democratizing access to high-performing language models, as evidenced by case studies.

Given natural language test case description for an Android application, existing testing approaches require developers to manually write scripts using tools such as Appium and Espresso to execute the corresponding test case. This process is labor-intensive and demands significant effort to maintain as UI interfaces evolve throughout development. In this work, we introduce LELANTE, a novel framework that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to automate test case execution without requiring pre-written scripts. LELANTE interprets natural language test case descriptions, iteratively generate action plans, and perform the actions directly on the Android screen using its GUI. LELANTE employs a screen refinement process to enhance LLM interpretability, constructs a structured prompt for LLMs, and implements an action generation mechanism based on chain-of-thought reasoning of LLMs. To further reduce computational cost and enhance scalability, LELANTE utilizes model distillation using a foundational LLM. In experiments across 390 test cases spanning 10 popular Android applications, LELANTE achieved a 73% test execution success rate. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can effectively bridge the gap between natural language test case description and automated execution, making mobile testing more scalable and adaptable.

Video dubbing aims to synthesize realistic, lip-synced videos from a reference video and a driving audio signal. Although existing methods can accurately generate mouth shapes driven by audio, they often fail to preserve identity-specific features, largely because they do not effectively capture the nuanced interplay between audio cues and the visual attributes of reference identity . As a result, the generated outputs frequently lack fidelity in reproducing the unique textural and structural details of the reference identity. To address these limitations, we propose IPTalker, a novel and robust framework for video dubbing that achieves seamless alignment between driving audio and reference identity while ensuring both lip-sync accuracy and high-fidelity identity preservation. At the core of IPTalker is a transformer-based alignment mechanism designed to dynamically capture and model the correspondence between audio features and reference images, thereby enabling precise, identity-aware audio-visual integration. Building on this alignment, a motion warping strategy further refines the results by spatially deforming reference images to match the target audio-driven configuration. A dedicated refinement process then mitigates occlusion artifacts and enhances the preservation of fine-grained textures, such as mouth details and skin features. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that IPTalker consistently outperforms existing approaches in terms of realism, lip synchronization, and identity retention, establishing a new state of the art for high-quality, identity-consistent video dubbing.

This paper presents Deceptive-Human, a novel Prompt-to-NeRF framework capitalizing state-of-the-art control diffusion models (e.g., ControlNet) to generate a high-quality controllable 3D human NeRF. Different from direct 3D generative approaches, e.g., DreamFusion and DreamHuman, Deceptive-Human employs a progressive refinement technique to elevate the reconstruction quality. This is achieved by utilizing high-quality synthetic human images generated through the ControlNet with view-consistent loss. Our method is versatile and readily extensible, accommodating multimodal inputs, including a text prompt and additional data such as 3D mesh, poses, and seed images. The resulting 3D human NeRF model empowers the synthesis of highly photorealistic novel views from 360-degree perspectives. The key to our Deceptive-Human for hallucinating multi-view consistent synthetic human images lies in our progressive finetuning strategy. This strategy involves iteratively enhancing views using the provided multimodal inputs at each intermediate step to improve the human NeRF model. Within this iterative refinement process, view-dependent appearances are systematically eliminated to prevent interference with the underlying density estimation. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental comparison shows that our deceptive human models achieve state-of-the-art application quality.

Generating an image from a provided descriptive text is quite a challenging task because of the difficulty in incorporating perceptual information (object shapes, colors, and their interactions) along with providing high relevancy related to the provided text. Current methods first generate an initial low-resolution image, which typically has irregular object shapes, colors, and interaction between objects. This initial image is then improved by conditioning on the text. However, these methods mainly address the problem of using text representation efficiently in the refinement of the initially generated image, while the success of this refinement process depends heavily on the quality of the initially generated image, as pointed out in the DM-GAN paper. Hence, we propose a method to provide good initialized images by incorporating perceptual understanding in the discriminator module. We improve the perceptual information at the first stage itself, which results in significant improvement in the final generated image. In this paper, we have applied our approach to the novel StackGAN architecture. We then show that the perceptual information included in the initial image is improved while modeling image distribution at multiple stages. Finally, we generated realistic multi-colored images conditioned by text. These images have good quality along with containing improved basic perceptual information. More importantly, the proposed method can be integrated into the pipeline of other state-of-the-art text-based-image-generation models to generate initial low-resolution images. We also worked on improving the refinement process in StackGAN by augmenting the third stage of the generator-discriminator pair in the StackGAN architecture. Our experimental analysis and comparison with the state-of-the-art on a large but sparse dataset MS COCO further validate the usefulness of our proposed approach.

Multi-view image generation holds significant application value in computer vision, particularly in domains like 3D reconstruction, virtual reality, and augmented reality. Most existing methods, which rely on extending single images, face notable computational challenges in maintaining cross-view consistency and generating high-resolution outputs. To address these issues, we propose the Geometry-guided Multi-View Diffusion Model, which incorporates mechanisms for extracting multi-view geometric information and adjusting the intensity of geometric features to generate images that are both consistent across views and rich in detail. Specifically, we design a multi-view geometry information extraction module that leverages depth maps, normal maps, and foreground segmentation masks to construct a shared geometric structure, ensuring shape and structural consistency across different views. To enhance consistency and detail restoration during generation, we develop a decoupled geometry-enhanced attention mechanism that strengthens feature focus on key geometric details, thereby improving overall image quality and detail preservation. Furthermore, we apply an adaptive learning strategy that fine-tunes the model to better capture spatial relationships and visual coherence between the generated views, ensuring realistic results. Our model also incorporates an iterative refinement process that progressively improves the output quality through multiple stages of image generation. Finally, a dynamic geometry information intensity adjustment mechanism is proposed to adaptively regulate the influence of geometric data, optimizing overall quality while ensuring the naturalness of generated images. More details can be found on the project page: https://sobeymil.github.io/GeoMVD.com.

Recent advancements in multi-view 3D reconstruction and novel-view synthesis, particularly through Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have greatly enhanced the fidelity and efficiency of 3D content creation. However, inpainting 3D scenes remains a challenging task due to the inherent irregularity of 3D structures and the critical need for maintaining multi-view consistency. In this work, we propose a novel 3D Gaussian inpainting framework that reconstructs complete 3D scenes by leveraging sparse inpainted views. Our framework incorporates an automatic Mask Refinement Process and region-wise Uncertainty-guided Optimization. Specifically, we refine the inpainting mask using a series of operations, including Gaussian scene filtering and back-projection, enabling more accurate localization of occluded regions and realistic boundary restoration. Furthermore, our Uncertainty-guided Fine-grained Optimization strategy, which estimates the importance of each region across multi-view images during training, alleviates multi-view inconsistencies and enhances the fidelity of fine details in the inpainted results. Comprehensive experiments conducted on diverse datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both visual quality and view consistency.

Voice directors often iteratively refine voice actors' performances by providing feedback to achieve the desired outcome. While this iterative feedback-based refinement process is important in actual recordings, it has been overlooked in text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). As a result, fine-grained style refinement after the initial synthesis is not possible, even though the synthesized speech often deviates from the user's intended style. To address this issue, we propose a TTS method with multi-step interaction that allows users to intuitively and rapidly refine synthesized speech. Our approach models the interaction between the TTS model and its user to emulate the relationship between voice actors and voice directors. Experiments show that the proposed model with its corresponding dataset enables iterative style refinements in accordance with users' directions, thus demonstrating its multi-interaction capability. Sample audios are available: https://ntt-hilab-gensp.github.io/ssw13multiinteractiontts/

We address the challenge of Small Object Image Retrieval (SoIR), where the goal is to retrieve images containing a specific small object, in a cluttered scene. The key challenge in this setting is constructing a single image descriptor, for scalable and efficient search, that effectively represents all objects in the image. In this paper, we first analyze the limitations of existing methods on this challenging task and then introduce new benchmarks to support SoIR evaluation. Next, we introduce Multi-object Attention Optimization (MaO), a novel retrieval framework which incorporates a dedicated multi-object pre-training phase. This is followed by a refinement process that leverages attention-based feature extraction with object masks, integrating them into a single unified image descriptor. Our MaO approach significantly outperforms existing retrieval methods and strong baselines, achieving notable improvements in both zero-shot and lightweight multi-object fine-tuning. We hope this work will lay the groundwork and inspire further research to enhance retrieval performance for this highly practical task.

We present MatAtlas, a method for consistent text-guided 3D model texturing. Following recent progress we leverage a large scale text-to-image generation model (e.g., Stable Diffusion) as a prior to texture a 3D model. We carefully design an RGB texturing pipeline that leverages a grid pattern diffusion, driven by depth and edges. By proposing a multi-step texture refinement process, we significantly improve the quality and 3D consistency of the texturing output. To further address the problem of baked-in lighting, we move beyond RGB colors and pursue assigning parametric materials to the assets. Given the high-quality initial RGB texture, we propose a novel material retrieval method capitalized on Large Language Models (LLM), enabling editabiliy and relightability. We evaluate our method on a wide variety of geometries and show that our method significantly outperform prior arts. We also analyze the role of each component through a detailed ablation study.

In the realm of computer vision and graphics, accurately establishing correspondences between geometric 3D shapes is pivotal for applications like object tracking, registration, texture transfer, and statistical shape analysis. Moving beyond traditional hand-crafted and data-driven feature learning methods, we incorporate spectral methods with deep learning, focusing on functional maps (FMs) and optimal transport (OT). Traditional OT-based approaches, often reliant on entropy regularization OT in learning-based framework, face computational challenges due to their quadratic cost. Our key contribution is to employ the sliced Wasserstein distance (SWD) for OT, which is a valid fast optimal transport metric in an unsupervised shape matching framework. This unsupervised framework integrates functional map regularizers with a novel OT-based loss derived from SWD, enhancing feature alignment between shapes treated as discrete probability measures. We also introduce an adaptive refinement process utilizing entropy regularized OT, further refining feature alignments for accurate point-to-point correspondences. Our method demonstrates superior performance in non-rigid shape matching, including near-isometric and non-isometric scenarios, and excels in downstream tasks like segmentation transfer. The empirical results on diverse datasets highlight our framework's effectiveness and generalization capabilities, setting new standards in non-rigid shape matching with efficient OT metrics and an adaptive refinement module.

Face video restoration (FVR) is a challenging but important problem where one seeks to recover a perceptually realistic face videos from a low-quality input. While diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have been shown to achieve remarkable performance for face image restoration, they often fail to preserve temporally coherent, high-quality videos, compromising the fidelity of reconstructed faces. We present a new conditional diffusion framework called FLAIR for FVR. FLAIR ensures temporal consistency across frames in a computationally efficient fashion by converting a traditional image DPM into a video DPM. The proposed conversion uses a recurrent video refinement layer and a temporal self-attention at different scales. FLAIR also uses a conditional iterative refinement process to balance the perceptual and distortion quality during inference. This process consists of two key components: a data-consistency module that analytically ensures that the generated video precisely matches its degraded observation and a coarse-to-fine image enhancement module specifically for facial regions. Our extensive experiments show superiority of FLAIR over the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) for video super-resolution, deblurring, JPEG restoration, and space-time frame interpolation on two high-quality face video datasets.

In this paper, we present a regression-based pose recognition method using cascade Transformers. One way to categorize the existing approaches in this domain is to separate them into 1). heatmap-based and 2). regression-based. In general, heatmap-based methods achieve higher accuracy but are subject to various heuristic designs (not end-to-end mostly), whereas regression-based approaches attain relatively lower accuracy but they have less intermediate non-differentiable steps. Here we utilize the encoder-decoder structure in Transformers to perform regression-based person and keypoint detection that is general-purpose and requires less heuristic design compared with the existing approaches. We demonstrate the keypoint hypothesis (query) refinement process across different self-attention layers to reveal the recursive self-attention mechanism in Transformers. In the experiments, we report competitive results for pose recognition when compared with the competing regression-based methods.

Though reasoning-based large language models (LLMs) have excelled in mathematics and programming, their capabilities in knowledge-intensive medical question answering remain underexplored. To address this, we introduce ReasonMed, the largest medical reasoning dataset, comprising 370k high-quality examples distilled from 1.7 million initial reasoning paths generated by various LLMs. ReasonMed is constructed through a multi-agent verification and refinement process, where we design an Error Refiner to enhance the reasoning paths by identifying and correcting error-prone steps flagged by a verifier. Leveraging ReasonMed, we systematically investigate best practices for training medical reasoning models and find that combining detailed Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with concise answer summaries yields the most effective fine-tuning strategy. Based on this strategy, we train ReasonMed-7B, which sets a new benchmark for sub-10B models, outperforming the prior best by 4.17\% and even exceeding LLaMA3.1-70B on PubMedQA by 4.60\%.

SmartAvatar is a vision-language-agent-driven framework for generating fully rigged, animation-ready 3D human avatars from a single photo or textual prompt. While diffusion-based methods have made progress in general 3D object generation, they continue to struggle with precise control over human identity, body shape, and animation readiness. In contrast, SmartAvatar leverages the commonsense reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (VLMs) in combination with off-the-shelf parametric human generators to deliver high-quality, customizable avatars. A key innovation is an autonomous verification loop, where the agent renders draft avatars, evaluates facial similarity, anatomical plausibility, and prompt alignment, and iteratively adjusts generation parameters for convergence. This interactive, AI-guided refinement process promotes fine-grained control over both facial and body features, enabling users to iteratively refine their avatars via natural-language conversations. Unlike diffusion models that rely on static pre-trained datasets and offer limited flexibility, SmartAvatar brings users into the modeling loop and ensures continuous improvement through an LLM-driven procedural generation and verification system. The generated avatars are fully rigged and support pose manipulation with consistent identity and appearance, making them suitable for downstream animation and interactive applications. Quantitative benchmarks and user studies demonstrate that SmartAvatar outperforms recent text- and image-driven avatar generation systems in terms of reconstructed mesh quality, identity fidelity, attribute accuracy, and animation readiness, making it a versatile tool for realistic, customizable avatar creation on consumer-grade hardware.

Modeling, understanding, and reconstructing the real world are crucial in XR/VR. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) methods have shown remarkable success in modeling and understanding 3D scenes. Similarly, various 4D representations have demonstrated the ability to capture the dynamics of the 4D world. However, there is a dearth of research focusing on segmentation within 4D representations. In this paper, we propose Segment Any 4D Gaussians (SA4D), one of the first frameworks to segment anything in the 4D digital world based on 4D Gaussians. In SA4D, an efficient temporal identity feature field is introduced to handle Gaussian drifting, with the potential to learn precise identity features from noisy and sparse input. Additionally, a 4D segmentation refinement process is proposed to remove artifacts. Our SA4D achieves precise, high-quality segmentation within seconds in 4D Gaussians and shows the ability to remove, recolor, compose, and render high-quality anything masks. More demos are available at: https://jsxzs.github.io/sa4d/.

Masked diffusion models have demonstrated competitive results on various tasks including language generation. However, due to its iterative refinement process, the inference is often bottlenecked by slow and static sampling speed. To overcome this problem, we introduce `KL-Adaptive Stability Sampling' (KLASS), a fast yet effective sampling method that exploits token-level KL divergence to identify stable, high-confidence predictions. By unmasking multiple tokens in each iteration without any additional model training, our approach speeds up generation significantly while maintaining sample quality. On reasoning benchmarks, KLASS achieves up to 2.78times wall-clock speedups while improving performance over standard greedy decoding, attaining state-of-the-art results among diffusion-based samplers. We further validate KLASS across diverse domains, including text, image, and molecular generation, showing its effectiveness as a broadly applicable sampler across different models.

We present Dual3D, a novel text-to-3D generation framework that generates high-quality 3D assets from texts in only 1 minute.The key component is a dual-mode multi-view latent diffusion model. Given the noisy multi-view latents, the 2D mode can efficiently denoise them with a single latent denoising network, while the 3D mode can generate a tri-plane neural surface for consistent rendering-based denoising. Most modules for both modes are tuned from a pre-trained text-to-image latent diffusion model to circumvent the expensive cost of training from scratch. To overcome the high rendering cost during inference, we propose the dual-mode toggling inference strategy to use only 1/10 denoising steps with 3D mode, successfully generating a 3D asset in just 10 seconds without sacrificing quality. The texture of the 3D asset can be further enhanced by our efficient texture refinement process in a short time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method delivers state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing generation time. Our project page is available at https://dual3d.github.io

Generating photorealistic driving videos has seen significant progress recently, but current methods largely focus on ordinary, non-adversarial scenarios. Meanwhile, efforts to generate adversarial driving scenarios often operate on abstract trajectory or BEV representations, falling short of delivering realistic sensor data that can truly stress-test autonomous driving (AD) systems. In this work, we introduce Challenger, a framework that produces physically plausible yet photorealistic adversarial driving videos. Generating such videos poses a fundamental challenge: it requires jointly optimizing over the space of traffic interactions and high-fidelity sensor observations. Challenger makes this affordable through two techniques: (1) a physics-aware multi-round trajectory refinement process that narrows down candidate adversarial maneuvers, and (2) a tailored trajectory scoring function that encourages realistic yet adversarial behavior while maintaining compatibility with downstream video synthesis. As tested on the nuScenes dataset, Challenger generates a diverse range of aggressive driving scenarios-including cut-ins, sudden lane changes, tailgating, and blind spot intrusions-and renders them into multiview photorealistic videos. Extensive evaluations show that these scenarios significantly increase the collision rate of state-of-the-art end-to-end AD models (UniAD, VAD, SparseDrive, and DiffusionDrive), and importantly, adversarial behaviors discovered for one model often transfer to others.

This paper introduces PatchRefiner, an advanced framework for metric single image depth estimation aimed at high-resolution real-domain inputs. While depth estimation is crucial for applications such as autonomous driving, 3D generative modeling, and 3D reconstruction, achieving accurate high-resolution depth in real-world scenarios is challenging due to the constraints of existing architectures and the scarcity of detailed real-world depth data. PatchRefiner adopts a tile-based methodology, reconceptualizing high-resolution depth estimation as a refinement process, which results in notable performance enhancements. Utilizing a pseudo-labeling strategy that leverages synthetic data, PatchRefiner incorporates a Detail and Scale Disentangling (DSD) loss to enhance detail capture while maintaining scale accuracy, thus facilitating the effective transfer of knowledge from synthetic to real-world data. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate PatchRefiner's superior performance, significantly outperforming existing benchmarks on the Unreal4KStereo dataset by 18.1% in terms of the root mean squared error (RMSE) and showing marked improvements in detail accuracy and consistent scale estimation on diverse real-world datasets like CityScape, ScanNet++, and ETH3D.

We introduce a novel sketch-to-image tool that aligns with the iterative refinement process of artists. Our tool lets users sketch blocking strokes to coarsely represent the placement and form of objects and detail strokes to refine their shape and silhouettes. We develop a two-pass algorithm for generating high-fidelity images from such sketches at any point in the iterative process. In the first pass we use a ControlNet to generate an image that strictly follows all the strokes (blocking and detail) and in the second pass we add variation by renoising regions surrounding blocking strokes. We also present a dataset generation scheme that, when used to train a ControlNet architecture, allows regions that do not contain strokes to be interpreted as not-yet-specified regions rather than empty space. We show that this partial-sketch-aware ControlNet can generate coherent elements from partial sketches that only contain a small number of strokes. The high-fidelity images produced by our approach serve as scaffolds that can help the user adjust the shape and proportions of objects or add additional elements to the composition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a variety of examples and evaluative comparisons. Quantitatively, evaluative user feedback indicates that novice viewers prefer the quality of images from our algorithm over a baseline Scribble ControlNet for 84% of the pairs and found our images had less distortion in 81% of the pairs.

Text-to-Image (T2I) generation methods based on diffusion model have garnered significant attention in the last few years. Although these image synthesis methods produce visually appealing results, they frequently exhibit spelling errors when rendering text within the generated images. Such errors manifest as missing, incorrect or extraneous characters, thereby severely constraining the performance of text image generation based on diffusion models. To address the aforementioned issue, this paper proposes a novel approach for text image generation, utilizing a pre-trained diffusion model (i.e., Stable Diffusion [27]). Our approach involves the design and training of a light-weight character-level text encoder, which replaces the original CLIP encoder and provides more robust text embeddings as conditional guidance. Then, we fine-tune the diffusion model using a large-scale dataset, incorporating local attention control under the supervision of character-level segmentation maps. Finally, by employing an inference stage refinement process, we achieve a notably high sequence accuracy when synthesizing text in arbitrarily given images. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the superiority of our method to the state of the art. Furthermore, we showcase several potential applications of the proposed UDiffText, including text-centric image synthesis, scene text editing, etc. Code and model will be available at https://github.com/ZYM-PKU/UDiffText .

Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly Code LLMs, have demonstrated impressive performance in code generation. Current research primarily focuses on the correctness of generated code, while efficiency remains less explored. Recent works have focused on modifying the initial version of the code to improve its efficiency. However, such refinements are limited by the algorithmic design and overall logic of the initial code, resulting in only incremental improvements. In contrast, when human developers write high-quality code, they typically begin by designing several potential solutions at the logical level, evaluating various algorithms and their complexities, and then proceeding to implement and optimize the solution. In this study, we introduce \tool: Large Language Model for Code Efficiency, a novel framework that enables LLMs to generate code that balances both efficiency and correctness. Specifically, \tool divides the efficiency optimization process into two domains: algorithmic exploration in the logic domain and implementation optimization in the code domain. The correctness of the code is then guaranteed through a synthetic test case refinement process. This approach, which prioritizes efficiency before ensuring correctness, offers a new paradigm for efficient code generation. Experiments demonstrate that \tool consistently improves both efficiency and correctness, achieving new state-of-the-art performance in code efficiency benchmarks across various LLM backbones.

Contextual Text Block Detection (CTBD) is the task of identifying coherent text blocks within the complexity of natural scenes. Previous methodologies have treated CTBD as either a visual relation extraction challenge within computer vision or as a sequence modeling problem from the perspective of natural language processing. We introduce a new framework that frames CTBD as a graph generation problem. This methodology consists of two essential procedures: identifying individual text units as graph nodes and discerning the sequential reading order relationships among these units as graph edges. Leveraging the cutting-edge capabilities of DQ-DETR for node detection, our framework innovates further by integrating a novel mechanism, a Dynamic Relation Transformer (DRFormer), dedicated to edge generation. DRFormer incorporates a dual interactive transformer decoder that deftly manages a dynamic graph structure refinement process. Through this iterative process, the model systematically enhances the graph's fidelity, ultimately resulting in improved precision in detecting contextual text blocks. Comprehensive experimental evaluations conducted on both SCUT-CTW-Context and ReCTS-Context datasets substantiate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results, underscoring the effectiveness and potential of our graph generation framework in advancing the field of CTBD.

Synthesizing high-quality images from text descriptions is a challenging problem in computer vision and has many practical applications. Samples generated by existing text-to-image approaches can roughly reflect the meaning of the given descriptions, but they fail to contain necessary details and vivid object parts. In this paper, we propose Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (StackGAN) to generate 256x256 photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions. We decompose the hard problem into more manageable sub-problems through a sketch-refinement process. The Stage-I GAN sketches the primitive shape and colors of the object based on the given text description, yielding Stage-I low-resolution images. The Stage-II GAN takes Stage-I results and text descriptions as inputs, and generates high-resolution images with photo-realistic details. It is able to rectify defects in Stage-I results and add compelling details with the refinement process. To improve the diversity of the synthesized images and stabilize the training of the conditional-GAN, we introduce a novel Conditioning Augmentation technique that encourages smoothness in the latent conditioning manifold. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-arts on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements on generating photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions.

Generating high-quality stereo videos that mimic human binocular vision requires maintaining consistent depth perception and temporal coherence across frames. While diffusion models have advanced image and video synthesis, generating high-quality stereo videos remains challenging due to the difficulty of maintaining consistent temporal and spatial coherence between left and right views. We introduce StereoCrafter-Zero, a novel framework for zero-shot stereo video generation that leverages video diffusion priors without the need for paired training data. Key innovations include a noisy restart strategy to initialize stereo-aware latents and an iterative refinement process that progressively harmonizes the latent space, addressing issues like temporal flickering and view inconsistencies. Comprehensive evaluations, including quantitative metrics and user studies, demonstrate that StereoCrafter-Zero produces high-quality stereo videos with improved depth consistency and temporal smoothness, even when depth estimations are imperfect. Our framework is robust and adaptable across various diffusion models, setting a new benchmark for zero-shot stereo video generation and enabling more immersive visual experiences. Our code can be found in~https://github.com/shijianjian/StereoCrafter-Zero.

We present CrossLoc3D, a novel 3D place recognition method that solves a large-scale point matching problem in a cross-source setting. Cross-source point cloud data corresponds to point sets captured by depth sensors with different accuracies or from different distances and perspectives. We address the challenges in terms of developing 3D place recognition methods that account for the representation gap between points captured by different sources. Our method handles cross-source data by utilizing multi-grained features and selecting convolution kernel sizes that correspond to most prominent features. Inspired by the diffusion models, our method uses a novel iterative refinement process that gradually shifts the embedding spaces from different sources to a single canonical space for better metric learning. In addition, we present CS-Campus3D, the first 3D aerial-ground cross-source dataset consisting of point cloud data from both aerial and ground LiDAR scans. The point clouds in CS-Campus3D have representation gaps and other features like different views, point densities, and noise patterns. We show that our CrossLoc3D algorithm can achieve an improvement of 4.74% - 15.37% in terms of the top 1 average recall on our CS-Campus3D benchmark and achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art 3D place recognition method on the Oxford RobotCar. We will release the code and CS-Campus3D benchmark.

We propose Easy End-to-End Diffusion-based Text to Speech, a simple and efficient end-to-end text-to-speech model based on diffusion. E3 TTS directly takes plain text as input and generates an audio waveform through an iterative refinement process. Unlike many prior work, E3 TTS does not rely on any intermediate representations like spectrogram features or alignment information. Instead, E3 TTS models the temporal structure of the waveform through the diffusion process. Without relying on additional conditioning information, E3 TTS could support flexible latent structure within the given audio. This enables E3 TTS to be easily adapted for zero-shot tasks such as editing without any additional training. Experiments show that E3 TTS can generate high-fidelity audio, approaching the performance of a state-of-the-art neural TTS system. Audio samples are available at https://e3tts.github.io.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial to real-world applications. Despite recent advances, several studies have highlighted that LLMs struggle when faced with challenging instructions, especially those that include complex constraints, hindering their effectiveness in various tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce Conifer, a novel instruction tuning dataset, designed to enhance LLMs to follow multi-level instructions with complex constraints. Utilizing GPT-4, we curate the dataset by a series of LLM-driven refinement processes to ensure high quality. We also propose a progressive learning scheme that emphasizes an easy-to-hard progression, and learning from process feedback. Models trained with Conifer exhibit remarkable improvements in instruction-following abilities, especially for instructions with complex constraints. On several instruction-following benchmarks, our 7B model outperforms the state-of-the-art open-source 7B models, even exceeds the performance of models 10 times larger on certain metrics. All the code and Conifer dataset are available at https://www.github.com/ConiferLM/Conifer.

While large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and PaLM have demonstrated remarkable performance in various language understanding and generation tasks, their capabilities in complex reasoning and intricate knowledge utilization still fall short of human-level proficiency. Recent studies have established the effectiveness of prompts in steering LLMs towards generating desired outputs. Building on these insights, we introduce a novel framework that harnesses the potential of large-scale pre-trained language models, to iteratively enhance performance of the LLMs. Our framework incorporates three components: Normal CoT, a Convincer, and an Answerer. It processes the output of a typical few-shot chain-of-thought prompt, assesses the correctness of the response, scrutinizes the answer, refines the reasoning, and ultimately produces a new solution. Experimental results on the 7 datasets of miscellaneous problems validate the efficacy of the Self-Convince framework, achieving substantial improvements compared to the baselines. This study contributes to the burgeoning body of research focused on integrating pre-trained language models with tailored prompts and iterative refinement processes to augment their performance in complex tasks.

As advanced image manipulation techniques emerge, detecting the manipulation becomes increasingly important. Despite the success of recent learning-based approaches for image manipulation detection, they typically require expensive pixel-level annotations to train, while exhibiting degraded performance when testing on images that are differently manipulated compared with training images. To address these limitations, we propose weakly-supervised image manipulation detection, such that only binary image-level labels (authentic or tampered with) are required for training purpose. Such a weakly-supervised setting can leverage more training images and has the potential to adapt quickly to new manipulation techniques. To improve the generalization ability, we propose weakly-supervised self-consistency learning (WSCL) to leverage the weakly annotated images. Specifically, two consistency properties are learned: multi-source consistency (MSC) and inter-patch consistency (IPC). MSC exploits different content-agnostic information and enables cross-source learning via an online pseudo label generation and refinement process. IPC performs global pair-wise patch-patch relationship reasoning to discover a complete region of manipulation. Extensive experiments validate that our WSCL, even though is weakly supervised, exhibits competitive performance compared with fully-supervised counterpart under both in-distribution and out-of-distribution evaluations, as well as reasonable manipulation localization ability.

3D vector graphics play a crucial role in various applications including 3D shape retrieval, conceptual design, and virtual reality interactions due to their ability to capture essential structural information with minimal representation. While recent approaches have shown promise in generating 3D vector graphics, they often suffer from lengthy processing times and struggle to maintain view consistency. To address these limitations, we propose ViewCraft3D (VC3D), an efficient method that leverages 3D priors to generate 3D vector graphics. Specifically, our approach begins with 3D object analysis, employs a geometric extraction algorithm to fit 3D vector graphics to the underlying structure, and applies view-consistent refinement process to enhance visual quality. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that VC3D outperforms previous methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, while significantly reducing computational overhead. The resulting 3D sketches maintain view consistency and effectively capture the essential characteristics of the original objects.

While large language models have facilitated breakthroughs in many applications of artificial intelligence, their inherent largeness makes them computationally expensive and challenging to deploy in resource-constrained settings. In this paper, we document the development of SmolLM2, a state-of-the-art "small" (1.7 billion parameter) language model (LM). To attain strong performance, we overtrain SmolLM2 on ~11 trillion tokens of data using a multi-stage training process that mixes web text with specialized math, code, and instruction-following data. We additionally introduce new specialized datasets (FineMath, Stack-Edu, and SmolTalk) at stages where we found existing datasets to be problematically small or low-quality. To inform our design decisions, we perform both small-scale ablations as well as a manual refinement process that updates the dataset mixing rates at each stage based on the performance at the previous stage. Ultimately, we demonstrate that SmolLM2 outperforms other recent small LMs including Qwen2.5-1.5B and Llama3.2-1B. To facilitate future research on LM development as well as applications of small LMs, we release both SmolLM2 as well as all of the datasets we prepared in the course of this project.

Animatable 3D human reconstruction from a single image is a challenging problem due to the ambiguity in decoupling geometry, appearance, and deformation. Recent advances in 3D human reconstruction mainly focus on static human modeling, and the reliance of using synthetic 3D scans for training limits their generalization ability. Conversely, optimization-based video methods achieve higher fidelity but demand controlled capture conditions and computationally intensive refinement processes. Motivated by the emergence of large reconstruction models for efficient static reconstruction, we propose LHM (Large Animatable Human Reconstruction Model) to infer high-fidelity avatars represented as 3D Gaussian splatting in a feed-forward pass. Our model leverages a multimodal transformer architecture to effectively encode the human body positional features and image features with attention mechanism, enabling detailed preservation of clothing geometry and texture. To further boost the face identity preservation and fine detail recovery, we propose a head feature pyramid encoding scheme to aggregate multi-scale features of the head regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LHM generates plausible animatable human in seconds without post-processing for face and hands, outperforming existing methods in both reconstruction accuracy and generalization ability.

The remarkable growth in large language model (LLM) capabilities has spurred exploration into multi-agent systems, with debate frameworks emerging as a promising avenue for enhanced problem-solving. These multi-agent debate (MAD) approaches, where agents collaboratively present, critique, and refine arguments, potentially offer improved reasoning, robustness, and diverse perspectives over monolithic models. Despite prior studies leveraging MAD, a systematic understanding of its effectiveness compared to self-agent methods, particularly under varying conditions, remains elusive. This paper seeks to fill this gap by conceptualizing MAD as a test-time computational scaling technique, distinguished by collaborative refinement and diverse exploration capabilities. We conduct a comprehensive empirical investigation comparing MAD with strong self-agent test-time scaling baselines on mathematical reasoning and safety-related tasks. Our study systematically examines the influence of task difficulty, model scale, and agent diversity on MAD's performance. Key findings reveal that, for mathematical reasoning, MAD offers limited advantages over self-agent scaling but becomes more effective with increased problem difficulty and decreased model capability, while agent diversity shows little benefit. Conversely, for safety tasks, MAD's collaborative refinement can increase vulnerability, but incorporating diverse agent configurations facilitates a gradual reduction in attack success through the collaborative refinement process. We believe our findings provide critical guidance for the future development of more effective and strategically deployed MAD systems.

This work addresses the challenge of high-quality surface normal estimation from monocular colored inputs (i.e., images and videos), a field which has recently been revolutionized by repurposing diffusion priors. However, previous attempts still struggle with stochastic inference, conflicting with the deterministic nature of the Image2Normal task, and costly ensembling step, which slows down the estimation process. Our method, StableNormal, mitigates the stochasticity of the diffusion process by reducing inference variance, thus producing "Stable-and-Sharp" normal estimates without any additional ensembling process. StableNormal works robustly under challenging imaging conditions, such as extreme lighting, blurring, and low quality. It is also robust against transparent and reflective surfaces, as well as cluttered scenes with numerous objects. Specifically, StableNormal employs a coarse-to-fine strategy, which starts with a one-step normal estimator (YOSO) to derive an initial normal guess, that is relatively coarse but reliable, then followed by a semantic-guided refinement process (SG-DRN) that refines the normals to recover geometric details. The effectiveness of StableNormal is demonstrated through competitive performance in standard datasets such as DIODE-indoor, iBims, ScannetV2 and NYUv2, and also in various downstream tasks, such as surface reconstruction and normal enhancement. These results evidence that StableNormal retains both the "stability" and "sharpness" for accurate normal estimation. StableNormal represents a baby attempt to repurpose diffusion priors for deterministic estimation. To democratize this, code and models have been publicly available in hf.co/Stable-X

The strong performance of large language models (LLMs) on natural language processing tasks raises extensive discussion on their application to code generation. Recent work suggests multiple sampling approaches to improve initial code generation accuracy or program repair approaches to refine the code. However, these methods suffer from LLMs' inefficiencies and limited reasoning capacity. In this work, we propose an LLM programming workflow (LPW) designed to improve both initial code generation and subsequent refinements within a structured two-phase workflow. Specifically, in the solution generation phase, the LLM first outlines a solution plan that decomposes the problem into manageable sub-problems and then verifies the generated solution plan through visible test cases. Subsequently, in the code implementation phase, the LLM initially drafts a code according to the solution plan and its verification. If the generated code fails the visible tests, the plan verification serves as the intended natural language solution to inform the refinement process for correcting bugs. We further introduce SLPW, a sampling variant of LPW, which initially generates multiple solution plans and plan verifications, produces a program for each plan and its verification, and refines each program as necessary until one successfully passes the visible tests. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods across various existing LLMs, our experimental results show that LPW significantly improves the Pass@1 accuracy by up to 16.4% on well-established text-to-code generation benchmarks, especially with a notable improvement of around 10% on challenging benchmarks. Additionally, SLPW demonstrates up to a 5.6% improvement over LPW and sets new state-of-the-art Pass@1 accuracy on various benchmarks, e.g., 98.2% on HumanEval, 84.8% on MBPP, 64.0% on APPS, and 35.3% on CodeContest, using GPT-4o as the backbone.

Terminology correctness is important in the downstream application of machine translation, and a prevalent way to ensure this is to inject terminology constraints into a translation system. In our submission to the WMT 2023 terminology translation task, we adopt a translate-then-refine approach which can be domain-independent and requires minimal manual efforts. We annotate random source words with pseudo-terminology translations obtained from word alignment to first train a terminology-aware model. Further, we explore two post-processing methods. First, we use an alignment process to discover whether a terminology constraint has been violated, and if so, we re-decode with the violating word negatively constrained. Alternatively, we leverage a large language model to refine a hypothesis by providing it with terminology constraints. Results show that our terminology-aware model learns to incorporate terminologies effectively, and the large language model refinement process can further improve terminology recall.

Existing benchmarks for visual document retrieval (VDR) largely overlook non-English languages and the structural complexity of official publications. To address this critical gap, we introduce SDS KoPub VDR, the first large-scale, publicly available benchmark for retrieving and understanding Korean public documents. The benchmark is built upon a corpus of 361 real-world documents (40,781 pages), including 256 files under the KOGL Type 1 license and 105 from official legal portals, capturing complex visual elements like tables, charts, and multi-column layouts. To establish a challenging and reliable evaluation set, we constructed 600 query-page-answer triples. These were initially generated using multimodal models (e.g., GPT-4o) and subsequently underwent a rigorous human verification and refinement process to ensure factual accuracy and contextual relevance. The queries span six major public domains and are systematically categorized by the reasoning modality required: text-based, visual-based (e.g., chart interpretation), and cross-modal. We evaluate SDS KoPub VDR on two complementary tasks that reflect distinct retrieval paradigms: (1) text-only retrieval, which measures a model's ability to locate relevant document pages based solely on textual signals, and (2) multimodal retrieval, which assesses retrieval performance when visual features (e.g., tables, charts, and layouts) are jointly leveraged alongside text. This dual-task evaluation reveals substantial performance gaps, particularly in multimodal scenarios requiring cross-modal reasoning, even for state-of-the-art models. As a foundational resource, SDS KoPub VDR not only enables rigorous and fine-grained evaluation across textual and multimodal retrieval tasks but also provides a clear roadmap for advancing multimodal AI in complex, real-world document intelligence.

With the emergence of audio-language models, constructing large-scale paired audio-language datasets has become essential yet challenging for model development, primarily due to the time-intensive and labour-heavy demands involved. While large language models (LLMs) have improved the efficiency of synthetic audio caption generation, current approaches struggle to effectively extract and incorporate detailed audio information. In this paper, we propose an automated pipeline that integrates audio-language models for fine-grained content extraction, LLMs for synthetic caption generation, and a contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) model-based refinement process to improve the quality of captions. Specifically, we employ prompt chaining techniques in the content extraction stage to obtain accurate and fine-grained audio information, while we use the refinement process to mitigate potential hallucinations in the generated captions. Leveraging the AudioSet dataset and the proposed approach, we create AudioSetCaps, a dataset comprising 1.9 million audio-caption pairs, the largest audio-caption dataset at the time of writing. The models trained with AudioSetCaps achieve state-of-the-art performance on audio-text retrieval with R@1 scores of 46.3% for text-to-audio and 59.7% for audio-to-text retrieval and automated audio captioning with the CIDEr score of 84.8. As our approach has shown promising results with AudioSetCaps, we create another dataset containing 4.1 million synthetic audio-language pairs based on the Youtube-8M and VGGSound datasets. To facilitate research in audio-language learning, we have made our pipeline, datasets with 6 million audio-language pairs, and pre-trained models publicly available at https://github.com/JishengBai/AudioSetCaps.

Fiber tractography is a cornerstone of neuroimaging, enabling the detailed mapping of the brain's white matter pathways through diffusion MRI. This is crucial for understanding brain connectivity and function, making it a valuable tool in neurological applications. Despite its importance, tractography faces challenges due to its complexity and susceptibility to false positives, misrepresenting vital pathways. To address these issues, recent strategies have shifted towards deep learning, utilizing supervised learning, which depends on precise ground truth, or reinforcement learning, which operates without it. In this work, we propose Tract-RLFormer, a network utilizing both supervised and reinforcement learning, in a two-stage policy refinement process that markedly improves the accuracy and generalizability across various data-sets. By employing a tract-specific approach, our network directly delineates the tracts of interest, bypassing the traditional segmentation process. Through rigorous validation on datasets such as TractoInferno, HCP, and ISMRM-2015, our methodology demonstrates a leap forward in tractography, showcasing its ability to accurately map the brain's white matter tracts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant capability across various tasks, with their real-world effectiveness often driven by prompt design. While recent research has focused on optimizing prompt content, the role of prompt formatting, a critical but often overlooked dimension, has received limited systematic investigation. In this paper, we introduce Content-Format Integrated Prompt Optimization (CFPO), an innovative methodology that jointly optimizes both prompt content and formatting through an iterative refinement process. CFPO leverages natural language mutations to explore content variations and employs a dynamic format exploration strategy that systematically evaluates diverse format options. Our extensive evaluations across multiple tasks and open-source LLMs demonstrate that CFPO demonstrates measurable performance improvements compared to content-only optimization methods. This highlights the importance of integrated content-format optimization and offers a practical, model-agnostic approach to enhancing LLM performance. Code will be available at https://github.com/HenryLau7/CFPO.

We present MosaicFusion, a simple yet effective diffusion-based data augmentation approach for large vocabulary instance segmentation. Our method is training-free and does not rely on any label supervision. Two key designs enable us to employ an off-the-shelf text-to-image diffusion model as a useful dataset generator for object instances and mask annotations. First, we divide an image canvas into several regions and perform a single round of diffusion process to generate multiple instances simultaneously, conditioning on different text prompts. Second, we obtain corresponding instance masks by aggregating cross-attention maps associated with object prompts across layers and diffusion time steps, followed by simple thresholding and edge-aware refinement processing. Without bells and whistles, our MosaicFusion can produce a significant amount of synthetic labeled data for both rare and novel categories. Experimental results on the challenging LVIS long-tailed and open-vocabulary benchmarks demonstrate that MosaicFusion can significantly improve the performance of existing instance segmentation models, especially for rare and novel categories. Code will be released at https://github.com/Jiahao000/MosaicFusion.

Time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Recently, mostly due to the high computational cost of traditional solution techniques, deep neural network based surrogates have gained increased interest. The practical utility of such neural PDE solvers relies on their ability to provide accurate, stable predictions over long time horizons, which is a notoriously hard problem. In this work, we present a large-scale analysis of common temporal rollout strategies, identifying the neglect of non-dominant spatial frequency information, often associated with high frequencies in PDE solutions, as the primary pitfall limiting stable, accurate rollout performance. Based on these insights, we draw inspiration from recent advances in diffusion models to introduce PDE-Refiner; a novel model class that enables more accurate modeling of all frequency components via a multistep refinement process. We validate PDE-Refiner on challenging benchmarks of complex fluid dynamics, demonstrating stable and accurate rollouts that consistently outperform state-of-the-art models, including neural, numerical, and hybrid neural-numerical architectures. We further demonstrate that PDE-Refiner greatly enhances data efficiency, since the denoising objective implicitly induces a novel form of spectral data augmentation. Finally, PDE-Refiner's connection to diffusion models enables an accurate and efficient assessment of the model's predictive uncertainty, allowing us to estimate when the surrogate becomes inaccurate.

We present VDC-Agent, a self-evolving framework for Video Detailed Captioning that requires neither human annotations nor larger teacher models. The agent forms a closed loop of caption generation, principle-guided scoring (score and textual suggestions), and prompt refinement. When caption quality regresses, a self-reflection path leverages the previous chain-of-thought to amend the update. Running this process on unlabeled videos produces trajectories of (caption, score) pairs. We convert the trajectories into preference tuples and filter out samples with JSON parsing errors, resulting in VDC-Agent-19K, which contains 18,886 automatically constructed pairs. We then fine-tune the base MLLM on this dataset using an easy-to-hard curriculum direct preference optimization. Built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, our VDC-Agent-7B attains state-of-the-art performance on the VDC benchmark with 49.08% average accuracy and 2.50 score, surpassing specialized video captioners and improving over the base model by +5.13% accuracy and +0.27 score at similar inference cost.

Occupancy prediction aims to estimate the 3D spatial distribution of occupied regions along with their corresponding semantic labels. Existing vision-based methods perform well on daytime benchmarks but struggle in nighttime scenarios due to limited visibility and challenging lighting conditions. To address these challenges, we propose LIAR, a novel framework that learns illumination-affined representations. LIAR first introduces Selective Low-light Image Enhancement (SLLIE), which leverages the illumination priors from daytime scenes to adaptively determine whether a nighttime image is genuinely dark or sufficiently well-lit, enabling more targeted global enhancement. Building on the illumination maps generated by SLLIE, LIAR further incorporates two illumination-aware components: 2D Illumination-guided Sampling (2D-IGS) and 3D Illumination-driven Projection (3D-IDP), to respectively tackle local underexposure and overexposure. Specifically, 2D-IGS modulates feature sampling positions according to illumination maps, assigning larger offsets to darker regions and smaller ones to brighter regions, thereby alleviating feature degradation in underexposed areas. Subsequently, 3D-IDP enhances semantic understanding in overexposed regions by constructing illumination intensity fields and supplying refined residual queries to the BEV context refinement process. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superior performance of LIAR under challenging nighttime scenarios. The source code and pretrained models are available https://github.com/yanzq95/LIAR{here}.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have revolutionized signal processing and computer vision by modeling signals as continuous, differentiable functions parameterized by neural networks. However, their inherent formulation as a regression problem makes them prone to regression to the mean, limiting their ability to capture fine details, retain high-frequency information, and handle noise effectively. To address these challenges, we propose Iterative Implicit Neural Representations (I-INRs) a novel plug-and-play framework that enhances signal reconstruction through an iterative refinement process. I-INRs effectively recover high-frequency details, improve robustness to noise, and achieve superior reconstruction quality. Our framework seamlessly integrates with existing INR architectures, delivering substantial performance gains across various tasks. Extensive experiments show that I-INRs outperform baseline methods, including WIRE, SIREN, and Gauss, in diverse computer vision applications such as image restoration, image denoising, and object occupancy prediction.

We present MagicColor, a diffusion-based framework for multi-instance sketch colorization. The production of multi-instance 2D line art colorization adheres to an industry-standard workflow, which consists of three crucial stages: the design of line art characters, the coloring of individual objects, and the refinement process. The artists are required to repeat the process of coloring each instance one by one, which is inaccurate and inefficient. Meanwhile, current generative methods fail to solve this task due to the challenge of multi-instance pair data collection. To tackle these challenges, we incorporate three technical designs to ensure precise character detail transcription and achieve multi-instance sketch colorization in a single forward. Specifically, we first propose the self-play training strategy to solve the lack of training data. Then we introduce an instance guider to feed the color of the instance. To achieve accurate color matching, we present fine-grained color matching with edge loss to enhance visual quality. Equipped with the proposed modules, MagicColor enables automatically transforming sketches into vividly-colored images with accurate consistency and multi-instance control. Experiments on our collected datasets show that our model outperforms existing methods regarding chromatic precision. Specifically, our model critically automates the colorization process with zero manual adjustments, so novice users can produce stylistically consistent artwork by providing reference instances and the original line art. Our code and additional details are available at https://yinhan-zhang.github.io/color

Motivated by the substantial achievements observed in Large Language Models (LLMs) in the field of natural language processing, recent research has commenced investigations into the application of LLMs for complex, long-horizon sequential task planning challenges in robotics. LLMs are advantageous in offering the potential to enhance the generalizability as task-agnostic planners and facilitate flexible interaction between human instructors and planning systems. However, task plans generated by LLMs often lack feasibility and correctness. To address this challenge, we introduce ISR-LLM, a novel framework that improves LLM-based planning through an iterative self-refinement process. The framework operates through three sequential steps: preprocessing, planning, and iterative self-refinement. During preprocessing, an LLM translator is employed to convert natural language input into a Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) formulation. In the planning phase, an LLM planner formulates an initial plan, which is then assessed and refined in the iterative self-refinement step by using a validator. We examine the performance of ISR-LLM across three distinct planning domains. The results show that ISR-LLM is able to achieve markedly higher success rates in task accomplishments compared to state-of-the-art LLM-based planners. Moreover, it also preserves the broad applicability and generalizability of working with natural language instructions.

Large language model agents have exhibited exceptional performance across a range of complex interactive tasks. Recent approaches have utilized tuning with expert trajectories to enhance agent performance, yet they primarily concentrate on outcome rewards, which may lead to errors or suboptimal actions due to the absence of process supervision signals. In this paper, we introduce the Iterative step-level Process Refinement (IPR) framework, which provides detailed step-by-step guidance to enhance agent training. Specifically, we adopt the Monte Carlo method to estimate step-level rewards. During each iteration, the agent explores along the expert trajectory and generates new actions. These actions are then evaluated against the corresponding step of expert trajectory using step-level rewards. Such comparison helps identify discrepancies, yielding contrastive action pairs that serve as training data for the agent. Our experiments on three complex agent tasks demonstrate that our framework outperforms a variety of strong baselines. Moreover, our analytical findings highlight the effectiveness of IPR in augmenting action efficiency and its applicability to diverse models.

Curb detection is a crucial function in intelligent driving, essential for determining drivable areas on the road. However, the complexity of road environments makes curb detection challenging. This paper introduces CurbNet, a novel framework for curb detection utilizing point cloud segmentation. To address the lack of comprehensive curb datasets with 3D annotations, we have developed the 3D-Curb dataset based on SemanticKITTI, currently the largest and most diverse collection of curb point clouds. Recognizing that the primary characteristic of curbs is height variation, our approach leverages spatially rich 3D point clouds for training. To tackle the challenges posed by the uneven distribution of curb features on the xy-plane and their dependence on high-frequency features along the z-axis, we introduce the Multi-Scale and Channel Attention (MSCA) module, a customized solution designed to optimize detection performance. Additionally, we propose an adaptive weighted loss function group specifically formulated to counteract the imbalance in the distribution of curb point clouds relative to other categories. Extensive experiments conducted on 2 major datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses existing benchmarks set by leading curb detection and point cloud segmentation models. Through the post-processing refinement of the detection results, we have significantly reduced noise in curb detection, thereby improving precision by 4.5 points. Similarly, our tolerance experiments also achieve state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, real-world experiments and dataset analyses mutually validate each other, reinforcing CurbNet's superior detection capability and robust generalizability. The project website is available at: https://github.com/guoyangzhao/CurbNet/.

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have brought remarkable success in the field of LLM-as-Agent. Nevertheless, a prevalent assumption is that the information processed by LLMs is consistently honest, neglecting the pervasive deceptive or misleading information in human society and AI-generated content. This oversight makes LLMs susceptible to malicious manipulations, potentially resulting in detrimental outcomes. This study utilizes the intricate Avalon game as a testbed to explore LLMs' potential in deceptive environments. Avalon, full of misinformation and requiring sophisticated logic, manifests as a "Game-of-Thoughts". Inspired by the efficacy of humans' recursive thinking and perspective-taking in the Avalon game, we introduce a novel framework, Recursive Contemplation (ReCon), to enhance LLMs' ability to identify and counteract deceptive information. ReCon combines formulation and refinement contemplation processes; formulation contemplation produces initial thoughts and speech, while refinement contemplation further polishes them. Additionally, we incorporate first-order and second-order perspective transitions into these processes respectively. Specifically, the first-order allows an LLM agent to infer others' mental states, and the second-order involves understanding how others perceive the agent's mental state. After integrating ReCon with different LLMs, extensive experiment results from the Avalon game indicate its efficacy in aiding LLMs to discern and maneuver around deceptive information without extra fine-tuning and data. Finally, we offer a possible explanation for the efficacy of ReCon and explore the current limitations of LLMs in terms of safety, reasoning, speaking style, and format, potentially furnishing insights for subsequent research.

In recent years, diffusion-based text-to-music (TTM) generation has gained prominence, offering an innovative approach to synthesizing musical content from textual descriptions. Achieving high accuracy and diversity in this generation process requires extensive, high-quality data, including both high-fidelity audio waveforms and detailed text descriptions, which often constitute only a small portion of available datasets. In open-source datasets, issues such as low-quality music waveforms, mislabeling, weak labeling, and unlabeled data significantly hinder the development of music generation models. To address these challenges, we propose a novel paradigm for high-quality music generation that incorporates a quality-aware training strategy, enabling generative models to discern the quality of input music waveforms during training. Leveraging the unique properties of musical signals, we first adapted and implemented a masked diffusion transformer (MDT) model for the TTM task, demonstrating its distinct capacity for quality control and enhanced musicality. Additionally, we address the issue of low-quality captions in TTM with a caption refinement data processing approach. Experiments demonstrate our state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on MusicCaps and the Song-Describer Dataset. Our demo page can be accessed at https://qa-mdt.github.io/.

Vector font synthesis is a challenging and ongoing problem in the fields of Computer Vision and Computer Graphics. The recently-proposed DeepVecFont achieved state-of-the-art performance by exploiting information of both the image and sequence modalities of vector fonts. However, it has limited capability for handling long sequence data and heavily relies on an image-guided outline refinement post-processing. Thus, vector glyphs synthesized by DeepVecFont still often contain some distortions and artifacts and cannot rival human-designed results. To address the above problems, this paper proposes an enhanced version of DeepVecFont mainly by making the following three novel technical contributions. First, we adopt Transformers instead of RNNs to process sequential data and design a relaxation representation for vector outlines, markedly improving the model's capability and stability of synthesizing long and complex outlines. Second, we propose to sample auxiliary points in addition to control points to precisely align the generated and target B\'ezier curves or lines. Finally, to alleviate error accumulation in the sequential generation process, we develop a context-based self-refinement module based on another Transformer-based decoder to remove artifacts in the initially synthesized glyphs. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively resolves those intrinsic problems of the original DeepVecFont and outperforms existing approaches in generating English and Chinese vector fonts with complicated structures and diverse styles.

The referring video object segmentation task (RVOS) involves segmentation of a text-referred object instance in the frames of a given video. Due to the complex nature of this multimodal task, which combines text reasoning, video understanding, instance segmentation and tracking, existing approaches typically rely on sophisticated pipelines in order to tackle it. In this paper, we propose a simple Transformer-based approach to RVOS. Our framework, termed Multimodal Tracking Transformer (MTTR), models the RVOS task as a sequence prediction problem. Following recent advancements in computer vision and natural language processing, MTTR is based on the realization that video and text can be processed together effectively and elegantly by a single multimodal Transformer model. MTTR is end-to-end trainable, free of text-related inductive bias components and requires no additional mask-refinement post-processing steps. As such, it simplifies the RVOS pipeline considerably compared to existing methods. Evaluation on standard benchmarks reveals that MTTR significantly outperforms previous art across multiple metrics. In particular, MTTR shows impressive +5.7 and +5.0 mAP gains on the A2D-Sentences and JHMDB-Sentences datasets respectively, while processing 76 frames per second. In addition, we report strong results on the public validation set of Refer-YouTube-VOS, a more challenging RVOS dataset that has yet to receive the attention of researchers. The code to reproduce our experiments is available at https://github.com/mttr2021/MTTR

In this paper, we introduce a framework ARBEx, a novel attentive feature extraction framework driven by Vision Transformer with reliability balancing to cope against poor class distributions, bias, and uncertainty in the facial expression learning (FEL) task. We reinforce several data pre-processing and refinement methods along with a window-based cross-attention ViT to squeeze the best of the data. We also employ learnable anchor points in the embedding space with label distributions and multi-head self-attention mechanism to optimize performance against weak predictions with reliability balancing, which is a strategy that leverages anchor points, attention scores, and confidence values to enhance the resilience of label predictions. To ensure correct label classification and improve the models' discriminative power, we introduce anchor loss, which encourages large margins between anchor points. Additionally, the multi-head self-attention mechanism, which is also trainable, plays an integral role in identifying accurate labels. This approach provides critical elements for improving the reliability of predictions and has a substantial positive effect on final prediction capabilities. Our adaptive model can be integrated with any deep neural network to forestall challenges in various recognition tasks. Our strategy outperforms current state-of-the-art methodologies, according to extensive experiments conducted in a variety of contexts.

Large language models (LLMs), both proprietary and open-source, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. However, they face significant limitations in legal reasoning tasks. Proprietary models introduce data privacy risks and high inference costs, while open-source models underperform due to insufficient legal domain training data. To address these limitations, we study data generation for legal reasoning to improve the legal reasoning performance of open-source LLMs with the help of proprietary LLMs. This is challenging due to the lack of legal knowledge in proprietary LLMs and the difficulty in verifying the generated data. We propose KgDG, a knowledge-guided data generation framework for legal reasoning. Our framework enables leveraging legal knowledge to enhance generation diversity and introduces a refinement and verification process to ensure the quality of generated data. Moreover, we expand the generated dataset to further enhance the LLM reasoning capabilities. Using KgDG, we create a synthetic legal reasoning dataset containing 50K high-quality examples. Our trained model LawGPT outperforms existing legal-specific LLMs and achieves performance comparable to proprietary LLMs, demonstrating the effectiveness of KgDG and LawGPT. Our code and resources is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/KgDG-45F5 .

Recent advances in visual generation have increasingly explored the integration of reasoning capabilities. They incorporate textual reasoning, i.e., think, either before (as pre-planning) or after (as post-refinement) the generation process, yet they lack on-the-fly multimodal interaction during the generation itself. In this preliminary study, we introduce Thinking-while-Generating (TwiG), the first interleaved framework that enables co-evolving textual reasoning throughout the visual generation process. As visual content is progressively generating, textual reasoning is interleaved to both guide upcoming local regions and reflect on previously synthesized ones. This dynamic interplay produces more context-aware and semantically rich visual outputs. To unveil the potential of this framework, we investigate three candidate strategies, zero-shot prompting, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our curated TwiG-50K dataset, and reinforcement learning (RL) via a customized TwiG-GRPO strategy, each offering unique insights into the dynamics of interleaved reasoning. We hope this work inspires further research into interleaving textual reasoning for enhanced visual generation. Code will be released at: https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Thinking-while-Generating.

The foundational capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are deeply influenced by the quality of their pre-training corpora. However, enhancing data quality at scale remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the trade-off between refinement effectiveness and processing efficiency. While rule-based filtering remains the dominant paradigm, it typically operates at the document level and lacks the granularity needed to refine specific content within documents. Inspired by emerging work such as ProX, we propose RefineX, a novel framework for large-scale, surgical refinement of pre-training data through programmatic editing tasks. RefineX enables efficient and fine-grained data refinement while reliably preserving the diversity and naturalness of raw text. The core strength of RefineX lies in distilling high-quality, expert-guided end-to-end refinement results into minimal edit-based deletion programs. This high-precision distillation pipeline is used to train an efficient and reliable refine model that can systematically improve every instance in the corpus at scale. We evaluate RefineX across from-scratch pre-training at multiple model scales and find that it consistently outperforms models trained on raw, filtered, or alternatively refined data across diverse downstream tasks. On the 750M model, RefineX yields 2.6%-7.2% average gains on lighteval tasks, and achieves comparable performance using significantly fewer training tokens. Further analysis shows that RefineX reliably enhances text quality with both high efficiency and precision, outperforming prior approaches such as end-to-end generation and Prox-C. These results position RefineX as a scalable, effective, and reliable solution for optimizing pre-training data in modern LLM pipelines.

Result diversification (RD) is a crucial technique in Text-to-Image Retrieval for enhancing the efficiency of a practical application. Conventional methods focus solely on increasing the diversity metric of image appearances. However, the diversity metric and its desired value vary depending on the application, which limits the applications of RD. This paper proposes a novel task called CDR-CA (Contextual Diversity Refinement of Composite Attributes). CDR-CA aims to refine the diversities of multiple attributes, according to the application's context. To address this task, we propose Multi-Source DPPs, a simple yet strong baseline that extends the Determinantal Point Process (DPP) to multi-sources. We model MS-DPP as a single DPP model with a unified similarity matrix based on a manifold representation. We also introduce Tangent Normalization to reflect contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/NEC-N-SOGI/msdpp.

Feedback is crucial for every design process, such as user interface (UI) design, and automating design critiques can significantly improve the efficiency of the design workflow. Although existing multimodal large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks, they often struggle with generating high-quality design critiques -- a complex task that requires producing detailed design comments that are visually grounded in a given design's image. Building on recent advancements in iterative refinement of text output and visual prompting methods, we propose an iterative visual prompting approach for UI critique that takes an input UI screenshot and design guidelines and generates a list of design comments, along with corresponding bounding boxes that map each comment to a specific region in the screenshot. The entire process is driven completely by LLMs, which iteratively refine both the text output and bounding boxes using few-shot samples tailored for each step. We evaluated our approach using Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT-4o, and found that human experts generally preferred the design critiques generated by our pipeline over those by the baseline, with the pipeline reducing the gap from human performance by 50% for one rating metric. To assess the generalizability of our approach to other multimodal tasks, we applied our pipeline to open-vocabulary object and attribute detection, and experiments showed that our method also outperformed the baseline.

We introduce the Extract-Refine-Retrieve-Read (ERRR) framework, a novel approach designed to bridge the pre-retrieval information gap in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems through query optimization tailored to meet the specific knowledge requirements of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike conventional query optimization techniques used in RAG, the ERRR framework begins by extracting parametric knowledge from LLMs, followed by using a specialized query optimizer for refining these queries. This process ensures the retrieval of only the most pertinent information essential for generating accurate responses. Moreover, to enhance flexibility and reduce computational costs, we propose a trainable scheme for our pipeline that utilizes a smaller, tunable model as the query optimizer, which is refined through knowledge distillation from a larger teacher model. Our evaluations on various question-answering (QA) datasets and with different retrieval systems show that ERRR consistently outperforms existing baselines, proving to be a versatile and cost-effective module for improving the utility and accuracy of RAG systems.

The performance of single image super-resolution depends heavily on how to generate and complement high-frequency details to low-resolution images. Recently, diffusion-based models exhibit great potential in generating high-quality images for super-resolution tasks. However, existing models encounter difficulties in directly predicting high-frequency information of wide bandwidth by solely utilizing the high-resolution ground truth as the target for all sampling timesteps. To tackle this problem and achieve higher-quality super-resolution, we propose a novel Frequency Domain-guided multiscale Diffusion model (FDDiff), which decomposes the high-frequency information complementing process into finer-grained steps. In particular, a wavelet packet-based frequency complement chain is developed to provide multiscale intermediate targets with increasing bandwidth for reverse diffusion process. Then FDDiff guides reverse diffusion process to progressively complement the missing high-frequency details over timesteps. Moreover, we design a multiscale frequency refinement network to predict the required high-frequency components at multiple scales within one unified network. Comprehensive evaluations on popular benchmarks are conducted, and demonstrate that FDDiff outperforms prior generative methods with higher-fidelity super-resolution results.

High-quality training data is fundamental to large language model (LLM) performance, yet existing preprocessing pipelines often struggle to effectively remove noise and unstructured content from web-scale corpora. This paper presents Blu-WERP, a novel data preprocessing pipeline designed to optimize the quality of Common Crawl WARC files for LLM training. We demonstrate that Blu-WERP significantly outperforms established baselines including DCLM across multiple model scales and evaluation benchmarks. Our pipeline processes CC WARC dumps, implementing advanced filtering and quality assessment mechanisms. We conducted comprehensive evaluations using models with 150M, 400M, 530M, 750M, and 1B parameters, testing against nine standard benchmarks categorized as World Knowledge & Reasoning, Language Understanding, and Commonsense Reasoning. Results show Blu-WERP consistently achieved superior performance across all model scales. At the 1B parameter scale, Relatively Blu-WERP demonstrates a 4.0% and 9.5% aggregate improvement over DCLM and Fineweb respectively, while achieving quality-per-token efficiency gain. Categorical analysis reveals 2.4% improvement in World Knowledge & Reasoning, 6.2% improvement in Language Understanding, and 4.2% improvement in Commonsense Reasoning. These results establish Blu-WERP as a state-of-the-art preprocessing pipeline that substantially improves LLM training data quality and downstream model performance with reduced computational cost. Our findings contribute to the growing body of research on data-centric AI, demonstrating that preprocessing pipeline design significantly impacts LLM capabilities. The Blu-WERP pipeline represents a practical advancement in data quality optimization, offering researchers and practitioners an effective solution for improving LLM training efficiency and model performance.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has inaugurated a transformative epoch in natural language processing, fostering unprecedented proficiency in text generation, comprehension, and contextual scrutiny. Nevertheless, effectively handling extensive contexts, crucial for myriad applications, poses a formidable obstacle owing to the intrinsic constraints of the models' context window sizes and the computational burdens entailed by their operations. This investigation presents an innovative framework that strategically tailors LLMs for streamlined context processing by harnessing the synergies among natural language summarization, soft prompt compression, and augmented utility preservation mechanisms. Our methodology, dubbed SoftPromptComp, amalgamates natural language prompts extracted from summarization methodologies with dynamically generated soft prompts to forge a concise yet semantically robust depiction of protracted contexts. This depiction undergoes further refinement via a weighting mechanism optimizing information retention and utility for subsequent tasks. We substantiate that our framework markedly diminishes computational overhead and enhances LLMs' efficacy across various benchmarks, while upholding or even augmenting the caliber of the produced content. By amalgamating soft prompt compression with sophisticated summarization, SoftPromptComp confronts the dual challenges of managing lengthy contexts and ensuring model scalability. Our findings point towards a propitious trajectory for augmenting LLMs' applicability and efficiency, rendering them more versatile and pragmatic for real-world applications. This research enriches the ongoing discourse on optimizing language models, providing insights into the potency of soft prompts and summarization techniques as pivotal instruments for the forthcoming generation of NLP solutions.

Molecular docking is a key computational tool utilized to predict the binding conformations of small molecules to protein targets, which is fundamental in the design of novel drugs. Despite recent advancements in geometric deep learning-based approaches leading to improvements in blind docking efficiency, these methods have encountered notable challenges, such as limited generalization performance on unseen proteins, the inability to concurrently address the settings of blind docking and site-specific docking, and the frequent occurrence of physical implausibilities such as inter-molecular steric clash. In this study, we introduce DeltaDock, a robust and versatile framework designed for efficient molecular docking to overcome these challenges. DeltaDock operates in a two-step process: rapid initial complex structures sampling followed by multi-scale iterative refinement of the initial structures. In the initial stage, to sample accurate structures with high efficiency, we develop a ligand-dependent binding site prediction model founded on large protein models and graph neural networks. This model is then paired with GPU-accelerated sampling algorithms. The sampled structures are updated using a multi-scale iterative refinement module that captures both protein-ligand atom-atom interactions and residue-atom interactions in the following stage. Distinct from previous geometric deep learning methods that are conditioned on the blind docking setting, DeltaDock demonstrates superior performance in both blind docking and site-specific docking settings. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that DeltaDock consistently surpasses baseline methods in terms of docking accuracy. Furthermore, it displays remarkable generalization capabilities and proficiency for predicting physically valid structures, thereby attesting to its robustness and reliability in various scenarios.

The ability to derive underlying principles from a handful of observations and then generalize to novel situations -- known as inductive reasoning -- is central to human intelligence. Prior work suggests that language models (LMs) often fall short on inductive reasoning, despite achieving impressive success on research benchmarks. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of the inductive reasoning capabilities of LMs through iterative hypothesis refinement, a technique that more closely mirrors the human inductive process than standard input-output prompting. Iterative hypothesis refinement employs a three-step process: proposing, selecting, and refining hypotheses in the form of textual rules. By examining the intermediate rules, we observe that LMs are phenomenal hypothesis proposers (i.e., generating candidate rules), and when coupled with a (task-specific) symbolic interpreter that is able to systematically filter the proposed set of rules, this hybrid approach achieves strong results across inductive reasoning benchmarks that require inducing causal relations, language-like instructions, and symbolic concepts. However, they also behave as puzzling inductive reasoners, showing notable performance gaps between rule induction (i.e., identifying plausible rules) and rule application (i.e., applying proposed rules to instances), suggesting that LMs are proposing hypotheses without being able to actually apply the rules. Through empirical and human analyses, we further reveal several discrepancies between the inductive reasoning processes of LMs and humans, shedding light on both the potentials and limitations of using LMs in inductive reasoning tasks.

We introduce ``Idea to Image,'' a system that enables multimodal iterative self-refinement with GPT-4V(ision) for automatic image design and generation. Humans can quickly identify the characteristics of different text-to-image (T2I) models via iterative explorations. This enables them to efficiently convert their high-level generation ideas into effective T2I prompts that can produce good images. We investigate if systems based on large multimodal models (LMMs) can develop analogous multimodal self-refinement abilities that enable exploring unknown models or environments via self-refining tries. Idea2Img cyclically generates revised T2I prompts to synthesize draft images, and provides directional feedback for prompt revision, both conditioned on its memory of the probed T2I model's characteristics. The iterative self-refinement brings Idea2Img various advantages over vanilla T2I models. Notably, Idea2Img can process input ideas with interleaved image-text sequences, follow ideas with design instructions, and generate images of better semantic and visual qualities. The user preference study validates the efficacy of multimodal iterative self-refinement on automatic image design and generation.

We introduce D-FINE, a powerful real-time object detector that achieves outstanding localization precision by redefining the bounding box regression task in DETR models. D-FINE comprises two key components: Fine-grained Distribution Refinement (FDR) and Global Optimal Localization Self-Distillation (GO-LSD). FDR transforms the regression process from predicting fixed coordinates to iteratively refining probability distributions, providing a fine-grained intermediate representation that significantly enhances localization accuracy. GO-LSD is a bidirectional optimization strategy that transfers localization knowledge from refined distributions to shallower layers through self-distillation, while also simplifying the residual prediction tasks for deeper layers. Additionally, D-FINE incorporates lightweight optimizations in computationally intensive modules and operations, achieving a better balance between speed and accuracy. Specifically, D-FINE-L / X achieves 54.0% / 55.8% AP on the COCO dataset at 124 / 78 FPS on an NVIDIA T4 GPU. When pretrained on Objects365, D-FINE-L / X attains 57.1% / 59.3% AP, surpassing all existing real-time detectors. Furthermore, our method significantly enhances the performance of a wide range of DETR models by up to 5.3% AP with negligible extra parameters and training costs. Our code and pretrained models: https://github.com/Peterande/D-FINE.

Image-based 3D reconstruction has increasingly stunning results over the past few years with the latest improvements in computer vision and graphics. Geometry and topology are two fundamental concepts when dealing with 3D mesh structures. But the latest often remains a side issue in the 3D mesh-based reconstruction literature. Indeed, performing per-vertex elementary displacements over a 3D sphere mesh only impacts its geometry and leaves the topological structure unchanged and fixed. Whereas few attempts propose to update the geometry and the topology, all need to lean on costly 3D ground-truth to determine the faces/edges to prune. We present in this work a method that aims to refine the topology of any 3D mesh through a face-pruning strategy that extensively relies upon 2D alpha masks and camera pose information. Our solution leverages a differentiable renderer that renders each face as a 2D soft map. Its pixel intensity reflects the probability of being covered during the rendering process by such a face. Based on the 2D soft-masks available, our method is thus able to quickly highlight all the incorrectly rendered faces for a given viewpoint. Because our module is agnostic to the network that produces the 3D mesh, it can be easily plugged into any self-supervised image-based (either synthetic or natural) 3D reconstruction pipeline to get complex meshes with a non-spherical topology.

Reasoning is a key component of language understanding in Large Language Models. While Chain-of-Thought prompting enhances performance via explicit intermediate steps, it suffers from sufficient token overhead and a fixed reasoning trajectory, preventing step-wise refinement. Recent advances in latent reasoning address these limitations by refining internal reasoning processes directly in the model's latent space, without producing explicit outputs. However, a key challenge remains: how to effectively update reasoning embeddings during post-training to guide the model toward more accurate solutions. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight post-training framework that refines latent reasoning trajectories using two novel strategies: 1) Contrastive reasoning feedback, which compares reasoning embeddings against strong and weak baselines to infer effective update directions via embedding enhancement; 2) Residual embedding refinement, which stabilizes updates by progressively integrating current and historical gradients, enabling fast yet controlled convergence. Extensive experiments and case studies are conducted on five reasoning benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Notably, a 5\% accuracy gain on MathQA without additional training.

Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation, yet they often struggle with complex programming tasks that require deep algorithmic reasoning. While process supervision through learned reward models shows promise in guiding reasoning steps, it requires expensive training data and suffers from unreliable evaluation. We propose Outcome-Refining Process Supervision, a novel paradigm that treats outcome refinement itself as the process to be supervised. Our framework leverages concrete execution signals to ground the supervision of reasoning steps, while using tree-structured exploration to maintain multiple solution trajectories simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate that our approach enables even smaller models to achieve high success accuracy and performance metrics on competitive programming tasks, creates more reliable verification than traditional reward models without requiring training PRMs. Our approach achieves significant improvements across 5 models and 3 datasets: an average of 26.9% increase in correctness and 42.2% in efficiency. The results suggest that providing structured reasoning space with concrete verification signals is crucial for solving complex programming tasks. We open-source all our code and data at: https://github.com/zhuohaoyu/ORPS

Language models (LMs) are susceptible to in-context reward hacking, where they exploit flaws in tainted or faulty written specifications or rubrics to achieve high scores without fulfilling the user's true intent. We introduce Specification Self-Correction (SSC), a novel, test-time framework that enables an LM to identify and correct flaws within its own guiding specification. SSC employs a multi-step inference process where the model first generates a response based on a potentially tainted specification, critiques its output, and then revises the specification itself to remove the exploitable loophole. A final, more robust response is then generated using this self-corrected specification. Across experiments spanning creative writing and agentic coding tasks with several LMs, we demonstrate that while models initially game tainted specifications in 50-70\% of cases, the SSC process reduces this vulnerability by over 90\%. This dynamic repair occurs at inference time, requires no weight modification, and leads to more robustly aligned model behavior. Code at https://github.com/vicgalle/specification-self-correction .

Recent advancements in visual language models (VLMs) have notably enhanced their capabilities in handling complex Graphical User Interface (GUI) interaction tasks. Despite these improvements, current frameworks often struggle to generate correct actions in challenging GUI environments. State-of-the-art commercial VLMs are black-boxes, and fine-tuning open-source VLMs for GUI tasks requires significant resources. Additionally, existing trajectory-level evaluation and refinement techniques frequently fall short due to delayed feedback and local optimization issues. To address these challenges, we propose an approach that guides VLM agents with process supervision by a reward model during GUI navigation and control at inference time. This guidance allows the VLM agent to optimize actions at each inference step, thereby improving performance in both static and dynamic environments. In particular, our method demonstrates significant performance gains in three GUI navigation tasks, achieving a 3.4% improvement in single step action accuracy for static environments, along with a around 33% increase in task success rate in one dynamic environment. With further integration of trajectory reflection and retry mechanisms, we also demonstrate even greater enhancement in task success.

Multimodal foundation models (MFMs) have demonstrated significant success in tasks such as visual captioning, question answering, and image-text retrieval. However, these models face inherent limitations due to their finite internal capacity, which restricts their ability to process extended temporal sequences, a crucial requirement for comprehensive video and audio analysis. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a specialized cognitive module, temporal working memory (TWM), which aims to enhance the temporal modeling capabilities of MFMs. It selectively retains task-relevant information across temporal dimensions, ensuring that critical details are preserved throughout the processing of video and audio content. The TWM uses a query-guided attention approach to focus on the most informative multimodal segments within temporal sequences. By retaining only the most relevant content, TWM optimizes the use of the model's limited capacity, enhancing its temporal modeling ability. This plug-and-play module can be easily integrated into existing MFMs. With our TWM, nine state-of-the-art models exhibit significant performance improvements across tasks such as video captioning, question answering, and video-text retrieval. By enhancing temporal modeling, TWM extends the capability of MFMs to handle complex, time-sensitive data effectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/xid32/NAACL_2025_TWM.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with unit test feedback has enhanced large language models (LLMs) code generation, but relies on sparse rewards provided only after complete code evaluation, limiting learning efficiency and incremental improvements. When generated code fails all unit tests, no learning signal is received, hindering progress on complex tasks. To address this, we propose a Process Reward Model (PRM) that delivers dense, line-level feedback on code correctness during generation, mimicking human code refinement and providing immediate guidance. We explore various strategies for training PRMs and integrating them into the RL framework, finding that using PRMs both as dense rewards and for value function initialization significantly boosts performance. Our approach increases our in-house LLM's pass rate from 28.2% to 29.8% on LiveCodeBench and from 31.8% to 35.8% on our internal benchmark. Our experimental results highlight the effectiveness of PRMs in enhancing RL-driven code generation, especially for long-horizon scenarios.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted increasing research attention due to their powerful visual understanding capabilities. While they have achieved impressive results on various vision tasks, their performance on chart-to-code generation remains suboptimal. This task requires MLLMs to generate executable code that can reproduce a given chart, demanding not only precise visual understanding but also accurate translation of visual elements into structured code. Directly prompting MLLMs to perform this complex task often yields unsatisfactory results. To address this challenge, we propose {ChartIR}, an iterative refinement method based on structured instruction. First, we distinguish two tasks: visual understanding and code translation. To accomplish the visual understanding component, we design two types of structured instructions: description and difference. The description instruction captures the visual elements of the reference chart, while the difference instruction characterizes the discrepancies between the reference chart and the generated chart. These instructions effectively transform visual features into language representations, thereby facilitating the subsequent code translation process. Second, we decompose the overall chart generation pipeline into two stages: initial code generation and iterative refinement, enabling progressive enhancement of the final output. Experimental results show that, compared to other method, our method achieves superior performance on both the open-source model Qwen2-VL and the closed-source model GPT-4o.

The integration of large language models (LLMs) with function calling has emerged as a crucial capability for enhancing their practical utility in real-world applications. However, effectively combining reasoning processes with accurate function execution remains a significant challenge. Traditional training approaches often struggle to balance the detailed reasoning steps with the precision of function calls, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these limitations, we introduce FunReason, a novel framework that enhances LLMs' function calling capabilities through an automated data refinement strategy and a Self-Refinement Multiscale Loss (SRML) approach. FunReason leverages LLMs' natural reasoning abilities to generate high-quality training examples, focusing on query parseability, reasoning coherence, and function call precision. The SRML approach dynamically balances the contribution of reasoning processes and function call accuracy during training, addressing the inherent trade-off between these two critical aspects. FunReason achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning. FunReason provides a comprehensive solution for enhancing LLMs' function calling capabilities by introducing a balanced training methodology and a data refinement pipeline. For code and dataset, please refer to our repository at GitHub https://github.com/BingguangHao/FunReason

The caliber and configuration of retinal blood vessels serve as important biomarkers for various diseases and medical conditions. A thorough analysis of the retinal vasculature requires the segmentation of the blood vessels and their classification into arteries and veins, typically performed on color fundus images obtained by retinography. However, manually performing these tasks is labor-intensive and prone to human error. While several automated methods have been proposed to address this task, the current state of art faces challenges due to manifest classification errors affecting the topological consistency of segmentation maps. In this work, we introduce RRWNet, a novel end-to-end deep learning framework that addresses this limitation. The framework consists of a fully convolutional neural network that recursively refines semantic segmentation maps, correcting manifest classification errors and thus improving topological consistency. In particular, RRWNet is composed of two specialized subnetworks: a Base subnetwork that generates base segmentation maps from the input images, and a Recursive Refinement subnetwork that iteratively and recursively improves these maps. Evaluation on three different public datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method, yielding more topologically consistent segmentation maps with fewer manifest classification errors than existing approaches. In addition, the Recursive Refinement module within RRWNet proves effective in post-processing segmentation maps from other methods, further demonstrating its potential. The model code, weights, and predictions will be publicly available at https://github.com/j-morano/rrwnet.

Diffusion models are the current state-of-the-art in image generation, synthesizing high-quality images by breaking down the generation process into many fine-grained denoising steps. Despite their good performance, diffusion models are computationally expensive, requiring many neural function evaluations (NFEs). In this work, we propose an anytime diffusion-based method that can generate viable images when stopped at arbitrary times before completion. Using existing pretrained diffusion models, we show that the generation scheme can be recomposed as two nested diffusion processes, enabling fast iterative refinement of a generated image. We use this Nested Diffusion approach to peek into the generation process and enable flexible scheduling based on the instantaneous preference of the user. In experiments on ImageNet and Stable Diffusion-based text-to-image generation, we show, both qualitatively and quantitatively, that our method's intermediate generation quality greatly exceeds that of the original diffusion model, while the final slow generation result remains comparable.

Real-world image super-resolution (RWSR) is a long-standing problem as low-quality (LQ) images often have complex and unidentified degradations. Existing methods such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or continuous diffusion models present their own issues including GANs being difficult to train while continuous diffusion models requiring numerous inference steps. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Token Evaluation and Refinement (ITER) framework for RWSR, which utilizes a discrete diffusion model operating in the discrete token representation space, i.e., indexes of features extracted from a VQGAN codebook pre-trained with high-quality (HQ) images. We show that ITER is easier to train than GANs and more efficient than continuous diffusion models. Specifically, we divide RWSR into two sub-tasks, i.e., distortion removal and texture generation. Distortion removal involves simple HQ token prediction with LQ images, while texture generation uses a discrete diffusion model to iteratively refine the distortion removal output with a token refinement network. In particular, we propose to include a token evaluation network in the discrete diffusion process. It learns to evaluate which tokens are good restorations and helps to improve the iterative refinement results. Moreover, the evaluation network can first check status of the distortion removal output and then adaptively select total refinement steps needed, thereby maintaining a good balance between distortion removal and texture generation. Extensive experimental results show that ITER is easy to train and performs well within just 8 iterative steps. Our codes will be available publicly.

Step-by-step painting tutorials are vital for learning artistic techniques, but existing video resources (e.g., YouTube) lack interactivity and personalization. While recent generative models have advanced artistic image synthesis, they struggle to generalize across media and often show temporal or structural inconsistencies, hindering faithful reproduction of human creative workflows. To address this, we propose a unified framework for multi-media painting process generation with a semantics-driven style control mechanism that embeds multiple media into a diffusion models conditional space and uses cross-medium style augmentation. This enables consistent texture evolution and process transfer across styles. A reverse-painting training strategy further ensures smooth, human-aligned generation. We also build a large-scale dataset of real painting processes and evaluate cross-media consistency, temporal coherence, and final-image fidelity, achieving strong results on LPIPS, DINO, and CLIP metrics. Finally, our Perceptual Distance Profile (PDP) curve quantitatively models the creative sequence, i.e., composition, color blocking, and detail refinement, mirroring human artistic progression.

Natural language explanations represent a proxy for evaluating explanation-based and multi-step Natural Language Inference (NLI) models. However, assessing the validity of explanations for NLI is challenging as it typically involves the crowd-sourcing of apposite datasets, a process that is time-consuming and prone to logical errors. To address existing limitations, this paper investigates the verification and refinement of natural language explanations through the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Theorem Provers (TPs). Specifically, we present a neuro-symbolic framework, named Explanation-Refiner, that integrates TPs with LLMs to generate and formalise explanatory sentences and suggest potential inference strategies for NLI. In turn, the TP is employed to provide formal guarantees on the logical validity of the explanations and to generate feedback for subsequent improvements. We demonstrate how Explanation-Refiner can be jointly used to evaluate explanatory reasoning, autoformalisation, and error correction mechanisms of state-of-the-art LLMs as well as to automatically enhance the quality of explanations of variable complexity in different domains.

Synthesizing novel views for urban environments is crucial for tasks like autonomous driving and virtual tours. Compared to object-level or indoor situations, outdoor settings present unique challenges, such as inconsistency across frames due to moving vehicles and camera pose drift over lengthy sequences. In this paper, we introduce a method that tackles these challenges on view synthesis for outdoor scenarios. We employ a neural point light field scene representation and strategically detect and mask out dynamic objects to reconstruct novel scenes without artifacts. Moreover, we simultaneously optimize camera pose along with the view synthesis process, and thus, we simultaneously refine both elements. Through validation on real-world urban datasets, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results in synthesizing novel views of urban scenes.

Diffusion models for single image novel view synthesis (NVS) can generate highly realistic and plausible images, but they are limited in the geometric consistency to the given relative poses. The generated images often show significant errors with respect to the epipolar constraints that should be fulfilled, as given by the target pose. In this paper we address this issue by proposing a methodology to improve the geometric correctness of images generated by a diffusion model for single image NVS. We formulate a loss function based on image matching and epipolar constraints, and optimize the starting noise in a diffusion sampling process such that the generated image should both be a realistic image and fulfill geometric constraints derived from the given target pose. Our method does not require training data or fine-tuning of the diffusion models, and we show that we can apply it to multiple state-of-the-art models for single image NVS. The method is evaluated on the MegaScenes dataset and we show that geometric consistency is improved compared to the baseline models while retaining the quality of the generated images.

Image distortion by atmospheric turbulence is a stochastic degradation, which is a critical problem in long-range optical imaging systems. A number of research has been conducted during the past decades, including model-based and emerging deep-learning solutions with the help of synthetic data. Although fast and physics-grounded simulation tools have been introduced to help the deep-learning models adapt to real-world turbulence conditions recently, the training of such models only relies on the synthetic data and ground truth pairs. This paper proposes the Physics-integrated Restoration Network (PiRN) to bring the physics-based simulator directly into the training process to help the network to disentangle the stochasticity from the degradation and the underlying image. Furthermore, to overcome the ``average effect" introduced by deterministic models and the domain gap between the synthetic and real-world degradation, we further introduce PiRN with Stochastic Refinement (PiRN-SR) to boost its perceptual quality. Overall, our PiRN and PiRN-SR improve the generalization to real-world unknown turbulence conditions and provide a state-of-the-art restoration in both pixel-wise accuracy and perceptual quality. Our codes are available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/PiRN.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities through test-time scaling approaches, particularly when fine-tuned with chain-of-thought (CoT) data distilled from more powerful large reasoning models (LRMs). However, these reasoning chains often contain verbose elements that mirror human problem-solving, categorized as progressive reasoning (the essential solution development path) and functional elements (verification processes, alternative solution approaches, and error corrections). While progressive reasoning is crucial, the functional elements significantly increase computational demands during test-time inference. We introduce PIR (Perplexity-based Importance Refinement), a principled framework that quantitatively evaluates the importance of each reasoning step based on its impact on answer prediction confidence. PIR systematically identifies and selectively prunes only low-importance functional steps while preserving progressive reasoning components, creating optimized training data that maintains the integrity of the core solution path while reducing verbosity. Models fine-tuned on PIR-optimized data exhibit superior test-time scaling properties, generating more concise reasoning chains while achieving improved accuracy (+0.9\% to +6.6\%) with significantly reduced token usage (-3\% to -41\%) across challenging reasoning benchmarks (AIME, AMC, and GPQA Diamond). Our approach demonstrates strong generalizability across different model sizes, data sources, and token budgets, offering a practical solution for deploying reasoning-capable LLMs in scenarios where efficient test-time scaling, response time, and computational efficiency are valuable constraints.

Generating music with coherent structure, harmonious instrumental and vocal elements remains a significant challenge in song generation. Existing language models and diffusion-based methods often struggle to balance global coherence with local fidelity, resulting in outputs that lack musicality or suffer from incoherent progression and mismatched lyrics. This paper introduces SongBloom, a novel framework for full-length song generation that leverages an interleaved paradigm of autoregressive sketching and diffusion-based refinement. SongBloom employs an autoregressive diffusion model that combines the high fidelity of diffusion models with the scalability of language models. Specifically, it gradually extends a musical sketch from short to long and refines the details from coarse to fine-grained. The interleaved generation paradigm effectively integrates prior semantic and acoustic context to guide the generation process. Experimental results demonstrate that SongBloom outperforms existing methods across both subjective and objective metrics and achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art commercial music generation platforms. Audio samples are available on our demo page: https://cypress-yang.github.io/SongBloom\_demo.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has become an integral component of modern technology, powering applications such as voice-activated assistants, transcription services, and accessibility tools. Yet ASR systems continue to struggle with the inherent variability of human speech, such as accents, dialects, and speaking styles, as well as environmental interference, including background noise. Moreover, domain-specific conversations often employ specialized terminology, which can exacerbate transcription errors. These shortcomings not only degrade raw ASR accuracy but also propagate mistakes through subsequent natural language processing pipelines. Because redesigning an ASR model is costly and time-consuming, non-intrusive refinement techniques that leave the model's architecture unchanged have become increasingly popular. In this survey, we systematically review current non-intrusive refinement approaches and group them into five classes: fusion, re-scoring, correction, distillation, and training adjustment. For each class, we outline the main methods, advantages, drawbacks, and ideal application scenarios. Beyond method classification, this work surveys adaptation techniques aimed at refining ASR in domain-specific contexts, reviews commonly used evaluation datasets along with their construction processes, and proposes a standardized set of metrics to facilitate fair comparisons. Finally, we identify open research gaps and suggest promising directions for future work. By providing this structured overview, we aim to equip researchers and practitioners with a clear foundation for developing more robust, accurate ASR refinement pipelines.

The task of Split and Rephrase, which splits a complex sentence into multiple simple sentences with the same meaning, improves readability and enhances the performance of downstream tasks in natural language processing (NLP). However, while Split and Rephrase can be improved using a text-to-text generation approach that applies encoder-decoder models fine-tuned with a large-scale dataset, it still suffers from hallucinations and under-splitting. To address these issues, this paper presents a simple and strong data refinement approach. Here, we create WikiSplit++ by removing instances in WikiSplit where complex sentences do not entail at least one of the simpler sentences and reversing the order of reference simple sentences. Experimental results show that training with WikiSplit++ leads to better performance than training with WikiSplit, even with fewer training instances. In particular, our approach yields significant gains in the number of splits and the entailment ratio, a proxy for measuring hallucinations.

With the success of Diffusion Models for image generation, the technologies also have revolutionized the aesthetic Quick Response (QR) code generation. Despite significant improvements in visual attractiveness for the beautified codes, their scannabilities are usually sacrificed and thus hinder their practical uses in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a novel training-free Diffusion-based QR Code generator (DiffQRCoder) to effectively craft both scannable and visually pleasing QR codes. The proposed approach introduces Scanning-Robust Perceptual Guidance (SRPG), a new diffusion guidance for Diffusion Models to guarantee the generated aesthetic codes to obey the ground-truth QR codes while maintaining their attractiveness during the denoising process. Additionally, we present another post-processing technique, Scanning Robust Manifold Projected Gradient Descent (SR-MPGD), to further enhance their scanning robustness through iterative latent space optimization. With extensive experiments, the results demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms other compared methods in Scanning Success Rate (SSR) with better or comparable CLIP aesthetic score (CLIP-aes.) but also significantly improves the SSR of the ControlNet-only approach from 60% to 99%. The subjective evaluation indicates that our approach achieves promising visual attractiveness to users as well. Finally, even with different scanning angles and the most rigorous error tolerance settings, our approach robustly achieves over 95% SSR, demonstrating its capability for real-world applications. Our project page is available at https://jwliao1209.github.io/DiffQRCoder.

The explicit neural radiance field (NeRF) has gained considerable interest for its efficient training and fast inference capabilities, making it a promising direction such as virtual reality and gaming. In particular, PlenOctree (POT)[1], an explicit hierarchical multi-scale octree representation, has emerged as a structural and influential framework. However, POT's fixed structure for direct optimization is sub-optimal as the scene complexity evolves continuously with updates to cached color and density, necessitating refining the sampling distribution to capture signal complexity accordingly. To address this issue, we propose the dynamic PlenOctree DOT, which adaptively refines the sample distribution to adjust to changing scene complexity. Specifically, DOT proposes a concise yet novel hierarchical feature fusion strategy during the iterative rendering process. Firstly, it identifies the regions of interest through training signals to ensure adaptive and efficient refinement. Next, rather than directly filtering out valueless nodes, DOT introduces the sampling and pruning operations for octrees to aggregate features, enabling rapid parameter learning. Compared with POT, our DOT outperforms it by enhancing visual quality, reducing over 55.15/68.84% parameters, and providing 1.7/1.9 times FPS for NeRF-synthetic and Tanks & Temples, respectively. Project homepage:https://vlislab22.github.io/DOT. [1] Yu, Alex, et al. "Plenoctrees for real-time rendering of neural radiance fields." Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision. 2021.

Most existing sequence generation models produce outputs in one pass, usually left-to-right. However, this is in contrast with a more natural approach that humans use in generating content; iterative refinement and editing. Recent work has introduced edit-based models for various tasks (such as neural machine translation and text style transfer), but these generally model a single edit step. In this work, we propose modeling editing processes, modeling the whole process of iteratively generating sequences. We form a conceptual framework to describe the likelihood of multi-step edits, and describe neural models that can learn a generative model of sequences based on these multistep edits. We introduce baseline results and metrics on this task, finding that modeling editing processes improves performance on a variety of axes on both our proposed task and related downstream tasks compared to previous single-step models of edits.

We present SR3, an approach to image Super-Resolution via Repeated Refinement. SR3 adapts denoising diffusion probabilistic models to conditional image generation and performs super-resolution through a stochastic denoising process. Inference starts with pure Gaussian noise and iteratively refines the noisy output using a U-Net model trained on denoising at various noise levels. SR3 exhibits strong performance on super-resolution tasks at different magnification factors, on faces and natural images. We conduct human evaluation on a standard 8X face super-resolution task on CelebA-HQ, comparing with SOTA GAN methods. SR3 achieves a fool rate close to 50%, suggesting photo-realistic outputs, while GANs do not exceed a fool rate of 34%. We further show the effectiveness of SR3 in cascaded image generation, where generative models are chained with super-resolution models, yielding a competitive FID score of 11.3 on ImageNet.

Recent advances in self-refinement have demonstrated significant potential for improving the outputs of large language models (LLMs) through iterative refinement. However, most existing self-refinement methods rely on a reactive process with a fixed number of iterations, making it difficult to determine the optimal timing and content of refinement based on the evolving generation context. Inspired by the way humans dynamically refine their thoughts during execution, we propose ProActive Self-Refinement (PASR), a novel method that enables LLMs to refine their outputs during the generation process. Unlike methods that regenerate entire responses, PASR proactively decides whether, when, and how to refine based on the model's internal state and evolving context. We conduct extensive experiments on a diverse set of 10 tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of PASR. Experimental results show that PASR significantly enhances problem-solving performance. In particular, on Qwen3-8B, PASR reduces average token consumption by 41.6 percent compared to standard generation, while also achieving an 8.2 percent improvement in accuracy. Our code and all baselines used in the paper are available in the GitHub.

Most real-world networks are noisy and incomplete samples from an unknown target distribution. Refining them by correcting corruptions or inferring unobserved regions typically improves downstream performance. Inspired by the impressive generative capabilities that have been used to correct corruptions in images, and the similarities between "in-painting" and filling in missing nodes and edges conditioned on the observed graph, we propose a novel graph generative framework, SGDM, which is based on subgraph diffusion. Our framework not only improves the scalability and fidelity of graph diffusion models, but also leverages the reverse process to perform novel, conditional generation tasks. In particular, through extensive empirical analysis and a set of novel metrics, we demonstrate that our proposed model effectively supports the following refinement tasks for partially observable networks: T1: denoising extraneous subgraphs, T2: expanding existing subgraphs and T3: performing "style" transfer by regenerating a particular subgraph to match the characteristics of a different node or subgraph.

Despite the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in various reasoning tasks, they still struggle with table reasoning tasks, particularly in maintaining consistency throughout multi-step reasoning processes. While existing approaches have explored various decomposition strategies, they often lack effective mechanisms to identify and correct errors in intermediate reasoning steps, leading to cascading error propagation. To address these issues, we propose Table-Critic, a novel multi-agent framework that facilitates collaborative criticism and iterative refinement of the reasoning process until convergence to correct solutions. Our framework consists of four specialized agents: a Judge for error identification, a Critic for comprehensive critiques, a Refiner for process improvement, and a Curator for pattern distillation. To effectively deal with diverse and unpredictable error types, we introduce a self-evolving template tree that systematically accumulates critique knowledge through experience-driven learning and guides future reflections. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that Table-Critic achieves substantial improvements over existing methods, achieving superior accuracy and error correction rates while maintaining computational efficiency and lower solution degradation rate.

Caution: This paper includes offensive words that could potentially cause unpleasantness. Language models (LMs) are vulnerable to exploitation for adversarial misuse. Training LMs for safety alignment is extensive and makes it hard to respond to fast-developing attacks immediately, such as jailbreaks. We propose self-refine with formatting that achieves outstanding safety even in non-safety-aligned LMs and evaluate our method alongside several defense baselines, demonstrating that it is the safest training-free method against jailbreak attacks. Additionally, we proposed a formatting method that improves the efficiency of the self-refine process while reducing attack success rates in fewer iterations. We've also observed that non-safety-aligned LMs outperform safety-aligned LMs in safety tasks by giving more helpful and safe responses. In conclusion, our findings can achieve less safety risk with fewer computational costs, allowing non-safety LM to be easily utilized in real-world service.

Crafting the ideal, job-specific resume is a challenging task for many job applicants, especially for early-career applicants. While it is highly recommended that applicants tailor their resume to the specific role they are applying for, manually tailoring resumes to job descriptions and role-specific requirements is often (1) extremely time-consuming, and (2) prone to human errors. Furthermore, performing such a tailoring step at scale while applying to several roles may result in a lack of quality of the edited resumes. To tackle this problem, in this demo paper, we propose ResumeFlow: a Large Language Model (LLM) aided tool that enables an end user to simply provide their detailed resume and the desired job posting, and obtain a personalized resume specifically tailored to that specific job posting in the matter of a few seconds. Our proposed pipeline leverages the language understanding and information extraction capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini, in order to (1) extract details from a job description, (2) extract role-specific details from the user-provided resume, and then (3) use these to refine and generate a role-specific resume for the user. Our easy-to-use tool leverages the user-chosen LLM in a completely off-the-shelf manner, thus requiring no fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool via a video demo and propose novel task-specific evaluation metrics to control for alignment and hallucination. Our tool is available at https://job-aligned-resume.streamlit.app.

Natural Language Understanding has seen an increasing number of publications in the last few years, especially after robust word embeddings models became prominent, when they proved themselves able to capture and represent semantic relationships from massive amounts of data. Nevertheless, traditional models often fall short in intrinsic issues of linguistics, such as polysemy and homonymy. Any expert system that makes use of natural language in its core, can be affected by a weak semantic representation of text, resulting in inaccurate outcomes based on poor decisions. To mitigate such issues, we propose a novel approach called Most Suitable Sense Annotation (MSSA), that disambiguates and annotates each word by its specific sense, considering the semantic effects of its context. Our approach brings three main contributions to the semantic representation scenario: (i) an unsupervised technique that disambiguates and annotates words by their senses, (ii) a multi-sense embeddings model that can be extended to any traditional word embeddings algorithm, and (iii) a recurrent methodology that allows our models to be re-used and their representations refined. We test our approach on six different benchmarks for the word similarity task, showing that our approach can produce state-of-the-art results and outperforms several more complex state-of-the-art systems.

One tough problem of image inpainting is to restore complex structures in the corrupted regions. It motivates interactive image inpainting which leverages additional hints, e.g., sketches, to assist the inpainting process. Sketch is simple and intuitive to end users, but meanwhile has free forms with much randomness. Such randomness may confuse the inpainting models, and incur severe artifacts in completed images. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage image inpainting method termed SketchRefiner. In the first stage, we propose using a cross-correlation loss function to robustly calibrate and refine the user-provided sketches in a coarse-to-fine fashion. In the second stage, we learn to extract informative features from the abstracted sketches in the feature space and modulate the inpainting process. We also propose an algorithm to simulate real sketches automatically and build a test protocol with different applications. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that SketchRefiner effectively utilizes sketch information and eliminates the artifacts due to the free-form sketches. Our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art ones both qualitatively and quantitatively, meanwhile revealing great potential in real-world applications. Our code and dataset are available.

Video representation is a long-standing problem that is crucial for various down-stream tasks, such as tracking,depth prediction,segmentation,view synthesis,and editing. However, current methods either struggle to model complex motions due to the absence of 3D structure or rely on implicit 3D representations that are ill-suited for manipulation tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel explicit 3D representation-video Gaussian representation -- that embeds a video into 3D Gaussians. Our proposed representation models video appearance in a 3D canonical space using explicit Gaussians as proxies and associates each Gaussian with 3D motions for video motion. This approach offers a more intrinsic and explicit representation than layered atlas or volumetric pixel matrices. To obtain such a representation, we distill 2D priors, such as optical flow and depth, from foundation models to regularize learning in this ill-posed setting. Extensive applications demonstrate the versatility of our new video representation. It has been proven effective in numerous video processing tasks, including tracking, consistent video depth and feature refinement, motion and appearance editing, and stereoscopic video generation. Project page: https://sunyangtian.github.io/spatter_a_video_web/

Language models (LMs) can perform complex reasoning either end-to-end, with hidden latent state, or compositionally, with transparent intermediate state. Composition offers benefits for interpretability and safety, but may need workflow support and infrastructure to remain competitive. We describe iterated decomposition, a human-in-the-loop workflow for developing and refining compositional LM programs. We improve the performance of compositions by zooming in on failing components and refining them through decomposition, additional context, chain of thought, etc. To support this workflow, we develop ICE, an open-source tool for visualizing the execution traces of LM programs. We apply iterated decomposition to three real-world tasks and improve the accuracy of LM programs over less compositional baselines: describing the placebo used in a randomized controlled trial (25% to 65%), evaluating participant adherence to a medical intervention (53% to 70%), and answering NLP questions on the Qasper dataset (38% to 69%). These applications serve as case studies for a workflow that, if automated, could keep ML systems interpretable and safe even as they scale to increasingly complex tasks.

Existing large language models (LLMs) show exceptional problem-solving capabilities but might struggle with complex reasoning tasks. Despite the successes of chain-of-thought and tree-based search methods, they mainly depend on the internal knowledge of LLMs to search over intermediate reasoning steps, limited to dealing with simple tasks involving fewer reasoning steps. In this paper, we propose RAG-Star, a novel RAG approach that integrates the retrieved information to guide the tree-based deliberative reasoning process that relies on the inherent knowledge of LLMs. By leveraging Monte Carlo Tree Search, RAG-Star iteratively plans intermediate sub-queries and answers for reasoning based on the LLM itself. To consolidate internal and external knowledge, we propose an retrieval-augmented verification that utilizes query- and answer-aware reward modeling to provide feedback for the inherent reasoning of LLMs. Our experiments involving Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and GPT-4o demonstrate that RAG-Star significantly outperforms previous RAG and reasoning methods.

This paper presents a novel deep-learning framework that significantly enhances the transformation of rudimentary face sketches into high-fidelity colour images. Employing a Convolutional Block Attention-based Auto-encoder Network (CA2N), our approach effectively captures and enhances critical facial features through a block attention mechanism within an encoder-decoder architecture. Subsequently, the framework utilises a noise-induced conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) process that allows the system to maintain high performance even on domains unseen during the training. These enhancements lead to considerable improvements in image realism and fidelity, with our model achieving superior performance metrics that outperform the best method by FID margin of 17, 23, and 38 on CelebAMask-HQ, CUHK, and CUFSF datasets; respectively. The model sets a new state-of-the-art in sketch-to-image generation, can generalize across sketch types, and offers a robust solution for applications such as criminal identification in law enforcement.

Prompting methods such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have shed new light on enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models, and researchers have extensively explored the generation process of rationales and answers. However, they have overlooked the potential challenges posed by the poor quality of reasoning problems, which may influence the reasoning performance significantly. In this work, we propose Self-Polish (SP), a novel method that facilitates the model's problem-solving process by prompting them to progressively refine the given problems to be more comprehensible and solvable. Specifically, the method teaches models to eliminate irrelevant information, rearrange the logic structure and organize local conditions into new ones parallelly. SP is orthogonal to all other prompting methods, making it convenient to integrate with state-of-the-art techniques for further improvement. We conduct thorough experiments on five benchmarks to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. For example, with Text-davinci-003, our method boosts the performance of standard few-shot prompting by 8.0% on GSM8K and 17.8% on MultiArith; it also improves the performance of CoT by 6.0% on GSM8K and 6.0% on MathQA, respectively. Furthermore, our method also showcases impressive performance on robustness evaluation.